His tramping for cargo had been phenomenally successful.  He was filling his holds at astonishingly heavy freights.  And not only would this bring him credit with his owners, which meant promotion in due course to a larger ship, but in the mean time, as he drew his 2-1/2 per cent, on the profits, it represented a very comfortable matter of solid cash for that much-needing person himself.  He hugged himself with pleasure when he thought of this new found prosperity.  It represented so many things which he would be able to do for his wife and family, which through so many years narrow circumstances had made impossible.

The burly Arab on whose hips he rode pick-a-back stepped out of the water at last, and Kettle jumped down from his perch, and picked his way daintily among the litter of the foreshore toward the white houses of the town which lay beyond.

It was the first time he had set foot there.  So great was his luck at the time, that he had not been forced to go ashore in the usual way drumming up cargo.  The shippers had come off begging him to become their carrier, and he had muleted them in heavy freights accordingly.  So he stepped into the town with many of the feelings of a conqueror, and demanded to be led to the office of a man with whom he had done profitable business that very morning.

Of course, “office” in the Western meaning of the term there was none.  The worthy Rad el Moussa transacted affairs on the floor of his general sitting-room, and stored his merchandise in the bed-chambers, or wherever it would be out of reach of pilfering fingers.  But he received the little sailor with fine protestations of regard, and (after some giggles and shuffling as the women withdrew) inducted him to the dark interior of his house, and set before him delicious coffee and some doubtful sweetmeats.

Kettle knew enough about Oriental etiquette not to introduce the matter on which he had come at the outset of the conversation.  He passed and received the necessary compliments first, endured a discussion of local trade prospects, and then by an easy gradation led up to the powers of the local Kady.  He did not speak Arabic himself, and Rad el Moussa had no English.  But they had both served a life apprenticeship to sea trading, and the curse of the Tower of Babel had very little power over them.  In the memories of each there were garnered scraps from a score of spoken languages, and when these failed, they could always draw on the unlimited vocabulary of the gestures and the eyes.  And for points that were really abstruse, or which required definite understanding, there always remained the charcoal stick and the explanatory drawing on the face of a whitewashed wall.

When the conversation had lasted some half an hour by the clock, and a slave brought in a second relay of sweetmeats and thick coffee, the sailor mentioned, as it were incidentally, that one of his officers had got into trouble in the town.  “It’s quite a small thing,” he said lightly, “but I want him back as soon as possible, because there’s work for him to do on the steamer.  See what I mean?”