CHAPTER XIX. STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM
Mr Button saw no more rats, much to d**k’s disappointment. He was off the drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and wandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced the east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the flooding tide.
“ It’s a baste I’ve been,” said the repentant one—“a brute baste.”
He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and betrayed.
He stood for a while, cursing the drink, “and them that sells it.” Then he determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the bung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape?
Such a thought never even occurred to him—or, if it did, was instantly dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the d
