He looked for the coolie and found him on the starboard side of the promenade deck. The subsequent events have already been partly narrated.
CHAPTER II
The coolie plunged into the water with a weltering splash which sent a small spiral of spray almost to the deck. For a moment the man in the water pedaled and flailed, vastly frightened, and gasping, above the clang of the engine-room telegraph, for a rope. The black side of the Persian Gulf started to slide away from him.
"You better make for shore!" shouted Peter between megaphonic hands.
Several boatmen were poling in the coolie's direction, but all of them refrained from slipping within reach of the thrashing hands. A Javanese boatman can find more amusing and enjoyable scenes than an angry Chinese coolie flailing about in the water; but he must travel many miles to find them.
"Swim to the ma-fou," Peter encouraged him. He knew there were sharks in that emerald pond.
His attention then was diverted by a flutter of white at his elbow. He turned his head. The lonely passenger, a girl, was smiling mischievously into his face. But in her very dark eyes there was a blunt question.
"Why did you do that?" she asked in a voice that rang with a low musical quality. Her voice and her beauty were of the tropics, as were the features which, molded together, gave form to that beauty; because her hair and eyes were of a color, dark like walnut, and her olive skin was like silk under silk, with the rosy color of her youth and fire showing underneath.
She was rather startling, especially her deep, dark and restless eyes. It was by sense rather than by anything his eyes could base conclusions upon that Peter realized her spirited personality, knew instinctively that radiant and destructive fires burned behind the sombre, questioning eyes. The full, red lips might have told him this much.