“I am not ready for war,” he explained, rapidly, over his shoulder, “and to-morrow there may be no wind.”  Afterward for a time he forgot everybody and everything while he conned the brig through the few outlying dangers.  But in half an hour, and running off with the wind on the quarter, he was quite clear of the coast and breathed freely.  It was only then that he approached two others on that poop where he was accustomed in moments of difficulty to commune alone with his craft.  Hassim had called his sister out of the cabin; now and then Lingard could see them with fierce distinctness, side by side, and with twined arms, looking toward the mysterious country that seemed at every flash to leap away farther from the brig—­unscathed and fading.

The thought uppermost in Lingard’s mind was:  “What on earth am I going to do with them?” And no one seemed to care what he would do.  Jaffir with eight others quartered on the main hatch, looked to each other’s wounds and conversed interminably in low tones, cheerful and quiet, like well-behaved children.  Each of them had saved his kris, but Lingard had to make a distribution of cotton cloth out of his trade-goods.  Whenever he passed by them, they all looked after him gravely.  Hassim and Immada lived in the cuddy.  The chief’s sister took the air only in the evening and those two could be heard every night, invisible and murmuring in the shadows of the quarter-deck.  Every Malay on board kept respectfully away from them.

Lingard, on the poop, listened to the soft voices, rising and falling, in a melancholy cadence; sometimes the woman cried out as if in anger or in pain.  He would stop short.  The sound of a deep sigh would float up to him on the stillness of the night.  Attentive stars surrounded the wandering brig and on all sides their light fell through a vast silence upon a noiseless sea.  Lingard would begin again to pace the deck, muttering to himself.

“Belarab’s the man for this job.  His is the only place where I can look for help, but I don’t think I know enough to find it.  I wish I had old Jorgenson here—­just for ten minutes.”

This Jorgenson knew things that had happened a long time ago, and lived amongst men efficient in meeting the accidents of the day, but who did not care what would happen to-morrow and who had no time to remember yesterday.  Strictly speaking, he did not live amongst them.  He only appeared there from time to time.  He lived in the native quarter, with a native woman, in a native house standing in the middle of a plot of fenced ground where grew plantains, and furnished only with mats, cooking pots, a queer fishing net on two sticks, and a small mahogany case with a lock and a silver plate engraved with the words “Captain H. C. Jorgenson.  Barque Wild Rose.”