The Devils Admiral | Page 2

Kut Sang while they are fresh in my mind.

How well I can see in a mental vision the whole murderous plot
worked out! Certain parts of it flash on me at off moments, while I am
reading a book or watching a play or talking with a friend, and every
trivial detail comes out as clearly as if it were all being done over again
in a motion picture. The night gloom in the hall brings back to me the
'tween-decks of the old tub of a boat; the green-plush seats of a
sleeping-car remind me of the _Kut Sang's_ dining-saloon, and even a
bonfire in an adjacent yard recalls the odour of burned rice on the
galley fire left by the panic-stricken Chinese cook.
I know the very smell of the Kut Sang. I caught it last week passing a
ship-chandler's shop, and it set my veins throbbing again with the sense
of conflict, and I caught myself tensing my muscles for a death grapple.
To me the Kut Sang is a personality, a sentient being, with her own soul
and moods and temper, audaciously tossing her bows at the threatening
seas rising to meet her. She is my sea-ghost, and as much a character to
me as Riggs or Thirkle or Dago Red.
The deep, bright red band on her funnel gave her a touch of coquetry,
but she had the drabness of senility; she was worn out, and working,
when she should have gone to the junk pile years before. But her very
antiquity charmed me, for her scars and wrinkles told of hard service in
the China Sea; and there was an air of comfort about her, such as one
finds in an ancient house that has sheltered several generations.
Precious little comfort I had in her, though, which is why I remember
her so well, and why I never shall forget her. If she had made
Hong-Kong in five days, her name would be lost in the memory of
countless other steamers, and there would be no tale to tell. But now
she is the Kut Sang, and every time I whisper the two words to myself I
live once more aboard her.
Rajah is with me--inherited, I might say, from Captain Riggs. Perhaps
he keeps my memory keen on the old days, for how could I forget with
the black boy stalking about the house--half the time in his bare feet
and his native costume, which I rather encourage--for his sarong
matches the curtains of my den and adds a bit of colour to my
colourless surroundings.

I am quite sure that if Captain Riggs were still alive he would agree that
the story should begin with my first sight of the missionary and the
little red-headed man, so I will launch the narrative with an account of
how I first met the Rev. Luther Meeker.
He was in the midst of a litter of nondescript baggage on the Manila
mole when I came ashore from a rice-boat that had brought me across
the China Sea from Saigon. The first glance marked him as a
missionary, for he wore a huge crucifix cut out of pink shell, and as he
hobbled about on the embankment it bobbed at the end of a black cord
hung from his neck.
Quaint and queer he was, even for the Orient, where queerness in men
and things is commonplace and accepted as a part of the East's
inseparable sense of mystery. With his big goggles of smoked glass he
reminded one of some sea-monster, an illusion dispelled by his battered
pith helmet with its faded sky-blue pugri bound round its crown, the
frayed ends falling over his shoulders and flapping in the breeze.
He was a thin old man, clad in duck, turning yellow with age. When he
threw the helmet back it exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head,
except for a few wisps of hair at the temples. He appeared to be of great
age--a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard;
and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions. It
was plain that the tropics were fast making an end of him.
He was whining querulously as I stepped ashore, and the first words I
heard him say were:
"An organ! An organ! An organ in a cedarwood box! An organ in a
cedarwood box, and the sign of the cross on the ends! Oh, why do you
try my soul? Such stupidity! Such awful stupidity!"
The native porters were grinning at him as they simulated a frantic
search for his organ in a cedarwood box, but they probably knew all the
time where it was. He was surrounded by baskets and chests; and, if the
crucifix were not enough