"All lite! No wanchee soda? My can catchee."
"I shall not say anything, Mr. Clark, of the return those white men with souls made to those brown men without souls who saved them. But I shall tell you what would have happened if the missionaries had not gone to Lam-hong-o; if there had not been a chapel there; if those brown-skins had not been Christians. Your ship would have been pillaged. Your heads would have been cut off. Your carcasses would have been fed to the sharks. But they were Christians. So they saved you. They fed you. They clothed you. They sent you home with all your belongings that they were able to save from the sea."
"Right you are, MacKay!" exclaimed Captain Whiteley, bringing his fist down on the table with a thump which threatened to throw on the floor the few dishes which the motion of the ship had not already dashed out of the retaining frames. "Right you are! Nearly thirty years ago I was on the _Teucer_, Captain Gibson, as senior apprentice with rank of fourth mate. We were bound from Liverpool to Shanghai, but ran on the rocks a little farther down the East Coast than the _Betsy_ did. There were thirty-one of us all told. We got ashore without the loss of a man. But when those devils of natives were done with us, there were only three of us left alive--the carpenter, an A.B., and myself. And we wished that we were dead. We would have been dead, too, before long. But after being worked as slaves for nine months, a Chinaman, who had been with the missionaries on the mainland, bought us from the Malays, and rowed us out to the first foreign ship he saw, the old _Spindrift_. She took us to Shanghai."
As the captain finished speaking MacKay rose and left the table. As was his wont, he had eaten sparingly and quickly. MacAllister was pressing Captain Whiteley for more details of his captivity among the head-hunters. McLeod was on the point of going out to his watch.
"That was score one on you, Clark," he said to his neighbour. "It doesn't pay to get too fresh even with a parson."
"I don't see that it's any of your pidgin to stick up for those fakirs," retorted the tea-buyer angrily.
"And I don't make it my pidgin," replied McLeod, "but it wasn't up to you to butt in on a man like MacKay the way you did. He gave you what you deserved."