“Yer’ll ave to tyke thut sheet wiv yer; leastwyes whoever’s in charge of the baht’ll ave ter, an thye gives ut to th’ cops, and th’ cops shahs ut to the beak. As to do ut, to ave everyin roight and reglar. Otherwyes they cudden put yer awye--and they’re bahnd ter do that: not arf!” But Demaine was not heeding the discomforting comment of his warder. He was balancing in his mind the poor chances of the morning, and as he balanced them they seemed blacker with every moment. The shore was perhaps half a mile away: the hour say five, perhaps half-past. By six, or half-past six at the latest, the earliest people in Parham would be astir. The fixed inveterate hope of the governing class that a gentleman can always get out of a hole, had dwindled within him to that dying spark to which it dwindles during invasions and at the hour of death. He did not trust his accent, he did not trust his skin, he did not trust his parentage, he did not trust his wealth--alas, his former wealth!--to speak more accurately, his wife’s former wealth,--to speak still more accurately, the former wealth of his wife’s father. He trusted nothing but blind chance, his muscles and flight. He hated the vision which was in immediate prospect of the little weasel-faced captain with his pointed red beard, reciting by rote yet another string of idiotic sentences from a manual; he hated the vision of the next step, the men in blue, with their violence and their closing of his mouth by brutal means. Whether he could convince a magistrate he did not pause to inquire. The way was too long--it was a dark corridor leading to Doom. He heard a second voice calling the boy to the accompaniment of oaths quite novel and individual and in a high voice that he had not yet heard, and he thought that his hour had come. But the boy’s reply undeceived him. “Oi dursn’t!” he yelled down the decks, “Oi gotter look arter th’ Skunk.” Apparently, thought George bitterly, he already had a fixed traditional name aboard the _Lily_, like Blacky and the Old Man. The cook, for it was he, emerged from the galley aft, stood in the brilliant sunlight and delivered rapid blasphemy with tremendous velocity and unerring aim. The boy whimpered and was irresolute. If the threats of the mate had been less practical, those of the cook might have had less effect, but between the prospect of the excision of his liver and of a series of hearty buffets and mighty kicks endways, what reasonable youth would hesitate in a civilisation such as ours? The boy faltered visibly, and turning upon the Skunk informed him once again that he was always gettin’ people inter trouble. Nay, more, he threatened to pay out the innocent cause of his despair for the divided duty in which he found himself.