“Suppose ’m that fella Chink maybe he think ’m me kai-kai along him,” Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.

“All right,” the steward concluded.  “We find out.  You move ’m along my bunk, I move ’m along that fella Chink’s bunk.”

This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied the starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he went on deck and aft to his duties.  On his next return he found Ah Moy had transferred back to the port side, but this time into the last bunk aft.

“Seems the beggar’s taken a fancy to me,” the steward smiled to himself.

Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy’s reason for bunking always on the opposite side from Kwaque.

“I changee,” the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to please and placate, in response to Daughtry’s direct question.  “All the time like that, changee, plentee changee.  You savvee?”

Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy’s slant eyes betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily gazed on Kwaque’s two permanently bent fingers of the left hand and on Kwaque’s forehead, between the eyes, where the skin appeared a shade darker, a trifle thicker, and was marked by the first beginning of three short vertical lines or creases that were already giving him the lion-like appearance, the leonine face so named by the experts and technicians of the fell disease.

As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he had drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque’s bunks about.  And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to notice that he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied.  Nor did he notice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupied all the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it from the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and unmolested.

Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thing in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind.  He did notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley.  Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was:  “That’s the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I’ve ever clapped my lamps on.  Clean in galley, clean in steerage, clean in everything.  He’s always washing the dishes in boiling water, when he isn’t washing himself or his clothes or bedding.  My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!”

For there were other things to occupy the steward’s mind.  Getting acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to one another, consumed much time.  Then there was the path of the Mary Turner across the sea.  No old sailor breathes who does not desire to know the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.