‘Hey? What? You dare to deny you come from over there?’ the accomplished manager was down on him truculently.

At this the man straightened himself up, dropping a spanner^* he had been using, and faced us; but he trembled in all his limbs.

‘I deny nothing, nothing, nothing!’ he said, excitedly.

He picked up the spanner and went to work again without paying any further attention to us. After looking at him for a minute or so, we went away.

‘Is he really an anarchist?’ I asked, when out of ear-shot.

‘I don’t care a hang what he is,’ answered the humorous official of the B.O.S. Co. ‘I gave him the name because it suited me to label him in that way. It’s good for the company.’

‘What!’ I exclaimed, stopping short.

‘Aha!’ he triumphed, tilting up his hairless pug face and straddling his thin long legs. ‘That surprises you. I am bound to do my best for my company. They have enormous expenses. Why—our agent in Horta tells me they spend more than a hundred thousand pounds every year in advertising! One can’t be too economical in working the show. Well, I’ll tell you. When I took charge here the estate had no steamlaunch. I asked for one, and kept on asking by every mail till I got it; but the man they sent out with it chucked up his job at the end of two months, leaving the launch moored at the pontoon in Horta. Got a better screw at a sawmill up the river—blast him! And ever since it has been the same thing. Any Scotch or Yankee vagabond that likes to call himself a mechanic out here gets eighteen pounds a month, and the next thing you know he’s cleared out, after smashing something as likely as not. I give you my word that some of the objects I’ve had for engine-drivers couldn’t tell the boiler from the funnel. But this fellow understands his trade, and I don’t mean him to clear out. See?’

And he struck me lightly on the chest for emphasis. Disregarding his peculiarities of manner, I wanted to know what all this had to do with the man being an anarchist.

‘Come!’ jeered the manager. ‘If you saw suddenly a barefooted, unkempt chap slinking amongst the bushes on the sea face of the island, and at the same time observed, less than a mile from the beach, a small schooner full of niggers hauling off in a hurry, you wouldn’t think the man fell there from the sky, would you? And it could be nothing else but either that or Cayenne. I’ve got my wits about me. Directly I sighted this queer game I said to myself—“Convict.” I was as certain of it as I am of seeing you standing here this minute. So I spurred on straight at him. He stood his ground for a bit on a sand hillock crying out at me: “Monsieur! Monsieur. Arrêtez!”^* then at the last moment broke and ran for life. Says I to myself, ‘I’ll tame you before I’m done with you.’ So without a single word I kept on, heading him off here and there. I rounded him up towards the shore, and at last I had him corralled on a spit, his heels in the water and nothing but sea and sky at his back, with my horse pawing the sand and shaking his head within a yard of him.

‘He folded his arms on his breast then and stuck his chin up in a sort of desperate way; but I wasn’t to be impressed by the beggar’s posturing.

‘Says I, “You’re a runaway convict.”

‘When he heard French, his chin went down and his face changed.

‘ “I deny nothing,” says he, panting yet, for I had kept him skipping about in front of my horse pretty smartly. I asked him what he was doing there. He had got his breath by then, and explained that he had meant to make his way to a farm which he understood (from the schooner’s people, I suppose) was