“That very evening they departed on a visit to Bamtz in Niclaus’s prau, which had been lying, emptied of her cargo of cocoanuts, for a day or two under the canal bridge.  They must have crossed the bows of the anchored Sissie, and no doubt looked at her with interest as the scene of their future exploit, the great haul, le grand coup!

“Davidson’s wife, to his great surprise, sulked with him for several days before he left.  I don’t know whether it occurred to him that, for all her angelic profile, she was a very stupidly obstinate girl.  She didn’t like the tropics.  He had brought her out there, where she had no friends, and now, she said, he was becoming inconsiderate.  She had a presentiment of some misfortune, and notwithstanding Davidson’s painstaking explanations, she could not see why her presentiments were to be disregarded.  On the very last evening before Davidson went away she asked him in a suspicious manner: 

“‘Why is it that you are so anxious to go this time?’

“‘I am not anxious,’ protested the good Davidson.  ’I simply can’t help myself.  There’s no one else to go in my place.’

“‘Oh!  There’s no one,’ she said, turning away slowly.

“She was so distant with him that evening that Davidson from a sense of delicacy made up his mind to say good-bye to her at once and go and sleep on board.  He felt very miserable and, strangely enough, more on his own account than on account of his wife.  She seemed to him much more offended than grieved.

“Three weeks later, having collected a good many cases of old dollars (they were stowed aft in the lazarette with an iron bar and a padlock securing the hatch under his cabin-table), yes, with a bigger lot than he had expected to collect, he found himself homeward bound and off the entrance of the creek where Bamtz lived and even, in a sense, flourished.

“It was so late in the day that Davidson actually hesitated whether he should not pass by this time.  He had no regard for Bamtz, who was a degraded but not a really unhappy man.  His pity for Laughing Anne was no more than her case deserved.  But his goodness was of a particularly delicate sort.  He realised how these people were dependent on him, and how they would feel their dependence (if he failed to turn up) through a long month of anxious waiting.  Prompted by his sensitive humanity, Davidson, in the gathering dusk, turned the Sissie’s head towards the hardly discernible coast, and navigated her safety through a maze of shallow patches.  But by the time he got to the mouth of the creek the night had come.

“The narrow waterway lay like a black cutting through the forest.  And as there were always grounded snaggs in the channel which it would be impossible to make out, Davidson very prudently turned the Sissie round, and with only enough steam on the boilers to give her a touch ahead if necessary, let her drift up stern first with the tide, silent and invisible in the impenetrable darkness and in the dumb stillness.