Other considerations occurring to his prudence had kept him tongue-tied from day to day.  It seemed to him now that it would yet have been easier to speak out in the first hour of discovery.  He almost regretted not having made a row at once.  But then the very monstrosity of the disclosure . . .  Why!  He could hardly face it himself, let alone pointing it out to somebody else.  Moreover, with a desperado of that sort one never knew.  The object was not to get him out (that was as well as done already), but to step into his place.  Bizarre as the thought seemed he might have shown fight.  A fellow up to working such a fraud would have enough cheek for anything; a fellow that, as it were, stood up against God Almighty Himself.  He was a horrid marvel—­that’s what he was:  he was perfectly capable of brazening out the affair scandalously till he got him (Sterne) kicked out of the ship and everlastingly damaged his prospects in this part of the East.  Yet if you want to get on something must be risked.  At times Sterne thought he had been unduly timid of taking action in the past; and what was worse, it had come to this, that in the present he did not seem to know what action to take.

Massy’s savage moroseness was too disconcerting.  It was an incalculable factor of the situation.  You could not tell what there was behind that insulting ferocity.  How could one trust such a temper; it did not put Sterne in bodily fear for himself, but it frightened him exceedingly as to his prospects.

Though of course inclined to credit himself with exceptional powers of observation, he had by now lived too long with his discovery.  He had gone on looking at nothing else, till at last one day it occurred to him that the thing was so obvious that no one could miss seeing it.  There were four white men in all on board the Sofala.  Jack, the second engineer, was too dull to notice anything that took place out of his engine-room.  Remained Massy—­the owner—­the interested person—­nearly going mad with worry.  Sterne had heard and seen more than enough on board to know what ailed him; but his exasperation seemed to make him deaf to cautious overtures.  If he had only known it, there was the very thing he wanted.  But how could you bargain with a man of that sort?  It was like going into a tiger’s den with a piece of raw meat in your hand.  He was as likely as not to rend you for your pains.  In fact, he was always threatening to do that very thing; and the urgency of the case, combined with the impossibility of handling it with safety, made Sterne in his watches below toss and mutter open-eyed in his bunk, for hours, as though he had been burning with fever.