“If I hadn’t a wife and a child at home you may be sure, sir, I would have asked you to let me go the very minute you came on board.”

I answered him with a matter-of-course calmness as though some remote third person were in question.

“And I, Mr. Burns, would not have let you go.  You have signed the ship’s articles as chief officer, and till they are terminated at the final port of discharge I shall expect you to attend to your duty and give me the benefit of your experience to the best of your ability.”

Stony incredulity lingered in his eyes:  but it broke down before my friendly attitude.  With a slight upward toss of his arms (I got to know that gesture well afterward) he bolted out of the cabin.

We might have saved ourselves that little passage of harmless sparring.  Before many days had elapsed it was Mr. Burns who was pleading with me anxiously not to leave him behind; while I could only return him but doubtful answers.  The whole thing took on a somewhat tragic complexion.

And this horrible problem was only an extraneous episode, a mere complication in the general problem of how to get that ship—­which was mine with her appurtenances and her men, with her body and her spirit now slumbering in that pestilential river—­how to get her out to sea.

Mr. Burns, while still acting captain, had hastened to sign a charter-party which in an ideal world without guile would have been an excellent document.  Directly I ran my eye over it I foresaw trouble ahead unless the people of the other part were quite exceptionally fair-minded and open to argument.

Mr. Burns, to whom I imparted my fears, chose to take great umbrage at them.  He looked at me with that usual incredulous stare, and said bitterly: 

“I suppose, sir, you want to make out I’ve acted like a fool?”

I told him, with my systematic kindliness which always seemed to augment his surprise, that I did not want to make out anything.  I would leave that to the future.

And, sure enough, the future brought in a lot of trouble.  There were days when I used to remember Captain Giles with nothing short of abhorrence.  His confounded acuteness had let me in for this job; while his prophecy that I “would have my hands full” coming true, made it appear as if done on purpose to play an evil joke on my young innocence.

Yes.  I had my hands full of complications which were most valuable as “experience.”  People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience.  But in this connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions.

I must say I was losing mine rapidly.  But on these instructive complications I must not enlarge more than to say that they could all be resumed in the one word:  Delay.

A mankind which has invented the proverb, “Time is money,” will understand my vexation.  The word “Delay” entered the secret chamber of my brain, resounded there like a tolling bell which maddens the ear, affected all my senses, took on a black colouring, a bitter taste, a deadly meaning.