own better--oh, they all
came up and crawled around her skirts and whined and fawned when she
whistled. They were all guilty, from young Ardmore, a pink cherub of
nineteen outward bound for some clerkship in the Consular Service, to
old Captain Bentley, grizzled and sea-worn, and as emotional, to look
at, as a Chinese joss. There was a nice middle-aged chap, Perkins, I
believe, who forgot his wife was on board until Miss Caruthers sent him
to the right about and back where he belonged.

"Men were wax in her hands. She melted them, or softly molded them, or
incinerated them, as she pleased. There wasn't a steward, even, grand
and remote as she was, who, at her bidding, would have hesitated to
souse the Old Man himself with a plate of soup. You have all seen such
women--a sort of world's desire to all men. As a man-conqueror she was
supreme. She was a whip-lash, a sting and a flame, an electric spark.
Oh, believe me, at times there were flashes of will that scorched
through her beauty and seduction and smote a victim into blank and
shivering idiocy and fear.

"And don't fail to mark, in the light of what is to come, that she was
a prideful woman. Pride of race, pride of caste, pride of sex, pride of
power--she had it all, a pride strange and wilful and terrible.

"She ran the ship, she ran the voyage, she ran everything, and she ran
Dennitson. That he had outdistanced the pack even the least wise of us
admitted. That she liked him, and that this feeling was growing, there
was not a doubt. I am certain that she looked on him with kinder eyes
than she had ever looked with on man before. We still worshiped, and
were always hanging about waiting to be whistled up, though we knew that
Dennitson was laps and laps ahead of us. What might have happened we
shall never know, for we came to Colombo and something else happened.

"You know Colombo, and how the native boys dive for coins in the
shark-infested bay. Of course, it is only among the ground sharks and
fish sharks that they venture. It is almost uncanny the way they know
sharks and can sense the presence of a real killer--a tiger shark, for
instance, or a gray nurse strayed up from Australian waters. Let such a
shark appear, and, long before the passengers can guess, every mother's
son of them is out of the water in a wild scramble for safety.

"It was after tiffin, and Miss Caruthers was holding her usual court
under the deck-awnings. Old Captain Bentley had just been w