"No, you didn't make good, Bill," I answered. Then my attention was taken by the expression of his face—a curious blankness which I knew too well. My neighbor noticed, too, and said sharply:
"Brace up, Bill! Brace up, man!"
I knew the remedy from former experience, and happened to have it in a closet. Quickly pouring a glass of liquor, I gave it to the shaking, tottering old man, and he swallowed it at a gulp.
"Thank ye, sir," he said a moment later, when he was steadier. "Ye know I don't drink, sir; but when I feel it comin' on, nothin' else but a drink'll stop the spell. I'll be back in an hour, sir."
He left, and the artist remarked: "Poor old Bill. He'll go out feet first one of these days, and that'll be the last of him. Well, I'll tell you about that bark. I shipped in her at Hongkong, and stuck to her at Batavia, where every other man 'fore the mast deserted. She was not exactly a hell ship, as hell ships go; but the skipper and two mates were American, with American ideas of discipline, and these ideas were too strenuous for the cosmopolitan crew of Dagoes, Dutchmen, and Sou'egians that had taken her down the China Sea.
"But the crew we took on at Batavia was worse; there was not a white man in the crowd. There were three giants among them—one, Wong Fing, a short-haired renegade from Ningpo, where he was wanted for cutting his brother's throat. Another was Pango Sam, a West Coast negro, and a capital seaman, but with a frightful temper. The third was Landy Jim, and I never knew his nationality. He was a half-breed, or a fourth-breed; when things went well with him he was yellow, but when angered he turned black, and his eyes turned red as his hair, which, though kinky, was the color of a brand-new brick. They were a fine trio, and the master spirits.
"The rest were the usual riffraff of the Orient, yellow and brown, barely able to speak English or understand orders, but able to get out of their own way, steer after a fashion, and pull a rope if put in their hands. With this crowd we went to sea, bound for Cape Town, and at the last moment our passenger, of whom I have spoken, joined us with his apparatus. There was nothing that I understood at the time, nor even now. He had a lot of tanks, flasks, carboys, spiral pipes, and such things, with a big, cup-shaped affair that might have been a reflector if it had not been so long. I remember it was polished inside, and perhaps now, could I see that outfit, I might make a guess as to what he was experimenting with.
"No, in painting that picture you did not read my mind, or you would have put the Reverend Mr. Mayhew in with the apparatus on the poop; for I saw it plainly, though unable to understand; and there is plenty of room in the foreground—on the poop. You have pictured Pango Sam correctly, and the fellow down on deck near the fore-rigging is Landy Jim, and Wong Fing is that fellow on the fore-hatch. It is wonderful, and it is more than mere mind reading, though I cannot say that you have got the features of the others. I cannot remember."
At this moment there was an interruption. The elevator boy appeared, announcing that a visitor had arrived, asking for my neighbor, and, with apologies and promises to return, he left me, leaving the door open. I sat there in my easy-chair thinking of the wonderful powers of the subconscious mind, as indicated in my own case, and wondering if I could go farther, and solve the mystery that was beyond the powers of my experienced and erudite old friend. I smoked and pondered, until my pipe went out, then filled and relighted it to smoke and ponder still more, while I looked at the picture I had painted. And as I looked the pipe went cold in my grasp, the fixed expression on the faces of Pango Sam, Wong Fing, and Landy Jim took on mobility of action, while the men on deck writhed in their dying agony.
My pipe fell to the floor again, and I roused up, realizing only that I had been half asleep, but also feeling the desire to fill in the hiatus—to place in the vacant foreground the scientific apparatus vaguely described by my friend. So, after a few preliminary outlinings in charcoal, I went at it, and soon I had placed the tanks and spiral pipes and the long, cup-shaped object described to me.