“When we were taken aback in a white squall in the Indian Ocean, and it verily seemed that we had but a few minutes to float, James was here, there, and everywhere, his manly voice, calm and collected, ringing high above the roaring of the wind and the surging of the terrible seas. The very fire of his bravery on that occasion affected the men, and they worked as only bold men can work in face of death and danger, till our craft was once more righted and tearing along before the wind.
“And just as brave on shore as afloat was sturdy James Malone.
“When our steward was attacked by fifty spear-armed savages on shore at the Looboo Island, my mate seized a club that a gorilla could hardly have wielded, and fought his way through the black and vengeful crowd, till he reached and saved our faithful steward.
“And, that day, it was not until he had almost reached the ship that he told me, with that half-shy and quiet smile of his, that he believed he was slightly wounded. Then he fainted dead away.
“I nursed poor James back to health. Yes, but more than once, both before and after that event, he nursed me, and I doubt if even a brother could have been half so kind as my mate James.
“For many a long year, then, James and I had sailed the salt seas together. Without James sitting opposite me at the table at breakfast or at dinner, the neatly painted and varnished saloon, with all its glittering odds and ends, wouldn’t have seemed the same. Without James sitting near me on the quarterdeck on black-dark evenings in the tropics, I should have felt very strange and lonesome indeed.
“But James and I didn’t agree on every subject on which we conversed. Had we done so, conversation would have lost its special charm. No, he aired his opinions and I shook out mine. There were times when I convinced James; there were times when James convinced me; there were times when neither convinced the other, and then we agreed to differ.
“‘Very well, sir,’ James would say, ‘you has your ’pinions, and I has mine. You keeps to your ’pinions, and I sticks to mine.’
“It will be noted that James’s ordinary English would scarcely have passed muster in the first families of Europe. But, like many of his class, James could talk correctly enough when he set himself the task. But there was no better sailor afloat for all that, and on the stormiest night or squalliest day I always felt safe when my first mate trod the planks.