 was enough to look at his
band. He made, at the sound of a shrill whistle, all his men appear standing in
a row on the logs in full view, so that Jim could see them. For the killing of
the man, it had been done - well, it had - but was not this war, bloody war - in
a corner? and the fellow had been killed cleanly, shot through the chest, not
like that poor devil of his lying now in the creek. They had to listen to him
dying for six hours, with his entrails torn with slugs. At any rate this was a
life for a life.... And all this was said with the weariness, with the
recklessness of a man spurred on and on by ill-luck till he cares not where he
runs. When he asked Jim, with a sort of brusque despairing frankness, whether he
himself - straight now - didn't understand that when it came to saving one's
life in the dark, one didn't care who else went - three, thirty, three hundred
people - it was as if a demon had been whispering advice in his ear. I made him
wince, boasted Brown to me. He very soon left off coming the righteous over me.
He just stood there with nothing to say, and looking as black as thunder - not
at me - on the ground. He asked Jim whether he had nothing fishy in his life to
remember that he was so damnedly hard upon a man trying to get out of a deadly
hole by the first means that came to hand - and so on, and so on. And there ran
through the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an
assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of
secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts.
    At last Brown threw himself down full length and watched Jim out of the
corners of his eyes. Jim on his side of the creek stood thinking and switching
his leg. The houses in view were silent, as if a pestilence had swept them clean
of every breath of life; but many invisible eyes were turned, from within, upon
the two men with the creek between them, a stranded white boat, and the body of
the third man half sunk in the mud. On the river canoes were moving again, for
Patusan was recovering its belief in the stability of earthly institutions since
the return of the white lord. The right bank, the platforms of the houses, the
rafts moored
