ns for not wanting to tell too much: and Hales had his
own very good reasons for not putting too many questions. To start
with, he didn't like missionaries as a class, _or_ their
conversation: and I gather that his crew likewise didn't take much
truck in them; neither in the species nor in you as a specimen: least
of all in you as a specimen. I'm sorry for it, too, in a way:
because, at first, I pictured them asking you to put up a prayer, and
pictured your face and feelings as you knelt down to oblige.
Well, that was one of the pretty fancies that ought to come true but
don't manage to, in this world. As for the next, there's no saying.
You passed yourself for a missionary, and if Satan has humour enough
to accept you on that ticket, a pretty figure you'll make, putting up
false prayers in hell. . . . Anyhow, you didn't make friends on board
that schooner--eh?"

"I did not," Foe answered listlessly.

"You weren't over comfortable with that crowd when you changed me for
it?"

"I was not, if that's any comfort to you."

Farrell grinned. "Of course it's a comfort to me. They sent you to
Coventry more or less; and I'll tell you the reason, if you don't
know it. There was a whisper going round the ship forward. . . .
One of the hands--it being a clear day--had heard a dog barking from
the shore. Another fancied that he had. Then a third called to mind
having heard somewhere--he couldn't remember the public, or even the
port--that when old Buck Vliet marooned his missionary he'd left a
dog with him in compassion. . . . I should tell you two gentlemen
that the yarn about Vliet and how he caught a missionary by mistake,
and how he'd short-circuited him somewhere in a holy terror, was a
kind of legend all along the coast and around the Eastern islands.
I dare say it crossed to the Atlantic in time: for again it was the
kind of story that starts by being funny and gets funnier as each man
chooses to improve on it. . . . All I can say is, that if the body
you and I, Foe, looked down upon, that afternoon, belonged to Vliet's
missionary, I don't want to hear any more fun about it. . . . So you
see, gentlemen, this God-forsaken lot, down in the _I'll Away's_
fo'c'sle, patched it up amongst them that this man, in his hurry, had
deserted his dog. Now, as I shall tell you, if they had reasoned,
they'd have known that the dog wouldn't starve, anyway. But they
didn't reason. They were a God-forsaken lot--mostly broken men