showing
white.

"'Why the deuce don't you paddle to shore?' I shouted at length, taking
a sudden disgust of the situation.

"He did not turn his head as he answered, 'Ah--Ah,' he stammered, the
words coming hard as hiccoughs out of his throat, 'Ah don't know haow.'

"'Drop the sides of your boat and try,' I suggested.

"He seemed to ponder carefully over this for a while. 'Ah think it's
safer to stay this-a-way,' he decided finally.

"'But, good Lord, man,' I cried, angry at this calm stupidity, 'if
that's what you're going to do, you'd better get on this door here and
let me take the boat. I'll paddle ashore and come back for you.'

"He turned his head slowly. He contemplated my raft long, carefully,
critically.

"'Ah think Ah'll be safer heyah, seh,' he decided. 'It's a little bit o'
old door, and Ah reckon they's a heap of sharks around.'

"After that I had little to say. Given the premises of the man, his
conclusions were unquestionable. And the premises were a selfishness so
tranquil, so ingenuous, so fresh, I might say, that I couldn't work up
the proper indignation. It was something so perfect as to challenge
admiration. On the whole, however, it afforded a poor subject for
conversation; so we remained there, taciturn, I on my door,
half-submerged in the tepid water, my heels flung up over my back, he in
his dugout, rigid, his hands clutching the sides as if he were trying to
hold up the craft out of the liquid abyss beneath.

[Illustration: "NOT TWENTY FEET FROM ME MILLER SAT UPRIGHT IN HIS CANOE
AS IF PETRIFIED." FROM A PAINTING BY MERLE JOHNSON.]

"And thus we were still when, just as the sun was setting somberly, a
velos full of chattering natives
picked us up. They landed us at Bacolod, and Miller left me to report to
the Sup. I departed before sun-up the next morning for my station. I
didn't want to see Miller again.

"But I did. One night he came floundering through my pueblo. It was in
the middle of the rainy season. He wasn't exactly caked with mud;
rather, he seemed to ooze it out of every pore. He had been assigned to
Binalbagan, ten miles further down. I stared when he told me this.
Binalbagan was the worst post on the island, a musty, pestilential hole
with a sullenly hostile population, and he--well, inefficiency was
branded all over him in six-foot letters. I tried to stop him overnight,
but he would not do it, and I saw him splash off in the darkness, gaunt,
yellow, mournful.

"I s