“Mr. Almayer told me he wanted to see you very particularly, sir.”

Saying these words I smiled.  I don’t know why I smiled except that it seemed absolutely impossible to mention Almayer’s name without a smile of a sort.  It had not to be necessarily a mirthful smile.  Turning his head towards me Captain C—­ smiled too, rather joylessly.

“The pony got away from him—­eh?”

“Yes sir.  He did.”

“Where is he?”

“Goodness only knows.”

“No.  I mean Almayer.  Let him come along.”

The captain’s stateroom opening straight on deck under the bridge, I had only to beckon from the doorway to Almayer, who had remained aft, with downcast eyes, on the very spot where I had left him.  He strolled up moodily, shook hands and at once asked permission to shut the cabin door.

“I have a pretty story to tell you,” were the last words I heard.  The bitterness of tone was remarkable.

I went away from the door, of course.  For the moment I had no crew on board; only the Chinaman carpenter, with a canvas bag hung round his neck and a hammer in his hand, roamed about the empty decks knocking out the wedges of the hatches and dropping them into the bag conscientiously.  Having nothing to do I joined our two engineers at the door of the engine-room.  It was near breakfast time.

“He’s turned up early, hasn’t he?” commented the second engineer, and smiled indifferently.  He was an abstemious man with a good digestion and a placid, reasonable view of life even when hungry.

“Yes,” I said.  “Shut up with the old man.  Some very particular business.”

“He will spin him a damned endless yarn,” observed the chief engineer.

He smiled rather sourly.  He was dyspeptic and suffered from gnawing hunger in the morning.  The second smiled broadly, a smile that made two vertical folds on his shaven cheeks.  And I smiled too, but I was not exactly amused.  In that man, whose name apparently could not be uttered anywhere in the Malay Archipelago without a smile, there was nothing amusing whatever.  That morning he breakfasted with us silently, looking mostly into his cup.  I informed him that my men came upon his pony capering in the fog on the very brink of the eight-foot-deep well in which he kept his store of guttah.  The cover was off with no one near by, and the whole of my crew just missed going heels over head into that beastly hole.  Jurumudi Itam, our best quartermaster, deft at fine needlework, he who mended the ship’s flags and sewed buttons on our coats, was disabled by a kick on the shoulder.

Both remorse and gratitude seemed foreign to Almayer’s character.  He mumbled: 

“Do you mean that pirate fellow?”

“What pirate fellow?  The man has been in the ship eleven years,” I said indignantly.

“It’s his looks,” Almayer muttered for all apology.

The sun had eaten up the fog.  From where we sat under the after awning we could see in the distance the pony tied up in front of Almayer’s house, to a post of the verandah.  We were silent for a long time.  All at once Almayer, alluding evidently to the subject of his conversation in the captain’s cabin, exclaimed anxiously across the table: