Doane walked farther along the bank; stood for a time absorbed in thought that led, at length, to what seemed a new ray of light in the darkness that was his mind. And he strode back, hunting in this group and that for Dawley Kane. That man had offered help. Now he could give it. Dawley Kane, fully dressed, unruffled, quietly smoking a cigar and looking through a pocket notebook by the light from the river, seemed a note of sanity in an unbelievably confused world. To him, apparently, the nightmare of fighting and slaughter on the steamer, like the fire, were but incidents. The only evidence the man gave out of quickened nerves was that he talked a little more freely than usual. To Doane he presented a surface as clear and hard as polished crystal, impenetrable, in a sense repelling, yet, as we say, a gentleman. They even chatted casually, as men will, standing there looking out at the fire (which now had reached the stem and eaten down to the lower decks, incinerating alike the bodies of men who had died for faith and for lust) and at the wide circle of light on the rim of which floated the vulture-the boats of the rivermen. Doane forced himself into the vein of the man's interest; riding roughshod over a desperate sense of unreality. For he knew that the great masters of capital were often proud and even finicky men who must be approached with skill. They were kings; must be dealt with as kings. Kane was interested to learn what relation the fight below decks might have to the rebellion up the river. That, clearly, was characteristic of the man--the impersonal gathering in and relating of observable data. His interest was deeper in the agriculture and commerce of the immense Yangtze basin, to which subject he easily passed. His questions came out of a present fund of knowledge--questions as to the speed, cargo-capacity and operation-cost of the large junks that plied the river by thousands, as to the cost of employing Chinese labor and the average capacity of the coolie. He knew all about the slowly developing railroads of North and Central China; commented in passing on the surprising profits of the young Hankow-Peking line.... He seemed to Doane to have in his mind a map or diagram of a huge, profitmaking industrial world, to which he added such bits of line or color as occurred in the answers to his questions. But he gave out no conclusions, only questions. Famines, other wide-spread suffering so tragically common in the Orient, interested him only as an impairment of trade and industrial man power. The opium habit he viewed as an economic problem.