“Please take a look at the engine-room and report to me here. She is the Whang Ho, tied up at the China Navigation Company’s wharf. Don’t be too critical, but if there’s work that is absolutely necessary I will send ye machinists to work all night.”
“I know the condemned little hooker by sight,” bitterly quoth Mr. Kittridge with a tug at his starboard whisker. “Very well, sir. I will take a squint at her and make out my list of engine-room stores. Can you get them to-night?”
“The ship-chandler is waiting to hear from me, and I have sent word to the machine-shop,” briefly answered O’Shea.
Paddy Blake had very promptly raked up the required number of Chinese hands and was ready to deliver them on board whenever required. To the Hotel London he came, towing by the arm a most extraordinarily bent and shrivelled anatomy with a wisp of a white queue, whom he turned over to Captain O’Shea with the explanation:
“Here is a river and coastwise pilot for ye that is as wise as Confucius. And by the same token, I have no doubt that he was once pilot aboard the junk of that grand old philosopher himself. Or maybe he was shipmates with Noah.”
The ancient mariner croaked a phrase or two in a grating, rusty voice, and O’Shea dubiously observed:
“If he talks no English at all how will I tell him where I want to go?”
“I have sent ye a Chinese bos’n that can sling th’ pidgin,” said Paddy Blake. “Dearly would I love to know where ye are bound and what bobbery ye are up to, Captain Mike O’Shea, but a man in my business has learned to ask no more silly questions than he can help.”
“Keep that magnum on ice till I come back to Shanghai and I will spin ye the yarn in the little back room of yours, Paddy.”
“May ye come back right side up,” warmly exclaimed the old man. “By th’ look of the friends ye have mustered to go wid you, I wud say that ye are bound out on what th’ Shanghai diplomats call a policy of binivolint assimilation.”