lucky
flower which the Frenchman pinned to his coat--and afterward, when the
girl was dead, wore under his shirt, hung round his neck in a small box.
I suppose he had nothing else to put it into."

"Would those savages kill a woman for that?" asked Shaw, incredulously.

"Aye! They are pretty moral there. That was the first time in my life
I nearly went to war on my own account, Shaw. We couldn't talk those
fellows over. We couldn't bribe them, though the Frenchman offered the
best he had, and I was ready to back him to the last dollar, to the last
rag of cotton, Shaw! No use--they were that blamed respectable. So, says
the Frenchman to me: 'My friend, if they won't take our gunpowder for a
gift let us burn it to give them lead.' I was armed as you see now;
six eight-pounders on the main deck and a long eighteen on the
forecastle--and I wanted to try 'em. You may believe me! However, the
Frenchman had nothing but a few old muskets; and the beggars got to
windward of us by fair words, till one morning a boat's crew from the
Frenchman's ship found the girl lying dead on the beach. That put an end
to our plans. She was out of her trouble anyhow, and no reasonable man
will fight for a dead woman. I was never vengeful, Shaw, and--after
all--she didn't throw that flower at me. But it broke the Frenchman up
altogether. He began to mope, did no business, and shortly afterward
sailed away. I cleared a good many pence out of that trip, I remember."

With these words he seemed to come to the end of his memories of that
trip. Shaw stifled a yawn.

"Women are the cause of a lot of trouble," he said, dispassionately.
"In the Morayshire, I remember, we had once a passenger--an old
gentleman--who was telling us a yarn about them old-time Greeks fighting
for ten years about some woman. The Turks kidnapped her, or something.
Anyway, they fought in Turkey; which I may well believe. Them Greeks and
Turks were always fighting. My father was master's mate on board one of
the three-deckers at the battle of Navarino--and that was when we went
to help those Greeks. But this affair about a woman was long before that
time."

"I should think so," muttered Lingard, hanging over the rail, and
watching the fleeting gleams that passed deep down in the water, along
the ship's bottom.

"Yes. Times are changed. They were unenlightened in those old days. My
grandfather was a preacher and, though my father served in the navy, I
don't hold with war. S