"Wickwire?" With a jerk he caught up the real marvel at last, and the
crop hair seemed to stiffen all over his bullet head. "The chief!" he
roared.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you, sir."

"Alive?"

"Very much alive."

"Well, where is he? Why ain't he here?"

We saw the glow fade from Sutton's cheek. "I thought I explained, sir.
He--he's not quite himself." Already the index of his temperament was
beginning to swing from fair to foul again and his handsome face to blur
with doubt. The thing that had looked so easy at the first feverish
flush of relief was taking another proportion. "No, that's the devil of
it," he said, gnawing the corner of his mustache. "Not by any means
himself. He didn't even seem to know me."

"He might anyhow ha' wrote to tell us what happened to him that night."

The mate's dark lashes lifted a little in a superior way they had as he
stuffed the book out of sight.

"He might have, only Wickwire couldn't read--you remember, sir. He'd
hardly be apt to write either."

But Raff held to the point.

"Are you sure it was him? What'd he have to say?"

"He wouldn't come along--wouldn't listen to me. He--he said, if you want
to know--he told me to go troubling the wicked if I liked, but to leave
the weary at rest, and swore a little by this and that and so turned to
another pipe."

The captain smote his thigh a clap like a pistol shot, and indeed it
needed no more to convince any one, the quaint phrase brought quick
before us the figure of that sour, dour Scotch engineer whose loss had
cast such a gloom upon our little company, had left such a lading of
mystery aboard the _Moung Poh_.

"Six--seven weeks since. And he ain't dead after all--!"

"Seven weeks and three days."...

There was that in Sutton's tone which served to check the captain's
jubilant bellow. He knew, we both knew, what would be coming next.
"Twentieth June was the date, sir--before our last trip to Moulmein. We
were lying here in this very berth, No. 6 Principe Ghat, on just such
another night as this, at the beginning of the rains. We'd been coaling
too; some empty barges lay alongside. As it might be now, without the
gap of time--"

Sutton spoke downward-looking, twisting his cap in his hands, and he
told the thing like one doing penance and square enough, as he had from
the first alarm. A clean-cut, upstanding youngster, a satisfactory
figure of a youngster, the sort every man likes to frame to himself