m not asking you to help me more. I guess I'm quite
competent to find my way on board, and to wipe this house tolerably
clean before it's quit of me."

"Nothing of the kind, sar," said the man behind the slit. "You insult
me, sar. I very big gen'lem'n here, sar, an' a sovereign's no use to me.
Besides, I partner to ole man Rad, an' he say he want dem rifles you got
on your ole tramp."

"Does he, indeed? Then you can tell him, Mr. Nigger
runaway-drunken-fireman, that I'll see you and him in somewhere a big
sight hotter than Arabia before he gets them. I didn't know they were
rifles; if I had known before this, I'd not have put them ashore; but as
things are now, I'll land them into the hands of those that ordered
them, and I hope they come round to this town of yours and give you
fits. And see here, you talk more respectful about my steamboat, or
you'll get your shins kicked, daddy."

"An ole tramp," said the man relishingly. "I served on P. an' O., sar,
an' on P. an' O. we don't care 'sociate wid tramps' sailors."

"You impudent black cannibal. You'll be one of the animals those
passenger lines carry along to eat the dead babies, to save the trouble
of heaving them overboard."

The ex-fireman spluttered. But he did not continue the contest. He
recognized that he had to deal with a master in the cheerful art of
insult, and so he came back sulkily to business.

"Will you give Rad dem rifles, you low white fellow?"

"No, I won't."

"Very well. Den we shall spiflicate you till you do," said the man, and
after that Kettle heard his slippers shuffling away.

"I wonder what spiflicating is?" mused Kettle, but he did not remain
cudgelling his brain over this for long. It occurred to him that if this
negro could come and go so handily to the outside of this underground
prison, there must be a stairway somewhere near, and though he could not
enlarge the slit to get at it that way, it might be possible to burrow a
passage under the wall itself. For a tool, he had spied a broken crock
lying on the floor, and with the idea once in his head, he was not long
in putting it to practical effect. He squatted just underneath the slit,
and began to quarry the earth at the foot of the wall with skill and
determination.

But if Kettle was prompt, his captors were by no means dilatory. Between
Kettle's prison and the mate's was another of those bottle-shaped
_oubliettes_, and in that there was presently a bustle of movement.
There