door.

"I have a pretty story to tell you," were the last words I heard. The
bitterness of tone was remarkable.

I went away from the door, of course. For the moment I had no crew on
board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his
neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking
out the wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag
conscientiously. Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the
door of the engine-room. It was near breakfast time.

"He's turned up early, hasn't he?" commented the second engineer, and
smiled indifferently. He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and
a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.

"Yes," I said. "Shut up with the old man. Some very particular
business."

"He will spin him a damned endless yarn," observed the chief engineer.

He smiled rather sourly. He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing
hunger in the morning. The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two
vertical folds on his shaven cheeks. And I smiled too, but I was not
exactly amused. In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered
anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing
amusing whatever. That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking
mostly into his cup. I informed him that my men came upon his pony
capering in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in
which he kept his store of guttah. The cover was off with no one near