ere men who
found in the assigned authority of The Master full scope for the
satisfaction of their own passions. And Bell had seen what those
passions brought about, and there was a dull flame of hatred burning
in his eyes that would never quite leave them until those men were
powerless and The Master dead.

* * * * *

"You'll look after the ship and Paula," said Bell impatiently. "All
right?"

Jamison nodded. Paula looked appealingly at Bell, but he had become a
man with an obsession. Perhaps the death of Ortiz had cemented it, but
certainly he was unable to think of anything, now, but the necessity
of smashing the ghastly hold of The Master upon all the folk he had
entrapped. Subconsciously, perhaps, Bell saw in the triumph of The
Master a blow to all civilization. Less vaguely, he foresaw an attempt
at the extension of The Master's rule to his own nation. But when Bell
thought of The Master, mainly he remembered certain disconnected
incidents. The girl at Ribiera's luxurious _fazenda_ outside of Rio,
who had been ordered to persuade him to be her lover, on penalty of a
horrible madness for her infant son if she failed. Of a pale and
stricken _fazendiero_ on the Rio Laurenco who thought him a deputy and
humbly implored the grace of The Master for a moody twelve year old
girl. Of a young man who kept his father, murder mad, in a barred room
in his house and waited despairingly for that madness to be meted out
upon himself and on his wife and children. Of a white man who had been
kept in a cage in Cuyaba, with other men....

* * * * *

Bell trudged on through the deepening night with his soul a burning
flame of hatred. He clambered amid boulders, guided by the tall
lighthouse of Cape Possession with the little white dwelling he had
seen at its base before nightfall. He fell, and rose, and forced his
way on and upward, and at last was knocking heavily at a trim and
neatly painted door.

He was so absorbed in his rage that his talk with the lighthouse
keeper seemed vague in his memory, afterward. The keeper was a wizened
little Welshman from the Chibut who spoke English with an
extraordinary mixture of a Spanish intonation and a Cimbrian accent.
Bell listened heavily and spoke more heavily still. At the end he went
back to the plane with a spindle-shanked boy with a lantern
accompanying him.

"All settled," he said grimly, when Jamison came out into t