Captain Riggs had log-book stories that were good, and they might have served him for a volume of marine memoirs.  But I was with him when we freighted the Kut Sang with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me.  In the old logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle.  I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting about with a long kris stuck in the folds of his scarlet sarong, or a mate whose truculence equalled the chronic ill-humour of Harris, who learned his seamanship as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks.  And in all his log-books I never found another Devil’s Admiral!

Riggs is dead, and I can tell the story in my own way; for tell it I must, and the manuscript will be a comfort to me when I am old and my memory and imagination begin to fail.  Not that I ever expect to forget, because that would be a calamity; but I want to put down the events of the day and night in the Kut Sang while they are fresh in my mind.

How well I can see in a mental vision the whole murderous plot worked out!  Certain parts of it flash on me at off moments, while I am reading a book or watching a play or talking with a friend, and every trivial detail comes out as clearly as if it were all being done over again in a motion picture.  The night gloom in the hall brings back to me the ’tween-decks of the old tub of a boat; the green-plush seats of a sleeping-car remind me of the Kut Sang’s dining-saloon, and even a bonfire in an adjacent yard recalls the odour of burned rice on the galley fire left by the panic-stricken Chinese cook.

I know the very smell of the Kut Sang.  I caught it last week passing a ship-chandler’s shop, and it set my veins throbbing again with the sense of conflict, and I caught myself tensing my muscles for a death grapple.  To me the Kut Sang is a personality, a sentient being, with her own soul and moods and temper, audaciously tossing her bows at the threatening seas rising to meet her.  She is my sea-ghost, and as much a character to me as Riggs or Thirkle or Dago Red.

The deep, bright red band on her funnel gave her a touch of coquetry, but she had the drabness of senility; she was worn out, and working, when she should have gone to the junk pile years before.  But her very antiquity charmed me, for her scars and wrinkles told of hard service in the China Sea; and there was an air of comfort about her, such as one finds in an ancient house that has sheltered several generations.

Precious little comfort I had in her, though, which is why I remember her so well, and why I never shall forget her.  If she had made Hong-Kong in five days, her name would be lost in the memory of countless other steamers, and there would be no tale to tell.  But now she is the Kut Sang, and every time I whisper the two words to myself I live once more aboard her.