It was at slack water, at the moment when the tide turning began to run eastwards through the Straits, that Willatopy's yawl hove in sight, and he bore down in his usual impetuous style. He had not come before, he explained to the gloomy Skipper, because it was absurd to waste steam by forcing the yacht against a five or six knot current. An hour or two of delay had turned that current to one of equal velocity in the Humming Top's favour, and he was prepared forthwith to make up, and more than make up, for the apparent procrastination. Ching, who was sick of Thursday Island, and had wanted to get away at daybreak whatever might have been the state of the tide, was obliged to admit the force of so seamanlike an explanation, but he did not love the "Moor" any better for presenting it. In his view a coloured man's place was the stokehole, not the bridge, and most certainly not the cabin. He detested the favour which Willatopy had gained on board the Humming Top and scorned his pretensions to be a member of the House of Toppys. When the fathers have for generations played the merry three-legged game—Plymouth, Slave Coast, West Indies, Plymouth—a black skin remains a covering for merchandise in the eyes of the children, even in the Twentieth Century.
Fully a hundred miles interposed between Thursday Island and the "miles and miles of shore and forest" which were the home of Willatopy. Between lay a labyrinth of coral, for the most part uncharted, of which he alone in the yacht had the secret. Ching might call him a Moor and detest his presence on the sacred bridge, but Ching knew, better perhaps than anyone else, that the safety of yacht and of all who sailed therein rested in the brown hands of the half-caste boy. By unchallengeable right, Willatopy conned the ship while her lawful commander glowered below in the chart-room. If he had not put the yacht aground away yonder on the fringes of the Warrior Reef, Ching would still have believed in his own capacity, somehow by rule of thumb and lead, to navigate his own vessel. Now he knew that he couldn't, and that Willatopy could, but he grudged the boy the skill which was denied to himself. It was very absurd, and I am really rather ashamed of my compatriot of Devon. No seaman can have precise local knowledge of all waters everywhere. Ching would have subordinated himself without a murmur to an authorised pilot in the Thames or the Scheldt. What irked him was to play second fiddle before Madame Gilbert to a wholly unauthorised Moor. It was no consolation to Ching to know, as did everyone else in the yacht, that Willatopy had swum in these Straits before he could walk, and had sailed them before he could talk. They were his own back yard, and there was nothing specially commendable in the precision of his acquaintance with them. He had, it is true, more than a mere accumulation of local knowledge; he had a sure sea instinct. But that came to him by inheritance on both sides of the house. Daily habit, inspired by instinct, had made him the ideal pilot whom Ching should have hugged to his bosom on the bridge instead of cursing under his feet in the chart-room. But it was all the same to Willatopy. He had never been in sole charge of a big steamer before, and he joyously played with the yacht as any boy would. He loved to drive her at full speed, to tickle her sensitive steam steering gear with his pretty little telegraph, and to watch the whole length of her sweep round corners where a fractional misjudgment would have ripped the bilge keels off her frames.
Alexander Ewing highly approved of the methods of Willatopy. He hated what he called backing and filling. He liked his engines to be kept running at a sound steady speed, and not to be perpetually bothered with stopping and reversing and forcing the propellers to make good the deficiencies of the rudder. With Willatopy in command, the Humming Top drove along as if coral reefs did not exist, and as if the deep water channels had been never less than a mile wide. He never ran into difficulties, because for him there were no difficulties.
They lay up that night, and picking up the eastward current again early in the morning, ramped up to Tops Island at a speed to which the cautious Ching had not yet become reconciled. Madame was on the boat deck watching the thickly wooded island rise up with the sun out of the sea. It was no low coral atoll, but a fine volcanic lump of basalt towering six hundred feet out of the water, and clothed with green woods up to the summits of the hills. As the yacht approached the shores she saw a multitude of pretty little coves bounded by rocky headlands and fringed with white coral sand. Here and there groves of cocoa-nut palms delicately skirted the sea edge, while patches of the devouring mangrove ran right into the salt water, and won back to the land wide stretches which the sea had covered. Madame had seen many islands in the Straits, but this Island of Tops came most near to the realisation of her imaginative dreams of the South Seas. It was in truth an Island of Dreams, and Will Toppys, madman and saint, had chosen well when he built his hut upon it, and pegged out his claim upon hundreds of acres of shore and woodland. To the north-east, as they slipped along the coast, appeared the entrance to a long narrow bay—described by Alexander as "just a wee Scots loch"—of which the whole line of shore to the left was owned by Willatopy.
I do not know the dimensions of the Estate of Toppys. Willatopy's ideas of space were as vague as his ideas of time—one was miles and miles, the other hours and hours—but from what Madame told me it must have run to a thousand acres at the least. There was more than a mile of shore to Willatopy's front garden, and the natural park at the back—called by Alexander the policies—extended up the hillside for another mile or so. I don't suppose that the Honourable William Toppys paid very much for it. Grant of Thursday Island, who has all his papers, would know. Madame, who is much more interested in people than in their possessions, never troubled to enquire about the property, and proved to be quite useless as an authority upon it. Alexander Ewing, with whom I had much intimate conversation before I ventured upon the details of this story, declared dogmatically at first that it was "about twa squar-r-e miles." On cross-examination he admitted that "the policies" had no ring fence, and that he had never explored their alleged boundaries. Though I love to be particular, and refused to describe the Humming Top until Denny's of Dumbarton had sent me a scale plan of her—which they very kindly and obligingly did—I have not troubled Mr. Robert Grant. For one thing he is too far away, and for another—before I have done, the other reason will be clear to the discerning reader.
The narrow bay, the "wee Scots loch," bit deep into Tops Island, and across it had been piled up by the mountain streams a bar of mud and sand, a low wave-swept barrier. Though the yacht could not cross the bar, she could lie safely within the entrance to the bay, and under shelter from the prevailing trade wind—which at that season blew from the south-east, swelling up almost into a gale at midday and dying away to nothing shortly after sunset. The shore of the island was very steep, and Willatopy brought the yacht in to within a hundred yards of a thick clump of mangroves. He let go the bow anchor.
"The tide is now near the turn," said he, "and there is a rise of ten feet at high water. You had better run out another anchor seawards, and let her swing with the current."
"Thanks," growled Ching, rudely. "You can pilot me up the Straits, but you can't teach me anything about the mooring of a ship."
Willatopy turned away, and descended to the boat deck. He inspected the twenty-two-foot lifeboats with great care, and shook his head with emphasis. "No good, no damn good," said he.
"What is troubling you, Willie?" asked Madame.