or did Jerry, with a full stomach and weary from so
much excitement, find it difficult to fall immediately asleep.

An hour later he was awakened by the entrance of Borckman. When he
wagged his stub of a tail and smiled friendly with his eyes, the mate
scowled at him and muttered angrily in his throat. Jerry made no further
overtures, but lay quietly watching. The mate had come to take a drink.
In truth, he was stealing the drink from Van Horn's supply. Jerry did
not know this. Often, on the plantation, he had seen the white men take
drinks. But there was something somehow different in the manner of
Borckman's taking a drink. Jerry was aware, vaguely, that there was
something surreptitious about it. What was wrong he did not know, yet he
sensed the wrongness and watched suspiciously.

After the mate departed, Jerry would have slept again had not the
carelessly latched door swung open with a bang. Opening his eyes,
prepared for any hostile invasion from the unknown, he fell to watching a
large cockroach crawling down the wall. When he got to his feet and
warily stalked toward it, the cockroach scuttled away with a slight
rustling noise and disappeared into a crack. Jerry had been acquainted
with cockroaches all his life, but he was destined to learn new things
about them from the particular breed that dwelt on the _Arangi_.

After a cursory examination of the stateroom he wandered out into the
cabin. The blacks, sprawled about everywhere, but, conceiving it to be
his duty to his _Skipper_, Jerry made it a point to identify each one.
They scowled and uttered low threatening noises when he sniffed close to
them. One dared to menace him with a blow, but Jerry, instead of
slinking away, showed his teeth and prepared to spring. The black
hastily dropped the offending hand to his side and made soothing,
penitent noises, while others chuckled; and Jerry passed on his way. It
was nothing new. Always a blow was to be expected from blacks when white
men were not around. Both the mate and the captain were on deck, and
Jerry, though unafraid, continued his investigations cautiously.

But at the doorless entrance to the lazarette aft, he threw caution to
the winds and darted in in pursuit of the new scent that came to his
nostrils. A strange person was in the low, dark space whom he had never
smelled. Clad in a single shift and lying on a coarse grass-mat spread
upon a pile of tobacco cases and fifty-pound tins o