Ah Cho was twenty-two years old. He was happy and good-natured, and it was
easy for him to smile. While his body was slim in the Asiatic way, his
face was rotund. It was round, like the moon, and it irradiated a gentle
complacence and a sweet kindliness of spirit that was unusual among his
countrymen. Nor did his looks belie him. He never caused trouble, never
took part in wrangling. He did not gamble. His soul was not harsh enough
for the soul that must belong to a gambler. He was content with little
things and simple pleasures. The hush and quiet in the cool of the day
after the blazing toil in the cotton field was to him an infinite
satisfaction. He could sit for hours gazing at a solitary flower and
philosophizing about the mysteries and riddles of being. A blue heron on a
tiny crescent of sandy beach, a silvery splatter of flying fish, or a
sunset of pearl and rose across the lagoon, could entrance him to all
forgetfulness of the procession of wearisome days and of the heavy lash of
Schemmer.

Schemmer, Karl Schemmer, was a brute, a brutish brute. But he earned his
salary. He got the last particle of strength out of the five hundred
slaves; for slaves they were until their term of years was up. Schemmer
worked hard to extract the strength from those five hundred sweating bodies
and to transmute it into bales of fluffy cotton ready for export. His
dominant, iron-clad, primeval brutishness was what enabled him to effect
the transmutation. Also, he was assisted by a thick leather belt, three
inches wide and a yard in length, with which he always rode and which, on
occasion, could come down on the naked back of a stooping coolie with a
report like a pistol-shot. These reports were frequent when Schemmer rode
down the furrowed field.

Once, at the beginning of the first year of contract labour, he had killed