ub, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon
than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not
spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was
fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
that club was amazing. Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It
was not until he had driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and
started to run, that he received his first wounds. He arrived in the
boat with four spear thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man
for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the schooner and doctored up.

Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should to-day be a
supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.

"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day.
"It is easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be
spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master.
I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who
were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are
old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like
you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.

"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a
year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse
and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year. I
am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That is
because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul
a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I
am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good
for you to know navigation."

Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later
on it was:

"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and
he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better
paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money
over."

"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at
that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five thousand
dollars."

"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing
ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.