superiority.  ‘Drink!’ repeated the engineer with amiable scorn:  he was hanging on with both hands to the rail, a shadowy figure with flexible legs.  ’Not from you, captain.  You’re far too mean, b’gosh.  You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of schnapps.  That’s what you Germans call economy.  Penny wise, pound foolish.’  He became sentimental.  The chief had given him a four-finger nip about ten o’clock—­’only one, s’elp me!’—­good old chief; but as to getting the old fraud out of his bunk—­a five-ton crane couldn’t do it.  Not it.  Not to-night anyhow.  He was sleeping sweetly like a little child, with a bottle of prime brandy under his pillow.  From the thick throat of the commander of the Patna came a low rumble, on which the sound of the word schwein fluttered high and low like a capricious feather in a faint stir of air.  He and the chief engineer had been cronies for a good few years—­serving the same jovial, crafty, old Chinaman, with horn-rimmed goggles and strings of red silk plaited into the venerable grey hairs of his pigtail.  The quay-side opinion in the Patna’s home-port was that these two in the way of brazen peculation ‘had done together pretty well everything you can think of.’  Outwardly they were badly matched:  one dull-eyed, malevolent, and of soft fleshy curves; the other lean, all hollows, with a head long and bony like the head of an old horse, with sunken cheeks, with sunken temples, with an indifferent glazed glance of sunken eyes.  He had been stranded out East somewhere—­in Canton, in Shanghai, or perhaps in Yokohama; he probably did not care to remember himself the exact locality, nor yet the cause of his shipwreck.  He had been, in mercy to his youth, kicked quietly out of his ship twenty years ago or more, and it might have been so much worse for him that the memory of the episode had in it hardly a trace of misfortune.  Then, steam navigation expanding in these seas and men of his craft being scarce at first, he had ‘got on’ after a sort.  He was eager to let strangers know in a dismal mumble that he was ’an old stager out here.’  When he moved, a skeleton seemed to sway loose in his clothes; his walk was mere wandering, and he was given to wander thus around the engine-room skylight, smoking, without relish, doctored tobacco in a brass bowl at the end of a cherrywood stem four feet long, with the imbecile gravity of a thinker evolving a system of philosophy from the hazy glimpse of a truth.  He was usually anything but free with his private store of liquor; but on that night he had departed from his principles, so that his second, a weak-headed child of Wapping, what with the unexpectedness of the treat and the strength of the stuff, had become very happy, cheeky, and talkative.  The fury of the New South Wales German was extreme; he puffed like an exhaust-pipe, and Jim, faintly amused by the scene, was impatient for the time when he could get below:  the last ten minutes of the watch were irritating like a gun that hangs fire; those men did