As it was no concern of his I did not take the slightest notice of the shot. I said simply that I had heard there was a master needed for some vessel, and being a sailing-ship man I thought I would apply. . . .
He interrupted me. “Why! Hang it! You are the right man for that job—if there had been twenty others after it. But no fear of that. They are all afraid to catch hold. That’s what’s the matter.”
He was very irritated. I said innocently: “Are they, sir. I wonder why?”
“Why!” he fumed. “Afraid of the sails. Afraid of a white crew. Too much trouble. Too much work. Too long out here. Easy life and deck-chairs more their mark. Here I sit with the Consul-General’s cable before me, and the only man fit for the job not to be found anywhere. I began to think you were funking it, too. . . .”
“I haven’t been long getting to the office,” I remarked calmly.
“You have a good name out here, though,” he growled savagely without looking at me.
“I am very glad to hear it from you, sir,” I said.
“Yes. But you are not on the spot when you are wanted. You know you weren’t. That steward of yours wouldn’t dare to neglect a message from this office. Where the devil did you hide yourself for the best part of the day?”
I only smiled kindly down on him, and he seemed to recollect himself, and asked me to take a seat. He explained that the master of a British ship having died in Bangkok the Consul-General had cabled to him a request for a competent man to be sent out to take command.
Apparently, in his mind, I was the man from the first, though for the looks of the thing the notification addressed to the Sailors’ Home was general. An agreement had already been prepared. He gave it to me to read, and when I handed it back to him with the remark that I accepted its terms, the deputy-Neptune signed it, stamped it with his own exalted hand, folded it in four (it was a sheet of blue foolscap) and presented it to me—a gift of extraordinary potency, for, as I put it in my pocket, my head swam a little.