There was no sound on the sea. It was a vast, endless desert of water on which the sun lay as though fixed. Only the chugging of the rusted freighter broke the immobility of the silence. The tramp looked like a battered derelict, not battered by the stormy elements of the sea; but haggard by the creeping detritus of inactivities in crowded tropical ports. The steel hull was covered with rust; the stack leprous, and the metal devices of the deck newly covered with a cheap paint.
There was no breath of air in the world, either to disturb the immense placidity of the sea or to vary the thin line of smoke vaguely blending into the distant sky line.
Two men sat against a drum on the rear of the ship. If one had been searching the world for types of the worst human derelicts, the search would have ended at the drum on the rear of this tramp. The types were villainous, but they were distinct—in marked contrast. The little man was speaking.
“Cut along with it, Colonel,” he said. “How much did the Chink give you?”
He was a thin, nervous creature, with a habit of fingering his face, as though to remove some invisible thing clinging to it. It was impossible to place the man, either in nationality or environment of life. He might have been a Cockney, born under the Bow Bells; but it was more probable that he was a New York gunman. He had picked up habits of speech in every degraded port of the east, as a traveling rat picks up a scurvy.
The man he addressed was big, with a putty-colored face, dead-black hair plastered down with water over an immense head beginning to grow bald. He was dressed in a worn frock coat—the clothes of a clergyman—threadbare, but clean. His shoes, even, showed evidences of an attempt at polish. He wore a clean, white, starched shirt and a low collar with a black string tie. A huge black stogy hung in the corner of his mouth. He sat relaxed in a heap against the drum, he had a white handkerchief over his shirt front, tucked into the collar in order to protect his linen from the ash and while his body remained immobile he whittled a piece of pine board. The long knife blade polished to the edge of a razor, moved on the wood as in some grotesque manner of caress. He gave the appearance of one unutterably weary; an immense sagging body in which all the fibers were relaxed.
He was devitalized with opium.
His voice, when he spoke, presented the same evidence of utter languor. His lips scarcely moved, and the sound seemed to creep out in a slow drawl.
“The Chink gave me two yellow boys. He had six in his hand. ‘You bring Major Dillard of the American Division here to-night,’ he said, ‘and you get the other four.’ Of course, he didn’t speak English. He spoke the Manchu dialect. I know the Manchu dialect. That’s where I had a flock; but I came in when the Boxers started. That’s how I came to be on hand when the Allied armies began their march under old von Waldersee.... You understand, I had left the mission.”