attitude had subtly changed. Ducat's words had destroyed that last
secret refuge of the soul in which every man keeps the vestiges of
self-justification and self-respect.

McHenry sought me out that night while I sat on the cabin-house
gazing at the great stars of the Southern Cross, and began to talk.

"Now take me," he said, "I'm not so bad. I'm as good as most people.
As a matter of fact, I ain't done anything more in my life than
anybody'd've done, if they had the chance. Look at me--I had a
singlet an' a pair of dungarees when I landed on the beach in T'yti,
an' look at me now! I ain't done so bad!"

He must have felt the unconvincing ring of his tone, lacking the
full and complacent self-assurance usual to it, for as if groping
for something to make good the lack he sought backward through his
memories and unfolded bit by bit the tale of his experiences. Scotch
born of drunken parents, he had been reared in the slums of American
cities and the forecastles of American ships. A waif, newsboy, loafer,
gang-fighter and water-front pirate, he had come into the South Seas
twenty-five years earlier, shanghaied when drunk in San Francisco.
He looked back proudly on a quarter of a century of trading, thieving,
selling contraband rum and opium, pearl-buying and gambling.

But this pride on which he had so long depended failed him now.
Successful fights that he had waged, profitable crimes committed,
grew pale upon his tongue. Listening in the darkness while the
engine drove us through a black sea and the canvas awning flapped
overhead, I felt the baffled groping behind his words.