There was no stopping him otherwise. It was better to beat him into
insensibility than to have him go crazy in the boat, and to be obliged
to shoot him. The preventive, administered with enough force to brain
an elephant, boasted Ricardo, had to be applied on two occasions--the
second time all but in sight of the jetty.
"You have seen the beauty," Ricardo went on expansively, hiding his lack
of some sort of probable story under this loquacity. "I had to hammer
him away from the spout. Opened afresh all the old broken spots on his
head. You saw how hard I had to hit. He has no restraint, no restraint
at all. If it wasn't that he can be made useful in one way or another, I
would just as soon have let the governor shoot him."
He smiled up at Heyst in his peculiar lip-retracting manner, and added
by way of afterthought:
"That's what will happen to him in the end, if he doesn't learn to
restrain himself. But I've taught him to mind his manners for a while,
anyhow!"
And again he addressed his quick grin up to the man on the wharf. His
round eyes had never left Heyst's face ever since he began to deliver
his account of the voyage.
"So that's how he looks!" Ricardo was saying to himself.
He had not expected Heyst to be like this. He had formed for himself
a conception containing the helpful suggestion of a vulnerable point.
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