THE LOST GOD

A Rex Ingram—Metro Picture.A Rex Ingram—Metro Picture.Where the Pavement Ends.A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.

Prophets have cried out in print, no man regarding, and saints have been known to write their autobiographies, and even angels are credited now and then with revealing most curious matters in language quite plain and ungrammatical. But I have seen the diary of an authentic god who once went to and fro on the earth and in the waters underneath.

His record is the Book of Jim Albro, and he made it at Barange Bay, which is Papua, which is the end of the back of beyond and a bit farther yet; the great, dark, and smiling land that no white man has ever yet gripped as a conqueror, where anything can happen that you would care to believe and many things that you never would. He neglected to copyright it himself. The chances of his returning to claim it are apparently remote. And Jeckol says that fiction is stranger than truth anyhow, and pays better. So I shall feel quite safe in making free of that remarkable work, just as Jim Albro set it down with a leaden bullet on some strips of bark and left it for those who came after to find....

In his very blackest hour Jim Albro must have known that somebody would come after him, some time. Somebody always did come after him, no matter how far and to what desperate chance his trail might lead. He was that kind. All his days he never lacked the friend to hunt him up and to pack him home when he was helpless, to pay his bills or to bail him out at need. One of those irresistible rascals born to a soft place near the world's heart, whose worst follies serveonly to endear them, whose wildest errors are accepted as the manifestation of an engaging caprice, while they go on serenely drawing blank checks against destiny!

It is odd that he should have had to settle up in the end unaided, cut off from all help, completely isolated—and yet with the savor of popular admiration still rising about him, amid the continued applause of a multitude....

"A chap like Albro can't simply drop out of sight, like you or me might," said Cap'n Bartlet, thoughtfully. "He's filled too much space and pulled through too many scrapes. He's had his way too often with men and devils—and women too."

We were strung along the rail on the after-deck of the littleAurora Bird, as she began to grope her passage through the barrier reef, a silent lot. Talk had been cheap enough on the long stretch up the Coral Sea, when every possible theory of Albro's fate, and the fate of his three white shipmates and their native crew, had been thrashed to weariness. But now suspense held us all by the throat, for we were come at last to Barange, the falling-off place.

And something else held us—I could call it a spell and not be so far wrong. The lazy airs offshore bore down to us the scent that is like nothing else in the world, of rotting jungle and teeming soil; of poisonous, lush green, and rare, sleepy blossoms, heavy with death and ardent with a fierce vitality. This is the breath of Papua, stirring warm on her lips, that none who has known between loathing and desire can ever forget. Many men have known it, traders, pearlers, recruiters, gold hunters, and eagerly have sought to know more and have died seeking. There she lies, the last enigma, guarding her secrets still behind her savage coasts and the fringe of her untracked forests—the black sphinx of the seas, lovely, vast, and cruel.

We had been watching the widening gap of the bay off our quarter, the palm-tufted threads of beach, thesullen hills aquiver in the heat haze and the nameless dim mountains beyond. For an hour or more the only sounds had been Bartlet's gruff orders to the Kanaka at the wheel, the gentle crush of foam overside, the musical cry of the leadsman and the tap-tap of reef points and creak of tackle as our sails slatted and filled again. Each one of us was intent for some sign of the disaster. Each one of us had a question pressing on his tongue—pretty much the same question, I judge—but nobody cared to voice it until the cap'n spoke. He had had, we knew, rather a special interest in Albro.... "Throw him how you like, he'd land on his feet," he said.

"Aye," confirmed Peters, the lank trader from Samarai. "Or if so be he couldn't stand, why the crowd would fairly fight for the privilege of proppin' him up and buying him the last drink in the house."

"You think he's alive?" piped Harris then.

"I think he's alive," said Bartlet, without turning his shaggy gray head. "He weren't made to finish hugger-mugger in no such hell hole. I'm backing the luck of Jim Albro, that always had his way."

"Like as not," said Peters, and span the cylinder of his big Webley revolver and chuckled a little; "like as not we'll find him sittin' on a stump all so lofty with the niggers squatted round in rows, addressin' of the congregation."

You will note—and a queer thing too—that this happened before we had learned the first sure detail of the affair at Barange Bay.

It was now the 20th of April. On the 2nd of November preceding, the pearling schoonerTimothy S.had cleared from Cooktown on her lawful occasions for Joannet Harbor in the Louisiades. She had never reached Joannet. A month later she had been spoken by a Sydney steamer up among the Bismarck Group,where she had no ostensible business to be. And early in March some cannibal gossip of the West Coast, friendly or only boastful, had passed word to some missionary of a British schooner cut off at Barange. That was strictly all. It remained for certain friends and backers at Cooktown, with or without lawful occasion, to link up the vaguely rumored outrage with the actual and private destination of theTimothy S., and to send our search party go-look-see.

But Jeckol snorted.... You could hardly blame him, at that. Among the five of us he was the only man who had never crossed Jim Albro at one point or another in the career of that eccentric luminary. And, besides, it was Jeckol's business to snort. You must have read his clever bits in the "Bulletin"—those little running paragraphs that snap and fume like a pack of Chinese crackers? He had been loafing about Bananaland on vacation just before we started, and of course he got wind and wished himself along. Trust a pressman to know the necessary people and a chance for copy.

"I've heard a deal of talk of this Albro since we weighed anchor," he said. "What's all about him? He wasn't commanding theTimothy S.?"

"No," drawled Peters. "No—he didn't command. Mullhall was skipper."

"Did he launch the scheme then? Was he the discoverer of this wonderful virgin shell bed they were going to strip?"

"No," returned Peters. "No—you couldn't say he had any regular standin' in the expedition.... He shipped as a sort of supercargo—didn't he, Cap'n Bartlet?"

"Cabin boy, more likely," said Bartlet in his slow way. "Or bos'n's mate—or even midshipmite."

Jeckol eyed us all around, but nobody smiled.

"You're getting at me," he said. "Never mind.Only I'm going to write the yarn, you know. You'd much better help me pick the right hero. What's your famous Albro like?"

"The takingest chap that ever stood in shoe leather," cried young Harris with a rush. "Absolutely. I never saw him only twice, but I remember just how he looked and what he said. The first time he was drunk—but—but that was all right. He sang 'Mad Bess of Bedlam' to make your hair curl. And one night in Brisbane when he took on the Castlereagh Slasher for two rounds—"

"Six foot of mad Irishman," said Peters, "and about three inches of dreamy Spaniard atop of that—to put a head on the mixture, you might say. Blue-black wavy beard and an eye like a blue glass marble—"

"With the sunlight shining through!" Harris shot in.

"James O'Shaughnessy Albro." Peters lingered upon the name. "As to his luck, Cap'n Bartlet may be right, but I wouldn't call it so. He was born too late. He should ha' been a conquistador—d'y' call 'em?—and gone swaggerin' up and down in the old time holdin' pepper rajahs to ransom and carvin' out kingdoms. Whereas he was only Jim and anything you like between a navvy and a millionaire.

"Nobody knows what he'd done back home—prob'ly he got to bulgin' over too many boundaries and needed room. He blew into the Endeavor River one season with a tradin' schooner of his own—curly maple saloon, satin divans, silver-mounted gun racks—by Joe, you'd ha' thought he was goin' to trade with cherryubims for golden harps in the isles of paradise. And so he very nearly did, too, what with the dare-devil chances he took, till he lost craft and all on a race back from Thursday Island."

"Wrecked?" asked Jeckol.

"Just gambled. Old man Tyler could lay hisHawfinchhalf a point nearer the wind than a chap has a right to expect from an archbishop. Jimmie paid over at the dock head and went weavin' his way up Charlotte Street a beggar, turned into a political barney they were havin' there, and made them a roarin' speech on somethin'—temperance prob'ly. And, by Joe, if they didn't elect him a divisional councilor the next day!"

"I've heard of that," proffered Harris with a grin. "Wasn't it the same winter he did a quick dash to the tin mines for his health? It seems there was a beauteous and wealthy widow. He couldn't have loved her half so well had he not loved her pretty under-housemaid more. So he started for Mount Romeo!... My word, he'd turn the worst scrape into a romance, that fellow! They say he made a big winning at Romeo—just to console himself."

"He made a dozen winnings. And I've helped him to a job as warehouse clerk at Samarai when he wore no shirt under his coat, and gunny bags for trousies. That's what the cap'n here means by his luck, I fancy, because you couldn't keep him down. Capitalist, miner, politician, stevedore—it was all one to Jimmie. Look how he brought up theCreswickthat nobody else would touch when she went ashore on Turn-again Island, cleared two thou' off her by the nerviest kind of work and dropped it all on the next Melbourne Cup. Little he cared. He was havin' his own way with life—as you say, Cap'n Bartlet."

But Jeckol frowned and pursed his thin lips.

"He never saw the game that was too big for him," said Harris, "nor held back his smile nor his fist."

"Darlinghurst jail is full of the same sort," observed Jeckol dryly.

"You ask what he was like?" Cap'n Bartlet swung around beside the wheel. "I'll tell you. I'm married to a girl that was pretty chief with Jim Albro once.There's no living man dare stand and say a word agen my wife—the finest in Queensland, sir—but I knew all the talk when I married her. And yet you see me here."

"Ah? With an entirely friendly purpose?" queried Jeckol, peering at him. "Or to make sure he won't come back?"

I saw the color flood to Bartlet's rugged cheek and ebb again.

"In friendship," he answered simply.

Jeckol made a gesture like a salute, with a hint of mockery perhaps, but he said no more. And we others said rather less. Bartlet brought the schooner smartly about on her heel and laid her square through the gap and we turned again to that sinister bay, opening before us like the painted depth of a stage set, whereon we were now to discover and reconstruct our obscure tragedy.

We drew a quick curtain on it. Scarcely had we come abreast the near headland when one of the brown, breech-clouted sailors leaped up forward with a yell, and each startled eye swept past his darting finger to the wreck of theTimothy S.There could be no manner of doubt—a green hull with a black water line, bedded low and on her side, hatches awash, just behind a shallow jag of the shore well away to leeward. We needed no glasses to pick her name or to see that nothing remained of life or value about the battered shell. She lay in her last berth, in the final stage of naval decay, stripped to the shreds of rigging, her masts broken short and bare as bleached bones; and from her whitened rail rose up a flight of boobies that cried like shrill, mournful ghosts and vanished....

"Aye—that's the end of their pearlin' cruise," said Peters grimly. "That's Mullhall's craft, sure enough. The southwest gales would drive her there. She mustha' been anchored just about where we're passin' now, and I shouldn't wonder."

"On the shell bank?" sniffed Jeckol, leaning to squint down into the sparkling blue.

"Fair under our keel, I'd say."

At a signal the leadsman had flown his pigeon again, though we were well past all reefs.

"Eleven fathom!" Harris echoed the cry. "That's diving! I heard it was a deep-water bed. D'you suppose they were at it when the niggers jumped 'em?"

"I figger they were," said Peters. "See that scrubby bit of island?—the point's not a hundred yards away. A dozen canoes could mass up there and never be noticed. By Joe, it's plain as paint. The ship snugged down for business—the diver below, like as not—pumps and tackle goin'—all hands busy on board and the watch calculatin' profits to three decimals behind the windlass. Aye, there's your treasure hunter, every time! Then perhaps a slant of wind settin' around that point to give the raid a runnin' start—and—"

"Him finish," concluded Harris briefly. "All over in ten minutes. They'd hardly know what hit 'em. A black cloud—that's all. A black cloud."

And Peters was right—it was all too plain. None of us but had heard tales enough, and stark history enough, of these blood-stained barriers that hedge the true unknown continent. To our waiting minds his few phrases threw a sharp picture of the careless ship, the stalking death, and the swift horror that must have followed. There lay the wreck and there the empty bay. The rest we could fill in for ourselves, or just about.

"Then what are we doing here?" asked Jeckol at last.

Peters was already dealing out rifles and ammunitionby the deck house, and Bartlet, looking drawn and old, did not seem to hear, but Harris jerked an answer over his shoulder with the flippancy of emotion. "Oh, you can't tell—we might find some smoked heads to bring away."...

A few minutes later the cap'n was giving his last instructions, while we of the shore party dropped to our places in the big whaleboat.

"You're not to follow us in whatever happens—mind that. If you sight more'n three canoes at a time, knock out the shackles and run for open sea. I'm leaving you Obadiah—he's a goodish shot—and four of the best boys."

The young mate nodded. He hated not coming with us, but Bartlet knew. This was Papua, where wise men take no chance and fools seldom live long enough to take a second.

We took none ourselves as we rowed slowly shoreward and sheered off out of spear throw, watching the wall of jungle. There is no beach inside Barange, only the mangrove roots that writhe down to the water's edge like tangled pythons through the oozy bank of salt marsh. It was very still and very clear in the afternoon sunlight, though the heat pouring out over us seemed the exhalation of a great steam bath, choked with stewing vegetation. Now and then our crew of clean-limbed Tonga boys rested on their oars, with timid, limpid gaze turned askance. We heard their quick breathing and the drip from the oar blades—nothing else. At such times we floated in a mirage where each leaf and frond and webbed liana with its mirrored image had an unnatural brilliance and precision, like a labored canvas or a view seen through a stereoscope.

And there stole upon us again the oppressive solicitation of the land, subtle and perilous. Behind the beauty and wonder of it, beyond those bright shores and the first low foot-hills of the range—what? Nobody knows, that is the charm and the lure. Peoples, religions, empires untouched since the birth of time—fabulous wealth, mountains of gold, cliffs of ruby, "cataracts of adamant," any marvel that fantasy still dares to dream in a prosaic century. They may be; no man has ever drawn the map to deny them. They must be: why else should the sphinx smile?...

"I suppose a hundred woolly-heads are spying on us now," whispered Jeckol suddenly. "Why don't they do something?" He fiddled nervously with his rifle and sniffed. "What a place! This air is deadly—rotten with fever. Faugh! It's animal. It's like—it's like a tiger's throat!"

I blinked at the little chap and with the same glance was aware of Peters standing up in the bow. The trader was just lighting a short-fused stick of dynamite from his cigar. Before I could cry murder he had lobbed it in and shot the bush.

It struck with the smash of all calamity in that utter quiet. The trees sprang toward us and the roar rolled back from angry rocks. Like a multi-colored dust of the explosion burst a myriad of screaming birds, lories, parakeets, kingfishers, flashing motes of green and blue and scarlet in the sunshine. But they dwindled and passed. The echoes died. The smoke drifted away and the green wall closed up without a scar; the silence engulfed us once more, floating there, futile invaders who assaulted its immense riddle with a squib....

"They don't seem to care much," giggled Jeckol.

But Bartlet raised a finger.

Far away in the wood something stirred. It drew nearer, with long pauses, pressing on and at last charging recklessly through the undergrowth. We had thespot covered from half a dozen rifles as there broke out at the verge a creature that leaped and clung among the creepers.

"Mahrster!" it cried, imploring. "Mahrster!"

A man—though more like a naked, starving ape with his knobby joints and the bones in a rack under his black skin—and shaken now by the ecstasy of terror! Not at us. He faced the guns without wincing. His beady eyes kept coasting behind him the way he had come as if he looked to see a dreadful hand reach from the thicket and pluck him back. The jungle, the land, was what he feared—

"Mahrster," he gasped, "you take'm me that fella boat along you! One fella ship-boy me—good fella too much!"

"What name?" challenged Peters. "What fella ship?"

From the chattered reply we caught a startling word.

"By Joe—he's one of their boys! Give way, cap'n."...

We edged in until Peters could yank the quaking bundle aboard and pulled again to safety from the mangrove shadow while the fugitive stammered his story in brokenbêche de mer.

It was true: we had found a survivor from the lostTimothy S.Kakwe, he called himself, and he had come to Barange "long time before altogether." Two months, at least, we judged. In the attack on the schooner he had escaped by swimming. Himself a Papuan, of a different tribe and region, he had taken to the tree tops after the fashion of his own people, the painted monkey folk of Princess Marianne Straits—a facility to which he owed his life, it appeared, for he had since lived on fruits and nuts among the cockatoos, undiscovered.

This much we gathered from his gabble before Peters caught him up.

"But the others—them white fella?"

"All finish," said Kakwe bluntly.

"How?" cried Peters.

"No savee, me. Too much fright—walk along salt water—get to hell along beach, along tree. Me fright like hell!"

His account tallied with our own theory of the massacre, but he had seen no bodies brought ashore, could not identify the murderers, could not say where the native village lay or how to reach it, would not guide any one into that bush on any consideration. For the rest—this was a "good fella place" to get away from quickly.

"Ah," said Jeckol, sympathizing. "And that's a true word."

So indeed it seemed, and it is odd to think how close we were to giving up then. Aye, we were that close. We drifted out toward the anchorage and looked helplessly around us. The place was so huge, so baffling. Hopeless to search further among empty swamps and forests, to grope at large in this hushed wilderness, to coerce a jungle. The cruisers that have bombarded these same coasts on many a punitive expedition have learned how hopeless—against Papua, who keeps her secrets.

We must have been halfway back to theAurora Birdwhen Bartlet, sitting thoughtful in the stern, made the sign that brought us up all sharp.

"He's lying," he said quietly.

Jeckol's nerves jumped in protest.

"Eh—what? The black? He's only scared half to death. You wouldn't blame him for wanting to get out of this trap, would you? I do myself."

"He couldn't have lived overhead the whole nest o'them all this time without learning something," declared Bartlet.

"Why should he lie?"

But Peters had risen to snatch around that weazened face, blank as a mummy's—his own was alight. "By Joe, and a timely reminder. When you've got to ask why a Papuan nigger should lie you've gone pretty wide! As for scare—what d'y' suppose he must ha' seen to scare him so?"

Here he bent our monkey man over a thwart and introduced him affectionately to the Webley....

"You fella Kakwe," he said, "my survivin' jewel—I forgot your breed. I should ha' begun by bang'm black head b'long you. Now don't stop to gammon. Whatever you're holdin' back youshow—savee? S'pose you no show'm straight, me finish 'long you close up altogether!"

And Kakwe showed. Dominated by superior wickedness, with all the black man's docility under the instant threat, he collapsed quite simply at the touch of steel, and he showed—the nook where a tiny, hidden creek flowed down among the mangroves, the winding course that led by the swamp's edge through dank and darksome channels to a trodden mud bank and Barange village itself, tucked away there like a huddle of giant hives in a back lot. This time we paused for no maneuvering. Even Jeckol grabbed a boat hook and we pushed through, eager to strike on a definite lead at last—

Though we might have saved our energy, for the wild had its surprise in waiting. The village was silent, deserted, tenantless.

We landed at the square, to call it so, a rude clearing on which the few houses faced, those sprawling, spacious communal dwellings—palaces among huts—that sometimes amaze the explorer along the WestCoast. None opposed us. Nothing moved, not so much as a curl of smoke. An insect hummed in the sun like a bullet, and I take no shame to say I ducked. But that was all. And when the groveling Kakwe led us to a wide platform that ran breast high across the front of the largest house we stood with rifles propped and quickened pulses, staring stupidly at the thing we had come this far to find....

Only a box, lying on the middle of the platform, under the shadow of the lofty thatch—a small, brass-bound chest such as sailormen love and ships carry everywhere! "Loot!" snorted Jeckol. "Well—?"

But Cap'n Bartlet had laid hold of another trove, a coil of ringed rubber tubing, neatly disposed about the chest. "What's there?"

"A diver's air pipe," stated the cap'n.

"What about it?"

"It's been cut—top and bottom."

We crowded for a look, and I saw his tanned fist tremble ever so slightly.

"A diver's pipe," he repeated. "A diver, d'you see? They had a diver, and—according to your notions, Peters—" He drew a slow breath. "What—what if that there diverdidhappen to be overboard at the minute the rush came?"

And then came the voice of Peters, cool and drawling: "Some one's left a message on the box."

As we span around he turned it over atilt, so that all might see the bold letters, scarred in lead, of that laconic legend—all but Bartlet, who fumbled for his spectacles. "Writ with a Snider bullet, I take it," continued the trader. "One of them soft-nosed kind as supplied to heathen parts for a blessin' of civilization."

"Read it, can't you?" begged the cap'n.

And this was the notice Jeckol read:

The Crew of the SchoonerTimothy S.of Cooktownthat tried a cast with fortune and turneda deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19—J. Mullhall,masterBamba, KohoB. Smythe,mateKakwe, Jack-JackHenry NewMenomi, FrankHic finis fandi

The Crew of the SchoonerTimothy S.of Cooktownthat tried a cast with fortune and turneda deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19—

J. Mullhall,masterBamba, KohoB. Smythe,mateKakwe, Jack-JackHenry NewMenomi, Frank

Hic finis fandi

Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that 'hic' language."

"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"

Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he inquired, "that the niggers run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books—?"

He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the box—a packet of thin bark strips covered with coarse markings and bound with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....

And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro. Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figuresof our Tonga boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the master's next whim; the massed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners; the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of Papua!

Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and I came up a professional god. But I wish I could find which son of a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the altar.

This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived. Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here was the man "with an eye like a blue glass marble," that "never held his fist or his smile." No other could have written it after the events he had survived.

Just as Peters inferred to have been the case, the attack on theTimothy S.caught the whole crew of pearl hunters unready. They had seen no natives at Barange, they kept no lookout, and when Albro stepped off the ladder that morning of January 22 he left his shipmates contentedly employed on deck. He never saw any of them again, or—what might have been a different matter—any part of them. He went down to the shell bed, and while he was there the black raiders made their sweep of the schooner.

It is likely the savages took the diving lines for an extra mooring—it is certain they knew nothing whatever about the apparatus—and Albro's first warningwas the cutting of that air pipe, when he found his pressure gone and water trickling through the inlet valve. Fortunately, he was just preparing to ascend and had tightened his outlet to inflate the suit. Fortunately, too, his helmet was furnished with an adjustable inlet and he was able hastily to close both valves.

He tugged at his life line, but it drew loose in his hand. He turned over on his side to look upward, but he could see nothing—only the vague blue twilight through which the slack coils of his severed air pipe came sagging. Then he knew that he had been cut off, and the hideous fear that lies in wait for every diver, amid the perils and loneliness of the sea bottom seized upon him. He might have popped to the surface by throwing off his forty-pound weights, but he was aware that no chance accident could have served him so, and his impulse was to get away, from schooner and all, to shore. Under water he had some few minutes to live, perhaps four or five, as long as the inclosed air should last him. Frantically he began to struggle toward the beach, yielding to a moment's panic that was to cost him dear.... While trying blindly to slash free the useless pipe he lost his diver's knife.

The rotten coral burst and sank under footing. Clogging weeds enwreathed and held him back with evil embrace. A tridacna spread its jaws before his steps so that he nearly plunged into the deadly springtrap of the deep. But he kept on up the slope; his keen spirit rallied and bore him through, and he came surging from the waves at last on a point of rocks outside the bay where he could cling and open the emergency cock in the helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness took him and he slipped and pitched forwardheavily, and with a great clang of armor the god fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.

Broke left arm getting ashore. Walking the beach when I met the niggers. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected.

These are the words with which Jim Albro chooses to make his note of a scene that can scarcely have had its parallel in human experience. With two dozen words, no more. You figure him there, I hope, that muffled colossus with his huge copper helm flashing red and his monstrous cyclopean eye agleam, striding along the strip of white beach against the hostile green hills of Papua. You see him break, an incredible apparition of power and majesty, upon the view of the dusky cannibal folk and stand towering over their stricken ranks, triumphant—a glimpse as through the flick of a shutter that passes and leaves the beholder dazzled and unsatisfied! But the whole record is only a series of such glimpses, some focused with startling lucidity, some clouded and confused, and all too brief.

One other bit remains to fix the picture—an inimitable splash of color, flung at the end of a perplexing page....

I picked out the chief devil-devil doctor, and raised him to honor. Old Gum-eye. Friend of mine.

Mark the spirit of the man. Whole chapters could supply no clearer tribute to his resilience and entire adequacy. Unerringly he took the right course to enforce the rôle thus amazingly thrust upon him and to establish his godhead. Already he had caught up the situation, had put its shock behind him. The inscription on the box remains his only reference to the loss of the schooner and her crew. And while this might seem to argue a certain lack of sensibility, I cannotfeel it was so with Albro. His was a nature essentially episodic, prompt to the play of circumstance. The thing was done and past crying over; the blacks had acted by their lights, and he had very swiftly to act by his. They had given him his cue. How well he filled the part we can guess. By evening he had been installed in some kind of temple or devil house as an accredited deity to the Barange tribes....

Here ends the first part of the Book, so far as its unnumbered and fugitive entries can be arranged—the first part and the only part quite comprehensible, before the haze of distress and anxiety has dimmed our image of that strange god, whose mortality was all too real. He began its composition that same night, picking up the Snider cartridge and the bark strips while still he had some measure of liberty. Perhaps he foresaw that he would want to leave the record. Perhaps he merely sought distraction, and he had need of it.

Squatting above his own altar, he prepared his own epistle. Around his sanctuary slept a guard of devil doctors, priests, sorcerers—he uses all three terms. No sleep for Albro. But while he wrestled there alone through long hours he found the pluck to jot those early notes by the flare of a guttering torch, beguiling the pain of his broken arm and the new terror that was now rapidly closing upon him.

Like a glint of lightning from a cloud comes the following spurted item, written the next day:

Forty hours of this. Am growing weaker. My arm—[word scratched out]. Had to give up trying to start the glass in my helmet. Can't budge it....

Soon afterward occurs another passage in the same startling altered key:

Tried to get away this [morning], but the priests too suspicious. I wanted to try smashing the glass on a rock. Likely would have burst my ear drums anyway—

And further:

If I could get hold of a knife for three minutes. Bamboo stick [part illegible here]—can't tear vulcan canvas. No use....

When Peters read those lines aloud and looked up he confronted a sickly ring of auditors.

"Good God!" breathed Bartlet. "He couldn't get out!"

The knowledge of Albro's actual plight crashed upon us all in just that phrase, and I leave you to gauge its impact. We had had no hint of it. Here was the diary before us. We were only waiting to learn the present address of the diarist. Indeed our whole attitude toward the singular discovery we were making had been quite cheerful, even exultant, like that of children who follow the tribulations of some favorite hero, secure of the happy solution.

"Couldn't getout?" squeaked Jeckol. "How do you mean—he couldn't?"

"He was locked up in that blasted diving dress!"

"Locked up?"...

"Sewed up—sacked up," said Peters heavily. "Did you ever see the damn' stuff? He calls it canvas, which it ain't, but tanned twill—two-ply—with rubber between. He can't tear his way out with a stick, he says. And small wonder. Talk about strait-jackets!"

"But—but why doesn't he take off the helmet?"

Peters stared unseeing at the packet in his hand, and his face was saturnine.

"By Joe, what a mess!" he murmured. "What a beau-ti-ful mess! Look here—d'y' know a diver's outfit? First he wears a solid breastplate—see?—that sets about his shoulders. Then the helmet fits onthat with segmental neck rings and screws hard down with a quarter turn to a catch. Aye, there's a catch to snap it home.... And where is that catch? Why at theback! No diver was ever intended to take off his own helmet!"

We could only blink at him dumbly.

"Albro couldn't reach it. Of course if he should manage to rip away the cloth from the eyelets he'd be all right—he'd simply shift the whole upper works. But them eyelets, now, they lock down all around through a vulcanized collar. He couldn't reach more'n two of them either."

"There's the glass—"

Peters offered the diary.

"What does he say himself? There's only one removable glass to a helmet and that's in front—an inch thick and screws tight in a gun-metal socket. It's guarded with a gridiron of bars—same as the two side glasses. He wants to break it, but he can't. He wants to unscrew it, but he can't. He wants to cut himself loose, but he has no knife. Do you see him—by Joe!—do you see him twistin' and writhin' and fightin' for his life in there—with one good arm?"

"Why—" cried Jeckol, in sudden appalled perception. "He couldn't even eat. He's starving inside that suit!"

"Starving?" echoed Bartlet, from colorless lips. "God—if that was all! He's dying of thirst by inches!"...

I do not know how it struck Jeckol, but it seemed to me as if a blackness came in upon the sun.

"Go on," urged Bartlet. "Go on!"

But it was not so easy to go on. Peters found whole pages of the Book impossible to decipher. At places it lapsed to a mere jumble of sprawling characters. Again the soft lead was hopelessly blurred over, where the pages had been often thumbed, or perhaps crumbledand thrown aside. He shuffled them hastily and we hung upon his search.

... uneasy god. They got me tied up now to keep me safe [words missing] joke, to pass out here like a rat under a bell jar. Not me. I don't mean to....

Curious. When Peters resumed the thread, when he read that eloquent line, those of us who had known Jim Albro nodded solemnly, one to another, as if sharing a profound and secret thrill. For this was the man's real triumph—and we felt it then, regardless of the outcome—that alone, beyond any conceivable aid for the first time in his life, speechless, helpless, at the end of all those amiable arts which had given him his way so often with men and devils, and women, too, Jim Albro was still the Jim Albro "that you couldn't keep down."

His body was consuming and shriveling with its own heat. He had to scheme for each scant breath he drew, spreading the dress and collapsing it at short intervals to renew the foul air. He had to view the tempting tribute laid out before the altar: juicy mangoes and figs and sugar cane, wild berries and young drinking coconuts freshly opened, with the new, cool milk frothing up at the brim. He had to receive the homage of a people, and to count by the wheeling sun how many hours of torment were left him. Worse than all, he had to withstand the pitiless irony of it, the derisive grin of fate that drives men mad. He did these things, and he would not yield. He did not mean to. And lest you should think the phrase a mere flourish—observe the testimony of the Book....

The tribes flocked in that second day to do him honor. There was a great gathering in the square. Some vivid pantomime was displayed before the highseat. Some unusual rites were enacted before the temple, when the bamboo pipes and drums were going and the doctors wore their vermilion mop wigs and masks of ceremony and chains of naked dancers were stamping and circling to the chant. Jim Albro watched and noted it all behind his solid inch of plate glass; not passively, not indifferently, but with close attention and the very liveliest interest. Aye, this god took an interest in the welfare of his people!

Heaven knows what he saw in the Papuans of Barange. By all accounts they are a plum-black race of rather superior ferocity—six feet is their medium stature and their favorite dish a human ear, nicely broiled. So the old traders report, and never an explorer has improved the description. It required some one who could sit down among them without losing his head—quite literally—to learn more. Albro filled the bill. He had nothing to do but to sit. And while he sat he busied himself with the thoughts that have made the strangest, and blindest, reading in the diary.

A prime lot of raw material. Why [do?] people always lie about niggers? Unspoiled [part illegible] the makings. Their orators told me in dumb show [words missing] behind the hills [lines missing].... Wonderful!

Wonderful, he says. Wonderful what? Chances, perhaps. Opportunities. Possibilities. Certainly nobody else ever had such as lay before Jim Albro if he could have won free to take them, as a conqueror, as a god. Was he dreaming even then of empire? Had he had a glimpse into the meaning of Papua that struck fire to his roving and restless soul? Had he fallen enamored of the sphinx, and had she drawn the veil for him? It may be. The fact stands that, fevered and tortured as he was, burning with thirst and pain, he discovered something capable of rousing that cry fromhim. We hear the cry, and that is all we hear—nearly.

...suppose I should take a hand at this dumb show myself. I could do it. I know I could. Am going to trust old Gum-eye. And afterward....

Peters looked up from the last page.

"Well?" said Jeckol impatiently.

"That's the end," announced Peters.

I cannot say what the breathless group of us had been expecting. Possibly the first-hand memoir of a miracle would have satisfied us, or the harrowing confessions and last wishes of the moribund. But so natural and unfanciful a thing as a full stop to the tension left us stupefied. We felt aggrieved, too, as if the author should have postponed his business long enough to let us know whether he was dead or not.

"It can't be!" cried Jeckol, all abroad. "How could it end there? What happened to him? Where is he?"

Peters swung his gaze around the vacant clearing and the impenetrable palisade of the forest.

"This was written three months ago, remember," he said.

"But he had a plan," insisted Jeckol. "He surely had a plan. He says he was going to do something. He'd found a friend he could trust. What next?"

"That friend must ha' failed him."

Cap'n Bartlet shook himself like one awaking. "No friend would have failed him," he said deliberately. "And—you're forgetting that ship boy again."

Once more, with a rattled oath, Peters pounced on the unfortunate Kakwe, quailing beside him. Once more he brought to bear the persuasion he best knew how to use; and once more the black boy submitted, wholly, and showed. He had nothing to tell. Hecould throw no light on events. But he had seen from the trees where the "white fella mahrster him diver" forgathered with all the fiends of the pit, whereat he was "too much fright," and he showed us this time up the platform of the identical wide-thatched house by which we had been standing. We crept in through the low entrance and across a floor of sagging bamboo mats and found ourselves before a curtain of pandanus that hung midway. We were long past astonishment, but Jeckol, arresting a gesture, dropped his hand.

"I daren't," he whimpered.

It was Bartlet who put the curtain aside. And there, in the twilight of the place, we saw the god as he had appeared in his recent earthly phase. His great copper head gleamed at the back of a shallow niche, made fast against the wall. The muffled, stiff clumsiness of his diving dress revealed a heroic figure, still disposed in the attitude of a sitting Buddha, with the leaden-soled diving shoes thrust out by either knee. His single huge eye glared down at us balefully from over the altar as we stood, overwhelmed in the presence. "And so he did—pass out," said Jeckol.

Something had caught the quick eye of Peters. Horrified, we saw him step forward and lay a vigorous and sacrilegious hold on that high divinity, saw the shape start and tremble as with life, saw it shake and flutter like a bundle of rags in the wind, and flap—emptily....

"Yes," said Peters. "He's passed out, right enough. Leastways from here. Passed out, and on. And quite easy too. Look at these slits—would you?"

The diving suit had been laid open like a stripped pelt with long cuts of a keen blade, one down the middle of the back, one across the shoulders, and others connected along the inside of each limb to the wrists and ankles.

"Gone!"

"Gone," confirmed Peters. "Whether the niggers dug him from it piece by piece like the kernel from a nut or whether that friend of his helped him to shed complete—you can take your choice. In either case he's gone—and gone this time to stay."

"There's no—no blood!" gasped Jeckol. "Anyhow!"

Cap'n Bartlet had removed his hat to polish his shiny forehead with the colorful kerchief, and he was looking out of the door over the tops of the trees to the far blue and nameless mountains of Papua, with an eye at peace.

"You could always bank on the luck of James O'Shaughnessy Albro," he said simply. "I knew he was alive."

But Jeckol was still reeling.

"I shan't write this yarn," he assured us earnestly.

"It's too—it's too—and besides, there's no end to it."...

"Hic finis fandi," suggested Peters.

It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland god, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.

Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the passion-vine....

Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things that are not done—that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never being the West. Where two eligible persons ofopposite sex are concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees they never ought.

Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the passion-vine was to blame. The passion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of passion-vine—and that embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and plantain, the twinkling signal of fireflies at dusk—one cannot live with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while the thrill and spring of youth remain.

They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion. Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham, as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression, for any ravaging of secret revolt—unless, like Hull Gregson, the trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the passion-vine. Then, perhaps....

Certainly her excellent father would have been thelast unprompted and of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles, these last remnants of an earthly paradise.

He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock, stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and brogans—these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor; moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.

"We have our little trials—" he said, and smoothed them rather fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.

For had he not also his mission, his infant class, his home, his books, his reports?—a whole solid and established institution from which to draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the passion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae about them as a snail secretes its shell....

"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little money we have put by—you remember we were going to purchase a new oil lamp for the chapel—would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for Jeremiah's Loo?"

"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.

"She is going to marry that tramp shell-buyer from Papeete. At least she consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I admit—"

Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had assisted there, dispensing the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the tea-urn—that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since she had passed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.

Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary—almost reckless.

"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."

He blinked.

"I don't—no. Nothing good."

"Still you are willing to marry them."

Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all things perhaps not strange.

For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air. Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded, and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to fear that something more troublous than yellow ribbons had ruffled his pink serenity. If Miss Matilda had been the trembling kind she would have trembled now at her own temerity—the result of indefinable impulse. And yet when his answer came it was no rebuke, rather it was eager, with an unwonted touch of embarrassment.

"What would you have me do, my dear?" he said. "I can't pass judgment on these people. Our society is limited—largely primitive. How many months is it since you saw another white woman here in Wailoa, for instance? They wish to wed—that's enough."

"The man is white and the girl is a native, and you would marry them so readily?"

Miss Matilda put the query with perfect outward calm. The Reverend Spener himself was the one to clatter his cup.

"What would you have?" he repeated. "I marry them; yes. I will marry any that ask—barring known criminals—and only too thankful to lend religious sanction. Because—don't you see?—they are bound to marry anyhow. Matilda—" He brought up short and regarded her with sharpened concern, very curious for a man who was commonly so sure of himself. "My dear daughter, I don't believe I've ever explained this point to you before. It's not—er—it's a subject rather awkward to discuss. But since we've reached it, there is a need why I should intrudebriefly upon your delicacy.... A very definite need."

If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place. If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.

"Yes?" she said.

"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead and started again.

"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union—really, you know, it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides which, they are very fair to look upon—undeniably—very fair indeed."

She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....

"Consider, moreover," he pleaded—actually it was as if he pleaded—"considered the position of the resident white in these isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world. Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah, yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls—it palls. He requires—er—diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in such charm and—er—sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."

He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily, as it proved. Miss Matilda wasin no condition just then to deploy the expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter of a lone missionary?

Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty worries and the same money needs....

From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the walls—"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated rectitude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart of the riotous tropics....

"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed to ask at last.

But the pastor had had time to reform his lines.

"I spoke somewhat at large," he said, with a wave. "My specific purpose was to define an attitude which perhaps you may have mistaken—to warn you against undue intolerance, my dear. You see, as a matter of fact, I had a talk to-day on this samehead—quite a helpful talk—with Captain Gregson."

For all her preoccupation with her own problems the name caught her with new astonishment.

"Gregson! The trader?"

"Captain," he repeated, significantly. "Captain Gregson."

"You talked with him?" she exclaimed. "But he—but you—I've heard you say—"

Thereupon Pastor Spener took the upper hand decisively, like one who has come off well in an anxious skirmish over difficult ground.

"Never mind what you have heard, my dear. Many things have been said of him—idle chatter of the beaches. He has been sadly misjudged. Captain Gregson is a very remarkable man, besides being the wealthiest in the islands—undeniably, quite the wealthiest.... He intends joining our church."

Miss Matilda rose from the table and moved away to the open side of the veranda, looking off to seaward. Tall, erect, with her hands resting on the high rail, she made a decorous and restful figure against the sunset sky. But those hands, so casual seeming, were driving their nails into the wood. For within the maiden breast of Miss Matilda, behind that obtrusive composure, there seethed a tumult of question, alarm, bewilderment....

This startling dissertation of her father's—she could not begin to think what it meant. Was it possible, in spite of all assurance, was it possible that he knew, had heard or guessed—about Motauri? And if he had, was it conceivable that he should speak so—to state, as it might be, the very terms of her guilt, an actual plea for that unnameable temptation to which she had been drifting? It was mad. She could no longer be sure of anything, of her safety, her purpose, her father, herself—truly, of herself. And Gregson! An evil presentiment hadpierced her at his mention of the gross, dark, enigmatic trader, whose intent regard she had felt fixed upon her so often—whenever she met him on the village path or passed his broad-eaved house by the beach. What did it mean?

Through a gap in the passion-vine she gazed out and over the whole side of the mountain into the wide glory of the sunset. There was nothing to interrupt that full outward sweep, nothing between her and the horizon.

The parsonage at Wailoa could never have been placed or built by any one of the Reverend Spener's level temperament. He had never found anything but a grievance in the fact that he should have to dwell so far aloft from routine affairs in a spot of the wildest and most romantic beauty. The village itself lay hidden below and to the left, at the mouth of the valley, whence the smoke of its hearths rose as incense. Half-way up the winding track stood his little chapel in a grove of limes. And here on a higher terrace of the basalt cliff, like an eyrie—or, perhaps more fittingly, a swallow's nest—was perched the pastor's home. The lush growth of an untamed jungle massed up to its step; beetling heights menaced it from behind; and always, at all seasons, a rushing mountain torrent in the ravine beside made its flimsy walls to thrill, disturbing its peace with musical clamor.

That stream should have been indicted for trespass and disorder by the worthy pastor's way of thinking. Somehow all the unruly and wayward elements of his charge seemed to find expression in those singing waters, which were not to be dammed or turned aside. From the veranda-rail one might lean and toss anything—a passion-flower—into the current and follow it as it danced away down the broken slide, lost here and there amid mists andmilky pools and the shadowing tangle of lianas snatched at last through a chute and over a sheer outfall, to reappear some minutes later as a spark in the fret of the surf far below.

Standing there at the verge of the world, Miss Matilda watched the day's end. For a time the bright gates stayed open at the end of an unrolled, flaming carpet across the sea, then slowly drew in, implacably swung to, while the belated spirit sprang hurrying forward—too late. With an almost audible brazen clang they closed, and Miss Matilda drew back, chilled, as the veranda shook to a heavy footfall....

"Ah, Captain Gregson—step up, sir!" Her father's voice was unctuous with welcome as he hastened to meet the ponderous bulk that loomed through the dusk. "Happily met, sir. You are just in time to join us at prayers. I believe you must know my daughter—Matilda?"

It was strange to hear the pastor use such a tone with such a visitor, and stranger still to see the assurance with which Captain Gregson entered the parsonage, where he had never until now set foot.

"Evening, Pastor. Just a moment. That path—pretty tough on a chap who's used—ship's deck as much as I have, d'y' see? Very kind, I'm sure. Very kind and neighborly. And this—Miss Matilda, if I may say so bold.... Very proud to know you, ma'am. Proud and happy."

He made her his bow, plying a broad straw hat and a billowy handkerchief of tussore silk. She found herself answering him. And presently—most singular thing of all—he had properly ensconced himself by the tall astral lamp like one of the family circle, balancing a Testament on his knee and reading his verse in turn with surprising facility....

Captain Hull Gregson was one of those men apparently preserved in lard, whose shiny, tanned skin seems as impervious as Spanish leather alike to age and to rude usage. But if his years were indeterminate, his eyes were as old as blue pebbles. By those eyes, as by his slow, forceful speech and rare gesture, as by a certain ruthless jut of jaw, was revealed the exploiter, the conquering white that has taken the South Pacific for an ordained possession.

He had led a varied and more or less picturesque career up and down the warm seas. He had been a copra buyer through black Melanesia in the open days; had owned his ships and sailed them after labor in the Archipelago with a price on his head and his life in his hand. And now, rich in phosphate shares and plantation partnerships, a sort of comfortable island squire, he had retired to peaceful Wailoa at last as a quiet corner where business was play and the hot roll dropped on time from the breadfruit-tree. So much was said of him, and it was not considered the part either of wisdom or of island etiquette to say much more—nor was much else required to set him in his place. Certainly he might have seemed somewhat out of it now. The type does not pervade the parlors of the missionaries as a rule.

But Captain Gregson turned it off very well. Once he had recovered his breath, and a purplish haze had cleared from his face, he comported himself easily, even impressively, neither belittling nor forcing the social event, the while that Pastor Spener beamed encouragement and smoothed a complacent brow....

"It's like I told you to-day, Pastor. The notion came to me like that—I've been a bad neighbor. There's so few of us marooned here, like. I said to myself—where's the use of being strangers, hey? Why not get neighborly with those good folks and help along that good work of faith and righteousness. Why not, hey—?"

He spoke with an effect of heartiness that delighted the Reverend Spener, and that fell on the ear of the Reverend Spener's daughter as hollow as a drum.

"Why not, indeed?" echoed the pastor.

"So many places you find a kind of feud betwixt the commercial people and the mission people," continued Captain Gregson. "Where's the sense of it? I believe in you, Pastor, and your work and your church. Yes, and I feel the need of the church myself, and a chance to visit a fine respectable home like this.... Why shouldn't I have it?"

Miss Matilda carefully avoided looking toward him, where he sat wedged between the fragile bamboo what-not and the lacquer tabouret, well knowing that she must cross his smoldering gaze and shunning it.

"And perhaps, by the same token, perhaps you might need me too and not know it," he continued. "I've a notion I might be of some service to the cause, d'y see?"

"Undeniably, Captain," said the pastor, eagerly. "A man so influential—so experienced as yourself—"

"Could help, hey? It's what I think myself. I could. Why even now I'll lay I could tell you matters—things going on right under your nose, so to speak—that you'd hardly dream yourself."

"Among my people?" asked the pastor, wrinkling.

"Aye. Right among your own people—at least some of the wild ones that you want to be most careful of. They're a devilish bold, sly lot for all their pretty ways—these brown islanders—an astonishing bold lot. You'd hardly believe that now, would you—?" His voice dragged fatly. "Would you—Miss Matilda?"

Taken aback, she could not speak, could scarcelyparry the attack with a vague murmur. She feared him. She feared that slow, glowering and dangerous man, whose every word came freighted with obscure and sinister meaning. The instinct dimly aroused by her glimpses of him had leapt to vivid conviction. She knew that he was staring across the room; staring avidly at the fresh whiteness of her there, the precise, slim lines of her dress, the curve of her neck, the gleam of her low-parted hair. And it seemed as if he were towering toward her, reaching for her with hot and pudgy hands—

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