I heard a shout, and dropping the image, I rushed aft.  Leung Kai Chu had thrown himself over the rail just by the purser’s office.  A steward had seen him fling himself into the white foam.  I tore a gas-buoy from its rack and tossed it toward the screw, in which direction he must have been swept.  A sailor ran to the bridge, the whistle blew, and the ship shook as the engines ceased revolving, and then reversed in stopping her.  Orders were flung about fast.  A man climbed to the lookout as the first officer began to put a boat into the water.  The crew of it and the second officer were already at the oars and the tiller as the ropes slid in the blocks.  The passengers came crowding from their cabins, where they were dressing for dinner, and there were many expressions of surprise and slight terror.  Death aboard ship is terrible in its imminence to all.  The buoy, with its flaming torch, had drifted far to leeward, and the lookout could do no more than follow its fainting light as the dark of the tropics closed in.  An hour the Noa-Noa lay gently heaving upon the mysterious waters in which the despairing pundit had sought Nirvana, until the boat returned with a report that it had picked up the buoy, but had seen no sign of the man.  Doubtless he had been swept into the propellers, but if not quickly given release in their cyclopean strokes, he may have watched for a few minutes our vain attempt to negative his fate.  If so, I imagine he smiled again, as when he gave me the god upon the tiger.

As they hoisted the boat to its davits, I found in the lantern light his ancient volume, the “Analects of Confucius,” and claimed it for my own.  It was the very boat he had been accustomed to sit under, and he must have laid down the ancient philosopher to procure the gift for me, his grim determination already made.  I had caught a glimpse of him Sunday morning listening to the Christian services conducted by the captain in the social hall, and when I told the brooding captain that, he was struck by the idea that perhaps some word of his preachment might have come to Leung Kai Chu’s mind in his agony in the waters, and that at the last moment he might have repented and been saved.

“One aspiration, and he might be washed as white as snow.  ’This day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,’” said the commander, who was known as the parson skipper, dour, but ever on the watch for the first sign of repentance.

On the other hand, Hallman more nearly stated the general feeling: 

“By God, he spoiled sport, that black ghost on deck.  He was like a tupapau, a Polynesian demon.”

Hallman was in his early forties, with twenty years of South-Seas trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but hard-faced, European, with thin lips over nearly perfect teeth, and cold, small, pale-blue eyes.  He talked little to men, but isolated young women whenever possible, and bent over them in attempted gay, but earnest, converse.  He was one of those cold sensualists whose passion is as that of some animals, insistent, prowling, fierce, but impersonal.  An English South-Sea trader aboard gave me an astonishing light upon him: