A discord of three voices raised together in a drawling wail trailed on the sudden immobility of the air.

“Brig ahoy!  Give us a rope!”

The first boat-load from the yacht emerged floating slowly into the pool of purple light wavering round the brig on the black water.  Two men squeezed in the bows pulled uncomfortably; in the middle, on a heap of seamen’s canvas bags, another sat, insecure, propped with both arms, stiff-legged, angularly helpless.  The light from the poop brought everything out in lurid detail, and the boat floating slowly toward the brig had a suspicious and pitiful aspect.  The shabby load lumbering her looked somehow as if it had been stolen by those men who resembled castaways.  In the sternsheets Carter, standing up, steered with his leg.  He had a smile of youthful sarcasm.

“Here they are!” he cried to Lingard.  “You’ve got your own way, Captain.  I thought I had better come myself with the first precious lot—­”

“Pull around the stern.  The brig’s on the swing,” interrupted Lingard.

“Aye, aye!  We’ll try not to smash the brig.  We would be lost indeed if—­fend off there, John; fend off, old reliable, if you care a pin for your salty hide.  I like the old chap,” he said, when he stood by Lingard’s side looking down at the boat which was being rapidly cleared by whites and Malays working shoulder to shoulder in silence.  “I like him.  He don’t belong to that yachting lot either.  They picked him up on the road somewhere.  Look at the old dog—­carved out of a ship’s timber—­as talkative as a fish—­grim as a gutted wreck.  That’s the man for me.  All the others there are married, or going to be, or ought to be, or sorry they ain’t.  Every man jack of them has a petticoat in tow—­dash me!  Never heard in all my travels such a jabber about wives and kids.  Hurry up with your dunnage—­below there!  Aye!  I had no difficulty in getting them to clear out from the yacht.  They never saw a pair of gents stolen before—­you understand.  It upset all their little notions of what a stranding means, hereabouts.  Not that mine aren’t mixed a bit, too—­and yet I’ve seen a thing or two.”

His excitement was revealed in this boyish impulse to talk.

“Look,” he said, pointing at the growing pile of bags and bedding on the brig’s quarter-deck.  “Look.  Don’t they mean to sleep soft—­and dream of home—­maybe.  Home.  Think of that, Captain.  These chaps can’t get clear away from it.  It isn’t like you and me—­”

Lingard made a movement.

“I ran away myself when so high.  My old man’s a Trinity pilot.  That’s a job worth staying at home for.  Mother writes sometimes, but they can’t miss me much.  There’s fourteen of us altogether—­eight at home yet.  No fear of the old country ever getting undermanned—­let die who must.  Only let it be a fair game, Captain.  Let’s have a fair show.”

Lingard assured him briefly he should have it.  That was the very reason he wanted the yacht’s crew in the brig, he added.  Then quiet and grave he inquired whether that pistol was still in Carter’s pocket.