hat cared aught for him--there grew upon him that quiet, reserved
temperament that led the other white men on the plantation to call him
in kindly jest, "Prout, the Hermit."

But although he never mixed with the men on the Kalahua Estate in the
wild revelries with which they too often sought to break the monotony of
their existence and celebrate a good season, he was by no means a morose
or unsociable man; and Chard, the merry-hearted Belgian sugar-boiler,
often declared that it was Prout alone who kept the estate going and
the native labourers from turning on the white men and cutting their
throats, out of sheer revenge for the brutal treatment they received
from Sherard, the savage, drunken owner of Kalahua.

Between Roden Sherard and Prout there had been always, from the first
day almost of the latter entering upon his duties, a silent, bitter
antagonism. And the reason of it was known only to the two men
themselves.

In those times the native labour for the Hawaiian sugar plantations was
recruited from the islands of the Mid-Pacific, and from the chains of
sandy atolls lying between the Bonins and the Radack Archipelago of the
Marshall Group. On Kalahua there were some three hundred natives, and
within a month of Prout taking charge, he had changed their condition
so much for the better, that not one of the wild-eyed, half-naked beings
who toiled from sunrise to dark but would give him a grateful glance as
he rode through the cane fields. And Sherard, who rode with him, would
see this, and scowl and tell Prout that as soon as his engagement
terminated, he, Sherard, would bring back Fletcher, the former manager,
"a man who would thump a kanaka into a pulp if he dared to look sideways
at him."

"If you are not satisfied with me you can bring him here to-morrow if
you like," Prout had said coldly to him one day. "I've managed bigger
places than this in Demerara, and on no one of them have I ever seen
a nigger struck. But then, you see, in Demerara the planters are
Englishmen, and Englishmen as a rule don't shine at nigger walloping."

Sherard, a black-visaged Marylander, snapped his teeth together and,
smothering his rage, tried to laugh the matter off.

"Well, I suppose you're right, Prout. I know I have got a good man in
you; but at the same time, God never intended these damned saucy niggers
to be coddled and petted."

Prout laughed ironically as he repeated Sherard's words "coddled and
petted!" And then lon