On the forepart of the bridge the giant and the pigmy muttered to each other frequently in quiet tones.  Behind them Massy stood sideways with an expression of disdain and suspense on his face.  His globular eyes were perfectly motionless, and he seemed to have forgotten the long pipe he held in his hand.

On the fore-deck below the bridge, steeply roofed with the white slopes of the awnings, a young lascar seaman had clambered outside the rail.  He adjusted quickly a broad band of sail canvas under his armpits, and throwing his chest against it, leaned out far over the water.  The sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder, bared his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny skin like a woman’s.  He swung it rigidly with the rotary and menacing action of a slinger:  the 14-lb. weight hurtled circling in the air, then suddenly flew ahead as far as the curve of the bow.  The wet thin line swished like scratched silk running through the dark fingers of the man, and the plunge of the lead close to the ship’s side made a vanishing silvery scar upon the golden glitter; then after an interval the voice of the young Malay uplifted and long-drawn declared the depth of the water in his own language.

“Tiga stengah,” he cried after each splash and pause, gathering the line busily for another cast.  “Tiga stengah,” which means three fathom and a half.  For a mile or so from seaward there was a uniform depth of water right up to the bar.  “Half-three.  Half-three.  Half-three,”—­and his modulated cry, returned leisurely and monotonous, like the repeated call of a bird, seemed to float away in sunshine and disappear in the spacious silence of the empty sea and of a lifeless shore lying open, north and south, east and west, without the stir of a single cloud-shadow or the whisper of any other voice.

The owner-engineer of the Sofala remained very still behind the two seamen of different race, creed, and color; the European with the time-defying vigor of his old frame, the little Malay, old, too, but slight and shrunken like a withered brown leaf blown by a chance wind under the mighty shadow of the other.  Very busy looking forward at the land, they had not a glance to spare; and Massy, glaring at them from behind, seemed to resent their attention to their duty like a personal slight upon himself.

This was unreasonable; but he had lived in his own world of unreasonable resentments for many years.  At last, passing his moist palm over the rare lanky wisps of coarse hair on the top of his yellow head, he began to talk slowly.

“A leadsman, you want!  I suppose that’s your correct mail-boat style.  Haven’t you enough judgment to tell where you are by looking at the land?  Why, before I had been a twelvemonth in the trade I was up to that trick—­and I am only an engineer.  I can point to you from here where the bar is, and I could tell you besides that you are as likely as not to stick her in the mud in about five minutes from now; only you would call it interfering, I suppose.  And there’s that written agreement of ours, that says I mustn’t interfere.”