without dismay ill-luck, censure, and disaster.  The smuggling of a few guns was no great crime, he pointed out.  As to coming to Patusan, who had the right to say he hadn’t come to beg?  The infernal people here let loose at him from both banks without staying to ask questions.  He made the point brazenly, for, in truth, Dain Waris’s energetic action had prevented the greatest calamities; because Brown told me distinctly that, perceiving the size of the place, he had resolved instantly in his mind that as soon as he had gained a footing he would set fire right and left, and begin by shooting down everything living in sight, in order to cow and terrify the population.  The disproportion of forces was so great that this was the only way giving him the slightest chance of attaining his ends—­he argued in a fit of coughing.  But he didn’t tell Jim this.  As to the hardships and starvation they had gone through, these had been very real; it 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