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Thomas Dubois, with his knees drawn up under his chin, sat on the forward hatch-covering of the sturdy steamer Portlander and for the fiftieth time that day exclaimed half aloud:

“Can water anywhere be bluer than this!”

Never had he seen such depth of blue—deeper than the water in the beautiful Mediterranean, more radiant than the colors of the Red Sea, more brilliant than any blue he had seen in the velvety nights of the mid-Atlantic. The Indian Ocean was casting a spell over him and he felt that he would ask nothing more of Life than to let him float across it forever, just as he was doing on this glorious late afternoon, with the sun blazing from the west over the spreading wake of the steamer.

He rubbed his knees gratefully, because the shadow of the deck structure and the approach of sunset made the air cooler and fresher. Then he let his eyes roam over all he could see of the Portlander.

She was an ordinary cargo ship with a rather stumpy nose of a prow and no speed worth speaking of, but to Thomas she was the most adventurous boat that had ever crossed the Atlantic and crawled through the Suez Canal. Hadn’t she brought him carefully out among the impertinent tugs and the haughty transatlantic liners and the troublesome beetle-like ferryboats of the lower harbor from the smelly freight docks of Brooklyn? And wouldn’t she soon be carrying him past the fabled island of Ceylon, along the spice-laden coasts of India, and up the wriggling river to story-book Calcutta?

No; he changed his wish. His desire was not to go on like this forever, but to go on as rapidly as the throbbing engines of the good old Portlander could push her towards the goal of his venturesome voyage to the Far East.

The boy’s face changed as his eyes, gazing past the gently dipping and rising railing of the high bow deck, fixed themselves on the vast empty space beyond. Here he was in the Indian Ocean, surrounded by the most glorious blues that ocean waters know, with a golden orange sun disk rapidly slipping into the misty west. But Tom’s glance saw none of these beauties. His mind rested on none of these tropical changes. His thoughts were six thousand miles away, in a crowded city, in a narrow dining-room, where he and Bill Johnson, his lifelong companion, listened to the latter’s gray-haired mother, who was finishing her story.

She pushed a crumpled sheet of foreign-looking paper across the table towards Thomas.

“And that’s the last we ever heard of him—any of us,” she concluded solemnly.

Thomas gazed at the fateful letter.

“From Penang,” muttered Bill, repeating one of his mother’s phrases in a professional manner; for Bill worked for an importing silk firm and possessed an accurate knowledge of the geography of the Orient.

Tom’s eyes seemed charmed by the insignificant scrap of paper. He could not bring himself to touch it—yet. It was the only existing link between him and his unknown and long-lost father, that shadowy yet real person about whom Mrs. Johnson had tried to tell him all she knew. Her knowledge was little enough, for Dubois, just arrived from the interior of the United States, traveling in an attempt to forget the death of the young wife he had married in Guatemala, had not talked much. Finally the desire for wandering had become irresistible and he had entrusted this child to her, with the assurance of regular payments for his maintenance.

“Then he shipped to the East,” was about all that Mrs. Johnson could say, as she had repeated to Thomas over and over again for years.

“His notes told me where his ships had touched,” she had explained, “and for a long time the money came regular.”

“I’m glad of that,” Thomas always answered.

“Then—after that letter—all news stopped,” she wound up.

“Penang—that’s in the Malay Peninsula,” Bill added.

Thomas stretched out his hand to pick up his father’s last message. He looked at the faded words on the discolored sheet and repeated parts aloud.

“Feeling better than ever,” he read. “Going on to Singapore. Let you hear from there. Don’t let little Tom forget me.”

That was all.

The three sat silent for a time. Then Thomas began to speak in a low voice.

“Anything could have happened—shipwreck, sunstroke, an accident, sickness—it’s terribly unhealthy out there. If I only knew. If I were only certain that he had died.”

“That’s what worries me. With sailors in my boarding-house,” Mrs. Johnson went on, to Tom’s apparent relief at the chance to cover his own true feelings, “I’ve heard some awful disturbing yarns. Men coming home years after their wives, believing themselves widows, had married and were raising new families. Like that Enoch Arden poetry story your sister Anna used to cry over for school lessons. And men who forgot their names and homes for years and were lost to their relatives. Sailors’ lives are fascinating to them but awful wearing on the women folks left at home.”

“Don’t look at me. I didn’t go to sea,” her son Bill maintained stoutly, as he cast a pointed look at his companion.

“No,” she admitted, “but Tom, here, wants to. He’s not content with working on shore, drawing plans for boats and poking about them in port. He wants to take a long voyage on one. Might as well combine his work and try to get some news of his father. This chance made me get out this old letter.”

“It is a wonderful chance!” Tom had burst out enthusiastically. “You’re a brick to let me know, Bill.”

For Bill was really responsible for this family conference. At the offices of his firm, The Peernone Importing Corporation, he had chatted with the purser of the Portlander and had reported to Tom that the old fellow would like a clerk on the next voyage to the East. As Tom’s school vacation would permit it, he urged him to try to get into the graces of Old Penwiper, as the ship’s other officers jestingly called him.

Tom’s mind was still thousands of miles away from the deck of the ship on which he was lounging, when he had a strange feeling that curious eyes were fastened upon him. Slowly at first he recalled his concentrated wits to the surroundings of the ship. A blast of curses and a shuffling of heavy feet on the bow deck brought him back with a start. As he recognized the surly voice he muttered to himself:

“That terrible bo’s’n!”

Then he laughed aloud as he recalled his earliest knowledge of this man. When he first jumped at the sound of his brutal orders he had shaken the desk so much that Old Penwiper looked over his bifocal glasses and rapped out:

“It’s only that Eurasian.”

Thomas had never heard that word before. To remember it he jotted it down on the desk blotter. But he spelled it “You Razian.” Later in the day he found his spelling neatly crossed out and above it, in Old Penwiper’s neat British handwriting, the correct word, “Eurasian.” Even then the word puzzled Thomas. Suddenly he saw in it the term “Asian.” The “Eu” must come from “European.” It was as plain as daylight; a Eurasian had one parent Asian, the other European.

How terrible if all Eurasians were like this boatswain of the Portlander!

Yet the scattering of the sailors to the duties of the first of the dog-watches did not remove Tom’s feeling that eyes were focused intently upon him. For a few seconds he fidgeted, growing more and more uncomfortable. Suddenly he swung around sharply.

“Oh, that’s all, is it?” he muttered under his breath.

Standing in a seldom opened iron door of the deck-house, in flapping pearl-gray pajamas, was the silent figure of the ship’s Chinese cook.

Thomas would have called out, “Hello, Sing Ho,” except that the fixed gaze of the Celestial restrained him. But he stared back just as hard.

Suddenly the yellow false-face of Sing Ho, on which for weeks Thomas had seen not the slightest flicker of a smile, broke into a hundred wrinkles around a broad grin, and then one of the staring, slanting eyes slowly winked at Thomas.

In astonishment Thomas blinked his eyes for just a second. When he looked again the doorway was empty. Sing Ho seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Puzzle his brain as he might, Thomas could see no reason for the astonishing change in the frozen countenance of the Chinaman, from whom, during the entire voyage, he had heard no sounds except a few mysterious grunts. Then there came to his mind the thought that perhaps Sing Ho was as much disgusted as he was by the bo’s’n’s brutality and had noticed Tom’s involuntary response to it as he sat on the hatch cover. That must be it. But who had taught a silent Chinese cook to express sympathy and understanding by a crafty wink? There was more in this, Thomas felt, than appeared on the surface.

He must puzzle it out.

The boatswain was not attractive to look at. His powerful body was too short. His bull shoulders were not even; they made him look almost as much bent forward as a hunchback. From the deep chest between them his short, broad neck thrust itself forward aggressively. He was so bow-legged that Thomas had remarked to Old Penwiper:

“He looks like a pair of parentheses waddling down the deck.”

But his face was the most singular thing about him. In a ship’s company, where unusual types of men are frequent, where stunted bodies and scarred faces are regular details, where any strange nationality may appear, where stripling boys and hardened old sinners are thrown together for common work in a restricted area—even in such a menagerie of human beings the face of the boatswain was noticeable.

His head was small for his thickset body, but as round as a baseball. His skin was deep red, not browned as were the skins of the other seamen. His close-cropped hair—light threads on his red skull—seemed never to grow any longer. There were few wrinkles in his face; instead of squinting in the sun, as a seaman’s eyes do naturally, his light blue eyes just blinked rapidly. But the shape of those eyes! They were not small, but full, large, and long. They began close to the top of his pudgy nose and stretched out in a sharply sloping line, until it seemed that they would leave no room for his temples. They made Thomas wince every time he looked at them. No wonder the men in his watch hated the boatswain’s approach on deck, his commands in the hold, his shouts among the shrouds; for from those eyes, looking most of the time like the unmoving eyes of a dead fish on a dealer’s counter, there could spring the deadliest looks, and from his small, close-lipped mouth the most deadly oaths and most horrible threats.

“Scum of some Chinese swamp,” Thomas heard a sailor call him behind his back.

“How’d he get that name?” asked his companion as he rolled over beneath the lifeboat they were coating with sticky white paint.

“Father named Hans, I’ll bet a thousand.”

“Calls himself Hanson, though.”

“Sure. Added ‘son’ for use on British and American ships.”

“How much time do you suppose an American court would give a fellow for ridding the world of him?”

“None of that, now,” laughed the other. “We all grouch a lot, but none of us has the nerve.”

They moved to the next lifeboat. Thomas dared not follow and thus betray his listening.

As the ship approached the river entrance to Calcutta, nerves grew tense and tempers ragged. Thomas himself was all excitement and found even Old Penwiper unreasonable in insisting that landing papers and unloading blanks should be made out carefully and neatly.

“Stop wriggling!” he called out. “When we’re in the river you’ll see enough different kinds of ship to satisfy your marine architect eyes. Though you’ll never want to design boats like most of them,” he added in a grumble.

“Sorry,” mumbled Thomas. “But India’s an old story to you. It’s my first trip!”

“Well, get those blanks filled out properly and you’ll have all the more time in port to yourself.”

The sailors were especially jumpy. They loafed over their work, they answered back when ordered about, they clenched their fists at one another, and sometimes pounded one another for a few seconds until the commands of their boatswain parted them. They appeared in pieces of treasured clothing saved for shore visits, totally unconscious that for the most part they made themselves look like guests at a masquerade party.

Thomas could hardly suppress his laughter as he gazed in wonder at them. It was broiling hot on the glazed surface of the Indian Ocean, and the officers were comfortable in pajamas, or less. But the sailors sacrificed comfort for display.

Sven, a lumbering blond Swede, with a brain rendered slow—some said by a touch of sun in the tropics, others by a severe blow on the head—swaggered about like a boy in his first long trousers. From his seaman’s chest he had dug out a heavy felt hat that perched insecurely on the top of his capacious skull. Designed for the frigid snows of Scandinavian winters, it was as inappropriate for the Indian Ocean as anything that might be worn, yet it was Sven’s pride and treasure. Once, years ago, it had been black, but rough handling and unsympathetic weather had turned it to a sick-looking green. It was much too small for Sven’s giant head. Its narrow brim was sportively turned down in front and up in the rear. Its crown was pushed into a sharp peak, high above. It topped the awkward form of Sven like a tiny bird poised on the crest of a mountain. It was light and airy, and made you believe that at any moment Sven might astonish you by breaking into an amazing series of acrobatic dance steps.

Hanson’s nasty face almost smiled when he caught sight of the decoration as he rattled down the steps from the deck structure and saw Sven leaning idly against the side of the vessel.

Thomas was too far away to hear what was said or to interfere in any manner by a look or a remonstrance. Then, too, what happened among the seamen was strictly none of his business, no matter how his blood might boil with indignation.

Hanson gave some sharp order to Sven. The Swede, always slow in getting into motion, was slower than ever,—slow enough to bring a curse from his driving master. A flash of manly intelligence surged over the Swede’s countenance just long enough to let him make some sharp retort. The boatswain stood aghast at the Swede’s rashness; but a look at his face showed that the idea of retaliating had been momentary only. The childish look of submission had settled over him again.

In that instant’s pause Hanson’s first wave of rage had subsided, so Thomas knew that his next move was a deliberately planned act of malicious revenge.

He swung his left hand, and Sven’s beautiful peaked head-covering went soaring into the air in a wide, graceful curve. It struck the water with a hollow flop, and in a second was a soaked and bedraggled and shapeless mess.

Sven watched it disappear behind the ship in open-mouthed despair, while Hanson chuckled. Then the Swedish giant turned to face his tormentor. Slowly he raised both fists high above his head and advanced with a deep roar.

“If he falls on Hanson now, he’ll mash him flat,” Thomas said to himself.

Hanson never moved. He merely swung his right hand into the enraged Swede’s range of vision. His fingers gripped a monkey-wrench nearly two feet long. Some recollection of an earlier blow on the head swept into the bewildered Sven’s brain; he unclenched his fists to cover his eyes; and his angry roar changed to a plaintive wail of misery.

The boatswain moved on to the forecastle.

“I wish I could get even with you for that!” Thomas heard himself exclaim as he hurried along the deck to spare himself the sight of the tortured Sven.