Overhead, a pair of white shoes protruded from the rail in a blue film of smoke.  They twitched, as a dry cackle of laughter broke out.

“Kut Sing, ahoy!” shouted Heywood.  “On deck!  Kneebone!”

The shoes whipped inboard.  Outboard popped a ruddy little face, set in the green circle of a topi, and contorted with laughter.

“Listen to this, will ye!” cried the apparition, as though illustrating a point.  Leaning his white sleeves on the rail, cigar in one fist, Tauchnitz volume in the other, he roared down over the side a passage of prose, from which his visitors caught only the words “Ginger Dick” and “Peter Russet,” before mirth strangled him.

“God bless a man,” he cried, choking, “that can make a lonesome old beggar laugh, out here!  Eh, what?  How he ever thinks up—­But he’s took to writing plays, they tell me.  Plays!” He scowled ferociously.  “Fat lot o’ good they are, for skippers, and planters, and gory exiles!  Eh, what?  Be-george, I’ll write him a chit! I’ll tell him!  Plays be damned; we want more stories!”

Red and savage, he hurled the book fluttering into the sea, then swore in consternation.

“Oh, I say!” he wailed.  “Fish her out!  I’ve not finished her.  My intention was, ye know, to fling the bloomin’ cigar!”

Heywood, laughing, rescued the volume on a long bamboo.

“Just came out on the look-see, captain,” he called up.  “Can’t board you.  Plague ashore.”

“Plague be ’anged!” scoffed the little captain.  “That hole’s no worse with plague than’t is without.  Got two cases on board, myself—­coolies.  Stowed ’em topside, under the boats.—­Come up here, ye castaway!  Come up, ye goatskin Robinson Crusoe, and get a white man’s chow!”

He received them on deck,—­a red, peppery little officer, whose shaven cheeks and close gray hair gave him the look of a parson gone wrong, a hedge-priest run away to sea.  Two tall Chinese boys scurried about with wicker chairs, with trays of bottles, ice, and cheroots, while he barked his orders, like a fox-terrier commanding a pair of solemn dock-rats.  The white men soon lounged beside the wheel-house.

“So you brought Mrs. Forrester,” drawled Heywood.

Rudolph, wondering if they saw him wince, listened with painful eagerness.  But the captain disposed of that subject very simply.

“She’s no good.”  He stared up at the grimy awning.  “What I’m thinking is, will that there Dacca babu at Koprah slip me through his blessed quarantine for twenty-five dollars.  What?”

Their talk drifted far away from Rudolph, far from China itself, to touch a hundred ports and islands, Cebu and Sourabaya, Tavoy and Selangor.  They talked of men and women, a death at Zamboanga, a birth at Chittagong, of obscure heroism or suicide, and fortunes made or lost; while the two boys, gentle, melancholy, gliding silent in bright blue robes, spread a white tablecloth, clamped it with shining brass, and laid the tiffin.  Then the talk flowed on, the feast made a tiny clatter of jollity in the slumbering noon, in the silence of an ocean and a continent.  And when at last the visitors clambered down the iron side, they went victorious with Spanish wine.