d back from the race course, the pleasure ground of
the dominant race, and drifted along the red streets of the town, back
again to the holes and burrows from which they had come.

II

A year later, nearly. The Lieutenant who had quelled the uprising,
with a handful of men armed with rifles of the latest device, as
against three hundred natives armed with spears, had been decorated
and was very proud. He also continued to exhibit his unique collection
of arms to all comers, when the mail boats came in. Nor did he see
their pathos. And in the jungles of the interior, where most of them
lived, the natives never knew of the existence of the little red flag,
and would not have understood if they had been told. Why? The white
men were kind and considerate. Easy and indulgent masters who in no
wise interfered with life as lived in the jungle. But with the native
troops who had fired upon their brothers it was different.

Thus it happened that the small coastwise steamer, going her usual
cruise among the islands and along the coast of one of the Seven Seas,
carried unusual freight. Being a very little boat, with a light cargo,
she was sometimes severely buffeted by the northeast monsoon, which
was blowing at that time of the year. On these days, when the monsoon
was strongest, the few passengers she carried were not comfortable. On
other days, when she found calm weather among the islands, it was very
pleasant. She dropped anchor from time to time in little bays
bordered with cocoanut tree, and from the bays emerged sampans with
vivid painted eyes on their prows, seeking out the steamer and the
bales of rice she carried, or the mails. The mails, consisting of half
a dozen letters for each port, were tied up in big canvas sacks,
sealed with big government seals, and the white men who lived on these
remote, desert islands, would come themselves to fetch them. They
paddled themselves to the steamer in pirogues or in sampans, white
faced, anaemic, apathetic, devoid of vitality. The great, overwhelming
heat of the Tropics, the isolation of life, in unknown islands in the
southern seas, makes one like that. Yet they were "making money" on
their island plantations of rubber or cocoanut, or expecting to make
it. It takes seven years of isolation in the tropic seas, after one
has started a plantation--and even then, many things may happen----

So the little steamer stopped here and there, at little, unknown bays,
at places not me