Chapter VII: Part 7

"Well, if it seems so queer as all that why not blow yourself?" offered Junius with perfect good nature. "You can't tell, you might like it. Come along."

"Garn!" snarled the other.

So Junius turned away and walked down the strand alone. Outward the ground swell broke and came rushing in with long-spaced undulations, and as he stood at the verge, shrinking in his nakedness, the east flamed suddenly through its great red archway and turned all the world to tinted glory. Fair across to him was flung a shining path. It seemed as if he had only to step out along that straight way of escape, and for an instant he had a yearning to try. Never in his life had he followed a single course to a definite end, and what could be better now than to choose one at last, to follow, to go on following--and not to return.

* * * * *

He looked down at his body and saw as a revelation the pitiful wasting of his strength--how scrawny he was of limb, how bloated about the middle, and his skin how soft and leprous white. He made an ugly figure under the clear light of the morning, like the decaying things around him, where the carrion flies were beginning to swarm in the sun. And there came upon him then a sudden physical loathing of himself, a final sense of disaster and defeat.

"If I could only begin again--" thought Junius Peabody, and stopped and laughed aloud at the wish, which is old as folly and futile as sin. But he had no relief from laughter either, for it was the same he had just heard from the Sydney Duck, a sort of hiccup. So he stopped that too and strode forthright into the wash....

Something flung against his shin and tripped him. He sprawled awkwardly from a singular impact, soft though quite solid. He could see the object floating on the next wave and was curious enough to catch it up. It was a rough lump of some substance, a dirty grayish-brown in color, the size of a boy's football. The touch of it was rather greasy.

Junius stayed with the trove in his hands and the tingling of an odd excitement in his mind. His first instinct rejected the evidence. He had a natural suspicion that events do not happen so. But while he brought to bear such knowledge as he owned, facts read or heard, he found himself still thrilled.

There was a sound from the shore and the Sydney Duck hurried up behind him to the edge of the water, both hands clawed, his little eyes distended.

"You've got it!" He took two steps after a retreating wave, but the next drove him hopping. It was strange to see the fellow drawn by a frantic eagerness and chased again by the merest flicker of foam, lifting his feet as gingerly as a cat.

"What have I got?" asked Junius, standing at mid-thigh where the surf creamed in between them.

"It's the stuff! Chuck it over--wha-i-i!" Sydney's voice rose to a squeal as a frothing ripple caught his toes.

Junius came wading shoreward, but he did not relinquish the lump when the other felt and paddled it feverishly, babbling.

"Look at that--look at that! All smooth an' soft--an' kind of slimy, like. Oh, no, we 'in't struck it fair rich this time, nor nothin'--oh, _now_!... Mytey, I tell you--by Gaw', I tell you it's the real stuff!"

"But oughtn't there be an odor--a perfume?"

"Not yet--not while it's fresh. That comes after. And any'ow, what else could it be--'ey?"

Junius shook his head.

"'Ere, I'll show you, you poor flat!" The larrikin raged about like a man in a strong temper. "Where's a nail? Gimme a nail, a long nail, or a piece of wire--'ell, I'll show you!"

He snatched up a strip of planking from the sand and wrenched a rusty spike from it. With swift jerky gestures he gathered a few dry chips and splinters, whipped a match, and set them alight. In this brief blaze he heated the spike and then applied it to the lump. It sank smoothly, leaving a little melted ring around the hole.

"Ambergris!" he yelped. "Worth near two pound an ounce, right 'ere in Fufuti.... And the 'arf of it's mine," he added, with a startling shift to the most brazen impudence.

Junius regarded him, incredulous.

"What? That's wot! Wasn't I here? 'In't I been pallin' along of you? It's a fair divvy. W'y, damn your soul," he screamed in a sudden febrile blast of fury, "you don't think you're goin' to 'og my 'arf an' all!"

"_Your_ half!" repeated Junius. "Huh--nothing small about you, is there? Why, you weren't anywhere near when I found it. Didn't you pass up the swim?"

Just here the Sydney Duck made his mistake. Had he proceeded with any finesse, with any understanding of his man, he might have done about as he pleased and it is likely that little of moment would have transpired on Fufuti beach that morning. But he acted by his lights, which were narrow and direct, and he hit Junius Peabody suddenly in the smiling face of him and knocked him reeling backward. The next instant he was running for the nearest palms with the prize tucked under one arm.

* * * * *

Junius sat on the sand and blinked, and at first he felt rather hurt, for he was not used to being treated so, at least not while he was sober. And thereafter he grinned, for such was his way of turning aside a casual unpleasantness, and the thing undeniably had its humorous aspect. But finally came the throb of a strange new emotion, as if some one had planted a small, hot coal in his breast.

It is a fact worthy of note that never before had Junius Peabody known the sting of a living anger. But never before had Junius Peabody been reduced to a naked Junius Peabody, dot and carry nothing--penniless, desperate, and now cheated of a last hope. That made the difference.

"Hey!" he protested. "See here, you know--Dammit!"

He struggled up and climbed anyhow into trousers, coat, and shoes, and set off at a shambling trot, with no clear notion of what he meant to do but keeping the larrikin in sight.

Sydney dodged in among the trees, found them too scant for cover, paused to fling a yellow snarl over his shoulder, and swung up the shore. He turned, questing here and there, shouting as he ran, and presently raised an answering shout from a hollow whence another figure started up to join him, a bearded, heavy-set rogue, whose abnormally long arms dangled like an ape's out of his sleeveless shirt. Junius recognized Willems, the third of their party the night before, and he knew where the interest of that sullen big Hollander would lie. He had a coalition of thievery against him now. The two beachcombers ran on together, footing briskly past the long boat sheds and the high white veranda of Bendemeer's place....

Under this iron thatch stood the man Bendemeer himself, cool and lathy in spotless ducks, planted there, as was his morning custom, to oversee and command all his little capital. And in truth it was a kingdom's capital, the center of a trading monopoly of the old type and chief seat of as strange and absolute a tyrant as the world still offers room for; rich, powerful, independent, fearing nothing between heaven and hell and at once the best-loved and the best-hated individual in his sphere of influence.

Bendemeer, trader, philanthropist, and purveyor of rotgut, was one of those unclassed growths of the South Seas that almost constitute a new racial type. Nobody could have placed his nationality or his caste or his accent. His name was of a piece with the grim self-sufficiency that gave nothing and asked nothing: an obvious jest, borrowed from the Persian song of an Irish poet, but the one touch of fancy about him. Somewhere, somehow, he had taken a cynic twist or a rankling wound that had turned his white man's blood once for all. They tell stories of such cases up and down the islands, and mostly the stories are very ugly and discreditable indeed. But not so concerning Bendemeer; against whom was no scandal, only curses and bitterness. For his peculiarity took the especially irritating form of fair dealings with some thousands of brown-skinned natives and no dealings at all with any man of his own color--except to beat him at strict business and then to sell him as much villainous liquor as he could at the highest possible price. As he leaned there indolently in his doorway with arms folded and cheroot between his thin lips he could measure his own land as far as he could see on either side, a small part of his holdings in plantations and trading stations throughout the archipelago. Offshore, behind the only good strip of barrier reef and near the only navigable channel on the south coast, lay anchored his _Likely Jane_, flagship of a smart little navy. His gang of boys was hustling cargo out of her in surfboats, and both boys and boats were the handiest and ablest that could be found anywhere for that ticklish work. He had only to turn his head to view the satisfactory bulk of his sheds and dependencies, solid, new-painted. The house at his back was trim, broad, and comfortable, and in the storeroom underneath lay thousands of dollars' worth of assorted trade goods, all of which would eventually become copra and great wealth.

This was the man, decidedly in possession of his own legs and able to stand and to navigate on the same, to whom Junius Peabody appealed in his wretched need....

Junius stumbled up to the steps. The burst had marrow-drawn him, his lungs labored pitifully as if he were breathing cotton wool. It was hot, for the sun had sprung wide like an opened furnace gate, but he had not started a pore.

"I've been robbed," he wheezed, and pointed a wavering hand. "Those chaps there--robbed--!"

Bendemeer glanced aside up the strand after the disappearing ruffians and then down at the complainant, but otherwise he did not move, only stayed considering from his lean, leathery mask, with still eyes, outward-looking.

"What do you care?" he said idly. "You'll be dead in a month anyhow."

Junius gaped toward him dizzily. The fellow was the local authority and besides had taken his money. He could not believe that he had heard aright. "But, say--they've stolen my property!"

Bendemeer shot a blue ring of smoke into the sunshine. "In that case you've lost it. They're heading for the Rocks, and once they've gone to earth there you never could find them--you'd be torn to pieces if you did."

He nicked the ash of his cheroot in a pause. "I suppose you mean I might help you," he continued. "I might, but I won't. I've seen a good many of your kind before, drift stuff that gets washed up on the beach. You're not worth it. And now, since you have no further business with me, I'd be obliged if you'd kindly get the hell out of my front yard. You're interfering with the view." ...

Junius Peabody found himself groping away through the sunlight on Fufuti beach once more. A dead calm held the air. Under the steady, low organ note of the reef he could hear only the drag of his own steps, the curious, unforgetable "shr-ring" of boot leather on coral.

It was borne upon him then that he had just acquired a liberal education, that he had learned more essential facts within the last hour than he had ever gained before in his twenty-odd years--a tabloid of life--and too late to be of any use. Such abstractions are sometimes valuable to a man, but they are not the sort that brings a lump in his throat and a winking in his eyes. The thing, the sheerly heartfelt thing that Junius Peabody said to himself, sniffling, was this: "And he didn't--didn't even offer me a drink!"

There was nothing to draw him any farther--no help, no promise of success, not even a single witness to shame with a grin or to urge with an expectant stare--nothing outside himself. Fufuti beach lay stark and aching white before him. The two thieves had long since lost themselves among the palms. Down by the water's edge a couple of Bendemeer's boat boys were salvaging odds and ends lost overboard in an upset in yesterday's heavy surf. They did not waste a thought or a look on him. He was many degrees less important than a lot of other rubbish around there. He might just as well, he might much better, slump down in a sodden heap amid the rest of the jetsam. And yet he did not.... And he did go on. For some obscure, irrational human reason, he did go on. Perhaps because of the tiny coal in his breast, blown red by Bendemeer's blasting contempt. Perhaps because, after all, no man ever quite achieves complete resemblance to a jellyfish.

* * * * *

On the southern tip of Fufuti stands Tenbow Head, the end of a rough little jut of land known locally as the Rocks. To speak by the book, there is neither rock nor head, but the abyss turned in its sleep once, and shouldered half a mile of Fufuti's shore line to a height of thirty feet--enough for a mountain in this sea of humble atolls. Incidentally it smashed the elevated reefs like chalk in a mortar. Tenbow is a wreck of shattered coral terraces, clad in the eager growths which profit by its trifling rise and which alone do profit. For the rest it remains the island jungle, a section apart and untouched, almost impenetrable.

Junius Peabody began his exploration of this cheerful region by falling on his face in a gully and bruising his nose very grievously. He found no trail to guide him up the slope. It was pitted like slag, deceitful as old honeycomb. The footing crumbled; tempting beds of moss and fern slipped away at his clutch; twisting lianas caught his ankles and sent him asprawl. The very ground seemed armed against him with a malignant life of its own. He had to creep among jagged teeth that sliced his flimsy garments and his putty-soft flesh. And when a loosened mass slid gently over at a touch and caught and crushed an arm he scarcely wondered whether any personal power had directed. It was all the same.

* * * * *

For a long time he lay looking at his pulped fingers and the driven drops of blood from the quick of his nails, sensing the exquisite pain almost as a luxury, hugging it to him. But at length he stirred and began to wriggle forward again.

"If I'm going to die anyway," said Junius Peabody, "I'm going to die doing this." Which was an extraordinary remark on all accounts....

And so by dint of following something and still following with unlimited purpose over a limited terrain, he ran it down in the end and came to the hiding place he sought.

A rooted instinct of the potentially criminal, which prompts them to be ready to flee though no man pursueth, had moved the beachcombers of Fufuti long since to prepare their snug retreat in the heart of the Rocks. On the inward shore of the promontory they had found a level bit of shelf screened by lush vegetation, with the green-stained cliff for wall and the sapphire waters of the lagoon below for forecourt. Hither they repaired in the intervals of lesser lawbreaking and free entertainment, always secure of hearth and shelter where the broad pandanus spread its shingles. And hither, straight as merry men to their shaw, they had brought the great treasure of the morning.

A truly homelike scene was that on which Junius Peabody peered from ambush above....

From the convenient branch of a tree the Sydney Duck had suspended by its middle a single stout stick. At one end of the stick he had slung the stolen lump in a fiber net. At the other he had attached a battered tin can of the kind that the beneficent enterprise of an American oil company had spread to most of the dark parts of the earth. On this balance of an ancient and primitive design he was engaged in weighing his ill-gotten gains, squatting to the task.

"A gallon of water weighs a good eight pound," he declared. "I figger five quarts an' a 'arf. And five is ten and the 'arf is one--"

Willems stood beside him in an attitude of stolid skepticism. There was no mistaking the breed of this big derelict. He had managed to assert it on a Pacific isle by fashioning himself somehow a pipe with a clay bowl and a long stem of the true drooping line. He looked quite domestic and almost paternal as he shuffled his broad feet and towered over the little larrikin. But the fists he carried in the pockets of his dungarees bulged like coconuts, and his hairy arms were looped brown cables. A tough man for an argument was Mynheer Willems.

"Yaw," he was saying. "But how you know you got five quarts and a half?"

"W'y, any fool could guess near enough!" cried Sydney, with the superflous violence that was his caste mark. "And you--y' big Dutchman--'in't you swilled enough beer in your time to judge? Besides, the bally can 'olds three gallon--bound to. There's one sure measure.... I say we got, anyw'y, eleven pounds of this stuff, and I 'appen to know that Bendemeer's fair crazy after it. He'll pay big. We ought to 'ave two thousands dollars Chile to split.... Two thousands silver dibs!"

It was a cue to friendly feeling, that luscious phrase. The two men beamed upon it as Sydney dumped the balance and swung the fiber net. But it was also a cue of another kind, for it brought Junius Peabody on stage. He arrived by the simple process of sliding on a bundle over the brow of the cliff.

"That's mine," he announced.

The beachcombers stayed stricken, which was pardonable. Surely there never showed a less heroic figure on a stranger defiance than that of Mr. Peabody, torn, bedraggled, and besmeared. There was nothing muscular or threatening about him. He took no pose. He offered no weapon. He came on at them limping, with quivering lip and empty hands, even with open hands. And yet the incredible fact remained that he did come on at them and continued to come.

"It's mine," repeated Junius. "All mine, and I'm going to have it--all!"

Amazement held them motionless for as long as it took him to cross the ledge--pleased amazement, as they knew him better. There are few things more congenial to certain gentlemen than a chance to maul an easy victim. And here was the easiest victim that either of these gentlemen had seen in many a day. He was no match for them, could be no possible match. Since he would have it so, they accepted joyously, closed in upon him from either side and started to drag him down as a preliminary to trampling the lights out of him....

But they counted without the absolute simplicity of a man who has found an objective for the first time in his life and has set himself to reach it, regardless. Mr. Peabody did not pause to fight or to wrestle. He let them get a good grip on him and then took the unexpected way by keeping right on--and, pinioning their arms, merely walking them over the edge into space.

For an instant the three seemed to hang suspended, interlocked amid smashing vines and taut creepers, and then toppled toward the lagoon.

* * * * *

Even before they struck, Sydney's despairing yell rang out. Their plunge drowned it and gave way to the cries of startled sea birds, knifing the air in flung white crescents and circling about the troubled spot that boiled like blue champagne. But when he came up again the unfortunate larrikin loosed shriek after bubbling shriek and floundered madly for shore, all else forgotten in his dominant terror.

Willems was made of sterner metal. He grappled Peabody as they rose and sought to use his long arms, reaching for the throat. He learned better presently, however, and he learned, too, how much chance he had against a man who had once won a fancy diving title at Travers Island. Junius took him down by the feet and held him down until there was no spring and no temper left to him, only a large and limp and very badly frightened Hollander who wanted to get out of the wet. He was quite willing to paddle after the Sydney Duck. Meanwhile Junius gathered up an object in a fiber net that was floating near by and swam on to follow his purpose....

The man Bendemeer was standing behind his little zinc bar when a shadow sifted in through the doorway, and, looking up, he took a backward step that nearly cost him his stock of glassware. The man Bendemeer was not used to stepping back from anything, but the red and dripping ruin that confronted him was beyond usage of any kind. Junius Peabody looked as if he had been run through a mangle. His dress was fragmentary. Most of the skin had been flayed from the more prominent curves of his anatomy. His left arm hung useless. He crawled in and propped himself to keep from falling, and called for brandy in a voice scarcely recognizable. "Peabody--is it?" demanded Bendemeer, incredulous.

"Will you keep a customer waiting?" rasped Junius. "You needn't stare." He laughed weakly. "You can't order me off now, Bendemeer. I'm a paying customer again."

"As how?"

Junius lifted a fist and dropped the sopping net on the bar. "Ambergris--eleven pounds of it. My property."

Bendemeer inspected the brownish lump, and as he understood, his thin lips pleated and his glance quickened. "Oh, ho!" he said. "Was it _this_ they robbed you of?"

Peabody nodded.

"You got it back from them--yourself?"

"There's the stuff."

"So I see. But I'm asking--did you take it away from those two cutthroats alone, without any help?"

"I did. And now I've come to talk business. It's a good proposition, Bendemeer."

The tall, grim white man studied him with a narrow regard glinting like a probe and equally cool, detached, and impersonal. He had the air of a surgeon who approaches a clinical experiment. "I'm inclined to think it may be," he decided. "Yes--a sporting risk; though I'm certain enough of the result, Peabody, mind that. I believe I might make a bit of a gamble with myself, just to see that I'm right. Come now--what do you want?"

"A thousand silver," said Junius.

"I haven't so much about me. Suppose we say a standing credit for a thousand drinks instead."

Junius stiffened against the bar.

"It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?" continued Bendemeer: "Why should you trouble about dollars--mere tokens? You can't get away from Fufuti. The _Jane_ out there, she's due to sail this morning on a round of my plantations. She's the only ship clearing for a month at least.... By the time you'd drunk yourself to death I'd simply have the money back again."

* * * * *

Peabody stared, and a streak of crimson leaped into his cheek as if a whiplash had been laid across it.

"Damn you--!" he cried shakily. "Give me that brandy--I'll pay for it. Here's the stuff. It's mine. I went after it and I got it. I earned it myself, and fairly!"

"To what end?" Bendemeer cut in. "So you can pickle yourself before burial?"

Junius Peabody writhed. "What's it to you how I spend it afterward? I'm a free agent. I can do as I like."

"That," said Bendemeer with quiet emphasis, "is a lie."

Holding his quivering subject, impaled on his glance as it seemed, he reached a black, square bottle. He shoved a glass in front of Junius Peabody and poured a generous measure. With one hand he kept the glass covered and with the other pointed out through the doorway.

"I'll say you lie, and I'll demonstrate:

"You see my schooner out there? That's her boat on the beach. She leaves in half an hour; her captain's come now for final orders. She goes first from here to an island of mine a hundred miles away. I planted it with coconuts five years ago, and left a population of maybe a dozen Kanakas to tend them--it's going to be worth money some day. Nukava, they call it, and it's the edge of the earth, the farthest corner, and the loneliest and the driest. There's not a drop of anything on the place except water, scant and brackish at that. But a white man could live there, if he were fit to live at all, and wanted to badly enough.

"Now I'll make you an offer. I'll buy this lump of stuff from you, and I'll buy it either of two ways. A half interest in Nukava and you go there at once to take charge as agent.... Or else--here's your brandy and I'll keep you perpetually drunk as long as you last."

Junius swayed on his feet. "Agent?" he stammered. "To go away--?"

"Now. And once there you can't escape. You're stuck for a year on a coral gridiron, Peabody, to sit and fry."

"What for? You--! What for?"

Bendemeer shrugged.

"Because it amuses me. Because I please. Because--I know what you'll do. I've been watching men of your sort all my life, and I know what they're worth--drift on the beaches, scraps, trash, jetsam. Regeneration, eh? Rot and drivel! You can't save yourself any more than you could lift yourself by your own boot straps. It suits me to prove it to you this way."

He lifted his hand away from the glass. Peabody's stare dropped from that cryptic regard to the waiting brandy before him, the red liquor, odorous and maddening. Peabody's lips moved, and he wet them with the tip of his tongue and gripped the bar with straining white fingers.

"You're wrong," he breathed. "You lose, Bendemeer. I can do it--I've just learned I can do it. And, by God," he added, prayerfully, "I will."

Bendemeer took up the netted lump.

"Very well," he said, offhand. "Just a moment, while I chuck this stuff in the storeroom."

He turned and tramped out through the rear without a glance behind him--and left Junius Peabody there alone before the bar.

He was gone perhaps five minutes, quite as much as that, an ample space of time. When he came back there was no glass in sight. It had vanished, and the room reeked with the fumes of a very flagrant distillation of French brandy. He looked his customer up and down and his lids lowered a trifle.

"Well, how did you like the flavor?"

The face of Junius Peabody was like a death's-head, but the eyes in his sockets blazed with a light all their own, and, standing there erect, standing square on his two legs with his feet braced apart, he swore--somewhat inexpertly, it was true, but still quite heartily; good, crisp profanity such as one able man may use with another--until Bendemeer's puzzled gaze caught the sparkle of broken glass lying in a great splash of liquid in a corner of the floor. "I'm going to Nukava!" cried Junius Peabody. "And you see--you see there are some scraps thrown up on the beach that are worth something after all, and be damned to you, Bendemeer!"

Bendemeer's grip shot out as if against his volition and after an instant's hesitation Peabody took it. He did not yet know all the trader had done for him, perhaps would never know, but on the inscrutable front of that remarkable man was a faint glow curiously unlike a loser's chagrin.

"So it seems," acknowledged Bendemeer. "So it seems"--and smiled a little, rather oddly....

* * * * *

Bendemeer was still smiling that way, all by himself, an hour or so later when he had watched the _Likely Jane_ lay her course for Nukava with the new agent on board and had gone down into his storeroom to put the place to rights. There was a clutter of odds and ends of cargo that had been spilled from an upset surfboat the day before. Most of it had been salvaged by his Kanaka boys along shore, but a certain broken tub containing tallow had lost part of its contents. However, he was able now to restore a large lump weighing perhaps eleven pounds or so, which made the tally nearly good.

THE ADVERSARY

In the good old days of Thursday Island there passed as waif currency a certain local jest. When some pride of the pearling fleet was moved to approve himself, his company, and the pervading wickedness in general he was wont to state--more or less titubant on his pins the while--that the only honest men in that merry little hell had come by land. It was a useful and a harmless jest, salted with the essential fact whereby legends are preserved and made historic. But from a date it lost its savor....

At the Portugee's one night--Saturday, be sure, for it was always Saturday on Thursday with the pearlers--a gentleman from Wooloomooloo who had just adorned the traditional witticism with profane fancy found himself confronted by a quiet stranger who laid down his coat and a new law.

"I don't mind so much what you call yourselves _to_ yourselves," he observed, while the circle shouted and spread about. "Nor your nice new magistrate, nor your missionaries, nor your artillery guard on the hill. Maybe you've overlooked the modern spread of respectability and corrugated roofings. Or maybe you know 'em better than I do. But I've come to tarry with you for a time, my friends. And, as long as I'm in your midst, any chap that says I'm not honest--and can't prove it--I'll knock seven bells out of him."

Which he did, _seriatim_.

* * * * *

Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.

Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in _beche de mer_.

Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success. Nobody questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on a pearling license. Nobody wondered when he paid off and scattered his Kanaka crew--possible links with his past--and shipped a new lot from the motley mob on the jetty.

And a motley lot he picked! His cook was Chinese; his head diver a Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp, the name of Buttermilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact--which again nobody noticed--that they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who do.

This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself might have filled a whole illustration; thewed like a colossus, crop black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an institution....

"'Im? Cap'n of the _Fancy Free_, that flash little lugger out beyond. 'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on shore leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might ha' owed you--that's 'is sort. And--my word!--'e's got a jab to the boko you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im. 'Honest Wetherbee'--that's 'im."

For he lived to the title. If it is honest to abide by every hampering regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices over a bit of inferior shell; to lose two weeks with your outfit in quarantine, voluntarily--that happened when the _Opalton_ brought a hot cholera scare and her passenger list camped on Friday Island--to share your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee played it. Amazingly--as a man might play an arduous game!

Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the harbor master and was calling various pilots, navigators, and odd fish of Torres Strait by their handier names--especially the pilots. These were the rewards of reputation, and they defined Thursday's acceptance of him up to that night in the wet season when his visit ended....

A Saturday again. The northwest monsoon had broken with torrential downpour, and now the island reeked in a steam bath, as if the young moon had focused a sick, intolerable ray upon it. A high wind stormed the sands and brought no relief. The quiver of the surf beat on the senses like heat waves. A few thrashing pawpaws and palm tufts threw shadows like tormented sleepers along the beach. But up in the town Thursday took its usual "tangle," shouted and sang and drowned its fever without assuagement in the periodic crisis of the fortune hunt. A Brisbane steamer lay ready to depart with the morning tide. Meanwhile her shore goers, "seeing a bit o' life," did their possible to keep up the prevailing temperature. Only the long jetty was quiet. Here a man might stand back and away from it all and hear the single note of its turmoil and peer into the mist of its lights like a contemplative Lucifer at the verge of some lesser inferno.

* * * * *

And in truth there stood such a man in much that manner. He had come down soft-footed from the streets and, lingering to assure himself he had not been followed, stepped out upon the jetty where he stayed motionless and attentive. His glance roved from point to point, noting, verifying. First the outward spread twinkle of the deserted lugger fleet at anchor; then the bulk of the Brisbane steamer at the T head, with her yellow cargo flares that showed loading still in progress: and the town, all unconscious of him. Something sinister seemed to detach this big, dim figure from the restlessness of the night; brooding apart there so coolly alert and contained. He regarded Thursday for a while, and at last, alone and with himself for confidant, he made a gesture as if to seal its folly and its whole destiny with final contempt and triumph.

He was turning away with a swing of broad shoulders when another figure slipped from the shadow and moved suddenly to confront him.

"Ah--Captain Wetherbee?"

Everywhere and always up and down the earth, and more particularly in rather unhealthful corners of it, are men who have to go braced for that questioning slur, that significant little drag before the name. It is a challenge out of time and space, and at sound of it the big fellow drew up tense like a battler in a ring.

"Halvers," stated the newcomer without preamble or apology. "I'll take halvers, if you please, Captain Wetherbee."

He revealed himself as a long, weedy frame in limp linen. Both hands were jammed into his side pockets with a singular effect--against a hypothetical chill, one would have thought. Without his stoop he might have been as tall as Wetherbee, but he had shrunken like the sleeves tucked above his bony wrists. He had an air at once fearful and implacable--the doubly dangerous menace of a timid man ready to strike.

Wetherbee was aware of it, though incredulous.

"You spoke?" he inquired, from a lengthened jaw.

"I said--halvers," affirmed this extraordinary apparition. There was no mistaking the peculiar flavor in his husky voice--no mistaking, either, that at present its owner was deadly cold sober. "Don't move, captain. I've got you covered from here.... And this time I'm not afraid to shoot!"

Wetherbee continued aware of it.

"Just my little device for holding your attention," explained the newcomer, between a cough and a snuffle, the remnant of polite affectation. "I thought it out very carefully."

"Ho! You did?" queried Wetherbee.

"You used to be such a damnably abrupt sort of person yourself."

"Ho! Did I?"

"Even then. Even then, when we sat under the same pulpit--such time as you found it socially expedient to attend--it was a matter of grave doubt to me whether you took any real benefit. You were always a poor listener, Mr.--ah--Wetherbee. Whereas I--I was chosen deacon that winter, you may remember."

Wetherbee stared into the shaven, haunted face thus preposterously thrust at him across the years. Aside from the unimaginable oddity of the attack, there was cunning and unsettling purpose in it, but he yielded no nerve reaction, no start or outcry; not even a denial. And by this--had he been wise--the other might have taken warning.

"By Jove!" was all his comment.

"We've come a considerable distance," suggested the new arrival.

They looked in curious silence, each measuring that span from the edge of things. Thursday howled on one side of them and on the other wind and the sea, until the humor of it won Wetherbee to a grim chuckle.

"Well, what do they call you nowadays--deacon?"

"I'm usually known as Selden, thanks."

"Seldom?"

"I shouldn't insist: any more than you yourself, captain."

"And what are you doing here?"

"I dropped in from Samarai, meaning to catch the Brisbane steamer yonder. I've been diving up there all season. I'm a very fair diver, really; only my luck is generally so poor."

* * * * *

To any passer-by he must have seemed the usual loafer, with a string of woes on tap. But Wetherbee, one eye to the bulging pockets, appeared in no way bored.

"Strolling along the front, I chanced to recognize you. _That_ was luck, if you like. I've thought so. Especially since making inquiries. I've made rather exhaustive inquiries. In fact, I believe I have your rating fairly up to date." He coughed again. "Captain Wetherbee, do you remember when we last met?"

"No," said Wetherbee shortly.

Thereupon Mr. Selden recalled that meeting, and others, and his voice trailed like a snake in the dust, looping cryptic patterns. It was one of those counts of grievance and disaster such as almost any broken fugitive among far places has to tell. Thursday can offer them by the yard, and dear at the price of a drink. He spoke of shares and deals and swindling betrayal; of hope and fortune lost, and the false lead that puts a man on the chute and sets him off for a blackleg and a wanderer. All in the clipped jargon of the markets, a common tale, but with this difference in the telling--it came away briefly, with the slow-biting venom that such a fugitive would be apt to reserve for only one out of all possible living listeners in the world. From over the hidden weapon he drove home his point; while Wetherbee stood there rooted on the jetty, like the Wedding Guest.

"... So you knifed the lot of us in the dark--everyone that trusted you--and bolted. That was your way. You sent me ashore from that last yachting party all primed to go my last penny on a dead bird. I was flattered. I used to credit your honesty more or less myself--then."

"And now?" suggested Wetherbee.

Mr. Selden, late deacon, drew a husky breath.

"Why, now--I've caught up with you. I'm the flaw in the title, at 50 per cent. I'm judgment out of the past! Verily, no man shall escape it: do you mark? No man comes so far or hides his track so cleverly, even at Thursday Island. I've got your record--as you've got mine, of course; but yours is rather worse, with a warrant pending--of which, by the way, I know the very date.... And, besides, I've nothing at all to lose. I'm only a broken diver. Nobody ever called me 'Honest' Selden or 'Honest' anything else!"

His wrists stiffened as Wetherbee took a step.

"You mean to blow, you wasp?"

"You won't make me. Blow! That's no good to me: I mean to get level. Halvers, I said--captain.... I'm in!"

"On what?"

"On your new speculation, of course." He came very close to capering. "Your latest deviltry. Don't I know your little methods? D'you think I couldn't smell it out? Public character, no suspicion, traces all removed--alibi all complete--_and_ a clear road to the back door.

"You sneaked your crew out of town to-night. Your lugger's ready to slip cable. You've been hobnobbing all evening with the pilot you camped along with on Friday Island for two weeks--that had the _Opalton_--by George, I believe it was you made him a sot on the sly! I wouldn't put it past you. You used to gammon us the same way on your cursed week-end sprees. Don't I _know_? Haven't I _reason_ to know?

"But you needn't have pumped him so close. I could have told you days ago what she takes aboard of her this trip."...

"The hell you could!"

"Pearls: the season's sweep. Twenty thousand pounds' worth of pearls!" recited Selden. "Eh? Twenty thousand--and I've got you by the short hairs!" His eyes shone in the moonlight with a fanatic gleam. "_Thus saith the Lord God; An adversary there shall be, and he shall bring down thy strength from thee!_"

* * * * *

Then Captain Wetherbee relaxed and laughed in his chest to match the note of the reef. "Blackmail and piracy! My colonial oath, deacon, I never saw your beat. So you've dropped to me! I go bail you asked a blessing on the enterprise!"

Selden did not deny it.

"Let's hear the rest," urged Wetherbee, while his chuckle echoed the lap of waves among dark pilings. "What's your notion? Did you picture me sticking up the consignors as they walk aboard the plank and passing you your share in a little hand bag?"

The deacon shuffled nervously.

"It can't matter how you do it."

"Can't it? Now, don't you go disappointing me." He stole a step nearer. "Those pearls have been locked in the strong room of the Brisbane steamer since early afternoon. Now then. How the devil am I--are we--to nab 'em? Come! You're the little personal Providence in this affair, at 50 per cent. Don't tell me with all your knowing you didn't know _that_!"

"It's your deliver," said Selden, "anyhow."

"Well, let's take counsel--I'm agreeable to have an adversary. Goodness knows I haven't had much amusement so far--the thing's been so rotten easy. By way of a text--Brother Seldom--and a point of departure: did you ever hear of the _Volga_? Ever hear of the _Quetta_ or the _Mecca_; or a dozen of other ships lost one time or another between here and Cape Flattery?

"Pity about them too--they fell a trifle off the track. Just a few fathom off the track among these millions of reefs that will rip the heart out of anything afloat. Suppose for the sake of argument our Brisbane steamer which we're both so interested in--out there at the dock head--suppose she should happen to go wandering this trip--say, somewhere around Tribulation Passage, two hours out. Suppose she should--as a slant of luck." His voice lowered with obscurely evil suggestion. "Would it occur to you we might have any chance of salvage on those pearls?"

"I--I don't understand," stammered Selden. "The passage is lighted. There's a light on Tribulation Shoal."

"So there is. What a helpful chap you are to work with! You keep it to port as you turn the Blackbird Reef. It's a fourth order fixed dioptric--unattended. The keeper lives on Horn Island. But suppose, now--suppose that light were moved, either way?"

"Move the light!"

"In effect, merely; in effect. A man might very readily land there from the lee and blanket that light to the westward. And if that same man, with something like a discarded lightship lantern aboard his lugger, should then anchor half a mile away, and show his light at the masthead--hey? A fifty-foot elevation is visible at nearly fourteen miles twenty-five feet up. But a twenty-five-foot elevation gives a total of only eleven point four.... You begin to see the possibilities for error--particularly if the pilot of the oncoming steamer should happen to be, as you wisely suggest, a bit of a sot with a hazy eye--"

"My God! You're going to wreck her!"

"Hush!" said Wetherbee very loudly.

Selden whirled around to find a black-skinned native standing impassive behind him. At the same instant a steel grip locked his wrists. "Not that!" he gasped, struggling. "My God, man, you wouldn't! You daren't!"

"No? And yet you said you knew my little methods." "Honest" Wetherbee shifted a thumb to his throat and smiled into his face. "I've a mind to show you, deacon--shall I--how far I _have_ come and how cleverly I _have_ covered my tracks?... Hya, you fella boy--that fella boat all ready? Then bear a hand her one time. We've got a passenger."

* * * * *

Now, it is a fact that no one knows or is ever likely to know the actual explanation for the wreck of the Brisbane steamer, which left Thursday Island that night and came to grief some two hours later on Tribulation Shoals. Other craft have gone the same way from natural causes, and Thursday has kept no suspect tradition of them. The only man who might have denied the yarn as afterward colored in local legend--and incidentally a libel on his own memory--was the pilot who had her in charge. And he never came back, drunk or sober. But the records declare that about four o'clock of a fair enough morning, wind and sea then running high, the 2,000-ton _Fernshawe_ went clear off her course among the graveyards where a coral ledge stripped her plates as neatly as a butcher's knife lays open a carcass. She sank inside of five minutes, and her survivors were hurried.

Neither has any one ever told the true adventures of the _Fancy Free_, the flash little lugger that happened somehow to be missing from week-end rendezvous at the same hour. Her crew were mostly inarticulate, and those who might have talked of strange comings and goings were "black fella boy know nothing." Her passenger spent the night praying in the bilge; and as for her commander, he left no report. But it is equally certain that when the next dawn spread the iridescence of a pigeon's breast over those empty waters it struck out the hull and spars of Captain Wetherbee's vessel, anchored fair between the tips of two sunken masts.

Captain Wetherbee himself straddled the deck in diving rig, and while a native helper held ready his great gleaming copper helm he mocked a limp, bedraggled, white-faced creature that clung by the rail.

"You'll note for yourself, Brother Seldom," he was saying. "Not a trace of evidence. We've not been spied. The lantern is sunk. These poor cattle haven't a glimmer. Here are we, and there are the pearls, twenty thousand pounds' worth--just overside. Within three hours I'll be off on the pearling banks about my business, and I never heard of any lost steamer. Next week, or any time I choose, I'll be walking the streets of Thursday to hear the news. And who so surprised as Captain Wetherbee, that hardworking man? 'Honest' Wetherbee, with a fortune in his belt to dispose at leisure!"...

His pallid face took a diabolic glow in the first sun.

"Except yourself, of course," he added. "_You're_ evidence. King's evidence. I'm not forgetting you. I'll even give you your chance. Are you coming, old 50 per cent? Yes--down there! With me! Hell--what kind of an adversary do you call yourself? Come on and share. Now's your time to get level and change your luck once for all. Fight it out with me--what? No?... Damn it, deacon, I thought you were going to be amusing.... I'll knock your silly head in when I come back."

He climbed to the ladder, but a final odd fancy occurred to him, a parting twist to the other's torment; and he summoned the big negro mate.

"You see that fella white man? Mebbe he wants to go below--good; you give him that other suit. Mebbe he raises hell or touches the pump; you knock seven bells out of him. Otherwise no order. You savee?"

Buttermilk saveed with a vacant grin.

There hung for a moment after the helmet had been locked a singled-eyed and monstrous red ghoul of the sea that presently lowered itself and sank....

Wetherbee landed easily on the boat deck of the _Fernshawe_ well away aft. It was hardly bright enough as yet above him, and he had to feel his path a foot at a time in somber green twilight. Quick fishes steered to and fro about him, silent and curious witnesses of this invasion. He gave no heed, he had no care of sharks or diamond fish or any possible danger, too intent on his errand, too elate and confident.

Balancing on his hands like an acrobat, he crawled over the edge, down to the main deck, and began to explore forward.

In one hand he held a short and heavy steel crowbar, with a fine ground tip. In the other he drew the coils of his life line and air tube. They lengthened after him as he entered by the main companion, passed the door to the saloon, and up a long, dark passage to a thwartship corridor. There, as he had known from a vague and general familiarity with its plan, was the door to the steamer's strong room. The lock proved a trifle in the nip of his powerful jimmy....

* * * * *

When he groped out into the passage, twenty minutes later, he carried slung to his belt, a sagging canvas bag.

It seemed to him that the ship must have moved in the interval of his search. Some shifting of cargo or fracture of the coral supports had tilted her sharply by the stern. He walked down a noticeable slope, and halfway he met a dead man, sliding on an upward current.

The stranger bobbed into him and went asprawl like a clumsy and apologetic passer-by. His sightless eyes peered into Wetherbee's with mild reproach. Wetherbee thrust him off, and he went bowing and spinning gravely on his course.

Wetherbee cared for no such matters. His nerve remained unshaken, his pulses calm, as befitted a man who had played out the end of a difficult game to rewarded success. But as he resumed his retreat down the passage he caught a glimpse of something surely quite as human and lively as himself.

The light was somewhat stronger now and flooding in through the side panel made a kind of proscenium of the landing by the main companionway. And in that space he descried a dim form facing him there, looking toward him: a man as tall as himself, clad like himself in diving rig--like himself in polished copper helmet. He knew only two helmets of that particular shape and color. One he wore. The other he had left on the deck of the _Fancy Free_, his spare diving gear. No man of his crew ever could have worn it, for none of them used an apparatus. Therefore he knew that Deacon Selden had come down after all to dispute the prize with him and to claim vengeance on the spot.