“Even though I wash coal with rosewater a whole year long, shall I ever make it white? Even though the rain fall a whole year, will it make the sea less salt? One drop of indigo—and lo! the jar of milk is ruined! Seed sown upon a lake will never grow!”
Again the captain weighed the kris in hand.
“Maybe the singer was right, after all,” thought he. “I’ve done my best. I’ve given all I had to give. He’ll have his chance, the boy shall, but if, after that—”
“For Heaven’s sake, captain, what are you up to there?”
The voice of Filhiol startled Briggs. In the door of the cabin he saw the old man standing with a look of puzzled anxiety. Through the window Filhiol had seen him take down the kris; and, worried, he had painfully arisen and had hobbled into the house. “Better put that knife up, captain. It’s not a healthy article to be fooling with.”
“Not, eh?” asked the captain. “Pretty bad poison, is it?”
“Certainly! Put it up, captain, I beg you!” The doctor, more and more alarmed, came into the cabin. “Put it up!”
“What does it do to you, this _curaré_ stuff?” insisted the captain.
“You do, unless one very special antidote is applied.”
“Nobody in this country has that, though!”
“You’ve got it?” demanded the captain, amazed. “Where the devil would _you_ get it?”
“Out East, where you got that devilish kris! You haven’t forgotten that Parsee in Bombay, who gave me the secret cure, after I’d saved him from cholera? But that’s neither here nor there, captain! That kris is no thing to be experimenting with. Put it up now, I tell you! We aren’t going to have any foolishness, captain. Not at our age, mind you! Put it up, now.”
Unwillingly the captain obeyed. He hung the weapon up once more, while Filhiol eyed him with suspicious displeasure.
“It would be more to the point to see how we’re going to get the boy out of his trouble again,” the doctor reproved. “If you can’t meet this problem without doing something very foolish, captain, you’re not the man I think you!”
The old man’s chantey—it now had to do with one “Old Stormy,” alleged to be “dead and gone”—promptly ceased. Footfalls sounded, and Ezra appeared. The cut on his cheek showed livid in the tough, leathery skin.
“The doctor and I are going to take a little morning cruise down to Endicutt in the tender—the buggy, I mean.”