"That will be safe, that sampan?"
"I will make it safe, small one. For I will go with you as far as Kowloon, if that is what you wish."
"And does the brave one admire my sarong?" the small voice wavered.
"It shames my ugly body," said Peter. "Now run along to bed—kalak!" And he clapped his hands as the small figure bobbed out of sight, with her long, black pigtail flopping this way and that.
CHAPTER VI
It came to Peter as he climbed up the iron-fretted steps to the lonely promenade-deck that life had begun to take on its old golden glow, the luster of the uncertain, the charm of women who found in him something not undesirable.
At this he smiled a little bit. He had never known, as far back as the span of his adventures extended, a woman who deemed his companionship as quite so valuable a thing as the mysterious and alluring Romola Borria, the husband-beaten, incredible, and altogether dangerous young woman who passionately besought him to accompany her on a pilgrimage of forgetfulness into the flowery heart of dear old Japan.
Ascending the ladder to the unoccupied deck, he was conscious of the sweet drone of the monsoon, which blew off the shores of Annam over the restless bosom of the China Sea, setting up a tuneful chant in the Persian Gulf's sober rigging, and kissing his cheeks with the ardor of a despairing maiden.
Peter the Brazen decided to take a turn or two round deck before going to his bunk, to drink in a potion of this intoxicating, winelike night. The wheel of fortune might whirl many times before he was again sailing this most seductive of oceans.