He was very irritated.  I said innocently:  “Are they, sir.  I wonder why?”

“Why!” he fumed.  “Afraid of the sails.  Afraid of a white crew.  Too much trouble.  Too much work.  Too long out here.  Easy life and deck-chairs more their mark.  Here I sit with the Consul-General’s cable before me, and the only man fit for the job not to be found anywhere.  I began to think you were funking it, too. . . .”

“I haven’t been long getting to the office,” I remarked calmly.

“You have a good name out here, though,” he growled savagely without looking at me.

“I am very glad to hear it from you, sir,” I said.

“Yes.  But you are not on the spot when you are wanted.  You know you weren’t.  That steward of yours wouldn’t dare to neglect a message from this office.  Where the devil did you hide yourself for the best part of the day?”

I only smiled kindly down on him, and he seemed to recollect himself, and asked me to take a seat.  He explained that the master of a British ship having died in Bangkok the Consul-General had cabled to him a request for a competent man to be sent out to take command.

Apparently, in his mind, I was the man from the first, though for the looks of the thing the notification addressed to the Sailors’ Home was general.  An agreement had already been prepared.  He gave it to me to read, and when I handed it back to him with the remark that I accepted its terms, the deputy-Neptune signed it, stamped it with his own exalted hand, folded it in four (it was a sheet of blue foolscap) and presented it to me—­a gift of extraordinary potency, for, as I put it in my pocket, my head swam a little.

“This is your appointment to the command,” he said with a certain gravity.  “An official appointment binding the owners to conditions which you have accepted.  Now—­when will you be ready to go?”

I said I would be ready that very day if necessary.  He caught me at my word with great alacrity.  The steamer Melita was leaving for Bangkok that evening about seven.  He would request her captain officially to give me a passage and wait for me till ten o’clock.

Then he rose from his office chair, and I got up, too.  My head swam, there was no doubt about it, and I felt a certain heaviness of limbs as if they had grown bigger since I had sat down on that chair.  I made my bow.

A subtle change in Captain Ellis’ manner became perceptible as though he had laid aside the trident of deputy-Neptune.  In reality, it was only his official pen that he had dropped on getting up.

II

He shook hands with me:  “Well, there you are, on your own, appointed officially under my responsibility.”

He was actually walking with me to the door.  What a distance off it seemed!  I moved like a man in bonds.  But we reached it at last.  I opened it with the sensation of dealing with mere dream-stuff, and then at the last moment the fellowship of seamen asserted itself, stronger than the difference of age and station.  It asserted itself in Captain Ellis’ voice.