"I can see. I can steer you all through the night if you please. But if you and the white lady, the beautiful white lady with the hair so red, would wish to anchor, I will take you to a safe place." His hand waved here and there; the growing darkness made no difference to him, and presently the Humming Top was riding quietly at her anchor in the lagoon of a low coral atoll. The boy had conned her through the barrier reef and laid her up in the smooth water within. Ching gasped as the yacht slipped in through a narrow gap in the reef little wider than her own 30 feet of beam. It was like pushing a Rolls-Royce in between two threatening motor lorries.
"Boy," said Ching slowly, when the anchor had splashed into the warm quiet sea. "I meant to throw you overboard and you jolly well deserved it for monkeying with my telegraph. But I will say that you are a daisy of a pilot."
As they came down from the bridge they met Madame by the smoke-room.
"Who is that?" she enquired. "A native pilot?"
"No," replied the boy, before Ching could speak. "I am no pilot. I am very rich and do no work. I am going to Thursday Island to see my banker and get my money. I am Willatopy."
CHAPTER VI A NIGHT IN THE STRAITS
They were gathered in the smoke-room which was planted upon the boat deck abaft the chart-house. It was the snuggery held in common by Madame and Ching and Ewing; to them was now added another—Willatopy, Pilot. Madame, when she heard his name so unexpectedly had switched up the lights behind her and invited him to enter. She wanted to see him clearly, and to collect her thoughts. All through the long voyage she had pictured her meeting with a naked Cannibal in the appropriate setting of a tropical coral island. Yet here and now had come to her out of the seas a young man, passably English in dress except for his bare feet, passably English in speech, and a good deal superior to the English in his masterly knowledge of the variegated depths of his native seas. The blue eyes of this young man who called himself Willatopy had astonished her when first she came under their quick steely flash; now when they were bent upon her, quite plainly in admiration, she sensibly shrank before their bright intelligence. They were the Toppys eyes; she had admired them when set in Sir John's pale face; out of the dark, almost black countenance of young Willatopy they shone like beacons. They were beacons, the burning evidences of his Toppys blood.