God! I felt kingly. I knew at last the meaning of kingship.
My anger was white and cold. This subterranean rat of a miserable
human, crawling through the bowels of the ship to threaten me and
mine! A rat in the shelter of a knot-hole making a noise as beast-
like as any rat ever made! And it was in this spirit that I answered
the gangster.
"When you crawl on your belly, along the open deck, in the broad
light of day, like a yellow cur that has been licked to obedience,
and when you show by your every action that you like it and are glad
to do it, then, and not until then, will I talk with you."
Thereafter, for the next ten minutes, he shouted all the Billingsgate
of his kind at me through the slits in the ventilator. But I made no
reply. I listened, and I listened coldly, and as I listened I knew
why the English had blown their mutinous Sepoys from the mouths of
cannon in India long years ago.
And when, this morning, I saw the steward struggling with a five-
gallon carboy of sulphuric acid, I never dreamed the use he intended
for it.
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