“They’ll rot on Point Au Fer!  We’ll heave the stink of them, dead and alive, to the sharks of Au Fer Pass!  Drownin’ cows in dyin’ lilies—­”

And the small craft of his brain suddenly awakened coolly above his heat.  Why, yes!  Why hadn’t he thought of it?  He swung the stubby nose of the Marie more easterly in the hot, windless dusk.  After a while the black deckhand looked questioningly up at the master.

“We’re takin’ round,” Tedge grunted, “outside Au Fer!”

The black stretched on the cattle-pen frame.  Tedge was a master-hand among the reefs and shoals, even if the flappaddle Marie had no business outside.  But the sea was nothing but a star-set velvet ribbon on which she crawled like a dirty insect.  And no man questioned Tedge’s will.

Only, an hour later, the engineman came up and forward to stare into the faster-flowing water.  Even now he pointed to a hyacinth clump.

“Yeh!” the master growled.  “I’ll show yeh, Rogers!  Worlds o’ flowers!  Out o’ the swamps and the tide’ll send ’em back again on the reefs.  I’ll show yeh ’em—­dead, dried white like men’s bones.”  Then he began to whisper huskily to his engineer:  “It’s time fer it.  Five hundred fer yeh, Crump—­a hundred fer the nigger, or I knock his head in.  She brushes the bar, and yer oil tank goes—­yeh understand?” He watched a red star in the south.

Crump looked about.  No sail or light or coast guard about Au Fer—­at low tide not even a skiff could find the passages.  He nodded cunningly: 

“She’s old and fire-fitten.  Tedge, I knowed yer mind—­I was always waitin’ fer the word.  It’s a place fer it—­and yeh say yeh carry seven hundred on them cows?  Boat an’ cargo—­three thousand seven hundred—­”

“They’ll be that singed and washed in the sands off Au Fer that nobody’ll know what they died of!” retorted Tedge thickly.  “Yeh, go down, Crump, and lay yer waste and oil right.  I trust yeh, Crump—­the nigger’ll get his, too.  She’ll ride high and burn flat, hoggin’ in the sand——­”

“She’s soaked with oil plumb for’ard to the pens now,” grunted Crump.  “She’s fitten to go like a match all along when she bumps—­”

He vanished, and the master cunningly watched the ember star southeasterly.

He was holding above it now, to port and landward.  The white, hard sands must be shoaling fast under the cattle-freighted Marie.  It little mattered about the course now; she would grind her nose in the quiet reef shortly.

Tedge merely stared, expectantly awaiting the blow.  And when it came he was malevolently disappointed.  A mere slithering along over the sand, a creak, a slight jar, and she lay dead in the flat, calm sea—­it was ridiculous that that smooth beaching would break an oil tank, that the engine spark would flare the machine waste, leap to the greasy beams and floors.

The wheezy exhaust coughed on; the belt flapped as the paddle wheel kept on its dead shove of the Marie’s keel into the sand.  Hogjaw had shouted and run forward.  He was staring into the phosphorescent water circling about the bow when Crump raised his cry: