s no time to bother with other folk's
troubles. Our skipper, one breakfast-time, told me there was a woman
aboard that little thing, and he'd been asked whether I'd go over. She
was ill.

"I've seen some queer packets of misery at sea, but never one that
touched that ship. Her skipper seemed a regular fool. I had to ask him
to speak up, for he mumbled like a boy who has been caught out, and knows
it is useless to pretend. I learned from him that he was only just
beginning his voyage. You understand? He was just beginning it, there.
He was going up-river, to a point not on the chart. I cannot make out
now whether he wanted to put that woman ashore to get home in comfort at
the first opportunity, or whether . . . it's impossible to say. One
would sooner believe the best of another man, with half a chance. After
all," said the doctor bitterly, "as long as the woman survived I suppose
she was some consolation in misery.

"I scrambled over the deck lumber. There was hardly room to move. I
found her in a cabin where she could get little seclusion from the crew.
Hardly any privacy at all, I should say. As soon as I saw her I could
make a guess . . . however, I told the fellow afterwards what I thought,
and he gave me no answer. He even turned his back on me. He must have
known well enough that that river was no place for any sort of white
woman. He was condemning her perhaps to death just to make an ugly job
more attractive.

"I admit," said the doctor, with a sly glance, "that she could make it
attractive, for a sort of man. She was wrapped in a rosy dressing-gown.
She held it together with her hands. I noticed them . . . anybody might
. . . they were covered with rings. She had character, too. She made me
feel, the way she looked at me, that I was indiscreet in asking personal
questions. I could see what was wrong with her. It was debility, but
all the same the beginning of an end not far off, in that country.

"'You'll have to get out of this,' I told her.

"'Can't be done, Doctor,' she said coolly.

"'It can. A liner for England will be here in another week, and you must
take it.'

"'I don't,' she said. She was quiet enough, but she seemed a very wilful
woman. 'I've got my job here.'

"I told her that the skipper of her ship would never carry out his
orders, because they could not be carried out. I told her, what was
perfectly true, that their craft would rot on a sandbar, or find
catara