“Good God! sir,” he said, “how little any man, who makes a beginning on a crooked road, ever sees the end of it! I was the captain of a Shields collier two years ago, doing well, and calling my home my own. When Mr. Imroth found me out, I would no more have done a shabby thing than have harmed my little baby girl, who’s waiting for me in Newcastle now. Money bought me—I’ll not deny it. I promised to run this ship to the Brazils for a thousand guineas, and there’s Imroth’s seal upon it on the table yonder. You may not believe me, but what the story of this business is, how these men came here, or why they have come, I know no better than the Pope of Rome—and that’s the truth, if my life’s the price of it. And yet, sir, that it’s a bad business I’d be a fool to deny. He who touches pitch gets plenty on his fingers. I knew that Val Imroth was a bad lot the first day I saw him—and bad enough are his companions on this ship. Why, good God! there’d have been murder done every day if it hadn’t been for fear of the man and his words. He puts a palsy on you when you hear his step—his breath’s a flame of hell—this crowd shivered at his look. It’s fear of him that’s kept them quiet since he ran for shore; it’s fear of him which will send them all to the dock in the end; as sure as I lie here telling you so.” I cannot conceal the fact that this interview affected me greatly. Here was a robust British sailor, a man perhaps of thirty-five years of age, brown-haired, blue-eyed, and of an open cast of countenance, about to give up his life and to pass for ever from the love which awaited him in England because a monster had breathed a breath upon him, and had cried in his ears the fables of the gold. Hundreds of men, as innocent as this man, were exiles from wife and children to-day, outcasts, jail-birds, suspects, human derelicts, because of this devilish net which had enmeshed them, of these criminal arms which had embraced them, and this voice of lust which charmed them. Many a man have I seen die—but not as this seaman died, with a child’s name upon his lips, and a child’s image before his eyes. Of what avail to speak at such a moment of the Eternal Hope in the justice of an Almighty and all-Merciful God, or to recite those platitudes in which pious folk take refuge? Colin Ross was thinking of the child who nevermore would call him father, or by him to be called child again. This, however, is to anticipate the hour. There was much upon which I would gladly have questioned the man; but little that he had the strength to answer me. Just as the seamen had sworn that it was all well with Joan, so did he bear them out with such emphasis as his failing strength could command.