“But recollect that there are other grounds of dismissal.  There’s habitual carelessness, amounting to incompetence—­there’s gross and persistent neglect of duty.  I am not quite as big a fool as you try to make me out to be.  You have been careless of late—­leaving everything to that Serang.  Why!  I’ve seen you letting that old fool of a Malay take bearings for you, as if you were too big to attend to your work yourself.  And what do you call that silly touch-and-go manner in which you took the ship over the bar just now?  You expect me to put up with that?”

Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the bridge, Sterne, the mate, tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room companion.  Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about with indifference to the right and left at the river banks slipping astern of the Sofala steadily.

Massy turned full at the chair.  The character of his whine became again threatening.

“Take care.  I may yet dismiss you and freeze to your money for a year.  I may . . .”

But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man whose money had come in the nick of time to save him from utter ruin, his voice died out in his throat.

“Not that I want you to go,” he resumed after a silence, and in an absurdly insinuating tone.  “I want nothing better than to be friends and renew the agreement, if you will consent to find another couple of hundred to help with the new boilers, Captain Whalley.  I’ve told you before.  She must have new boilers; you know it as well as I do.  Have you thought this over?”

He waited.  The slender stem of the pipe with its bulky lump of a bowl at the end hung down from his thick lips.  It had gone out.  Suddenly he took it from between his teeth and wrung his hands slightly.

“Don’t you believe me?” He thrust the pipe bowl into the pocket of his shiny black jacket.

“It’s like dealing with the devil,” he said.  “Why don’t you speak?  At first you were so high and mighty with me I hardly dared to creep about my own deck.  Now I can’t get a word from you.  You don’t seem to see me at all.  What does it mean?  Upon my soul, you terrify me with this deaf and dumb trick.  What’s going on in that head of yours?  What are you plotting against me there so hard that you can’t say a word?  You will never make me believe that you—­you—­don’t know where to lay your hands on a couple of hundred.  You have made me curse the day I was born. . . .”

“Mr. Massy,” said Captain Whalley suddenly, without stirring.

The engineer started violently.

“If that is so I can only beg you to forgive me.”

“Starboard,” muttered the Serang to the helmsman; and the Sofala began to swing round the bend into the second reach.

“Ough!” Massy shuddered.  “You make my blood run cold.  What made you come here?  What made you come aboard that evening all of a sudden, with your high talk and your money—­tempting me?  I always wondered what was your motive?  You fastened yourself on me to have easy times and grow fat on my life blood, I tell you.  Was that it?  I believe you are the greatest miser in the world, or else why . . .”