Merry saw how the thing was done one steamy hot day at Palembang, and he saw quite stark and plain. He had a first balcony seat to the performance, as you might say, for he was leaning from a raised and shaded veranda on the river street when it happened just below him. Also, by some chance or other, he was almost completely sober at the time. And this is the thing the sobered Merry saw:

From a doorway just across sprang suddenly out and down to the muddy level a little stout-shouldered half-naked Malay with a face mottled and bluish, with foam on his lip a creese in his hand. Forthright he drove into the crowd like a reaper into standing grain. His blade rose and fell in a crimson flicker, and he strode over the bodies of two victims before the people were aware of him and fled streaming through alleys and bolt holes. Then the terrible hoarse cry of the man hunt began to muster, and furious swart figures to start back out of the mass and to line the course with bright points of steel. The murderer neither paused nor turned aside, but held straight on, hewing steadily and silently, until the weapons bristled thick about him and he went down at last like a malignant slug under a tumble of stinging wasps.

Merry resumed breathing with a conscious effort and loosed his clutch of the balcony rail....

"What—was that?" he wanted to know.

A stolid and rather shabby client of the Dutch marine persuasion drew stolidly on a cheroot and craned over to count the huddled bundles that marked the madman's path.

"Oh, it iss nothing," observed this judicious person, who might have been mate, or such, of a country ship. "He got four only. Sometimes they kill eight—twelve—even more, till they get themselves killed. That fellow was just a common fellow."

"But why—what was he after?"

"Oh, it iss just going amok, you know. That iss a habit wit' the Malay folk. I have seen them often."

Still Mr. Merry desired light.

"How can I say?" returned the other. "A native iss always a native, except when he iss only a man an' a dam' fool. Perhaps his woman has gone bad on him or he has played his last copper doit at gambling. Maybe he has crazied himself wit' opium or bhang. Maybe he iss just come to a finish, you know?"

"A finish?" stammered Merry.

"Where he has no more use: where he gets sorry wit' the world an' wants to die quick. So he takes his knife an' runs amok to stab so many people as he can, an' he don't care a dam' if only he makes a big smash. It is like a sport, truly."

"Yes," said Merry. "Very like a sport."

Thereupon he gave pious thanks that he owned no share in the fantastic human chemistry that could produce such results. It was the sharpest reminder of essential racial differences. It made him feel sick and shaky, and since he knew only the simple cure for ills of body as of mind, he applied himself so earnestly that within half an hour he felt nothing at all, and the proprietor of the verandaed house on the river street had him thrown into a barge, where he slept with the flies crawling over his beard.

Afterward he recovered sufficiently to get himself out of Palembang, and after that out of Muntok and Batavia and Banjermassin and other places where he had no ostensible business to be. On his road he continued to encounter divers strange sights and incidents peculiar to the latitude and the social layers through which he moved; but the affair was a warning to him. He had been shocked. He had been very deeply shocked, and he was always careful never to let himself get quite so sober again—a development of the simple system whereby he avoided too vivid a view of local color while he wandered on—aimlessly, as well as anyone might judge—farther and farther downhill over the curve of the earth.

Now, it has been observed that a chap who starts downhill through the Archipelago commonly comes to an end of his journeying soon, and sometimes even sooner. The climate affords what you may call a ready accelerator, and so do the fever and the sun and the quality of the drink and other amusements prevailing in those parts. And often, if his steps stray a bit off the beaten track, he is likely to meet some kindly guide, black or brown or even white, perhaps, who bobs up in a quiet corner to point out a short cut. But though Merry took no heed of his steps in the least, and though he went quartering very far wide on that great thoroughfare which reaches from Singapore to Torres Strait along the midrib of the world, yet he kept on going for quite a while: and the reasons therefor were curious and well worthy of note.

To begin with, he had brought along a fair constitution and a stomach that was not so much a stomach as a chemical retort—an advantage to be envied by kings. He carried a loose, limp, and rubbery frame well suited to the uses of a long-distance drunkard. He was by nature as mild and harmless a creature as ever tangled himself in a fool's quest. And finally he owned a gift, a certain special personal gift of the kind that tends universally to maintain a fixed percentage for the man alive over what he is worth when dead.

Such a provision is not so easily come by. Very able citizens have lacked it. Many an eminent explorer, many a devoted pioneer, has found his eminence and his devotion outbalanced in the primitive scale by the value of his trouser buttons. It is singular to reflect what potential marvels, what captains and leaders among men, have been knifed for the beers; or elsewhere even broiled and eaten and complained of at dessert—some being tough and some lacking flavor.

Merry was none of these sorts, but he had an odd juggling knack of his fingers.

It was a sketchy enough knack at best. Heaven knew where he had acquired it, just as Heaven was left the responsibility of knowing most facts about Merry, anyhow. And certainly that was never discovered—no more nearly than his proper name, nor the meaning of the upright wrinkle between his brows like the dent of an ax, nor what conceivable things he had done or been or wanted that had landed him among the islands.

Only there you were. Give the fellow a wisp of silk and some brass bracelets or mango seeds, or such, and he would squat by the wayside or in the shade of a hut or the cabin flares of a native prau and proceed to work miracles.

He could make an egg to vanish and pluck it again from your left ear, and he could mold a kerchief between his big, soft hands until it produced a live lizard, which presently turned to a tame lorikeet, which sat up and dratted your eyes in good set Malay. He drew chinking coins out of space. He stood a plate on his nose and caught it on his calf, kept six rings accurately flying, grew flowers from a paper spill and butterflies from a kanari nut, and on occasion—if he was not absolutely petrified and could still see the mark—would even undertake to sink half a dozen daggers within the space of a hand print on the opposite wall: and would do it, too, with the utmost speed and precision.

Accomplishments of this kind were his passport, good any day for a lift, a lodging, or a load from the most unlikely people, for they set him apart in cult of conjurers and jesters that has been privileged always and everywhere.

And so, past all the usual land-falls and long past the tables of mortality for persons of his class and condition, he did keep going on. He kept on after his clothes had fallen to ruin and his face had turned the tint of seaweed; after he had lost most of the pretensions of a white man, his shoes and his shirt. And in due course he arrived at Zimballo's, where he lost the little property left to him and the shreds of his pride, which every man has whether aware of it or not and which he loses last of all....

Here again was an eastern city—not Palembang, though between two winks you scarce could tell it from that or a dozen other ports: the same hive of mats and slats, of fishing poles and cigar boxes, like a metropolis devised by ingenious small children; with the same smells which remain the only solid memorials; with the same swarm of pullulating humanity and the same crowding junks and praus, and now and then the far-venturing ships of recognized flags, sometimes as many as two or three at once; with the same yellows and browns and clays against shifting greens and eternal distant blues—all hazed with the same molten light.

But in its own ways the city is different and remarkable. It is a falling-off place. It is the eddy in a stream. At its roadstead the trickle of traffic turns back and sheers aside from a shallow sea of uncharted and unprofitable dangers: one of the big, blank spaces.

It has some scores of Europeans, who linger as official or accidental units in the population. It has some hundreds of Eurasians, who occur as improper fractions of varying hue. It has a season of the east monsoon when there is no longer any steaminess in the heat, nor any muddiness underfoot, nor any escape from pestilential wind and pervading dust: dust of the roads and dust of the seared rice fields, and crumbled refuse heaps and dust of a scorching hinterland; until a man's soul is changed in him, as you might say, to a portion of immortal thirst.

And also by necessary logic it has Zimballo's.

To this institution, one evening in the dry weather, came Mr. Merry, making what speed he could and clinging to the handrail all the way up from the landing while he caught his breath and stared painfully about.

Below the point he saw the harbor like a sheet of crinkled copper. Overhead arched a coppery dome. To seaward he could gaze down a vista of rocky and deserted islets resembling slag heaps, where the sinking sun showed like a red-hot spot in the huge, coppered oven in which he found himself. He had been traveling since dawn; he had been without liquor for something like twelve hours; and as he resumed his struggle toward the clutter of tinroofed sheds and arbors which marked his goal he achieved in his mind a dim but quite definite conviction—that hell could hold few surprises for him now, and earth none at all....

But therein he erred.

"Where is the price?" demanded Zimballo, and when Merry laid down a single piece of silver the international ruffian shook his crop head. "No go," he stated.

"It's all I have," said Merry.

"It ain' enough," decided Zimballo, eying him.

In fact, Mr. Merry made an odd figure of a customer. He wore a coolie's grass hat with a pointed crown. About his body hung an old duck jacket, so rotted with rust and mildew as to lend scant anchorage for one brass safety pin. His feet were graced with a pair of aboriginal sandals. It was true he still retained the essential garment, as the frayed ends above his ankles were there to prove. But for political reasons he had swathed himself mid-about with a striped Malay sarong, which is half a skirt and half a sash: whereat Zimballo took purpled offense.

This rogue, himself a mongrel grown fat in the slums of three continents, held starchy notions on the subject of pants.

"A drink," he said with intention, "will be half a dollar. If you don' got it, get out. And if you do got it, pay quick and get out any'ow!"

"I—I haven't it; no. But for any sakes, man," gasped Merry between blackened lips, "you wouldn't turn a chap off! I'm done and double-done. I been knocked out, with the sun and all.... See here now. Give me the worth o' that."

"I give you nothing. I don' like your looks. Why, even in my back room," puffed Zimballo, "the half-castes and orang sirani, they come here as zaintlemen only!"

He loomed indignant under the glow of his fine oil lamps, just lighted against the dusk, in his fine main shed which it was the sentimental care of his life to run as close as might be on the model of a Levantine waterside dive.

There is a breed, or a type, whose destiny is to go about the world purveying garlic, cheap food, infamous wines, and more or less flea-infested hospitality in all manner of queer corners, by ice-bound bay or coral strand. So they did in the time of the Ph[oe]nicians, and so they still do, and that part is right enough. No one could have found fault with Zimballo's zinc bar, nor his highboy stacked to the ceiling with multicolored bottles, nor his tattered billiard table, nor his battered metal furniture. The flaring, red cotton covers, the gilt mirrors, and the crude prints of obscure royalties; the blue-glass siphons and the pinky lace curtains: these he had found some heroic means of transplanting, like the fixtures of a faith.

Meanwhile the East is the East and a good deal of a fixture itself, and behind his drawn jalousies and his masking vines Zimballo served the local devil quite successfully.

Not the red and lusty wickedness of other climes, but a languid sort, thriving in a reek of musk and raw Chinese apple blossom, of stale cooking and incense and stifled rooms and poisonous sweet champagne, as dreary as the click of fan-tan cash and the drag of silks and the voices of a cheeping bird cage that circulated through the secret mazes of the establishment day and night. An unsmiling devil—in the flesh and on the spot very well represented you would have said, by one of the billiard players, a tall, yellow, corpsy individual who had remarked the stir of Merry's arrival and who now lounged about the table.

"What's the row, Zimballo?" he drawled. "Let's have a share if there's any fun going. My word—is that a friend of yours?"

"No friend—Cap'n Silva, sir!" protested the hotel keeper, rubbing his hands in a fluster. It annoyed him vehemently that he had not banished this disreputable stranger at sight. "Ope to die, sir—I never see 'im before!"

Other guests had begun to gather at the promise of diversion: a bat-eared clerk from the Consulate office, a broken engineer, a benzoin trader looking professionally neat and antiseptic, and two or three loafers looking considerably less so—but all entire gentlemen, unpatched, and all expectant of Silva's lead and grateful for it.

"Well, well. A new specimen, then." The captain was pleased to assume a scientific interest as he propped himself on his cue and waved aside a wreath of cigarette smoke. "And a blasted poor specimen at that, I'd say.... Now which tribe would you take him to be, just as he stands?"

Captain Silva had a reputation of the kind invaluable to a humorist; it assured him an audience. Also, he had that rare immunity in tropic heats which makes any man formidable, and even sinister. An Anglo-Portuguese strain was supposed to account for him—for his color, for his superior air, and for various ventures of his not easy to define since piracy went out of date. Perhaps it did. But the gleam in his eye, a certain evil quickening with which he studied the unfortunate Merry, might have argued a darker origin.

"By God! A specimen for true!" he breathed, incredulous. "Zimballo," he added in his drawl, slow and acid, "you're getting infernally damned careless. Since when has this front room been free to any greasy lascar that comes along?"

The fat man went a rich shade of magenta.

"I can' help if he shoves in on me! 'Ow can I help?"

"He wouldn't shove in by chance—on his nerve."

"Tha's it! Tha's jus' what he done, sir. Nerve! He come after drink, and you know what he brings along with him—to buy off me? Eh—what?" Zimballo blew out his wrath. "Twenty-five Batavia cents!... Besides a lid'l fool parrot to do juggle-trick work!"

"Drink? Ah-ha. Likely enough too.... But how does he manage to call for 'em? Can he talk anything human, at least?"

And here, having confirmed his perception of the victim, Silva drove home the attack.

"Hey, you fella yonder. Bugis, Sula man, sea gypsy—whichever's your misbegotten stripe—suppose you speak'um. What pidgin belong you? Where you hail from, anyway?"

Mr. Merry stood there before them, dazed and helpless. In one hand he held his rejected coin; in the other the lorikeet's cage and a few trifles wrapped with a kerchief. He knew what these people meant. He was not so far gone as to miss what mockery was being put upon him in savage contempt, and how it measured the distance he had traveled and the depth to which he had sunk. But his head was humming like a pressure gauge, and his body was banked with unslaked clinkers, and he made his effort as best he could.

"Friends," he said, swaying on his feet. "I don't—I don't mind if somebody kindly will set me up to a bracer. I'm passing through to Amboyna; dropped off a prau up the coast this morning.... It's true I do a bit with sleight o' hand to pay my way, but I had no luck this trip and I am asking.... Brandy. Arrack or sagueir, if you say so. It's—it's quite a while since I had any. I—I want it pretty bad."

In the silence Silva softly held up a finger.

"You," he noted softly, "are a dirty renegade!"

---

Above, the line of swinging punkahs fanned the thick air with regular beat. It threw a constant flicker of shadow over the guests. Otherwise they showed no change of expression. They leaned against the tables and mopped their faces and drank and looked on. The way many men, not ingrained with cruelty to begin, have learned to look on at many curious things in regions where that particular devil does business.

"Pity," suggested the engineer after a time, emptying his glass deliberately—"a pity he can't pick a flask or two out that bloomin' hat he's wearin'. 'S big enough."

One of the loafers snickered.

"There's the river waiting for him. Full of drinks. And he could wash in it too."

"Turn him into those pigpens at the rear," advised the bat-eared clerk. "Let him try his games on the mixed lot inside, in the back rooms."

"No, sir, you won'!" Zimballo entered a gusty veto. "That sweep? He ain' fit for my back rooms neither!"

"You're right," said Silva. This yellow man did no mopping; his skin had the gloss of a salamander's, and his eyes were like dusky jewels. A humorist in his own fashion he surely was—and his speech was tipped with malice as with acrid poison. "The blighter's not good enough for half-castes, even."

"What's the lowest vermin on earth?... Why, the white who's forgot his own race. It's hard enough at best—isn't it?—to keep yourself topside with your right authority among a few million saddle-colored monkeys. But along comes a rascal like that and lives on the folk: acts like 'em; looks like 'em; drinks like 'em—by God! Then where's your sanguinary prestige gone?"

He knew how to stir these listless exiles.

"I tell you, when a blasted tramp goes native altogether he needs to be taught what white men think of him, and where he belongs. He's a pest and a danger.... I'd like to see him and every other like him wiped out of the islands. It's a common duty to suppress the whole filthy crew of 'em!"

---

They caught some of his energy—some of his superior biting viciousness as well. Especially the loafers were roused by a call to higher things. The benzoin merchant, betraying a habit acquired in a ruder society, groped vaguely at his hip. The engineer sought a billiard cue that balanced better to his fancy. Only the little clerk retained official scruples and timidly doubted if there was any order against juggling, as such.

"There's an order against vagrants," countered Silva.

"But, after all, if he has a trade of his own—"

"Trade be damned. He comes begging—doesn't he? And if you want to bet he's not a fraud besides—."

"We might give him a chance."

"It's what I mean!" cried Silva. "We'll give him a chance, for true.... Look here—"

He turned on the bewildered Merry.

"Look here—you! You say you've had no luck? Well: pray for it now. You say sleight o' hand is your line? Well: turn out a sample—if you can: something to prove you're not just a thieving beggar.... Observe! Here is a dollar. I lay it down to your silver bit, and I lay you the odds you've no trick worth a rotten straw—not one but I'll catch you out and show you up. If you win, you get your drinks. If you lose—!... I'm telling you! Be careful!"

---

Mr. Merry's first care, however, was to be seated. That is to say, he put himself into a chair at an iron-topped table because it happened to be nearer than the floor.

He understood. With some reserve of tortured clear vision he did understand—the subtle finish to Silva's jape: playing his poor claims against his frantic need—the last refinement of humiliation; to make him exhibit his pitiful arts as a faker and a trickster of brown natives before men of his own kind. They hitched closer about him. They were highly entertained, languid, avid, and vindictive; and they watched him with fish eyes from faces like wet leather bags, flabby and pithless. He saw them through the blue smoke and the heat and the lamplight, and he saw that in fact they were his own kind. He had fallen rather lower, that was all and they had dallied with the local devil rather more cautiously—they could still pay for their drinks. But if he meant to share with them he would have to grovel. There was no help, and no escape. None. For just then, with diabolic inspiration, Silva poured a glass of sticky yellow liquor and put it out of his reach where the drifting scent of it was a torment of Tantalus....

So he did what he had to do: untied his kerchief and the lorikeet's little cage and spread out his few cheap odds and ends of juggler's stuff—to try, as you might say, with the quickness of his hand to deceive the eye of his fate.

In his usual program he counted one bit of conjuring which had earned him many a step and many a tot of country spirits along his journey, and which reasonably he could trust. He used on occasion to take up three small beans, red and blue and black, and to take the lorikeet on the same thumb; and with magic by-play he made to feed the bird three beans and three and three again and so on, while the fluffy green mite still plucked them from his finger tips and chattered in a manner absurdly impudent and human.... It was an easy illusion. It had worked scores of times. It began to work this time, startling the watchers with its quick and graceful turn—even these. It ran on. It was winning. It might have won him through: but the room and the lights were spinning about the luckless magician like parts in a gigantic Catherine wheel—he sagged forward on the table, his nimble fingers faltered—slipped; and quick as a striking snake, Silva gripped him.

"Ah-ha! What did I say? Even at his own game—this liar—this dirty tramp!"

The nature of the man loosed itself in a sudden, an insensate spurt of fury, the complement of its accustomed dark restraint. He swept the poor rubbish from the table. He snatched up the lorikeet and flung it down and as the tiny thing flapped and screamed, broken-winged, stamped it underfoot. He whirled Merry around by the elbows, so that all should have an equal shot at him with fist or toe or billiard cue.

"This outcast!" he cried joyously. "What are we going to do with him?"

"Throw him out!" came the chorus. "Throw him out!"...

---

Of the next succeeding interval in Mr. Merry's pilgrimage, and his particular progress that night, some slight record afterward survived for a while. Not officially, of course. The witnesses were certain nameless and unnameable residents of Zimballo's whose presence in the colonial court would hardly have looked well, and throughout the subsequent perfunctory inquiry they were very justly held to be incompetent, irrelevant, and improper persons, and they were never questioned—in fact, their existence was even denied. But they knew something of Merry.

They knew how he was hunted all about that rabbit warren, in and out, by passages and traps and holes in the wall, upstairs and down. They knew how he sought refuge through filth and dust and blows with the blind cunning of a harried and flank-torn cur. How he got away at some turn. How he dragged himself to some innermost recess of the place before he collapsed. How he was found there at last, and how he found himself, in a sense—though exactly why or by what dispensation these matters came to pass, naturally the said witness never had any very clear idea.

They had few ideas about anything, beyond their daily plaint against God, man, the cook, and the weather—which was undeniably an ample source at that, you may say. They kept the story only as long as it was new, like a scrap of ribbon, or a painted bangle or any other trifle which circulates in common currency, soon to become faded, lost and forgotten. But while it lasted their tale was precise enough, and it certainly established beyond doubt that the girl with the pink wristbands was the first thing Merry saw when he opened his eyes again, when he filtered back toward consciousness with his head on her knee and her quick, cool hands nursing him....

"More!" was Mr. Merry's greeting.

She set down the empty cup.

"We got no more," she said.

To him she must have seemed, she could have seemed at first, only a figment of dreams. She crouched by the pallet to which she had dragged him. The room was darkened; a candle struggled fitfully somewhere with the rays of moonshine that came by the wide window. The light just sufficed to show her small, pinched face, of a deathly pallidity under its coil of heavy, dead hair, and her thin arms and figure loosely covered by her loose-sleeved wrapper. It sufficed for him to recognize her, as men, without start or surprise, absolutely and infallibly do recognize and collogue with the creatures of their delirium.

"I have been looking for you," he said simply.

"You've been a long time about it," she answered, with the same simplicity....

---

In truth, life and all issues had been pretty well simplified and fused down for both these people: for Merry, who was as nearly as possible incandescent, and for the woman, who was merely burned out.

"I looked everywhere," he affirmed, in childlike earnestness. "I looked at Samarang. I looked at Batavia. I looked at Palembang. That's a mean sort of place, don't you think?... Did you go to Palembang?"

"No," said the girl with the pink wristbands.

"I don't see how I missed you."

"You missed me, all right. You missed me at the start—at Singapore. That was the time to find me."

He drew his breath as if in his sleep she had prodded some old wound, and the dent between his brows deepened.

"I did look for you at Singapore."

"You looked too late," said the girl with the pink wristbands.

"I went to the Jalan Sultan," he pleaded. "You lived in a house in the Jalan Sultan, at Singapore. It was there I met you.... But when I went back to fetch you—you were gone!"

"Yes," she said dully. "I was gone.... They heard you promise to take me away. The captain—he said you wouldn't come back. He said you wouldn't dare—too likely to get your throat cut if you tried it. He said his people had scared you good. And you didn't come back that night."

"No." His stare was fixed and waking. "No. I didn't come back that night."

"The captain said you were scared. I didn't know. But I sat up waiting like we had planned—you and me. I was waiting and waiting. And you didn't come. Why?—?" Her flat voice slipped a note. "Why—why—why didn't you come that night? Were you scared?"

"I was drunk," he said. "God forgive me!"

Such tones a man may use when his naked soul is hauled out of him and stood up for judgment.

"It doesn't matter." She sank back again. "I wanted to get away then.... Afterward I didn't care."

The drink was taking hold of him, bracing him each instant nearer to an actual comprehension.

"Why didn't you care?" he demanded.

She pulled back the pink silk bands from her wrist and held them before him.

"That's one reason."

The man drew himself convulsively to his knees.

"Who did it? Who did that?"

"Silva. The captain—don't you know?"

"Silva?"

"They call him Captain Silva. He isn't really. He's a half-caste himself, only he pretends—and he scares everybody so. It was him brought me here. He's going to sell me to Zimballo."

"Zimballo!"

She nodded. "I suppose he'll sell me. I'm not worth much as a niÑa de salon, but I'm pretty tough. I've lasted—you see.... And—he says it's all I'm fit for."

Mr. Merry made never a sound.

For finally, with his wandering ended and with all questions of human chemistry and racial difference aside—finally this white man had reached the stage which had been so fully defined for him one steamy hot day by a Dutch navigator at Palembang. He had gambled away his last cent. He had been reduced to a wreck. His woman, in the laconic phrase—"his woman had gone bad on him." He had no more use for anything he could lay to mind. He was decidedly sorry with the world. And he was utterly ready to die with a big smash....

So Mr. Merry went amok, in the exact meaning of that word.

---

They were aware of him the moment he entered the main shed. They saw him, and they started at him with a yell.

He was the same man they chased and worried—that helpless and harmless outcast—just before. But so it is with all such outcasts: always helpless and harmless—just before. Heaven had fashioned Mr. Merry in one image, but the climatic devil had finished him in quite another. Most of his few rags had been torn from him, he was swathed about the middle with a Malay sarong, and his lean body was scored and pulped with blows. But his face was mottled and bluish now, with a fleck of foam in his beard. And when he came in among them he neither paused nor turned aside.

He made one jump to Zimballo's zinc bar. He made one leap to the highboy, Zimballo's high altar. He swept into his arms half a dozen of multicolored bottles, and, looming there above them from the top of the bar—up among the lights and the swaying punkahs—he began to launch those juggling missiles right and left, with the utmost speed and precision....

The first one caught Zimballo full in the chest and knocked him back against the wall with the shock of a battering ram. Another crashed just over his head as he sank to the floor. The engineer was sprawling at the billiard table when a third exploded like a shell fairly in front and deluged him in a flood of sticky liquor. The loafers and the clerk turned to run. But Merry dealt with them—and with retribution.

He was doing the thing he best knew how to do, by virtue of the odd knack of his fingers—and this time he made no mistakes.

He emptied a shelf, and the next, and the bottles still flew from him, streaking through space, smashing among the enemy.

Most of them made a miserable escape one way or another and fled, carrying a voice of panic that cleared out the establishment from end to end front and rear. But not Silva. Not the yellow-faced captain, who came back from the back of the room and charged with uplifted cue, snarling—who was met halfway: stopped, overwhelmed and crushed in his tracks as by a hail of thunderbolts....

---

When Mr. Merry led the girl out they had to cling for a time to each other and to the handrail that led down toward the landing.

All about them were the walls of the night, the dark, blank walls of land and sky and their prison. But outward lay a great silvered streak. To seaward they could gaze down a dim vista of rocky and deserted islets where the moon showed like an open silver gateway, like a wide, bright door to the uncharted spaces beyond—far beyond, as Merry's gesture showed her.

Of that consummation a whisper was caught, it seems, through the masking vines overhead: a last glimpse of them as they reeled there together on the brink.

"And you wasn't—you wasn't scared this time!" she gasped. "You ain't—you ain't scared now?"

"No," he said. "That is where we are going—out yonder.... I've a little prau canoe down here at the steps—if we can reach it.... It's where we belong, and our one chance. Over the curve of the earth—among the islands of the shallow sea. Where no one ever does go and nobody can follow."

"There's nothing much to eat. Nor drink, neither," she added quite practically. "We will die."

"What does that matter?... But a native might pull through, in the native way. And if it might happen to a native, it might happen to us.... Come!"

They went.

---

"The Books You Like to Read at the Price You Like to Pay"