Again he slapped his leg with the book; and Jukes opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“Running to get behind the weather!  Do you understand that, Mr. Jukes?  It’s the maddest thing!” ejaculated Captain MacWhirr, with pauses, gazing at the floor profoundly.  “You would think an old woman had been writing this.  It passes me.  If that thing means anything useful, then it means that I should at once alter the course away, away to the devil somewhere, and come booming down on Fu-chau from the northward at the tail of this dirty weather that’s supposed to be knocking about in our way.  From the north!  Do you understand, Mr. Jukes?  Three hundred extra miles to the distance, and a pretty coal bill to show.  I couldn’t bring myself to do that if every word in there was gospel truth, Mr. Jukes.  Don’t you expect me. . . .”

And Jukes, silent, marvelled at this display of feeling and loquacity.

“But the truth is that you don’t know if the fellow is right, anyhow.  How can you tell what a gale is made of till you get it?  He isn’t aboard here, is he?  Very well.  Here he says that the centre of them things bears eight points off the wind; but we haven’t got any wind, for all the barometer falling.  Where’s his centre now?”

“We will get the wind presently,” mumbled Jukes.

“Let it come, then,” said Captain MacWhirr, with dignified indignation.  “It’s only to let you see, Mr. Jukes, that you don’t find everything in books.  All these rules for dodging breezes and circumventing the winds of heaven, Mr. Jukes, seem to me the maddest thing, when you come to look at it sensibly.”

He raised his eyes, saw Jukes gazing at him dubiously, and tried to illustrate his meaning.

“About as queer as your extraordinary notion of dodging the ship head to sea, for I don’t know how long, to make the Chinamen comfortable; whereas all we’ve got to do is to take them to Fu-chau, being timed to get there before noon on Friday.  If the weather delays me—­very well.  There’s your log-book to talk straight about the weather.  But suppose I went swinging off my course and came in two days late, and they asked me:  ‘Where have you been all that time, Captain?’ What could I say to that?  ‘Went around to dodge the bad weather,’ I would say.  ’It must’ve been dam’ bad,’ they would say.  ‘Don’t know,’ I would have to say; ’I’ve dodged clear of it.’  See that, Jukes?  I have been thinking it all out this afternoon.”

He looked up again in his unseeing, unimaginative way.  No one had ever heard him say so much at one time.  Jukes, with his arms open in the doorway, was like a man invited to behold a miracle.  Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance.