The instant his throat was released, Sheldon struck out with his fist, and Carin-Jama joined his brother on the ground.  The mutiny was quelled, and five minutes more saw the brothers being carried to the hospital, and the mutineers, marshalled by the gang-bosses, on the way to the fields.

When Sheldon came up on the veranda, he found Joan collapsed on the steamer-chair and in tears.  The sight unnerved him as the row just over could not possibly have done.  A woman in tears was to him an embarrassing situation; and when that woman was Joan Lackland, from whom he had grown to expect anything unexpected, he was really frightened.  He glanced down at her helplessly, and moistened his lips.

“I want to thank you,” he began.  “There isn’t a doubt but what you saved my life, and I must say—­”

She abruptly removed her hands, showing a wrathful and tear-stained face.

“You brute!  You coward!” she cried.  “You have made me shoot a man, and I never shot a man in my life before.”

“It’s only a flesh-wound, and he isn’t going to die,” Sheldon managed to interpolate.

“What of that?  I shot him just the same.  There was no need for you to jump down there that way.  It was brutal and cowardly.”

“Oh, now I say—­” he began soothingly.

“Go away.  Don’t you see I hate you! hate you!  Oh, won’t you go away!”

Sheldon was white with anger.

“Then why in the name of common sense did you shoot?” he demanded.

“Be-be-because you were a white man,” she sobbed.  “And Dad would never have left any white man in the lurch.  But it was your fault.  You had no right to get yourself in such a position.  Besides, it wasn’t necessary.”

“I am afraid I don’t understand,” he said shortly, turning away.  “We will talk it over later on.”

“Look how I get on with the boys,” she said, while he paused in the doorway, stiffly polite, to listen.  “There’s those two sick boys I am nursing.  They will do anything for me when they get well, and I won’t have to keep them in fear of their life all the time.  It is not necessary, I tell you, all this harshness and brutality.  What if they are cannibals?  They are human beings, just like you and me, and they are amenable to reason.  That is what distinguishes all of us from the lower animals.”

He nodded and went out.

“I suppose I’ve been unforgivably foolish,” was her greeting, when he returned several hours later from a round of the plantation.  “I’ve been to the hospital, and the man is getting along all right.  It is not a serious hurt.”

Sheldon felt unaccountably pleased and happy at the changed aspect of her mood.