s written on that got
me. I'd seen cured human hide before. In Paris they've got a
Constitution printed on some that was peeled off an aristocrat in the
Revolution, and I've seen a seaman's upper arm and back, with the
tattoos, in a bottle of alcohol in a museum on Fourteenth Street, New
York--boys under fourteen not admitted. I wasn't a day over eight when I
saw those tattoos. However....

To get that prisoner loose was the duty that I owed to humanity; to
share the treasure was the duty that I owed to myself. So I got together
some niggers, and the fancy craft I've described (on shares with a
Singapore Dutchman, who was too fat to come himself, and too much
married), and made a start.... You're bothered by my calling them
niggers. Is that it? Well, the Mason and Dixon line ran plump through
my father's house; but mother's room being in the south gable, I was
born, as you may say, in the land of cotton, and consequently in my
bright Southern lexicon the word nigger is defined as meaning anything
black or brown. I think I said that Prana is on the west coast, and that
may have misled you. But Africa isn't the only God-forsaken place that
has a west coast; how about Staten Island?

Malaysian houses are built mostly of reed and thatch work standing in
shallow water on bamboo stalks, highly inflammable and subject to
alterations by a blunt pocket-knife. So a favorite device for holding a
man prisoner is a hole in the ground too deep and sheer for him to climb
out of. That's why I'd brought a length of knotted rope. The dynamite
was instead of men, which we hadn't means to hire or transport, and who
wouldn't have landed on that beach anyhow, unless drowned and washed up.
Now dynamite wouldn't be a pleasant thing to have round your club or
your favorite restaurant; but in some parts of the world it makes the
best company. It will speak up for you on occasion louder than your best
friend, and it gives you the feeling of being Jove with a handful of
thunderbolts. My plan was to find in what settlement there was the most
likely prisoner, drive the inhabitants off for two or three days--one
blast would do that, I calculated (especially if preceded and followed
by blowings on a pocket siren)--let my rope down into his well, lift the
treasure with him, and get away with it.

This was a straight ahead job--except for the god. And in daylight it
didn't seem as if It could be such an awful devil of a god. But It did
have the deuce