Whenever he came into the lagoon tugging with bare arms, Jorgenson, who would be watching the entrance of the creek ever since a muffled detonation of a gun to seaward had warned him of the brig’s arrival on the Shore of Refuge, would mutter to himself—­“Here’s Tom coming in his nutshell.”  And indeed she was in shape somewhat like half a nutshell and also in the colour of her dark varnished planks.  The man’s shoulders and head rose high above her gunwales; loaded with Lingard’s heavy frame she would climb sturdily the steep ridges, slide squatting into the hollows of the sea, or, now and then, take a sedate leap over a short wave.  Her behaviour had a stout trustworthiness about it, and she reminded one of a surefooted mountain-pony carrying over difficult ground a rider much bigger than himself.

Wasub wiped the thwarts, ranged the mast and sail along the side, shipped the rowlocks.  Lingard looked down at his old servant’s spare shoulders upon which the light from above fell unsteady but vivid.  Wasub worked for the comfort of his commander and his singleminded absorption in that task flashed upon Lingard the consolation of an act of friendliness.  The elderly Malay at last lifted his head with a deferential murmur; his wrinkled old face with half a dozen wiry hairs pendulous at each corner of the dark lips expressed a kind of weary satisfaction, and the slightly oblique worn eyes stole a discreet upward glance containing a hint of some remote meaning.  Lingard found himself compelled by the justice of that obscure claim to murmur as he stepped into the boat: 

“These are times of danger.”

He sat down and took up the sculls.  Wasub held on to the gunwale as to a last hope of a further confidence.  He had served in the brig five years.  Lingard remembered that very well.  This aged figure had been intimately associated with the brig’s life and with his own, appearing silently ready for every incident and emergency in an unquestioning expectation of orders; symbolic of blind trust in his strength, of an unlimited obedience to his will.  Was it unlimited?

“We shall require courage and fidelity,” added Lingard, in a tentative tone.

“There are those who know me,” snapped the old man, readily, as if the words had been waiting for a long time.  “Observe, Tuan.  I have filled with fresh water the little breaker in the bows.”

“I know you, too,” said Lingard.

“And the wind—­and the sea,” ejaculated the serang, jerkily.  “These also are faithful to the strong.  By Allah!  I who am a pilgrim and have listened to words of wisdom in many places, I tell you, Tuan, there is strength in the knowledge of what is hidden in things without life, as well as in the living men.  Will Tuan be gone long?”

“I come back in a short time—­together with the rest of the whites from over there.  This is the beginning of many stratagems.  Wasub!  Daman, the son of a dog, has suddenly made prisoners two of my own people.  My face is made black.”