“The thing simply can’t fail.  I’ve calculated every move.  I’ve guarded against everything.  I am no fool.”

“Yes—­you are.  Good-night.”

“Well, good-bye,” said Lingard, calmly.

He stepped into his boat, and Jorgenson walked up the jetty.  Lingard, clearing the yoke lines, heard him call out from a distance: 

“Drop it!”

“I sail before sunrise,” he shouted in answer, and went on board.

When he came up from his cabin after an uneasy night, it was dark yet.  A lank figure strolled across the deck.

“Here I am,” said Jorgenson, huskily.  “Die there or here—­all one.  But, if I die there, remember the girl must eat.”

Lingard was one of the few who had seen Jorgenson’s girl.  She had a wrinkled brown face, a lot of tangled grey hair, a few black stumps of teeth, and had been married to him lately by an enterprising young missionary from Bukit Timah.  What her appearance might have been once when Jorgenson gave for her three hundred dollars and several brass guns, it was impossible to say.  All that was left of her youth was a pair of eyes, undimmed and mournful, which, when she was alone, seemed to look stonily into the past of two lives.  When Jorgenson was near they followed his movements with anxious pertinacity.  And now within the sarong thrown over the grey head they were dropping unseen tears while Jorgenson’s girl rocked herself to and fro, squatting alone in a corner of the dark hut.

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Lingard, grasping Jorgenson’s hand.  “She shall want for nothing.  All I expect you to do is to look a little after Belarab’s morals when I am away.  One more trip I must make, and then we shall be ready to go ahead.  I’ve foreseen every single thing.  Trust me!”

In this way did the restless shade of Captain H. C. Jorgenson recross the water of oblivion to step back into the life of men.

VI

For two years, Lingard, who had thrown himself body and soul into the great enterprise, had lived in the long intoxication of slowly preparing success.  No thought of failure had crossed his mind, and no price appeared too heavy to pay for such a magnificent achievement.  It was nothing less than bringing Hassim triumphantly back to that country seen once at night under the low clouds and in the incessant tumult of thunder.  When at the conclusion of some long talk with Hassim, who for the twentieth time perhaps had related the story of his wrongs and his struggle, he lifted his big arm and shaking his fist above his head, shouted:  “We will stir them up.  We will wake up the country!” he was, without knowing it in the least, making a complete confession of the idealism hidden under the simplicity of his strength.  He would wake up the country!  That was the fundamental and unconscious emotion on which were engrafted his need of action, the primitive sense of what was due to justice, to gratitude, to friendship, the sentimental pity for the hard lot of Immada—­poor child—­the proud conviction that of all the men in the world, in his world, he alone had the means and the pluck “to lift up the big end” of such an adventure.