“Not of the kind that appeals to me. There is plenty of excitement, of a kind, but not an awful lot of adventure, as I understand the term. Most of the time it is nothing more than wholesale butchery of ignorant Malays and Chinkies who have no chance against us even though they do outnumber us. And to make it worse, we steal from them. That is not the kind of adventure that I enjoy.” This sort of talk from me must have sounded very strange and I was not surprised at Norton’s dumbfounded expression. “But we only take from them what they have stolen from somebody else,” he argued. “They have no right to it, while we can reasonably claim it as a reward for avenging those whom they have killed and robbed. Besides that, we ought to get a medal from the British Government for every one of those devils we put out of the way, for we are doing the world a service.” “That is no argument,” I contended, remembering Miss Crofton’s curt reproval of my own defence to her, along just the same line, only a month before. “The fact that they steal from others gives us no shadow of right to steal from them. Perhaps it is a good thing to kill them, but I hold no commission and draw no salary for that sort of thing. If the world wants them put out of the way, let the world attend to it. The world has never done anything for me that should make me want to assume the whole contract. If it is a public service to slay pirates, I have certainly killed my share, and directed the slaughter of enough more of them to absolve all of my most distant relatives from any further responsibility in the matter. Somebody else can now step up and kill his share, and they can keep it going as long as they like. I am sick of murdering and robbing, even though they are pirates, and there will be no more of it from my ships.” “What do you know about this ‘Beautiful White Devil’ Ah Fen has been telling me about?” he shot at me. He evidently expected to catch me off my guard, but I was looking for just such an inquiry and was not at all perturbed. “There is no such person,” I answered with perfect truthfulness. “I satisfied myself on that point while I was in Hong Kong. That is only one of the wild stories you hear out here where there are so many people who smoke opium. There may be a man pirate who sometimes masquerades in female attire, but there is no woman pirate.” “It may be,” he suggested sneeringly, “that this sudden decision of yours to retire is due to the fact that Moy Sen has threatened to exterminate us. If you don’t want to fight the old scoundrel, why don’t you say so, instead of backing out on an assumption of morality that does not harmonize with your makeup and with which it is far beyond me to agree.”