It is fine to succeed, beyond expectation, detail by detail of
strategy. His hands were clean. He remained the perfect administrator.
Had there been no other way, he would not have flinched at any necessary
lengths of wholesale or retail butchery. Still, it was nice to think
that his hands were spotless. For instance, if that gunboat, with its
purple-whiskered Amsterdammer of a captain, should just now happen in.

His face glowed in the dusk. His eyes shone with frank calculations.
Fists on hips, head thrust out, one saw him casting up the sum of his
treasure-trove.--But he was an epicure. He could wait. It was even
delightful to wait. When I turned away he came down with me, his hands
still on his hips and his eyes on the gently emerging stars.

The man was extraordinary. Sitting on the veranda, bombarding the
direction of the foreshore with that huge deliberate fusillade of cigar
smoke, he talked of home, of his boyhood on the dike at Volendam, and of
his mother, who, bless her! was still alive to send him cheeses at
Christmas-time.

It was midnight and the moon was rising when I got away and moved down
toward the beach where the dinghy waited. The horizontal ray struck
through the grating of the "calaboose" at the corner of the godown I was
skirting. I saw the prisoner. The upright shadow of an iron bar cut his
face in two, separating the high, soiled cheeks, each with an eye.

"You mustn't leave him get at her!"

I tell you it was not the same man that had come swimming and sniveling
out to the schooner less than forty hours before. Here was a fierce one,
a zealot, a flame, the very thin blade of a fine sword.

"Listen, Dole, if you leave that devil get at her--"

His eyes burned through me. He failed completely to accept the fact that
he was done. His mind, ignoring the present, ran months ahead. With a
flair of understanding, thinking of those three travesties of husbands
and the wife who was no wife, I perceived what he meant.

I left him. He was a wild man, but the quality of his wildness showed
itself in the fact that he squandered none of it in shaking the bars,
shouting, or flinging about. His voice to the last, trailing me around
the next corner, held to the same key, almost subdued.

"By God! if that--gets at her, I'll--I'll--"

"You'll what?" I mused. You see, even now I couldn't get rid of him as
the drifter, the gutter Hamlet, the congenital howler against fate.
"You'll what?" I repeated under