e their ears
for the knowledge of it. I'll tell you something: that's where I get all
my guttah and rattans. Simply inexhaustible, my boy."

While Lingard spoke Willems looked up quickly, but soon his head fell on
his breast in the discouraging certitude that the knowledge he and Hudig
had wished for so much had come to him too late. He sat in a listless
attitude.

"You will help Almayer in his trading if you have a heart for it,"
continued Lingard, "just to kill time till I come back for you. Only six
weeks or so."

Over their heads the damp sails fluttered noisily in the first faint
puff of the breeze; then, as the airs freshened, the brig tended to the
wind, and the silenced canvas lay quietly aback. The mate spoke with low
distinctness from the shadows of the quarter-deck.

"There's the breeze. Which way do you want to cast her, Captain
Lingard?"

Lingard's eyes, that had been fixed aloft, glanced down at the dejected
figure of the man sitting on the skylight. He seemed to hesitate for a
minute.

"To the northward, to the northward," he answered, testily, as if
annoyed at his own fleeting thought, "and bear a hand there. Every puff
of wind is worth money in these seas."

He remained motionless, listening to the rattle of blocks and the
creaking of trusses as the head-yards were hauled round. Sail was made
on the ship and the windlass manned again while he stood still, lost in
thought. He only roused himself when a barefooted seacannie glided past
him silently on his way to the wheel.

"Put the helm aport! Hard over!" he said, in his harsh sea-voice, to the
man whose face appeared suddenly out of the darkness in the circle of
light thrown upwards from the binnacle lamps.

The anchor was secured, the yards trimmed, and the brig began to move
out of the roadstead. The sea woke up under the push of the sharp
cutwater, and whispered softly to the gliding craft in that tender and
rippling murmur in which it speaks sometimes to those it nurses and
loves. Lingard stood by the taff-rail listening, with a pleased smile
till the Flash began to draw close to the only other vessel in the
anchorage.

"Here, Willems," he said, calling him to his side, "d'ye see that barque
here? That's an Arab vessel. White men have mostly given up the game,
but this fellow drops in my wake often, and lives in hopes of cutting me
out in that settlement. Not while I live, I trust. You see, Willems,
I brought prosperity to that place.