There was small joy in that homecoming, you can figure. Dawn broke weeping as we were hurrying aboard with our unconscious burden. The reaches of the river were beginning to show slaty downstream and a little damp wind running with the day was like a chill after fever, unfriendly and comfortless. The lamp in the chief engineer's cabin had paled from saffron to citrine in the morning light when the officers of the Moung Poh took stock of themselves once more, and of each other and an ill prospect.
Wickwire had neither spoken nor stirred, though his breathing was regular and he seemed to have taken no immediate hurt from his fall except the reopening of an old, ragged wound above the ear. Captain Raff had done the bandaging: he stood back from the last neat pleat.
"A clip over the head, as you say," he observed, addressing me pointedly while he wiped his clumsy great hands that yet had wrought as tenderly as a woman's. "And pretty lucky at that. H'll do well enough now till we get a doctor. You better dig out after one yourself—try the Port Office; they'll have to be notified anyway, I judge, when he wakes."
We looked at the shell of a man on the bunk. "It's got to be the—the hospital, then?" I asked.
"I believe that's what they call it," said Raff gruffly.
"Beg pardon, sir," put in Sutton very quietly, "but we'll notify no office and no doctor either—not till we sheer have to."...
The mate was planted by the door where he had been waiting in silence while we two ministered to the chief. Raff had ignored him since our return, but he eyed him now sternly up and down. Most people would have eyed him so, for he made rather an appalling figure, streaked and stained, with his wounds half dried upon him, a raking cut along one cheek and his coat hanging in shreds.
"What in Hull t' Halifax are you talkin' about?"
Sutton drew from his pocket a certain familiar object, a small, black-bound volume. "There was a chap in a book I read, sir—"
The captain regarded him, purpling.