The landlord returned.  The monocle fixedly and significantly regarded me.  “Have another, Doctor,” said the landlord, pointing to the empty tankard.  “How long were you in Macassar?” The doctor turned briskly to his old friend, and began some chaff.

4

Ferguson, who had just come into port with a damaged propeller shaft, was telling us how it was.  This was his first expansive experience, and there could be no doubt the engine-room staff of the Torrington had behaved very well.  The underwriters had recognized that, and handsomely, at a special meeting at Cornhill.  Though Ferguson was young for a chief engineer, his professional elders, who were listening to him, showed some critical appreciation of the way he solved his problem.  He was sitting at a table of the Negro Boy, drawing a diagram on it, and they stood round.

“There.  That was where it was.  You see what we had to do.  It would not have been so bad in calm weather, but we were labouring heavily, all the way from Savannah.  Our old man did not think it possible to do it.  But it was no good waiting for something worse to happen.”

The matter grew too technical for me.  There was cargo jettisoned, and ballast tanks emptied aft.  The stern of the Torrington was lifted so that her propeller at intervals was clear.  Ferguson then went overside on life-lines.  When he was not submerged, he was trying to put his ship right again; and when he became exhausted, one of his colleagues took his place, to see whether, while escaping drowning, he could continue the work of salvation.  They all escaped, and the Torrington put back to Tampa for repairs, which her own engineers accomplished.

The demonstration was over, and Ferguson’s story was lapsing into general gossip.  The party of men began to dissolve.

“Who do you think I saw at Tampa?” Ferguson asked Macandrew.  “Old Purdy.”

“What?” cried Macandrew.  “Is he alive?”

Ferguson laughed.  “Just about.  What’s he been doing?  I thought he had chucked the sea.  It was in the Customs Office.  I’d been there to make a declaration, and in one of those long corridors there he stood, all alone, with his hat in his hand, perhaps cooling his head.  I hardly knew him.  He’s more miserable than ever.”

“Did he say anything?” asked Macandrew.

“About as much as usual.  I didn’t know him at first.  He seemed rather ill.  The temples of that high forehead of his were knotted with veins.  It nearly gave me a headache to look at him.”

Several of us were impelled to ask a number of questions, but Ferguson was listening now, with the detachment of youth, to the end of a bawdy story that two men were laughing over.  This had already displaced Purdy in his mind.

“Didn’t he say anything at all?  Didn’t he mention Hanson?” we asked Ferguson.