urial?"

Junius Peabody writhed. "What's it to you how I spend it afterward? I'm
a free agent. I can do as I like."

"That," said Bendemeer with quiet emphasis, "is a lie."

Holding his quivering subject, impaled on his glance as it seemed, he
reached a black, square bottle. He shoved a glass in front of Junius
Peabody and poured a generous measure. With one hand he kept the glass
covered and with the other pointed out through the doorway.

"I'll say you lie, and I'll demonstrate:

"You see my schooner out there? That's her boat on the beach. She leaves
in half an hour; her captain's come now for final orders. She goes first
from here to an island of mine a hundred miles away. I planted it with
coconuts five years ago, and left a population of maybe a dozen Kanakas
to tend them--it's going to be worth money some day. Nukava, they call
it, and it's the edge of the earth, the farthest corner, and the
loneliest and the driest. There's not a drop of anything on the place
except water, scant and brackish at that. But a white man could live
there, if he were fit to live at all, and wanted to badly enough.

"Now I'll make you an offer. I'll buy this lump of stuff from you, and
I'll buy it either of two ways. A half interest in Nukava and you go
there at once to take charge as agent.... Or else--here's your brandy
and I'll keep you perpetually drunk as long as you last."

Junius swayed on his feet. "Agent?" he stammered. "To go away--?"

"Now. And once there you can't escape. You're stuck for a year on a
coral gridiron, Peabody, to sit and fry."

"What for? You--! What for?"

Bendemeer shrugged.

"Because it amuses me. Because I please. Because--I know what you'll do.
I've been watching men of your sort all my life, and I know what they're
worth--drift on the beaches, scraps, trash, jetsam. Regeneration, eh?
Rot and drivel! You can't save yourself any more than you could lift
yourself by your own boot straps. It suits me to prove it to you this
way."

He lifted his hand away from the glass. Peabody's stare dropped from
that cryptic regard to the waiting brandy before him, the red liquor,
odorous and maddening. Peabody's lips moved, and he wet them with the
tip of his tongue and gripped the bar with straining white fingers.

"You're wrong," he breathed. "You lose, Bendemeer. I can do it--I've
just learned I can do it. And, by God," he added, prayerfully, "I will."

Bendemeer took up the netted lump.

"Very well