ll you that I'm from Missouri. You'll
have to show _me_."

And as I thus talked the thought went through my mind of how I naturally
sought out the phrases of his own vocabulary in order to make myself
intelligible to him. The situation was bestial, with sixteen of our
complement already gone into the dark; and the terms I employed,
perforce, were terms of bestiality. And I thought, also, of I who was
thus compelled to dismiss the dreams of the utopians, the visions of the
poets, the king-thoughts of the king-thinkers, in a discussion with this
ripened product of the New York City inferno. To him I must talk in the
elemental terms of life and death, of food and water, of brutality and
cruelty.

"I give you your choice," he went on. "Give in now, an' you won't be
hurt, none of you."

"And if we don't?" I dared airily.

"You'll be sorry you was ever born. You ain't a mush-head, you've got a
girl there that's stuck on you. It's about time you think of her. You
ain't altogether a mutt. You get my drive?"

Ay, I did get it; and somehow, across my brain flashed a vision of all I
had ever read and heard of the siege of the Legations at Peking, and of
the plans of the white men for their womenkind in the event of the yellow
hordes breaking through the last lines of defence. Ay, and the old
steward got it; for I saw his black eyes glint murderously in their
narrow, tilted slits. He knew the drift of the gangster's meaning.

"You get my drive?" the gangster repeated.

And I knew anger. Not ordinary anger, but cold anger. And I caught a
vision of the high place in which we had sat and ruled down the ages in
all lands, on all seas. I saw my kind, our women with us, in forlorn
hopes and lost endeavours, pent in hill fortresses, rotted in jungle
fastnesses, cut down to the last one on the decks of rocking ships. And
always, our women with us, had we ruled the beasts. We might die, our
women with us; but, living, we had ruled. It was a royal vision I
glimpsed. Ay, and in the purple of it I grasped the ethic, which was the
stuff of the fabric of which it was builded. It was the sacred trust of
the seed, the bequest of duty handed down from all ancestors.

And I flamed more coldly. It was not red-brute anger. It was
intellectual. It was based on concept and history; it was the philosophy
of action of the strong and the pride of the strong in their own
strength. Now at last I knew Nietzsche. I knew the rig