"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.

"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all
the islands that are in the sea."

"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."

I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's
brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what
Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this
I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes.
Because of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal,
compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship and
there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and
would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me.
His pride in me entered into me, until it became one of the major
rules in my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride
of his.

Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward
me. He never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place
I held in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the
hurt I could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.

For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my
shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and
wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the