"I think," said Miller, very slowly, "that he would use anything."
And then Aylmer began to laugh—loudly, gaily, and quite whole-heartedly. Miller's eyebrows proclaimed their owner's astonishment.
"Melodrama!" explained Aylmer, still chuckling. "I remember Landon as a small boy, even before his Eton days. He bred these leanings then. He wasted his pocket money on 'bloods,' I think they are called—penny exhilarators for youths of tender years, crammed with impossible villainies. And now he is going to tie flaming splinters between my fingers and squeeze my thumbs in the crack of the door! This is the price I am to pay for refusing him social rehabilitation. We cannot congratulate him on his sense of humor, we really cannot."
Miller paused over his reply, looked down, looked up, and then bridged a moment of hesitation with his usual expedient—a shrug.
"For the moment I fear he hasn't got one," he said.
"Possibly not," agreed Aylmer. He nodded towards the door. "I'll take advantage of his concessions to come and see." He gave another little confident nod to usher the other two before him. As the child ran forward he caught him up with his bound hands and raised him shoulder high. Then, stooping, he passed out at Miller's heels on to the deck. He was laughing still, laughing up at the boy as the childish fingers steadied themselves in his hair.
"You won't be able to do that when they shave it to put the pitch plaster on," he cried. "And when they've stretched me on the rack, I shall be too tall to carry you out of a cabin. And as for being a pig man again, and carrying a spear after the thumbscrews have been applied, why, it simply won't bear thinking about!"
As he emerged on deck he looked about him keenly. Muhammed's was the first figure which caught his eye. The Moor was sitting on the gunwale opposite the companion, looking shoreward. And the shore, to Aylmer's surprise, was very near on the starboard bow.
Suddenly he realized that it was not the mainland which he saw, but an archipelago of islands girdled with reefs. Rockbound channels were frames to pictures of the dun red African strand half a dozen miles away.
He looked aft. The sun was not far from its setting, hanging in a red disc above the distant hills of Algeria. The captain was at the tiller. Beside him lounged Landon, watching a gray-painted torpedo boat which had emerged from the shelter of the islands and was about to pass close under their stern. The gold and crimson of the Spanish naval ensign floated at her flagstaff.