“Oo avay-voo cashay mon money-belt?” he inquired with much confidence, and with pure Yankee accent.

The sailor answered with a shrug and a spreading of empty hands.

“Pas de money-belt, pas de pantalon, pas de tous!  Dam queer Amayricain!”

Jim was not convinced of the sailor’s innocence, but perceived that he must give him the benefit of the doubt.  As the sailor intimated, Jim, himself, was open to suspicion, and couldn’t afford to be too zealous in calumniating others.  He fell to thinking again, and attacked the next Frenchman that came into the fo’cas’le with the following: 

“Kond j’aytay malade don ma tate, kee a pree mon money-belt?”

It was the ship’s cook this time, and he turned and stared at Jimmy as though he had seen a ghost.  When he found tongue he uttered a volume of opinion and abuse which Jimmy knew by instinct was not fit to be translated, and then he fled up the ladder.

On the fourth day, toward evening, James had a visitor.  All day the yacht had been pitching and rolling, and by afternoon she was laboring in the violence of a storm and was listing badly.

James was a fearless seaman, but it crossed his mind more than once that if he were captain, and if there were a port within reach, he would put into it before midnight.  But he could tell nothing of the ship’s course.  He turned the subject over in his mind as he lay on his bunk in that peculiar state half-way between sickness and health, when the body is relaxed by a purely accidental illness and the mind is abnormally alert.  He wished intensely for a bath, a shave, and a fair complement of clothes.  He longed also to go up the hatchway for a breath of air, and was considering the possibility of doing this later, with a blanket and darkness for a shield, when he became conscious of a pair of neatly trousered legs descending the ladder.  It was quite a different performance from the catlike climbing up and down of the sailors.

Jimmy watched in the dim light until the whole figure was complete, fantastically supplying, in his imagination, the coat, the shirt, the collar and the tie to go with the trousers—­all the things which he himself lacked.  Was there also a hat?  Jimmy couldn’t make out, and so he asked.

“Have you got on a hat?”

A frigid voice answered, “I beg your pardon!”

“I said, are you wearing a hat?  I couldn’t see, you know.”

“Monsieur takes the liberty of being impertinent.”

“Oh, excuse me—­I beg your pardon.  But it’s so beastly hot and dark in here, you know, and I’ve never been seasick before.”

“No?  Monsieur is fortunate.”  The visitor advanced a little, drew from a recess a shoe-blacking outfit, pulled over it one of the stiff blankets from a neighboring bunk, and sat down rather cautiously.  Little by little James made out more of the look of the man.  He was large and rather blond, well-dressed, clean-shaven.  He spoke English easily, but with a foreign accent.