Jimmy took a steady look at his watch. “So far as I know, it was a punch on the jaw.”
Mr. Sinclair looked up with amused interest. “No. It was a jolly good one then. Who hit him for us?”
“I did.”
Mr. Sinclair threw up an astonished leg and laughed. He laughed with his head thrown back, loudly and with complete abandon to his enjoyment. He slapped his raised leg with his hand. He was wiping his eyes when he turned to Jimmy, who was speaking to him.
“Please tell me what the paper said about it.”
“Eh? Oh, nothing much. I don’t remember. Said he was dead. That’s all. Found in his office, on the floor. Just dead. I say, what the devil are you doing here? It didn’t say anyone had hit him. I don’t believe it did.”
“Well, somebody did, and here he is, though God knows why.”
A sailor came to the door, and announced that the pilot was ready to go. Mr. Sinclair slid off the table, hesitated, and snapped his fingers. “All right, Wilson. Tell him … tell him there’s nobody for the shore.”
He turned to Jimmy. “You’d better be in no hurry. You want time for this. No harm in running round to Plymouth with us. The skipper knows you, doesn’t he? Nothing in it. A little loafing is all right. Besides,” he grinned, “old Perriam. That old dear. I want to hear all about it.”
X
The oil-lamp of the cabin, after a short sleep, would wake, and move uneasily in its gimbals. Its smoky glim was barely enough to fill the hollow with light, though the room was small, so the long shadow over the head of the settee might have been either a man or a hat and coat dangling from a peg; for, in sympathy with the movements of the swinging lamp, and the water in the bottle which sloped unnaturally first this way and then that, the limp coat came feebly to life now and then, and rubbed weakly over the cabin wall. It was reconciled to the perpendicular again when it found its tether would allow it no more freedom. There was no sound, except a suggestion that the night outside was a tide pouring headlong forever between the stars; but there was a tremor in the cabin, as of a dance of all its atoms, and a profound murmuring, which might have been the humming of an asteroid asleep with the speed of its rotation in space. An open book on a table beside the bunk, responsive to the dance of the atoms, was now projected over the edge, and was on the point of toppling over. The heavy brass handle of the door suddenly made frantic efforts to come off, and then the door opened, and the light flattened in a cold rush of night. The book fell. When the lamp flame stood upright in the quiet again, Sinclair was there, looking down on Colet. Jimmy continued asleep in his bunk with the calm abandon of the joys and woes of earth shown by the image of a crusader in his niche in a church. The sailor grinned, and was about to go, when the sleeper opened his eyes. The formidable figure he saw filling an unfamiliar and unescapable space, giant in its glistening oilskins, brought him up on the point of leaping out to meet the monstrous adversary of a dream.
“Eight bells,” said the sailor, “and all’s well. I just popped in to see how you were taking it.”
Colet sank back in a release to ease. “Where are we now?”
“Mind your own business. Do you want this book? What a dirty light you’ve got, though. Won’t it do any better? But this ship wasn’t fixed for comfort; only for cargo and sailors.”
XI
The steward had warned Colet that they were at Plymouth, and he was by the rail, watching a thin mist change into the hills of a Devon morning, when Sinclair came along.
“No hurry, but the old man is aboard. Give him time to find himself, then go to him. I’ve had a talk with him.”
Captain Hale, in his shirtsleeves, but wearing a bowler hat, was in his cabin advising the steward how he desired his property to be stowed. When Jimmy entered the room his step had to be stretched over a mound of clothes. The captain showed no surprise at his presence. “Come in, Mr. Colet. Sinclair has reported to me.” He motioned the steward out of the cabin. “Come back in five minutes.”
They talked, but the captain never took his eyes off a stack of shirts on the floor. Jimmy got an impression that somehow there was a difficulty with the laundry. They were discussing that. Some collars were missing? Even the neat pile of clean linen before him did not appear to interest the captain very much. Perhaps it was only old stuff which had gone astray; not much good. A grey and shy little man. The captain stooped and picked up a garment; turned it about as though in depreciating examination. Neither of them spoke for so long a spell that Jimmy was on the nervous point of bringing the encounter to a close and, going out to find Sinclair arid a boat. The captain silently considered the garment in his hands.
“It’s irregular,” he murmured at last, as if in dispraise of those pants. “A bit off the course. But I can log it, I suppose.” He changed his regard to Colet, though
