e young are
rash--irritated him. The night and the spot were full of contradictions.
It was impossible to say who in this shadowy warfare was to be an enemy,
and who were the allies. So close were the contacts issuing from this
complication of a yachting voyage, that he seemed to have them all
within his breast.

"Shoot me! He is quite up to that trick--damn him. Yet I would trust him
sooner than any man in that yacht."

Such were his thoughts while he looked at Carter, who was biting his
lips, in the vexation of the long silence. When they spoke again to each
other they talked soberly, with a sense of relief, as if they had come
into cool air from an overheated room and when Carter, dismissed, went
into his boat, he had practically agreed to the line of action traced
by Lingard for the crew of the yacht. He had agreed as if in implicit
confidence. It was one of the absurdities of the situation which had to
be accepted and could never be understood.

"Do I talk straight now?" had asked Lingard.

"It seems straight enough," assented Carter with an air of reserve; "I
will work with you so far anyhow."

"Mrs. Travers trusts me," remarked Lingard again.

"By the Lord Harry!" cried Carter, giving way suddenly to some latent
conviction. "I was warning her against you. Say, Captain, you are a
devil of a man. How did you manage it?"

"I trusted her," said Lingard.

"Did you?" cried the amazed Carter. "When? How? Where--"

"You know too much already," retorted Lingard, quietly. "Waste no time.
I will be after you."

Carter whistled low.

"There's a pair of you I can't make out," he called back, hurrying over
the side.

Shaw took this opportunity to approach. Beginning with hesitation: "A
word with you, sir," the mate went on to say he was a respectable man.
He delivered himself in a ringing, unsteady voice. He was married, he
had children, he abhorred illegality. The light played about his obese
figure, he had flung his mushroom hat on the deck, he was not afraid to
speak the truth. The grey moustache stood out aggressively, his glances
were uneasy; he pressed his hands to his stomach convulsively, opened
his thick, short arms wide, wished it to be understood he had been
chief-officer of home ships, with a spotless character and he hoped
"quite up to his work." He was a peaceable man, none more; disposed
to stretch a point when it "came to a difference with niggers of some
kind--they had to be taught manners and