l be bad enough when it
comes."

He was not wrong. The pleasant days of towing ended all too soon, though
the Haliotis trailed behind her a heavily weighted jib stayed out
into the shape of a pocket; and Mr. Wardrop was no longer an artist of
imagination, but one of seven-and-twenty prisoners in a prison full of
insects. The man-of-war had towed them to the nearest port, not to the
headquarters of the colony, and when Mr. Wardrop saw the dismal little
harbour, with its ragged line of Chinese junks, its one crazy tug, and
the boat-building shed that, under the charge of a philosophical Malay,
represented a dockyard, he sighed and shook his head.

"I did well," he said. "This is the habitation o' wreckers an' thieves.
We're at the uttermost ends of the earth. Think you they'll ever know in
England?"

"Doesn't look like it," said the skipper.

They were marched ashore with what they stood up in, under a generous
escort, and were judged according to the customs of the country, which,
though excellent, are a little out of date. There were the pearls; there
were the poachers; and there sat a small but hot Governor. He consulted
for a while, and then things began to move with speed, for he did not
wish to keep a hungry crew at large on the beach, and the man-of-war had
gone up the coast. With a wave of his hand--a stroke of the pen was not
necessary--he consigned them to the black gang-tana, the back-country,
and the hand of the Law removed them from his sight and the knowledge
of men. They were marched into the palms, and the back-country swallowed
them up--all the crew of the Haliotis.

Deep peace continued to brood over Europe, Asia, Africa, America,
Australasia, and Polynesia.

* * * * *

It was the firing that did it. They should have kept their counsel; but
when a few thousand foreigners are bursting with joy over the fact that
a ship under the British flag has been fired at on the high seas, news
travels quickly; and when it came out that the pearl-stealing crew had
not been allowed access to their consul (there was no consul within a
few hundred miles of that lonely port) even the friendliest of Powers
has a right to ask questions. The great heart of the British public
was beating furiously on account of the performance of a notorious
race-horse, and had not a throb to waste on distant accidents; but
somewhere deep in the hull of the ship of State there is machinery which
more or less accuratel