“I know how it will go,” he said.  “It’s been done and told of before, and the master is always blamed; and this is no decent end for me.  I’m known from Saddle Rocks to Kennebunkport as a brave man and a capable master, even if old.

“I stayed out here because I had a good billet with the Red Funnel people up to the time the Japs bought their ships.  Then I took the Kut Sang, only for a year it was to be; but I held on longer, waiting to get a big ship to take back home, and then quit.

“My boy is a lawyer in Bangor—­and smart, too—­and I’ve got a daughter a schoolma’am in Boston, and they’ve both been begging me to come home; but somehow I hated to go back since my wife died.

“Mr. Trenholm, I don’t want to bother you with all this now; but it’s no decent end for me, I say.  All the men scattered over the globe to-day, some that went as boys with me, will have to hear old man Riggs turned pirate at the last and scuttled his own ship.  That’s how it will go, boy, and you can’t understand.  Fight!  I’d walk into hell in my bare feet, with never a thought of the way back, if I could die with an honest name—­but this ain’t no way for me to go, along with a passel o’ gold!”

“Then, if you are concerned about what will be said of the mystery of the loss of the Kut Sang, there must be a way to let the world know of our end and the fate that overtook the ship, and at the same time a chance of making trouble for our Mr. Thirkle after we are gone.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Some message,” I said, more to find something to interest him and brighten him.  “The story of the Kut Sang and the Rev. Luther Meeker, Thirkle, the Devil’s Admiral, or whatever he is called, should be told; and, as it is my business to deal in information, I can write it all down, and we will seal it in this bottle and set it adrift.  How’s that, captain?”

“A good scheme,” he said, smiling at me.  “The very thing, Mr. Trenholm.  I have some papers and envelopes here in my jacket, and a stub of pencil for the log-book, and while you are at your writing I’ll fashion a stopper for the bottle and a buoy.”

We poured out the last of the water in a pannikin and kept it for Rajah, and I ripped open a couple of envelopes and set to work on them with a stub of pencil, while Captain Riggs took my knife and began to whittle a piece of board.

I put down briefly but clearly the story of how the Rev. Luther Meeker, and Buckrow, Long Jim, and Petrak came aboard the Kut Sang, giving their descriptions as well as I could remember.  Then I told of the killing of Trego, and all that had happened aboard the steamer, and about the gold and the plight we were in, “skeletonizing” the narrative, much as if it were to be filed as a news-cable.

Then I put down the names and addresses of my relatives, and those of Captain Riggs.  It was a queer job, writing one’s own obituary in the forecastle of the old Kut Sang, putting down the names of streets in Boston and Bangor and San Francisco, and making our wills—­which we did when we found the space at our disposal getting scant, although I had little enough to give or bequeath, chiefly a pair of Chinese jingals and a good pair of riding-boots with silver spurs.