The white men soon lounged beside the wheel-house.
"So you brought Mrs. Forrester," drawled Heywood.
Rudolph, wondering if they saw him wince, listened with painful
eagerness. But the captain disposed of that subject very simply.
"_She's_ no good." He stared up at the grimy awning. "What I'm thinking
is, will that there Dacca babu at Koprah slip me through his blessed
quarantine for twenty-five dollars. What?"
Their talk drifted far away from Rudolph, far from China itself, to
touch a hundred ports and islands, Cebu and Sourabaya, Tavoy and
Selangor. They talked of men and women, a death at Zamboanga, a birth at
Chittagong, of obscure heroism or suicide, and fortunes made or lost;
while the two boys, gentle, melancholy, gliding silent in bright blue
robes, spread a white tablecloth, clamped it with shining brass, and
laid the tiffin. Then the talk flowed on, the feast made a tiny clatter
of jollity in the slumbering noon, in the silence of an ocean and a
continent. And when at last the visitors clambered down the iron side,
they went victorious with Spanish wine.
"Mind ye," shouted Captain Kneebone, from the rail, "that don't half
exhaust the subjeck o' lott'ries! Why, luck"--He shook both fists aloft,
triumphantly, as if they had been full of money.
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