t of reading folks want these days. It was all over in a night and a
day, anyway--look at them Northern Spy apples, Mr. Trenholm!"

He wanted to forget the _Kut Sang_ and the awful night we had in her. He
imagined he didn't figure to advantage in the story, and he winced when
I mentioned certain events, although I always insisted that he was the
bravest man among us, having a better realization of the odds against us.
Those who have faced danger know it takes a brave man to admit that he is
beaten, and still keep up the fight.

We all have better memories for our brave moments than for the fear which
threatened for a time to prove us cowards. The man who has faced death
and says he was not afraid is either a fool or a liar; and, if only a
liar, still a fool for telling himself that which he knows to be a lie.
The bravery of the seaman is that he fears the sea and knows its
ruthlessness and its ultimate victory, and accepts it as a part of his
day's work. This is a sea-story.

Captain Riggs had log-book stories that were good, and they might have
served him for a volume of marine memoirs. But I was with him when
we freighted the _Kut Sang_ with adventure and sailed out of Manila, so
his musty records of rescues and wrecks lacked life for me. In the old
logbooks I found no men to compare with the Rev. Luther Meeker; or
Petrak, the little red-headed beggar; or Long Jim or Buckrow or Thirkle.
I never found in their pages a cabin-boy like Rajah the Malay, strutting
about with a long kris stuck in the folds of his scarlet _sarong_, or a
mate whose truculence equalled the chronic ill-humour of Harris, who
learned his seamanship as a fisherman on the Newfoundland Banks. And in
all his log-books I never found another Devil's Admiral!

Riggs is dead, and I can tell the story in my own way; for tell it I
must, and the manuscript will be a comfort to me when I am old and my
memory and imagination begin to fail. Not that I ever expect to forget,
because that would be a calamity; but I want to put down the events of
the day and night in the _Kut Sang_ while they are fresh in my mind.

How well I can see in a mental vision the whole murderous plot worked
out! Certain parts of it flash on me at off moments, while I am reading a
book or watching a play or talking with a friend, and every trivial
detail comes out as clearly as if it were all being done over again in a
motion picture. The night gloom in the hall brings back to me the