Page:'Twixt land and sea - tales (IA twixtlandseatale00conr).pdf/202

 interest: “Oh, here’s a yacht!” the Dutch captain, with a hostile glance, would grunt contemptuously: “Yacht! No! That’s only English Jasper. A pedlar”

“A good seaman you say,” ejaculated Jasper, still in the matter of the hopeless Schultz with the wonderfully touching voice.

“First rate. Ask any one, Quite worth havingonly impossible,” I declared.

“He shall have his chance to reform in the brig,” said Jasper, with a laugh. “There will be no temptations either to drink or steal where I am going to this time.”

I didn’t press him for anything more definite on that point. In fact, intimate as we were, I had a pretty clear notion of the general run of his business.

But as we are going ashore in his gig he asked suddenly: “By the way, do you know where Heemskirk is?”

I eyed him covertly, and was reassured. He had asked the question, not as a lover, but as a trader. I told him that I had heard in Palembang that the Neptun was on duty down about Flores and Sumbawa. Quite out of his way. He expressed his satisfaction.

“You know,” he went on, “that fellow, when he gets on the Borneo coast, amuses himself by knocking down my beacons. I have had to put up a few to help me in and out of the rivers. Early this year a Celebes trader becalmed in a prau was watching him at it. He steamed the gunboat full tilt at two of them, one after another, smashing them to pieces, and then lowered a boat on purpose to pull out a third, which