He rose off the stone he was sitting on and lay down on the path, belly under, and ran up the back sight of his rifle with care.  Flinging back the bolt, he blew into the chamber and thrust a cartridge in; tested the air with a wet finger, and wriggled the butt home into his shoulder.  Dave watched him in silence; Mills was, he knew, a good shot, and he was now preparing, with all the little tricks and graces of the rifle-range, to pull trigger on the man he had risked—­nay, almost thrown away—­his life to save from the consequences of an unspeakable crime.

“Ah!” breathed Mills, with an artist’s luxurious satisfaction.

Down the valley a figure had broken from the bush, and was plainly to be seen against the red ground.  The men on the hill flopped down and prepared to shoot.

“Don’t fire,” Dave warned the others.  He was watching Mills.  The trader’s face bore no signs of his recent mental struggle.  It carried no expression whatever, save one of cool interest, just touched with a craftsman’s confidence.  His barrel was steady as his head.  The little figure below was moving over the rough ground towards the black spot.  They could see its legs working grotesquely, like a mechanical toy.

“So,” murmured Mills.  “Now just a little farther.  So!”

He fired.

There was no leap into the air, no tragic bound and sprawling tumble. 
The little figure in the valley fell where it was, and never moved.

Mills jerked open his breech.

“I’ll bet that took him in the spine,” he said.

IV

THE MURDERER

From the open door of the galley, where the cross, sleepy cook was coaxing his stove to burn, a path of light lay across the deck, showing a slice of steel bulwark with ropes coiled on the pins, and above it the arched foot of the mainsail.  In the darkness forward, where the port watch of the Villingen was beginning the sea day by washing down decks, the brooms swished briskly and the head-pump clacked like a great, clumsy clock.

The men worked in silence, though the mate was aft on the poop, and nothing prevented them from talking as they passed the buckets to and from the tub under the pump and drove their brooms along the planks.  They labored with the haste of men accustomed to be driven hard, with the shuffling, involuntary speed that has nothing in it of free strength or good-will.  The big German four-master had gathered from the boarding-houses of Philadelphia a crew representing all the nationalities which breed sailors, and carried officers skilled in the crude arts of getting the utmost out of it.  And since the lingua franca of the sea, the tongue which has meaning for Swedish carpenters, Finn sail-makers, and Greek fo’c’s’le hands alike, is not German, orders aboard the Villingen were given and understood in English.

“A hand com’ aft here!”