f flour, was a young
black girl.

There was something furtive and lurking about her that Jerry did not fail
to sense, and he had long since learned that something was wrong when any
black lurked or skulked. She cried out with fear as he barked an alarm
and pounced upon her. Even though his teeth scratched her bare arm, she
did not strike at him. Not did she cry out again. She cowered down and
trembled and did not fight back. Keeping his teeth locked in the hold he
had got on her flimsy shift, he shook and dragged at her, all the while
growling and scolding for her benefit and yelping a high clamour to bring
Skipper or the mate.

In the course of the struggle the girl over-balanced on the boxes and
tins and the entire heap collapsed. This caused Jerry to yelp a more
frenzied alarm, while the blacks, peering in from the cabin, laughed with
cruel enjoyment.

When Skipper arrived, Jerry wagged his stump tail and, with ears laid
back, dragged and tugged harder than ever at the thin cotton of the
girl's garment. He expected praise for what he had done, but when
Skipper merely told him to let go, he obeyed with the realization that
this lurking, fear-struck creature was somehow different, and must be
treated differently, from other lurking creatures.

Fear-struck she was, as it is given to few humans to be and still live.
Van Horn called her his parcel of trouble, and he was anxious to be rid
of the parcel, without, however, the utter annihilation of the parcel. It
was this annihilation which he had saved her from when he bought her in
even exchange for a fat pig.

Stupid, worthless, spiritless, sick, not more than a dozen years old, no
delight in the eyes of the young men of her village, she had been
consigned by her disappointed parents to the cooking-pot. When Captain
Van Horn first encountered her had been when she was the central figure
in a lugubrious procession on the banks of the Balebuli River.

Anything but a beauty--had been his appraisal when he halted the
procession for a pow-wow. Lean from sickness, her skin mangy with the
dry scales of the disease called _bukua_, she was tied hand and foot and,
like a pig, slung from a stout pole that rested on the shoulders of the
bearers, who intended to dine off of her. Too hopeless to expect mercy,
she made no appeal for help, though the horrible fear that possessed her
was eloquent in her wild-staring eyes.

In the universal beche-de-mer English, Captain