smoke-cured. One was
of the captain of a schooner. It had long whiskers. He would sell it
for two quid. Black men's heads he would sell for one quid. He had
some pickaninny heads, in poor condition, that he would let go for ten
bob.

Five minutes afterward, Bertie found himself sitting on the
companionway-slide alongside a black with a horrible skin disease. He
sheered off, and on inquiry was told that it was leprosy. He hurried
below and washed himself with antiseptic soap. He took many antiseptic
washes in the course of the day, for every native on board was
afflicted with malignant ulcers of one sort or another.

As the _Arla_ drew in to an anchorage in the midst of mangrove swamps,
a double row of barbed wire was stretched around above her rail. That
looked like business and when Bertie saw the shore canoes alongside,
armed with spears, bows and arrows, and Sniders, he wished more
earnestly than ever that the cruise was over.

That evening the natives were slow in leaving the ship at sundown. A
number of them checked the mate when he ordered them ashore.

"Never mind, I'll fix them," said Captain Hansen, diving below.

When he came back, he showed Bertie a stick of dynamite attached to a
fish-hook. Now it happens that a paper-wrapped bottle of chlorodyne
with a piece of harmless fuse projecting can fool anybody. It fooled
Bertie, and it fooled the natives. When Captain Hansen lighted the
fuse and hooked the fish-hook into the tail-end of a native's
loin-cloth, that native was smitten with so ardent a desire for the
shore that he forgot to shed the loin-cloth. He started for'ard, the
fuse sizzling and spluttering at his rear, the natives in his path
taking headers over the barbed wire at every jump. Bertie was
horror-stricken. So was Captain Hansen. He had forgotten his
twenty-five recruits, on each of which he had paid thirty shillings
advance. They went over the side along with the shore-dwelling folk
and followed by him who trailed the sizzling chlorodyne bottle.

Bertie did not see the bottle go off; but the mate opportunely
discharging a stick of real dynamite aft where it would harm nobody,
Bertie would have sworn in any admiralty court to a nigger blown to
flinders.

The flight of the twenty-five recruits had actually cost the _Arla_
forty pounds, and, since they had taken to the bush, there was no hope
of recovering them. The skipper and his mate proceeded to drown their
sorrow in