At last he would lock up the desk with the decision of unshaken confidence, jump and go out.  He would walk swiftly back and forth on that part of the foredeck which was kept clear of the lumber and of the bodies of the native passengers.  They were a great nuisance, but they were also a source of profit that could not be disdained.  He needed every penny of profit the Sofala could make.  Little enough it was, in all conscience!  The incertitude of chance gave him no concern, since he had somehow arrived at the conviction that, in the course of years, every number was bound to have his winning turn.  It was simply a matter of time and of taking as many tickets as he could afford for every drawing.  He generally took rather more; all the earnings of the ship went that way, and also the wages he allowed himself as chief engineer.  It was the wages he paid to others that he begrudged with a reasoned and at the same time a passionate regret.  He scowled at the lascars with their deck brooms, at the quartermasters rubbing the brass rails with greasy rags; he was eager to shake his fist and roar abuse in bad Malay at the poor carpenter—­a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over, before the fury of that “devil.”  But it was when he raised up his eyes to the bridge where one of these sailor frauds was always planted by law in charge of his ship that he felt almost dizzy with rage.  He abominated them all; it was an old feud, from the time he first went to sea, an unlicked cub with a great opinion of himself, in the engine-room.  The slights that had been put upon him.  The persecutions he had suffered at the hands of skippers—­of absolute nobodies in a steamship after all.  And now that he had risen to be a shipowner they were still a plague to him:  he had absolutely to pay away precious money to the conceited useless loafers:—­As if a fully qualified engineer—­who was the owner as well—­were not fit to be trusted with the whole charge of a ship.  Well! he made it pretty warm for them; but it was a poor consolation.  He had come in time to hate the ship too for the repairs she required, for the coal-bills he had to pay, for the poor beggarly freights she earned.  He would clench his hand as he walked and hit the rail a sudden blow, viciously, as though she could be made to feel pain.  And yet he could not do without er; he needed her; he must hang on to her tooth and nail to keep his head above water till the expected flood of fortune came sweeping up and landed him safely on the high shore of his ambition.