 and
grasping it strongly by its long barrel, grounded the stock at his feet.
    »Perhaps it is near,« said Lingard, leaning both his elbows on the lower
cross-piece of the primitive window and looking out. »It is very black outside
yet,« he remarked carelessly.
    Babalatchi fidgeted about.
    »It is not good for you to sit where you may be seen,« he muttered.
    »Why not?« asked Lingard.
    »The white man sleeps, it is true,« explained Babalatchi, softly; »yet he
may come out early, and he has arms.«
    »Ah! he has arms?« said Lingard.
    »Yes; a short gun that fires many times - like yours here. Abdulla had to
give it to him.«
    Lingard heard Babalatchi's words, but made no movement. To the old
adventurer the idea that fire arms could be dangerous in other hands than his
own did not occur readily, and certainly not in connection with Willems. He was
so busy with the thoughts about what he considered his own sacred duty, that he
could not give any consideration to the probable actions of the man of whom he
thought - as one may think of an executed criminal - with wondering indignation
tempered by scornful pity. While he sat staring into the darkness, that every
minute grew thinner before his pensive eyes, like a dispersing mist, Willems
appeared to him as a figure belonging already wholly to the past - a figure that
could come in no way into his life again. He had made up his mind, and the thing
was as well as done. In his weary thoughts he had closed this fatal,
inexplicable, and horrible episode in his life. The worst had happened. The
coming days would see the retribution.
    He had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path; he had paid
off some very heavy scores a good many times. Captain Tom had been a good friend
to many: but it was generally understood, from Honolulu round about to Diego
Suarez, that Captain Tom's enmity was rather more than any man single-handed
could easily manage. He would not, as he said often, hurt a fly as long as the
fly left him alone; yet a man does not live for years beyond the pale of
civilized laws without evolving for himself some queer notions of justice.
Nobody of those he knew had ever cared to point out to him the errors of his
conceptions. It was not worth anybody's while to run counter to Lingard's ideas
of the fitness
