“I do not know dis coast,” he used to say. “I cama hera because Gordon-Nasmyth was coming too. Den he does not come!”
“Fortunes of war,” I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of these two men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament and wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express his own malignant Anti-Britishism.
He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole I was glad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.
(The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, get aground at the end of Mordet’s Island, but we got off in an hour or so with a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)
I suspected the mate of his opinion of t
