But Raff held to the point.
"Are you sure it was him? What'd he have to say?"
"He wouldn't come along—wouldn't listen to me. He—he said, if you want to know—he told me to go troubling the wicked if I liked, but to leave the weary at rest, and swore a little by this and that and so turned to another pipe."
The captain smote his thigh a clap like a pistol shot, and indeed it needed no more to convince any one, the quaint phrase brought quick before us the figure of that sour, dour Scotch engineer whose loss had cast such a gloom upon our little company, had left such a lading of mystery aboard the Moung Poh.
"Six—seven weeks since. And he ain't dead after all—!"
"Seven weeks and three days."...
There was that in Sutton's tone which served to check the captain's jubilant bellow. He knew, we both knew, what would be coming next. "Twentieth June was the date, sir—before our last trip to Moulmein. We were lying here in this very berth, No. 6 Principe Ghat, on just such another night as this, at the beginning of the rains. We'd been coaling too; some empty barges lay alongside. As it might be now, without the gap of time—"
Sutton spoke downward-looking, twisting his cap in his hands, and he told the thing like one doing penance and square enough, as he had from the first alarm. A clean-cut, upstanding youngster, a satisfactory figure of a youngster, the sort every man likes to frame to himself for an image of his own youth. And yet—and yet, hearkening, I caught the same unsteady note that had made me curious of him often and often before. Something in him rang false. Not so much like a bell that has cracked, if you understand me, but rather like metal whereof the alloy was never rightly fined.
"I was off watch that evening," he went on. "Chris Wickwire wanted to go ashore—for the first time in a year maybe. You know you generally couldn't lift him out of the ship with a winch, and so I waited till he should come up and step by the gangway to fix a bit of a joke on him. It was wrong of me, and very silly, you know, and dearly I've paid for it. But I only meant a jape, sir—to hear him rip and fuss and perhaps jolt a proper oath out of him and make him break that everlasting clay cutty he always wore in his face.... I fixed to loose the hand rope on the outboard side—
"I did loose it, you know I did; and then I leaned there on the rail to laugh. He went down the steps in the dark. I figgered he'd be slid quite neat into the shore boat waiting below, d'y'see? I heard him stumble and call for me before I thought what I'd done. I heard him, and I didn't go to help, but I never thought how it would be, sir, not till too late. You believe that—!"