"No," said Andrew Harben, all unashamed.
"Zat iss awright, but my God why did you not show your light till midnight?" asked the skipper. "I tell you I was out zere last night and z' light wass dark and z' devil walking abroad on z' waters. Almost, almost we went ashore with zese dam currents. But just as we would run on z' Poi Laut reef you lit up again. Not one little minute too soon did you show z' light? Why iss zis?"
"I lost my wicks!" said Andrew Harben, quite cool.
"Loze z' wicks?" shouted the skipper. "For why have you lose z' wicks? Did you find zem again?"
"Come and see," said Andrew Harben.
He took the skipper into the shack where the lights in the cupola were still burning broad and yellow. They were eight in number, as I said, and no man ever saw the like of them before nor will again. For every light there hung a Bugis from the iron framework by the long hair of his head. One lock of his hair held him up. The rest was twisted into a cue and looped so that it floated in the oil tub and then passed through a burner.
By the hand of Andrew Harben that did it, those eight Bugis were the wicks of Macassar that kept the strait clear!
Meanwhile Andrew Harben went whistling about his work, climbing around the frame and trimming all so careful and moving the thumbscrews a bit here and there and ladling oil in a gourd to keep the flow rising well.
"I have made a remarkable discovery," he said. "It is a fact in nature that human hair can be used for a lamp wick. Of course you have to keep wetting it, for hair will not draw oil fast enough by capillary action. But it serves."...
The skipper looked at the Bugis and looked around at the broken pickle bottles and the scattered specimen cases and the other remnants, and the skipper understood partly, being a highly intelligent man for a half-caste.