well with red lead and tallow, buried them in a deep hole, over which we planted a lot of young cocoanut trees. The “Leckwith” then became, in fact, a private yacht. We had no anxiety regarding our old friends, the pirates, for there was nothing we could not run away from. It was fortunate that we removed all traces of piracy and restored the “Leckwith” to an honest vessel for as soon as we reached Hong Kong we were boarded and inspected with great care. It transpired that while I was away with Miss Crofton, Norton had landed at a little village a hundred and fifty miles down the coast and played hob with it. I knew nothing about it until after we were examined, when Lorensen told me about it. Norton’s excuse was that he believed the village was inhabited only by pirates and he wanted to teach them a lesson, but there was no doubt in my mind that he had hoped to find a lot of loot there. The “Leckwith,” naturally, answered the descriptions of the ship that made the raid, and if we had not been nicely cleaned up when the officers came aboard, we undoubtedly would have been arrested for piracy, instead of which we were absolved from all suspicion. The “Florence” was waiting for us and I at once disposed of her, through our agents, to an English trading company. In a few weeks the “Surprise” came in from Yokohama, where she had delivered a cargo, and was sold to a Japanese house with a branch in Hong Kong. I remember that she brought seven thousand pounds, which I gave to Norton. We paid off their crews, with a bonus and their share of the profits, and saw that they were scattered and shipped on long voyages in different directions, as we had done with the surplus crew of the “Leckwith.” We had no fear that they would carelessly tell what they knew about our operations, for they were pleased with their treatment and, beyond that, self-protection would have stood in the way of any complaint against us, but we considered it wise to distribute them to the four corners of the earth before they had an opportunity to fill up with rum and become braggarts, wherein would be danger to all of us. The two captains, Brown and Heather, had fallen under the spell of the China Sea, with its dangers and its delights, and were in no hurry to leave it for prosaic England, but we knew they could be relied on; if they had not been discreet and close-mouthed I never would have engaged them. I had been out East about two years and considered that the adventures I had encountered there amply repaid me for the time, to say nothing of the joy I had found in establishing the identity of the Beautiful White Devil as a real, live being, and falling in love with her. Therefore I insisted on treating all of our men with a liberality that amounted to prodigality, but even after that Norton and I divided up something over three hundred thousand dollars, as the remaining share of what we had cleaned up from the pirates.