nice, fat-faced lions from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, painted a lifelike green, and no doubt by this time he is enthroned in a plaza somewhere and tourists from the States are driven at high rates to see him.

In place of the lion we took on another passenger, and we fell on him with tears. He was the Honorable Percy Algernon Sydney Blake Carothers, better known. along the latitudes as "Goldilocks," owing to his hair being as English as the rest of him. He was that queer though plentiful English animal, a younger son, whose eldest brother was born with all the family silver spoons in his mouth, while Percy was born to premeditated poverty.

Besides entirely hopeless prospects, Percy had inherited the caste system. He would not have believed it; but there are too many generations of caste behind a Hindu or an Englishman to be wiped out lightly. It was this that made the Honorable Percy willing to work as fieldhand, lead a forlorn hope, or drive mules -anything rather than keep shop. Percy thought that it was due to an inability for doing office work intelligently. But it was caste, inherited from ancestors who may have robbed shops but never kept them.

So, when the Honorable Percy Algernon, etc., Carothers came aboard the Trinculo and said: "I've got to jolly well settle accounts with some chaps in New York, you know," we knew at once that it was caste that made him thus explode with the fury of vengeance.

We knew, too, that it must be something unusual to induce Goldilocks to rise to a point of order regarding vengeance. As the descendant of a race accustomed to extensive family bereavements in the decapitation way every time England got a new king or queen, he took things mostly as they came and did not lay up for himself on this earth treasures of revenge, any more than he did treasures of money.

While the Trinculo was rolling out into the Windward Passage again, he went into details so far as it was humanly possible for him. Up Vancouver-way once I met an Englishman of Percy's kind that had been frozen in a whole winter in the Arctic Circle all alone. He used to think that he was telling a shamelessly elaborated tale when he said in moments of great verbosity: "Long winter I put

Ice and snow

in at Point Barrow once. and all that sort of thing, you know." The honorable descendant, it appeared, had been induced to go down to the Blancomar as assistant superintendent. The Blancomar is a place that many have seen from a distance, and some few know. The few who know it would gladly go to some trouble to blast it from the face of the sea.

Blancomar sticks up, a dazzling white pillar a hundred feet high, out of the turquoise Caribbean. Its top is about three miles square. The Sun of Cancer blazes on it till it frizzles, and a pretty little settlement of corrugated iron sheds stores the day's heat for the night. The sheds are the only vegetation on Blancomar.

The appealing quality of this sea-beauty is that it is almost pure phosphate. All that is necessary is to hack the top with picks, and dump the rock down a chute into a ship below. All around the rock the sea is deep. The sides of Blancomar pitch like walls straight into submarine hell. In calm weather a ship can lie close to. The captain needs merely to be clever about springs to his cables, and stay awake night and day, and keep his eye on the rock and on the wicked sea until he has his cargo and can sheer away, thanking God for another escape.

The gentlemen who own the rock have a neat little gold-mine, with only one drawback: no man who ever has been on Blancomar and escaped alive, will ever go back to it. West Indies men, who know all about it-they have seen specters in their ports-would as soon tie a rock to their feet and plunge into the Sigsbee Deep.

The family arrangement on Blancomar is to give each man a hole to peck at with his pick, mention his daily stint of barrows of phosphate rock, and make him stay in that hole till he has done his solemn duty. The sun stays with him. From dawn to dusk it still looks into each blazing hole. ing hole. The only ship that touches at the rock is the company's vessel, which arrives half a dozen times a year to get phosphate and deliver supplies and live men enough to feed the death-rate.

On the steep southwest face of Blancomar a little trail, just wide enough for one man at a time, zigzags downward to a tiny strip of beach where by skilful handling a ship's boat can be landed. The ap

proach to this trail on top of the rock is guarded day and night by a man with a repeating rifle.

This little precaution is taken because contract laborers from the States generally become actively homesick about thirty seconds after they are landed from the company's ship. Every new batch of laborers is so sure to contract this ailment, that when the superintendent and his assistants receive them, the reception committee has its revolver holsters open and the revolvers loose in them. Revolvers are not worn merely at receptions, however, on Blancomar. The officials there might forget to put on their trousers some morning, but never their revolvers. They have such an affection for weapons that they sleep with them close by; and one interested in really good, well-kept guns would admire the arsenal of rifles under lock in the superintendent's house.

All these matters the Honorable Percy discovered very soon. A fortnight's duty showed him more.

"Look here, old chaps," said he, when he had gotten thus far in his artless story; "I'm no little Christian Helper, eh? But this game was too much for my tummy."

He went into his cabin and returned with a handful of photographic prints. "Took 'em on the sly, whenever I got a chance," he explained. They were not art, those pictures; but they told Percy's story ever so much better than he was tell

ing it. Goldilocks was no Christian Helper and we were n't either; but after looking at about a dozen, Bob said that it made him sick. It is n't nice to see men dying in holes like Norway rats.

Percy kept one photograph till the last. He held his hand over it for a time and then showed it, suddenly. The face of a dead man stared at us. Between the eyes was a little, round, black hole.

them," said he, "that I was n't in the business of killing men for a ton of smelly rock or standing by and seeing it done, either. I ordered 'em to set signal for the first ship that came by to take me off, don't you know. The superintendent jawed back something, do you see, about ordering me to duty; and, of course, I did n't bother to notice. Then he called to some chap to be witness, and ordered me again. He did the silly rot three times, and I turned to walk off. But he shouted, and his men closed around me, and there were too jolly many of 'em to fight, so I stood still. He made a long jaw. I'll cut out the rubbishy part, old chaps.

That's

"In the old days, it seems, the laborers used to strike, and they 'd sit still and eat the company's grub, and when the ship arrived they would swarm into her instead of phosphate, and when they got back to the States, d' you see, they 'd bring suits for damages, false pretenses, and all that sort of rot. So at last the company got a good lawyer-good, you know, in the legal sense. I say! not half bad, eh, what? I'll skip the legal twaddle, though. Remember the voodoo thing, Bob, that we saw back of Jeremie one night? Well, the lawyer did something like that before one of your big courts, and he got a decision about three leagues long. The superintendent read it to me. They had a great pile of 'em, printed, in the office and used to hand a copy out to each workman. I'd received one, you know, but I never thought to read it, mixed-up English and all that sort of thing. But I read it then. It showed me how I'd been had by the phosphate crowd, and how all the poor swine of navvies had been had, don't you know. D' you want to read it?"

There was about a league of what passes for human language in law-courts, to recount the undoubted fact that Blancomar was an island, under private ownership of American citizens, in the open sea, beyond the jurisdiction of any State. Another league without a gleam of punctuation or intelligence went into the question of marine jurisdiction beginning with Noah. In the third league the learned court at last felt itself headed in the direction of the stables and began to trot. And in the last ten lines it stated, quite intelligibly, that therefore and whereas, and because of all

the other therefores and whereases, the island Blancomar was adjudged to be legally a ship under the American flag.

"See the point?" asked the Honorable Goldilocks when we reached the end, worn, but alive. "I did n't-at first. I refused duty and got a lovely stinger on the head that laid me out neat. I woke up in my bunk, and thinking it over, I saw it. If the Blancomar was a ship, why, a man that refused duty was a mutineer. Jolly, was n't it? Eh, what?" The noble descendant checked himself with, "I say, chaps, but I'm talking!"

It required dainty handling to Goldilocks under way again, and at best after his horrible discovery that he had indulged in sustained speech, his gait was jerky. He relapsed into the British fashion of disconnected words. By careful attention it was possible to understand that the Honorable Carothers had thought over the situation for some painful hours. Then he lounged over to the superintendent's office to announce tamely that he had seen a great light and would obey orders.

They were glad. There were more than two hundred laborers, and only seven officials, counting Percy, to guard them. They forgave him and he went to work. He worked so hard that on the third night after that, he stood over the superintendent's bed with a revolver and induced him to part with the key to the arsenal, which was emptied promptly by laborers picked by Percy.

"They were a dirty lot to mess with," said Percy, "those poor devils, but I had the luck to hit it right with those I picked out for arming. They obeyed orders; They obeyed orders; and the whole show came off as smooth as Boxing Day Pantomime in old Drury Lane. We got the rest of his gang after we had the superintendent-Weeks, his name was, and he looked weak that night. Not half bad that, what?"

Goldilocks looked so pathetically pleased that Dick Sutton assured him on his sacred honor that it was the best ever, and he proceeded, quite encouraged. "There was n't a thing of what you could call scandal, except for one chap, the foreman or something like that. He ran and locked himself in the house where they kept the distillation plant, and commenced to shoot like a silly Guy Fawkes, you know. The men had to break in to make peace. They

got a little excited over it and jolly well broke up the distilling apparatus, and messed up my plans a bit, doing it.

66

"You see," continued Carothers, "I 'd intended to signal the first ship and get it to take off myself and the laborers, and leave Weeks and his ugly family to stay on the rock till the phosphate ship came down. They had plenty of grub, of course. But we could n't leave them to die from thirst, and the only way to get water on Blancomar is to distill it from sea-water. So we had to take 'em along. That 's what a fellow gets for messing, don't you know.

"We hoisted the American flag-nice thing to float over the Blancomar, eh?upside down and waited. Of course the first ship to answer might have been bound straight for the States, and then we 'd have been in a hole of sorts. But I did n't care much. I was too jolly well annoyed. Luckily a Danish tramp came along, bound Haiti-way. We told 'em the straight truth, that our water-supply was bally well wound up, and they took us off. Weeks and his gang kept still. I'd told them that if they talked rubbish, we 'd leave 'em on the rock and they would most likely dry up into little leather corpses before another ship hove in sight. Weeks paid the passage for all hands, too, out of the company funds, after a little talk with me. I thought he should. Not more than right, eh, what? I did n't care whether Weeks kept his mouth shut after we landed in Haiti or not. But he did. They don't like the Blancomar Phosphate Works Company in Gonaives, where we went ashore, and he kept quiet."

The Honorable made signals of distress. "Give him air!" yelled Toledo Spencer, fanning him with his hat. “Goldilocks," said Bob, "remember your ancestors at Runnymede or anywhere else and go through with it. Your story is n't half so bad as it sounds."

"Don't rot me, you fellows," said Goldilocks, appealingly. "It 's sickening to gas so much, and I have n't heard a word yet about what you chaps have been doing, don't you know. Where did you go, Dick, after we got out of Johannesburg?"

We brought the Honorable Goldilocks firmly back to his story and ordered him to finish it.

"Why, 't is finished!" said he. "The

men scattered, and shipped wherever they could. Quite a few vessels in Gonaives that week. Weeks stayed, he and his happy family. He did a lot of cabling and this morning he met me on the wharf and said that the president of the company was coming down himself and then he 'd have me laid by the heels for piracy and mutiny. So I knocked him down and came aboard, and here I am, you chaps. Is there any Scotch aboard?" And the Honorable Percy Algernon Sydney Blake Carothers relapsed into his majestic native silence.

That night the Trinculo flopped her tottering way out of the Windward very slowly, owing to what her engineer called the eccentricities of iron fragments. It was after breakfast-time next morning when the white pillar of Blancomar came in sight some miles away.

The first mate, standing near us, looked through his glass and uttered a word that sounded like "Well!" He complemented it with "The rock 's flying distress signals!" and started for the bridge. Goldilocks stretched out his leg to stop him. "Steady on!" said he. "There's nobody on the rock. They were all taken off a week ago. Water-supply went bad-and other things."

Then why, cried the mate in a fine Byronic burst, did the many adjectived and sublimely blanked and otherwise unprintable lubbers, old women, fertilizer grubbers, land-crabs, and explicitly qualified boobies leave their colors flying union down? Tell him that! Nobody told him that; and he continued to converse heatedly with the universe at large till Blancomar dropped into the sea astern.

"It was a silly ass trick, right enough!" said Percy, when the mariner at last exhausted the subject and wandered away. "Regular derelict, eh, what? Regular derelict on the high seas!"

Bob McAllister erected himself on his long legs and gave an intimation that he was a man about to make speech. Then he sat down again lazily and asked: "When will this packet make Caimanéra, do you suppose?"

Toledo Spencer thought that, if the little pieces of string that the engineer had tied around his engines did not unravel, we should be in that me-tro-po-lis of palm huts and alligators before dark.

"Then you

"Very well," said Bob. fellows shut up for a while. I want to remember where I mislaid my brain the last time I used it. I need it to think something with."

"What a hopeful beggar you are, Bob!" said Dick.

Bob looked at Dick with the serene glance of a man too lazy to be open to insult, and stretched himself out with his hat over his face.

About an hour afterward, just when we were having an interesting row about whether or not the Cuban Majah snake is really as good eating as Dick said, Bob interrupted with a triviality about how much money the crowd had. After unanimously amending the resolution to read. "how little," we fell to counting, the subject being one that had not occupied anybody's reasoning powers before. The pot amounted to a little over $1100, American.

"That 'll do," said Bob. "I'll be treasurer." And he took it. Then he retired under his hat again, and our utmost violence failed to get any human emotion out of him. He only said that he was considering how to manage something.

Bob was a great manager for everybody except himself, and always ready to use his talents for the public good. It was a harmless weakness and it saved more sensible persons much trouble. So we left him alone after making him promise not to strain his mind, and watched the tumbled rocky mountains of Cuba change from blue to red as the Trinculo bobbed toward them. She pointed her stubby nose straight at the wild wall as if she meant to butt out her cast-iron brains under the cliff where the dancing surf swung white veils.

Suddenly two mountains swung apart and the Trinculo slipped into a harbor like an inland sea. It was the harbor of Guantanamo, and before us lay the great naval station of the United States of America-a bird-house of a signal-station, half a dozen board huts, half a dozen corrugated iron ones, two red water tanks on stilts, something that looked like a poorhouse, and a wharf.

But in the foreground there was a big thing sitting on the water, shapeless, leadcolor, ominously ugly, with leaning towers of funnels and long, sleek guns. "Battleship!" said Dick, studying it with the

glass. "Hey! here 's luck! that 's the Oklahoma!"

That was luck! They loved Dick and me on the Oklahoma, from the captain down to the mascot pig. They loved us because once they had come on us in a noman's-land where Dick and I had tried pearl-fishery with immaterial results. The grub had given out, and the cold beer was nearly gone. They saved us, and gave us of their best, and took us away from there; and, naturally, they looked on us as benefactors.

"What!" said Bob. "Do you fellows know the Oklahoma crowd? And do they know you?" he added, with such an expression that I had to explain to him, while I pushed his nose down to the ship's rail, that sarcasm was n't his strong point.

Then, because he seemed to be anxious about it, we gave him satisfactory assurances that the Oklahoma's mess knew only good about us.

"Very well," said Bob. "That helps immensely. I will now disclose. At least," said he, taking a second thought, "I will disclose to all except Goldilocks. Goldilocks, you are a bloody mutineer and pirate, unfit for the society of honest men. Noble son of a thousand earls, oblige me by vanishing out of the picture right here. You go on with the Trinculo to-morrow to Santiago and lay up in that nice little sky-blue Casa Venus till you hear from me, which won't be long. I'll give you back enough of your money to keep you in the idleness to which you are accustomed. It is n't that I don't trust you, genuine descendant of real, genuine ancestors, but because I want to be able to swear, if I must, that you had nothing to do with what is going to happen. I hope your benighted British peerage of a mind will see my American point.'

"I

"Stop rotting," said Goldilocks. don't mind going to Santiago. I'll go there right enough to oblige you, and I'll wait there till you write to me to pull you out of the mess that no doubt you're going into."

"Faithful heart of oak!" said Bob. "Now when we get to Caimanéra, I 'll hustle ashore to look up a man that I know. He helped me run arms once, before the Spanish-American sweepstakes. If he 's alive yet, and if he 's there yet, he 'll be able to produce a schooner that I want.

Here! Listen, and I'll disclose, as I said before. Go away, Goldilocks."

Goldilocks yawned and went. Bob disclosed. "And now, you see," he concluded, "since you fellows know the Oklahoma, there's a shore end to this as well as the schooner end. The schooner end requires brains. That 's why Me and Dick and Spencer will attend to it. The shore end requires only cheek. It's as if made to order for you, Wesley," he said to me, without a blush.

The Trinculo waddled on, through the harbor that expanded and narrowed and expanded again, big enough for a dozen fleets, till she poked into the swampy Caimanéra River. Before she was fast to the pier that was the only visible sign of human affairs, Bob was sprinting up the steaming, reed-lined trail to the palm-hut village. We stayed stretched out on deck with something cool to drink and said what a good manager he was, Goldilocks dissenting. He handed in a minority report, saying that Bob was not a manager but a lunatic.

Bob managed so well, however, that by dark his Cuban friend and brother, the Señor José Ortega, was alongside with his good schooner La Pez, a sweet craft so wide that she was almost circular and built of timbers that would have been more appropriate as pier-spiles.

"Now remember, Wesley," said Bob before he and Dick and Spencer climbed into her; "you 're to visit the Oklahoma tomorrow with your face nicely washed and say 'how d' ye do' prettily. Then, sooner or later, you will deftly turn the tide of your sparkling conversation to the subject of phosphate. At the psychological moment, you will flash the photographs taken by the haughty and insolent Englishman with the canary-colored hair. You will be considerate enough, of course, not to vex your friends' minds with any refer ence to the recent trouble on the rock. You will also suffer from a total loss of memory about such persons as Me, Dick, and Spencer. We are as we were not. Your mission begins and ends, especially ends, with establishing a proper mental condition aboard the United States battleship Oklahoma regarding the phosphate business. See?"

And the schooner La Pez slatted away toward the Caribbean.