“I don’t ask for fancy goods,” said Kettle eagerly.  “Give me anything with hands on it—­apes, niggers, stokers, what you like, and I’ll soon teach them their dancing steps.”

Captain Image pulled at his moustache.  “The trouble of it is, we are short everywhere.  It’s been a sickly voyage, this.  I couldn’t let you have more than two out of the stokehold, and even if we take those, the old Chief will be fit to eat me.  You could do nothing with that big vessel with only two beside yourself.”

“Let me go round and see.  I believe I can rake up enough hands somehow.”

“Well, you must be quick about it,” said Image.  “I’ve wasted more than enough time already.  I can only give you five minutes, Captain.  Oh, by the way, there’s a nigger stowaway from Sarry Leone you can take if you like.  He’s a stonemason or some such foolishness, and I don’t mind having him drowned.  If you hammer him enough, probably he’ll learn how to put some weight on a brace.”

“That stonemason’s just the man I can use,” said Kettle.  “Get him for me.  I’ll never forget your kindness over this, Captain, and you may depend upon me to do the square thing by you if I get her home.”

Captain Kettle ran off down the bridge and was quickly out of sight, and hard at his quest for volunteers.  Captain Image waited a minute, and he turned to his third mate.  “Now, me lad,” he said, “I know you’re disappointed; but with the other mates sick like they are, it’s just impossible for me to let you go.  If I did, the Company would sack me, and the dirty Board of Trade would probably take away my ticket.  So you may as well do the kind, and help poor old Cappie Kettle.  You see what he’s come down to, through no fault of his own.  You’re young, and you’re full to the coamings with confidence.  I’m older, and I know that luck may very well get up and hit me, and I’ll be wanting a helping hand myself.  It’s a rotten, undependable trade, this sailoring.  You might just call the carpenter, and get the cover off that smaller lifeboat.”

“You think he’ll get a crew, then, sir, and not our deckhands?”

“Him?  He’ll get some things with legs and arms to them, if he has to whittle ’em out of kindling-wood.  It’s not that that’ll stop Cappie Kettle now, me lad.”

The third mate went off, sent for the carpenter, and started to get a lifeboat cleared and ready for launching.  Captain Image fell to anxiously pacing the upper bridge, and presently Kettle came back to him.

“Well, Captain,” he said, “I got a fine crew to volunteer, if you can see your way to let me have them.  There’s a fireman and a trimmer, both English; there’s a third-class passenger—­a Dago of some sort, I think he is, that was a ganger on the Congo railway—­and there’s Mr. Dayton-Philipps; and if you send me along your nigger stonemason, that’ll make a good, strong ship’s company.”

“Dayton-Philipps!” said Image.  “Why, he’s an officer in the English Army, and he’s been in command of Haussa troops on the Gold Coast, and he’s been some sort of a Resident, or political thing up in one of those nigger towns at the back there.  What’s he want to go for?”