egulations are explicit, and if the Coldwater crosses thirty it
devolves upon you to place Lieutenant Turck under arrest and
immediately exert every endeavor to bring the ship back into
Pan-American waters."

"I shall not know," replied Alvarez, "that the Coldwater passes thirty;
nor shall any other man aboard know it," and, with his words, he drew a
revolver from his pocket, and before either I or Johnson could prevent
it had put a bullet into every instrument upon the bridge, ruining them
beyond repair.

And then he saluted me, and strode from the bridge, a martyr to loyalty
and friendship, for, though no man might know that Lieutenant Jefferson
Turck had taken his ship across thirty, every man aboard would know
that the first officer had committed a crime that was punishable by
both degradation and death. Johnson turned and eyed me narrowly.

"Shall I place him under arrest?" he asked.

"You shall not," I replied. "Nor shall anyone else."

"You become a party to his crime!" he cried angrily.

"You may go below, Mr. Johnson," I said, "and attend to the work of
unpacking the extra instruments and having them properly set upon the
bridge."

He saluted, and left me, and for some time I stood, gazing out upon the
angry waters, my mind filled with unhappy reflections upon the unjust
fate that had overtaken me, and the sorrow and disgrace that I had
unwittingly brought down upon my house.

I rejoiced that I should leave neither wife nor child to bear the
burden of my shame throughout their lives.

As I thought upon my misfortune, I considered more clearly than ever
before the unrighteousness of the regulation which was to prove my
doom, and in the natural revolt against its injustice my anger rose,
and there mounted within me a feeling which I imagine must have
paralleled that spirit that once was prevalent among the ancients
called anarchy.

For the first time in my life I found my sentiments arraying themselves
against custom, tradition, and even government. The wave of rebellion
swept over me in an instant, beginning with an heretical doubt as to
the sanctity of the established order of things--that fetish which has
ruled Pan-Americans for two centuries, and which is based upon a blind
faith in the infallibility of the prescience of the long-dead framers
of the articles of Pan-American federation--and ending in an adamantine
determination to defend my honor and my life to the last ditch against
the blind