o be left behind by some
swift catastrophe. Massy being on the bridge, the old man had to brace
himself up and make a show, he supposed. But it was getting very bad
with him, very bad indeed, now. Even Massy had been emboldened to find
fault this time; Sterne, listening at the foot of the ladder, had heard
the other's whimpering and artless denunciations. Luckily the beast was
very stupid and could not see the why of all this. However, small blame
to him; it took a clever man to hit upon the cause. Nevertheless, it was
high time to do something. The old man's game could not be kept up for
many days more.

"I may yet lose my life at this fooling--let alone my chance," Sterne
mumbled angrily to himself, after the stooping back of the chief
engineer had disappeared round the corner of the skylight. Yes, no
doubt--he thought; but to blurt out his knowledge would not advance his
prospects. On the contrary, it would blast them utterly as likely as
not. He dreaded another failure. He had a vague consciousness of not
being much liked by his fellows in this part of the world; inexplicably
enough, for he had done nothing to them. Envy, he supposed. People were
always down on a clever chap who made no bones about his determination
to get on. To do your duty and count on the gratitude of that brute
Massy would be sheer folly. He was a bad lot. Unmanly! A vicious man!
Bad! Bad! A brute! A brute without a spark of anything human about him;
without so much as simple curiosity even, or else surely he would have
responded in some way to all these hints he had been given. . . . Such
insensibility was almost mysterious. Massy's state of exasperation
seemed to Sterne to have made him stupid beyond the ordinary silliness
of shipowners.

Sterne, meditating on the embarrassments of that stupidity, forgot
himself completely. His stony, unwinking stare was fixed on the planks
of the deck.

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more
perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest
path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the
coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping
banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the
earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut,
denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in
the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried
on the s