ngue
showed no sign of slipping. His glance had resumed its old stolid
watchfulness, which caused me to remain tactfully silent.

"But we wasn't shootin' at anybody," Mr. Aiken concluded, more genially.
"Not at anybody, just at selected folks."

He stopped to glance serenely about him, and somehow the dusty road, the
river, the trees and the soft sunlight seemed to make him strangely
confiding. His harsh voice lowered in gentle patronage.

"Would you like to know who those folks were?" he asked finally.

I must have been too eager in giving my assent, for Mr. Aiken smiled
broadly and nodded his head with complacent satisfaction.

"I thought you would admire to," said Mr. Aiken; "like as not you'd give
a tooth to know, now wouldn't you? Never do know a tooth is useful till
you lose it. Now look at me--I've had as many as six stove out off an'
on, and now--But you wanted to know who it was we shot at, didn't you? So
you did, boy, so you did. Well, I'll tell you, so I will. Yes, so help me
if I don't tell you, boy." And his voice trailed off in a low chuckle.

"It was folks like you," he concluded crisply; "folks who didn't mind
their own business."

Gleefully he repeated the sentence. Its ringing cadence and the trend of
his whole discourse gave him evident pleasure, and even caused him to
continue further with his rebuke.

"There you have it," said Mr. Aiken, "the Captain's own words, b'Gad.
'Mr. Aiken', he says, 'I fancy we may meet a number of people whose
affairs will not stop them interfering with our own. If you see any,' he
says, 'shoot them, Mr. Aiken'."

He had lapsed into a good-natured, reminiscent mood, and, as he fixed his
gaze on the trees across the road, he was prompted to enlarge still
further on the episode. He seemed to have forgotten I was there as he
continued.

"I wish it had been on deck," he remarked, "instead of a place with
damned gold chairs and gold on the ceiling, and cloth on the walls, and
velvets such as respectable folks use for dress and not for ornament, and
candles in gold sticks, and the floor like a sheet of ice.

"Hell," said Mr. Aiken. "I'd sooner slip on blood than on a floor like
that. Yes, so I would. I wonder why those frog eaters don't make their
houses snug and decent instead of big as a church. Now, though I'm not a
moral man, yet I call it immoral, damned if I don't, to live in a house
like that."

"Yet somehow pleasant," I ventured politely, "surely you have f