“Ah, well,” reflected Jasper. “The Bonito isn’t trading to any ports of civilisation. That’ll make it easier for him to keep straight.”
That was true. The brig’s business was on uncivilised coasts, with obscure rajahs dwelling in nearly unknown bays; with native settlements up mysterious rivers opening their sombre, forest-lined estuaries among a welter of pale green reefs and dazzling sand-banks, in lonely straits of calm blue water all aglitter with sunshine. Alone, far from the beaten tracks, she glided, all white, round dark, frowning headlands, stole out, silent like a ghost, from behind points of land stretching out all black in the moonlight; or lay hove-to, like a sleeping sea-bird, under the shadow of some nameless mountain waiting for a signal. She would be glimpsed suddenly on misty, squally days dashing disdainfully aside the short aggressive waves of the Java Sea; or be seen far, far away, a tiny dazzling white speck flying across the brooding purple masses of thunderclouds piled up on the horizon. Sometimes, on the rare mail tracks, where civilisation brushes against wild mystery, when the naïve passengers crowding along the rail exclaimed, pointing at her with interest: “Oh, here’s a yacht!” the Dutch captain, with a hostile glance, would grunt contemptuously: “Yacht! No! That’s only English Jasper. A pedlar—”
“A good seaman you say,” ejaculated Jasper, still in the matter of the hopeless Schultz with the wonderfully touching voice.
“First rate. Ask any one. Quite worth having—only impossible,” I declared.
“He shall have his chance to reform in the brig,” said Jasper, with a laugh. “There will be no temptations either to drink or steal where I am going to this time.”
I didn’t press him for anything more definite on that point. In fact, intimate as we were, I had a pretty clear notion of the general run of his business.
But as we are going ashore in his gig he asked suddenly: “By the way, do you know where Heemskirk is?”
I eyed him covertly, and was reassured. He had asked the question, not as a lover, but as a trader. I told him that I had heard in Palembang that the Neptun was on duty down about Flores and Sumbawa. Quite out of his way. He expressed his satisfaction.
“You know,” he went on, “that fellow, when he gets on the Borneo coast, amuses himself by knocking down my beacons. I have had to put up a few to help me in and out of the rivers. Early this year a Celebes trader becalmed in a prau was watching him at it. He steamed the gunboat full tilt at two of them, one after another, smashing them to pieces, and then lowered a boat on purpose to pull out a third, which I had a lot of trouble six months ago to stick up in the middle of a mudflat for a tide mark. Did you ever hear of anything more provoking—eh?”
“I wouldn’t quarrel with the beggar,” I observed casually, yet disliking that piece of news strongly. “It isn’t worth while.”