d.

"Why not?" asked Lingard.

"The white man sleeps, it is true," explained Babalatchi, softly; "yet
he may come out early, and he has arms."

"Ah! he has arms?" said Lingard.

"Yes; a short gun that fires many times--like yours here. Abdulla had to
give it to him."

Lingard heard Babalatchi's words, but made no movement. To the old
adventurer the idea that fire arms could be dangerous in other hands
than his own did not occur readily, and certainly not in connection with
Willems. He was so busy with the thoughts about what he considered
his own sacred duty, that he could not give any consideration to the
probable actions of the man of whom he thought--as one may think of an
executed criminal--with wondering indignation tempered by scornful pity.
While he sat staring into the darkness, that every minute grew thinner
before his pensive eyes, like a dispersing mist, Willems appeared to him
as a figure belonging already wholly to the past--a figure that could
come in no way into his life again. He had made up his mind, and the
thing was as well as done. In his weary thoughts he had closed this
fatal, inexplicable, and horrible episode in his life. The worst had
happened. The coming days would see the retribution.

He had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path; he had
paid off some very heavy scores a good many times. Captain Tom had been
a good friend to many: but it was generally understood, from Honolulu
round about to Diego Suarez, that Captain Tom's enmity was rather more
than any man single-handed could easily manage. He would not, as he said
often, hurt a fly as long as the fly left him alone; yet a man does not
live for years beyond the pale of civilized laws without evolving for
himself some queer notions of justice. Nobody of those he knew had ever
cared to point out to him the errors of his conceptions.

It was not worth anybody's while to run counter to Lingard's ideas of
the fitness of things--that fact was acquired to the floating wisdom
of the South Seas, of the Eastern Archipelago, and was nowhere better
understood than in out-of-the-way nooks of the world; in those nooks
which he filled, unresisted and masterful, with the echoes of his noisy
presence. There is not much use in arguing with a man who boasts of
never having regretted a single action of his life, whose answer to a
mild criticism is a good-natured shout--"You know nothing about it.
I would do it again. Yes, sir!" His ass