d to read you my letter," said he. "I've a good fist
with a pen when I choose, and this is a prime lark. She was a barmaid I
ran across in Northampton; she was a spanking fine piece, no end of
style; and we cottoned at first sight like parties in the play. I
suppose I spent the chynge of a fiver on that girl. Well, I 'appened to
remember her nyme, so I wrote to her, and told her 'ow I had got rich,
and married a queen in the Hislands, and lived in a blooming palace.
Such a sight of crammers! I must read you one bit about my opening the
nigger parliament in a cocked 'at. It's really prime."

The captain jumped to his feet. "That's what you did with the paper that
I went and begged for you?" he roared.

It was perhaps lucky for Huish--it was surely in the end unfortunate for
all--that he was seized just then by one of his prostrating accesses of
cough; his comrades would have else deserted him, so bitter was their
resentment. When the fit had passed, the clerk reached out his hand,
picked up the letter, which had fallen to the earth, and tore it into
fragments, stamp and all.

"Does that satisfy you?" he asked sullenly.

"We'll say no more about it," replied Davis.

FOOTNOTES:

[2] _Fei_ is the hill banana.

[3] By-and-by.

[4] "Captain Tom is coming."

CHAPTER III

THE OLD CALABOOSE--DESTINY AT THE DOOR

The old calaboose, in which the waifs had so long harboured, is a low,
rectangular enclosure of building at the corner of a shady western
avenue and a little townward of the British consulate. Within was a
grassy court, littered with wreckage and the traces of vagrant
occupation. Six or seven cells opened from the court: the doors, that
had once been locked on mutinous whalermen, rotting before them in the
grass. No mark remained of their old destination, except the rusty bars
upon the windows.

The floor of one of the cells had been a little cleared; a bucket (the
last remaining piece of furniture of the three caitiffs) stood full of
water by the door, a half cocoa-nut shell beside it for a drinking-cup;
and on some ragged ends of mat Huish sprawled asleep, his mouth open,
his face deathly. The glow of the tropic afternoon, the green of
sunbright foliage, stared into that shady place through door and window;
and Herrick, pacing to and fro on the coral floor, sometimes paused and
laved his face and neck with tepid water from the bucket. His long
arrears of suffering, the night's vigil, the