LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER III.—THE POT OF RED PASTE.

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      ONE Saturday it unexpectedly rained all day long, and after dinner Captain Barker, hearing from Mrs. Bratt that I was at home, sent word to enquire if I would go in for a game of chess.

      I had had a very worrying week at the office, and would have dearly liked to say "No," but I had no excuse ready, and so meekly went in.

      I thought the old chap was looking very ill, and I could see at once that he had been at the brandy.

      He was irritable and inclined to be rude—a sure sign with him that he had started drinking. We began to play, but my thoughts were wandering, and I played very badly.

      I made two bad blunders, and the old man swore angrily at me for my carelessness. I told him apologetically that I was not in a mood for playing, and then in a sudden burst of confidence let him know how things were going at the office, and that I was almost daily expecting to get the sack.

      He listened quite quietly to me, but with a sneer that hardened and deepened as I went on.

      "Oh, you little rotter," he jeered, when I had finished, "and to think that I call you my friend. You little crawling worm—you've not got the courage of a bug. Man alive, how long are you going to put up with it? Can't you see just where it's leading you to, and what a hell you're warming up for your poor dirty little soul? Where's it going to end? What are you always going to do? 'Rabbits' they call you, do they?—well, don't you make any mistake, it's the rabbits they insult—not you! Oh, you little swab!"

      I was too miserable to feel the faintest twinge of anger, but just leaned back in my chair, and dispiritedly regarded the driving rain upon the window.

      "Yes, you swab," he went on presently, seeing I was not going to make any excuses, "and do you know I could alter it all for you if I chose, yes, alter it at once. If you were worth it, and I could trust you, I'd send you out of this room with fifty times more courage even than I have. Fifty times more courage than I have—do you hear that, sir, and me—me, that in all my life's never been afraid of any man that's lived—do you hear that, I say?"

      Perhaps I looked incredulous or perhaps it was I smiled, but the next moment he was pointing angrily to a large cabinet in a corner of the room.

      "Open that door, you ass," he spluttered in his rage, "give me out the black box on the bottom shelf. I'll show you something, too, Mr. Rabbits—Mr. Bug."

      The box I carried to him was about the size of a cigar box. It was an ordinary looking wooden box without a lock or clasp, and just tied round with a piece of dirty string.

      The string was too knotted to untie, and the old man hesitated for a few moments before cutting it with his knife.

      "I've half a mind not to show you," he went on musingly, with all trace of his anger for the moment gone. "There's that in here that once cost the lives of four good men—and it might cost the lives of a good many more, if it got into wrong hands. But there," he sneered disgustedly, "it's safe with you. You'd want a bucketful before you'd ever dare to taste it. Oh, you miserable coward."

      He cut the string with a jerk, and, opening the box, took out a small packet wrapped in a length of dirty green oilskin.

      "Now, Wacks," he said solemnly, "it's eleven years and more since this oilskins been unwrapped, and I don't know why the devil I am unwrapping it now. I always swore I'd never touch it and that I'd let it die with me."

      He hesitated again, and then, taking a good gulp from the glass at his elbow, unrolled the oilskin clumsily, and a little brown jar rolled on to his knees. It was about the size of a small condensed milk can; the mouth of it was tied over tightly with a piece of greasy looking parchment.

      "No; I'm not going to open it," he growled. "This is as far as we'll go to-day anyhow."

      He held the jar close up for me to inspect, and then, setting it carefully on the table with his shaky hand, fell into a long reverie that I thought best not to interrupt or disturb.

      "Lord! how old I'm growing," he said, presently. "See the date on it. I said eleven years, didn't I? Well, it's more like twenty. Curse you, Wacks, I'm blasted sorry I ever disturbed it. I'm nine years older than I thought—no wonder I feel sometimes as if coffin time was come. Look here, my boy," he went on again, but in quite a gentle voice, "I said I'd tell you, and so I will, but it's a tale that won't do you no good, and maybe you'll be sorry you roused me up to tell it at all."

      "Listen here. Twenty years ago, when I was master of the 'Willing Bird,' from Liverpool to Fremantle, I shipped a Malayan as fireman at Marseilles. I was short handed, and had lost two men in a gale off Finisterre. Well, this new man was just such another as you. A little silly swine that let everyone curse him and never cursed back. A man without a grain of pluck. Everyone harried him from the first moment he came aboard, and he had a rotten time. I couldn't stop it, for I wasn't everywhere in the ship. They bullied him and knocked him about, just because he was a blithering coward, like you, and let 'em do it. He never once hit anybody back, and all he did was to threaten them with something a cousin of his was going to do.

      "'Me cousin at Colombo,' he would jabber, 'he gib me something and me gib you hell den—see.' But all they did was to jeer at him and give him more knocks. No one knew then what he meant. Well, at Colombo he went ashore, and right enough his damned cousin did give him something. He gave him this pot of paste. Two days out from Colombo he ate a teaspoonful of it, and in a couple of hours there was all hell aboard. Someone started him, and in a second he was flying at everyone he met. He knifed the quartermaster through the heart; then he stabbed a deck hand who tried to catch him. Then he rushed on deck, and put up an awful fight there. With everybody on him there was two more stabbed before the mate managed to break his arm with a marlinspike. Even then he fought 'em all like a tiger, and it was only when he broke his back by falling down the forecastle steps that we at last had him under control.

      "The poor brute was quite conscious before he died next day, and he told me all about the jar. It's a stuff the natives take before they go into the jungle after tigers, and it makes a man afraid of nothing in the world. Now you've heard all about it, Mr. Wacks, and will you have a taste?"

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