With the cutter close aboard of us, and with the captain and both the mates swearing at them, I suppose that the men at the hatch--who were swinging the things below with a whip--got rattled a little. At any rate, some of them rigged the sling so carelessly that a box fell out from it, and shot down to the main-deck with such a bang that it burst open. It was a small and strongly made box, that from its shape and evident weight I had fancied might have arms in it. But when it split to bits that way--the noise of the crash drawing me to the hatch to see what had happened--its contents proved to be shackles: and the sight of them, and the flash of thought which made me realize what they must be there for, gave me a sudden sick feeling in my inside! In my hurried reading about the West Coast--carried on at odd times since my meeting with the palm-oil people--I had learned enough about the trade carried on there to know that slaving still was a part of it; but so small a part that the matter had not much stuck in my mind. But it was a fact then (as it also is a fact now) that the traders who run along the coast--exchanging such stuff as Captain Luke carried for ivory and coffee and hides and whatever offers--do now and then take the chances and run a cargo of slaves from one or another of the lower ports into Mogador: where the Arab dealers pay such prices for live freight in good condition as to make the venture worth the risk that it involves. This traffic is not so barbarous as the old traffic to America used to be--when shippers regularly counted upon the loss of a third or a half of the cargo in transit, and so charged off the death-rate against profit and loss--for the run is a short one, and slaves are so hard to get and so dangerous to deal in nowadays that it is sound business policy to take enough care of them to keep them alive. But I am safe in saying that the men engaged in the Mogador trade are about the worst brutes afloat in our time--not excepting the island traders of the South Pacific--and for an honest man to get afloat in their company opens to him large possibilities of being murdered off-hand, with side chances of sharing in their punishment if he happens to be with them when they are caught. And so it is not to be wondered at that when I saw the shackles come flying out from that broken box, and so realized the sort of men I had for shipmates, that a sweating fright seized me which made my stomach go queer. And then, as I thought how I had tumbled myself into this scrape that the least shred of prudence would have kept me out of, I realized for the second time that day that I was very young and very much of a fool. III I HAVE A SCARE, AND GET OVER IT