The days passed, no more island schooners put in for night shelter at the entrance to the bay, and the Hedge Lawyer gained with every passing day a tighter grip upon the vagrant mind of Willatopy. The Great Lord made the villein work for the pleasure of seeing a white man sweat in his service, but in the intervals of labour the two of them became host and guest rather than master and slave. And hour by hour the cunning hand of the lawyer, deftly kneading the soft wax of the native boy's intelligence, obliterated the impressions left by his father's teaching. Willatopy still declared at intervals that he would never go to England, but his tone had lost much of its old conviction. The once fixed resolution was degenerating into a verbal formula. For awhile Clifford stuck to the first inducements of which he had demonstrated the effective potency. White women at Willatopy's seignorial pleasure, white men as his humble, willing slaves, yachts and buzz boats at his orders--Willatopy was salt to the bones. Then, as his grip became firmer, Clifford bethought him of a further engine of influence, and devised a means of bringing it into early operation. Immovably bent upon the one purpose of bearing Willatopy as a helpless fly into the spider's web of St. Mary Axe--and of securing that junior partnership for himself--Clifford perceived that a corrupted, degenerate Willatopy would be a prey more profitable to the plunderers than the healthy, shrewd sportsman of Tops Island. Wholly unscrupulous, it was nothing to him that a brave human soul should be lost. Willatopy was in his eyes not a human soul, but a much-desired client. After having been won over and despoiled in the interests of St. Mary Axe, the Twenty-Eighth Lord of Topsham might go to the Devil as fast as he pleased. The more he could be prevailed upon to dip into the Toppys estates--no great property by modern standards--the larger would be the profits of Chudleigh, Caves, Caves, and Chudleigh, poachers and speculators in law. I am no effusive admirer of Roger Gatepath, the solicitor of peers and princes, but the dingy honesty of Gatepaths was as driven snow in comparison with the black foulness of Chudleighs.