"You had better not," quoth Madame. "Ching is slow and quiet. He has no small talk, and, it must be confessed, is sometimes a bit heavy on hand. He is not a lively companion like our Alexander. But in a misspent life I have learned something of men, and I bank on Ching. Mar-r-k my wor-r-ds, Sandy. He will bring us through the reefs without scraping our false keel, and if you chaff him at a moment when he is really anxious he will chuck you into the Ditch. The Scotch are a great people, but they are not conspicuous for tact."
It was well into May when, far up in the Gulf of Papua, Ching swung the Humming Top to the westward, and began the hazardous unaided penetration of the coral barriers which lay between him and Thursday Island. The weather was perfect and could be depended upon. It was the season of the regular south-east trade, the sunny rainless season of the Torres winter. The wind would gather strength every morning to a half gale at noon and then as evenly decline to a calm after sunset. The tides ran very strongly, between three and four knots, and gained in speed as the Straits narrowed, but to judge their tidal drift, and the variable leeway due to the rise and fall of the trade wind, was child's play to a seaman of Ching's quality. Upon his chart were marked all the islands—many of them loftily volcanic, others low coral atolls—and the sandbanks, known locally as cays. He could work by taking bearings of the more conspicuous island features, and by calculating his horizontal danger angles with a generous margin. He assumed that every island had an inner fringing reef and an outer barrier—though many of them had no barrier—and that every turf-swept cay shelved slowly into the depths. Time was not his master, and Ching was a cautious man. When one evening, just after sunset, he raised the beacon on the Bramble Cay, and found the position of the yacht very near to his dead reckoning, he patted himself on the back and went to dinner with a mind temporarily at ease. He dropped his anchor off the Black Rocks at the exact point for which he had aimed—the Bligh Entrance to the North-East Channel.
"Now the fun is about to begin," said he, smiling. Madame plied him with broad flattery, and the Chief did his rather clumsy best to support her. Now that the yacht was actually in the Straits, Ewing had enough of good sense to attend to his own job, and to leave Ching unharried to attend to his. Both Madame and Ewing were well pleased to see the Captain smile.
Navigation on the following day would have been less hair-raising if the chart had been half as wise as it pretended. But since most of its features were based upon surveys of some half a century earlier, and the coral polyp is an industrious creature, there was a wide margin of conjecture left to the hardy sailor. The channels were deep enough—Ching sometimes had fourteen fathoms and usually not less than ten under his forefoot—but there were so many of them, and they were so liberally cut into by what in trench warfare were called traverses, that running a vessel through them was very like threading an imperfectly remembered maze. Still the Skipper's eye for water held true, he could generally tell by the look of the surface if the reefs were closing in upon him, and the lead which was freely kept going warned him off the sandbanks. He ran dead slow all through the day, except when the tide setting against him called for half speed. More than once he was obliged to stop and back out of a cul de sac, but, as I have said, there was usually plenty of water under foot, and a timely warning by eye or lead when obstructions were reaching up towards the broken surface. All through the day the Humming Top never touched once, and Ching began to feel that he needed but a licence to rate himself a pilot of the Straits. But his self-satisfaction was not destined to last very long.
It was about five o'clock, and for an hour past the Skipper had noticed a fully decked yawl, sailed apparently single-handed, following on his own course about a mile to leeward. With the tide under her, and sailing on a beam wind, this thirty-foot yawl was moving rather faster than the big yacht which she was gradually overhauling. The yawl pulled in more and more to the south-west, and passing astern of the Humming Top, reached out towards a group of islands which Ching judged to be away from his own channel. He himself bore off almost due west, and the gap between the steam yacht and the yawl opened out rapidly. That was at about five o'clock. Ching was therefore surprised half an hour later to see the yawl come flying out of space with the wind behind her, and steering direct for his own port bow with apparently a complete disregard for the intricacies of the coral channels. He put up his glass. The yawl was, as he had judged, sailed single-handed. Her skipper, a small white figure with a bare black head, was sitting by the tiller, and, as Ching looked, he seemed to be waving one hand. There could be no doubt that the yawl was making for the yacht, so, with sailor courtesy, Ching ran off his engines and waited for the little craft to arrive.
She came with a rush and swirl which showed at least, high courage in her solitary navigator. She passed the bow of the Humming Top at about a hundred yards distance, swung under the lee of the yacht, and skilfully used the flow of the tide as a brake upon her progress. The white figure sprang up, let the yawl swing with flapping sails into the wind, and then in thirty active seconds had lowered and roughly stowed mainsail, jib and foresail. He left the spanker standing set on the small mizzen aft. The whole manœuvre was so accurately timed that the yacht had lost her way when she arrived close beside the Humming Top's counter. In a moment more the visitor had caught a line which was deftly thrown to him from the yacht, reeved it through a ringbolt by his bowsprit, hauled his little vessel half round, and sprang, active as a monkey, up the seven feet of freeboard to the Humming Top's rail. His deserted yawl trailed away at the end of the line, and her late skipper and crew, now aboard the Humming Top, strolled forrard grinning capaciously. It could now be seen that though clad in the white Palm Beach trousers, and fine cotton shirt of an Englishman, he was a dark-skinned, frizzy-haired Melanesian. His feet were bare and his head was bare; the shirt and trousers seemed to comprise his entire wardrobe.
He moved forrard looking curiously and eagerly at the yacht's equipment. He mounted the steps of the shade deck on which were stowed four lifeboats, a small dinghy, and a twenty-foot motor launch. His eye ran closely over all of them; the motor boat seemed specially to please him. He passed the yellow funnel, and peered into the smoke-room, a pleasant structure in which Madame Gilbert spent much of her time on deck. She was within at the moment knitting her ninth jumper—she caught a glimpse of a dark grinning face, and started slightly at the contrast between the brown of the face and the bright blue eyes which looked eagerly out of it. It was the face of a boy of some twenty years. Madame saw him for a brief instant, and wondering who he was, and how he had reached the yacht—she had not witnessed his masterly boarding operation—came out on the boat deck to see more. An unexpected incident is very welcome indeed on a long voyage unbroken except by smuggling operations and the knitting of jumpers. The boy reached the chart-room and wheel-house above which was built the bridge, with its engine and steering telegraphs. Ching from the bridge looked down upon the boy, and the boy looked up at Ching. The visitor waved a hand at the Captain.
"Cheerio, Skipper," cried he. "You are a bit off your course, aren't you?" His voice was not unpleasing and his English was surprisingly good for a coffee-coloured native—dark coffee, too.
"That depends on what the course is," replied Ching shortly. He was frowning, and his genial eye had gone cold.
What I have described did not occupy more than a very few minutes, during which time the yacht, with her engines stopped, was idly drifting under the influence of wind and tide.