“There’s the breeze. Which way do you want to cast her, Captain Lingard?”
Lingard’s eyes, that had been fixed aloft, glanced down at the dejected figure of the man sitting on the skylight. He seemed to hesitate for a minute.
“To the northward, to the northward,” he answered, testily, as if annoyed at his own fleeting thought, “and bear a hand there. Every puff of wind is worth money in these seas.”
He remained motionless, listening to the rattle of blocks and the creaking of trusses as the head-yards were hauled round. Sail was made on the ship and the windlass manned again while he stood still, lost in thought. He only roused himself when a barefooted seacannie glided past him silently on his way to the wheel.
“Put the helm aport! Hard over!” he said, in his harsh sea-voice, to the man whose face appeared suddenly out of the darkness in the circle of light thrown upwards from the binnacle lamps.
The anchor was secured, the yards trimmed, and the brig began to move out of the roadstead. The sea woke up under the push of the sharp cutwater, and whispered softly to the gliding craft in that tender and rippling murmur in which it speaks sometimes to those it nurses and loves. Lingard stood by the taff-rail listening, with a pleased smile till the Flash began to draw close to the only other vessel in the anchorage.
“Here, Willems,” he said, calling him to his side, “d’ye see that barque here? That’s an Arab vessel. White men have mostly given up the game, but this fellow drops in my wake often, and lives in hopes of cutting me out in that settlement. Not while I live, I trust. You see, Willems, I brought prosperity to that place. I composed their quarrels, and saw them grow under my eyes. There’s peace and happiness there. I am more master there than his Dutch Excellency down in Batavia ever will be when some day a lazy man-of-war blunders at last against the river. I mean to keep the Arabs out of it, with their lies and their intrigues. I shall keep the venomous breed out, if it costs me my fortune.”
The Flash drew quietly abreast of the barque, and was beginning to drop it astern when a white figure started up on the poop of the Arab vessel, and a voice called out—
“Greeting to the Rajah Laut!”
“To you greeting!” answered Lingard, after a moment of hesitating surprise. Then he turned to Willems with a grim smile. “That’s Abdulla’s voice,” he said. “Mighty civil all of a sudden, isn’t he? I wonder what it means. Just like his impudence! No matter! His civility or his impudence are all one to me. I know that this fellow will be under way and after me like a shot. I don’t care! I have the heels of anything that floats in these seas,” he added, while his proud and loving glance ran over and rested fondly amongst the brig’s lofty and graceful spars.