Page:The Days Work (1899).djvu/180

 The engine-room was a cemetery, and it did not need the contents of the ash-lift through the skylight to make it any worse.

He invited the skipper to look at the completed work.

"Saw ye ever such a forsaken wreck as that? "said he proudly. "It almost frights me to go under those shores. Now, what d' you think they 'll do to us?"

"Wait till we see," said the skipper. "It 'll be bad enough when it comes."

He was not wrong. The pleasant days of towing ended all too soon, though the Haliotis trailed behind her a heavily weighted jib stayed out into the shape of a pocket; and Mr. Wardrop was no longer an artist of imagination, but one of seven-and- twenty prisoners in a prison full of insects. The man-of-war had towed them to the nearest port, not to the headquarters of the colony, and when Mr. Wardrop saw the dismal little harbour, with its ragged line of Chinese junks, its one crazy tug, and the boat-building shed that, under the charge of a philosophical Malay, represented a dock-yard, he sighed and shook his head.

"I did well," he said. "This is the habitation o' wreckers an' thieves. We 're at the uttermost ends of the earth. Think you they 'll ever know in England?"

"Does n't look like it," said the skipper. They were marched ashore with what they stood up in, under a generous escort, and were judged according to the customs of the country, which, though excellent, are a little out of date. There were the pearls; there were the poachers; and there sat a small but hot Governor. He consulted for a while, and then things