Why not?
Were not his own sentiments inclined in favour of the patient?
But fifty gold was fifty gold.
One morning, as he took his stand on the Hong-Kong packet dock to ambush the possible tourist, he witnessed the arrival of a tubby schooner, dirty gray and blotched as though she had run through fire.

Her two sticks were bare and brown, her snugged canvas drab, her brasses dull, her anchor mottled with rust.

There was only one clean spot in the picture--the ship's wash (all white) that fluttered on a line stretched between the two masts.

The half-nude brown bodies of the crew informed Ah Cum that the schooner had come up from the South Seas.

The boiling under her stern, however, told him nothing.