It was that knowledge which had brought trouble to his face at the first news of the wreck.  He took up his hat.

“Where are you going, Mr. Mesman?”

“I am going to look for Allen.  I think he must be ashore.  Does anybody know?”

No one of those present knew.  And Mr. Mesman went out on the “front” to make inquiries.

The other part of the town, the part near the church and the fort, got its information in another way.  The first thing disclosed to it was Jasper himself, walking rapidly, as though he were pursued.  And, as a matter of fact, a Chinaman, obviously a sampan man, was following him at the same headlong pace.  Suddenly, while passing Orange House, Jasper swerved and went in, or, rather, rushed in, startling Gomez, the hotel clerk, very much.  But a Chinaman beginning to make an unseemly noise at the door claimed the immediate attention of Gomez.  His grievance was that the white man whom he had brought on shore from the gunboat had not paid him his boat-fare.  He had pursued him so far, asking for it all the way.  But the white man had taken no notice whatever of his just claim.  Gomez satisfied the coolie with a few coppers, and then went to look for Jasper, whom he knew very well.  He found him standing stiffly by a little round table.  At the other end of the verandah a few men sitting there had stopped talking, and were looking at him in silence.  Two billiard-players, with cues in their hands, had come to the door of the billiard-room and stared, too.

On Gomez coming up to him, Jasper raised one hand to point at his own throat.  Gomez noted the somewhat soiled state of his white clothes, then took one look at his face, and fled away to order the drink for which Jasper seemed to be asking.

Where he wanted to go—­or what purpose—­where he, perhaps, only imagined himself to be going, when a sudden impulse or the sight of a familiar place had made him turn into Orange House—­it is impossible to say.  He was steadying himself lightly with the tips of his fingers on the little table.  There were on that verandah two men whom he knew well personally, but his gaze roaming incessantly as though he were looking for a way of escape, passed and repassed over them without a sign of recognition.  They, on their side, looking at him, doubted the evidence of their own eyes.  It was not that his face was distorted.  On the contrary, it was still, it was set.  But its expression, somehow, was unrecognisable.  Can that be him? they wondered with awe.

In his head there was a wild chaos of clear thoughts.  Perfectly clear.  It was this clearness which was so terrible in conjunction with the utter inability to lay hold of any single one of them all.  He was saying to himself, or to them:  “Steady, steady.”  A China boy appeared before him with a glass on a tray.  He poured the drink down his throat, and rushed out.  His disappearance removed the spell of wonder from the beholders.  One of the men jumped up and moved quickly to that side of the verandah from which almost the whole of the roadstead could be seen.  At the very moment when Jasper, issuing from the door of the Orange House, was passing under him in the street below, he cried to the others excitedly: