He shrugged expressively.  Then he shook his head.

“No,” he went on.  “I don’t know a thing but what any guy can learn who comes along up this coast.  I’ve thought a heap.  An’, like you, I’ve ast questions all the time.  But you don’t learn a thing of this enterprise but the things you see.  Bat Harker don’t ever talk.”  He laughed in quiet enjoyment.  “He’s most like a clam mussed up in a cement bar’l.  There don’t seem any clear reason either.  The only thing queer to me was Standing’s ‘get out.’  There was talk then when that happened along.  But it was jest talk.  Canteen talk.  Something sort of happened.  No one seemed rightly to know.  They guessed Bat was a tough guy who’d boosted him out—­some way.  Then I heard his wife had quit and he was all broke up.  Then they said he’d made losses of millions on stock market gambles.  But the yarns don’t fit.  You see, the mill’s gone right ahead.  The capital’s there, sure.  They’ve just built and built.  There’s more than twice the ‘hands’ there was eight years back.  And get a look at the ‘bottoms’ loading at the wharves.  No.  Say, when I came aboard the Myra and they scrapped the Lizzie, I never guessed to get a full cargo.  Well, I can load right down to the water line for this place alone all the time.  No.  Sachigo’s a mighty big fixture in the trade of this coast.  It’s a swell proposition for us sea folk.  It keeps our propellers moving all the time.  They’re bright folk, sure.”

The old seaman laughed and moved off again to his telegraphs.  The business of running in to the quayside was beginning in earnest.

* * * * *

The hawsers creaked and strained at the bollards.  The vessel yawed.  Then she settled at her berth.  The engine-room telegraph chimed its final order, and the vessel’s busy heart came to rest.  Instantly activity reigned upon the deck, and the discharge of cargo was in full swing.

Bull Sternford was one of the first to pass down the gangway.  Clad in the pleasant tweeds of civilisation, part hidden under a close-buttoned pea-jacket, he bulked enormously.  His more than six feet of height was lost against his massive breadth of shoulder.  Then, too, his keen face under a beaver cap, and his shapely head with its mane of hair, were things to deny his body that attention it might otherwise have attracted.

For all that, at least one pair of critical eyes lost no detail of his personality.  Bat Harker was unobtrusively standing amongst the piled bales of groundwood that stacked the wharf from end to end.  There was nothing about him to single him out from those who stood on the quay.  The rough clothing of his original calling was very dear to him, and he clung to it tenaciously.  He seemed to have aged not one whit in the added eight years.  His iron-grey hair was just as thick and colourful as before.  There was no added line in his hard face.  His girth was no less and no more.  And his eyes, penetrating, steady, had the same spirit shining in them.