“Yep,” smiled Bobs.
Haywood drew a deep breath and rose to his feet.
“By God, Bobs,” he muttered, “do you want to give me heart-failure? Thought sure you was campin’ on my trail.”
“Naw,” answered the policeman, “none o’ the toffs in Colombo ayn’t seen them notices yet. But you’d best keep on the move.”
The rumor that there were three white men “on deck with the niggers” soon found its way to the cabin, and brought down upon us a visitation that poor Jack Tar must often suffer in the Orient. He was a missionary from Kansas, stationed in the hills of Mysore. Marten and I, refusing to admit his assertion that, as sailors, we were, ex officio, drunken, dissolute, ambitionless louts, were cruelly abandoned to future damnation. But Haywood, who had been wondering till then where he could “raise the dust for an eye-opener in the morning,” pleaded guilty to every charge and, in the course of a half-hour, was duly “converted.”
“Do you men know why you have no money; why you must travel on deck with natives?” demanded the missionary, in parting. “It’s because you’re not Christians.”
We might have pointed out that the Lascars chattering about the deck drew a monthly wage because they were Hindus. But why prolong the argument? Haywood had already pocketed the two rupees that made our toleration worth while.
We landed with Bobby in the early morning and bade him farewell sooner than we had expected. For a native on the wharf handed him a telegram announcing that the forger was already en route for Colombo in charge of a Madras officer. Tuticorin was an uninspiring collection of mud huts and reeking bazaars. Our halt there was brief. It would have been briefer had we not chanced to run across Askins. The erudite wanderer had stranded sooner than he had anticipated. I took pleasure in setting him afloat again, and caught the last glimpse of his familiar figure, beginning to bend a bit now under the weight of twenty years of “knocking about,” as the train bearing us northward rumbled through the village.
Even the beachcomber does not walk in India. To ride is cheaper. Third-class fare ranges from two-fifths to a half a cent a mile, and on every train is a compartment reserved for “Europeans and Eurasians only,” into which no native may enter on penalty of being frightened out of his addled wits by a bellowing official.
Descending at the first station to quench a tropical thirst, I was astonished to see Bobby peering out of a second-class window.