said with the weariness,
with the recklessness of a man spurred on and on by ill-luck till he
cares not where he runs. When he asked Jim, with a sort of brusque
despairing frankness, whether he himself--straight now--didn't
understand that when "it came to saving one's life in the dark, one
didn't care who else went--three, thirty, three hundred people"--it was
as if a demon had been whispering advice in his ear. "I made him wince,"
boasted Brown to me. "He very soon left off coming the righteous over
me. He just stood there with nothing to say, and looking as black as
thunder--not at me--on the ground." He asked Jim whether he had nothing
fishy in his life to remember that he was so damnedly hard upon a man
trying to get out of a deadly hole by the first means that came to
hand--and so on, and so on. And there ran through the rough talk a
vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common
experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge
that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts.

'At last Brown threw himself down full length and watched Jim out of
the corners of his eyes. Jim on his side of the creek stood thinking and
switching his leg. The houses in view were silent, as if a pestilence
had swept them clean of every breath of life; but many invisible eyes
were turned, from within, upon the two men with the creek between them,
a stranded white boat, and the body of the third man half sunk in the
mud. On the river canoes were moving again, for Patusan was recovering
its belief in the stability of earthly institutions since the return of
the white lord. The right bank, the platforms of the houses, the rafts
moored along the shores, even the roofs of bathing-huts, were covered
with people that, far away out of earshot and almost out of sight, were
straining their eyes towards the knoll beyond the Rajah's stockade.
Within the wide irregular ring of forests, broken in two places by the
sheen of the river, there was a silence. "Will you promise to leave the
coast?" Jim asked. Brown lifted and let fall his hand, giving everything
up as it were--accepting the inevitable. "And surrender your arms?" Jim
went on. Brown sat up and glared across. "Surrender our arms! Not till
you come to take them out of our stiff hands. You think I am gone crazy
with funk? Oh no! That and the rags I stand in is all I have got in the
world, besides a few more breechloaders on board; and I ex