The first morning the new flag floated over the stern of the Nan-Shan Jukes stood looking at it bitterly from the bridge.  He struggled with his feelings for a while, and then remarked, “Queer flag for a man to sail under, sir.”

“What’s the matter with the flag?” inquired Captain MacWhirr.  “Seems all right to me.”  And he walked across to the end of the bridge to have a good look.

“Well, it looks queer to me,” burst out Jukes, greatly exasperated, and flung off the bridge.

Captain MacWhirr was amazed at these manners.  After a while he stepped quietly into the chart-room, and opened his International Signal Code-book at the plate where the flags of all the nations are correctly figured in gaudy rows.  He ran his finger over them, and when he came to Siam he contemplated with great attention the red field and the white elephant.  Nothing could be more simple; but to make sure he brought the book out on the bridge for the purpose of comparing the coloured drawing with the real thing at the flagstaff astern.  When next Jukes, who was carrying on the duty that day with a sort of suppressed fierceness, happened on the bridge, his commander observed: 

“There’s nothing amiss with that flag.”

“Isn’t there?” mumbled Jukes, falling on his knees before a deck-locker and jerking therefrom viciously a spare lead-line.

“No.  I looked up the book.  Length twice the breadth and the elephant exactly in the middle.  I thought the people ashore would know how to make the local flag.  Stands to reason.  You were wrong, Jukes. . . .”

“Well, sir,” began Jukes, getting up excitedly, “all I can say—­” He fumbled for the end of the coil of line with trembling hands.

“That’s all right.”  Captain MacWhirr soothed him, sitting heavily on a little canvas folding-stool he greatly affected.  “All you have to do is to take care they don’t hoist the elephant upside-down before they get quite used to it.”

Jukes flung the new lead-line over on the fore-deck with a loud “Here you are, bo’ss’en—­don’t forget to wet it thoroughly,” and turned with immense resolution towards his commander; but Captain MacWhirr spread his elbows on the bridge-rail comfortably.

“Because it would be, I suppose, understood as a signal of distress,” he went on.  “What do you think?  That elephant there, I take it, stands for something in the nature of the Union Jack in the flag. . . .”

“Does it!” yelled Jukes, so that every head on the Nan-Shan’s decks looked towards the bridge.  Then he sighed, and with sudden resignation:  “It would certainly be a dam’ distressful sight,” he said, meekly.

Later in the day he accosted the chief engineer with a confidential, “Here, let me tell you the old man’s latest.”

Mr. Solomon Rout (frequently alluded to as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout), from finding himself almost invariably the tallest man on board every ship he joined, had acquired the habit of a stooping, leisurely condescension.  His hair was scant and sandy, his flat cheeks were pale, his bony wrists and long scholarly hands were pale, too, as though he had lived all his life in the shade.