would
be a rich man for life, with a house of his own, a wife, and children
growing up to venerate him. Yes, and back of the house he would have a
small garden, a place of meditation and repose, with goldfish in a tiny
lakelet, and wind bells tinkling in the several trees, and there would
be a high wall all around so that his meditation and repose should be
undisturbed.

Well, he had worked out three of those five years. He was already a
wealthy man (in his own country) through his earnings, and only two
years more intervened between the cotton plantation on Tahiti and the
meditation and repose that awaited him. But just now he was losing money
because of the unfortunate accident of being present at the killing of
Chung Ga. He had lain three weeks in prison, and for each day of those
three weeks he had lost fifty cents. But now judgment would soon be
given, and he would go back to work.

Ah Cho was twenty-two years old. He was happy and good-natured, and it
was easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way,
his face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a
gentle complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual
among his countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused
trouble, never took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was
not harsh enough for the soul that must belong to a gambler. He was
content with little things and simple pleasures. The hush and quiet in
the cool of the day after the blazing toil in the cotton field was
to him an infinite satisfaction. He could sit for hours gazing at a
solitary flower and philosophizing about the mysteries and riddles
of being. A blue heron on a tiny crescent of sandy beach, a silvery
splatter of flying fish, or a sunset of pearl and rose across the
lagoon, could entrance him to all forgetfulness of the procession of
wearisome days and of the heavy lash of Schemmer.

Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute. But he earned
his salary. He got the last particle of strength out of the five hundred
slaves; for slaves they were until their term of years was up. Schemmer
worked hard to extract the strength from those five hundred sweating
bodies and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export.
His dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to
effect the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt,
three inches wide and a yard in length, with w