Rajah is with me—­inherited, I might say, from Captain Riggs.  Perhaps he keeps my memory keen on the old days, for how could I forget with the black boy stalking about the house—­half the time in his bare feet and his native costume, which I rather encourage—­for his sarong matches the curtains of my den and adds a bit of colour to my colourless surroundings.

I am quite sure that if Captain Riggs were still alive he would agree that the story should begin with my first sight of the missionary and the little red-headed man, so I will launch the narrative with an account of how I first met the Rev. Luther Meeker.

He was in the midst of a litter of nondescript baggage on the Manila mole when I came ashore from a rice-boat that had brought me across the China Sea from Saigon.  The first glance marked him as a missionary, for he wore a huge crucifix cut out of pink shell, and as he hobbled about on the embankment it bobbed at the end of a black cord hung from his neck.

Quaint and queer he was, even for the Orient, where queerness in men and things is commonplace and accepted as a part of the East’s inseparable sense of mystery.  With his big goggles of smoked glass he reminded one of some sea-monster, an illusion dispelled by his battered pith helmet with its faded sky-blue pugri bound round its crown, the frayed ends falling over his shoulders and flapping in the breeze.

He was a thin old man, clad in duck, turning yellow with age.  When he threw the helmet back it exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head, except for a few wisps of hair at the temples.  He appeared to be of great age—­a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard; and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions.  It was plain that the tropics were fast making an end of him.

He was whining querulously as I stepped ashore, and the first words I heard him say were: 

“An organ!  An organ!  An organ in a cedarwood box!  An organ in a cedarwood box, and the sign of the cross on the ends!  Oh, why do you try my soul?  Such stupidity!  Such awful stupidity!”

The native porters were grinning at him as they simulated a frantic search for his organ in a cedarwood box, but they probably knew all the time where it was.  He was surrounded by baskets and chests; and, if the crucifix were not enough to indicate his profession, black lettering on his possessions advertised him as “The Rev. Luther Meeker, London Evangelical Society.”  The multiplicity of labels proclaimed him a traveller known from Colombo to Vladivostok, and he must have been wandering over Asia for years, as his luggage was as ancient as himself.

Fighting my way out of the multitude on the river-bank, I gained the cable office near the customhouse and reported myself in Manila, bought all the newspapers I could to learn how the war was going in Manchuria, and to anticipate if possible where I might be ordered next.