carelessness in expectorating the tobacco he was
ceaselessly chewing. But these, after all, were some of his minor
traits. I was soon to get an inkling of one of his major ones--his
prodigious meanness. For when I rushed about and finally found a lorcha
that was to sail for Bacolod and asked him to chip in with me on
provisions, he demurred.

"'Ah'd like to git my own, seh,' he said in that decisive drawl of his.

"'All right,' I said cheerfully, and went off and stocked up for two. My
instinct served me well. When, that evening, Miller walked up the
gang-plank, he carried only his carpet-bag, and that was flat and
hungry-looking as before. The next morning he shared my provisions
calmly and resolutely, with an air, almost, of conscious duty. Well, let
that go; before another day I was face to face with his other flaming
characteristic.

"Out of Ilo-Ilo we had contrary winds at first; all night the lorcha--an
old grandmother of a craft, full of dry-rot spots as big as
woodpeckers' nests--flapped heavily about on impotent tacks, and when
the sun rose we found ourselves on the same spot from which we had
watched its setting. Toward ten o'clock, however, the monsoon veered,
and, wing-and-wing, the old boat, creaking in every joint as if she had
the dengue, grunted her way over flashing combers with a speed that
seemed almost indecent. Then, just as we were getting near enough to
catch the heated glitter of the Bacolod church-dome, to see the golden
thread of beach at the foot of the waving cocoanuts, the wind fell,
slap-bang, as suddenly as if God had said hush--and we stuck there,
motionless, upon a petrified sea.

"I didn't stamp about and foam at the mouth; I'd been in these climes
too long. As for Miller, he was from Mississippi. We picked out a
comparatively clean spot on the deck, near the bow; we lay down on our
backs and relaxed our beings into infinite patience. We had been thus
for perhaps an hour; I was looking up at a little white cloud that
seemed receding, receding into the blue immensity behind it. Suddenly a
noise like thunder roared in my ears. The little cloud gave a great leap
back into its place; the roar dwindled into the voice of Miller, in
plaintive, disturbed drawl. 'What the deuce are the niggahs doing?' he
was saying.

"And certainly the behavior of that Visayan crew was worthy of question.
Huddled quietly at the stern, one after another they were springing over
the rail into the small boat