And to have "done something" in those days meant something worth talking
about, something that would give a man a name and a place in the ranks
of the daring men who had spent nearly all their lives in the South
Seas. Little Barney Watt, the chief engineer of the _Ripple_, when the
captain and most of the crew had been slaughtered by the niggers of
Bougainville Island, had shut himself up in the deck-house, and, wounded
badly as he was, shot seventeen of them dead with his Winchester, and
cleared the steamer's decks. Then, with no other white man to help, he
succeeded in bringing the _Ripple_ to Sydney; Cameron, the shark-fisher,
after his crew mutinied at Wake Island, escaped with his native wife
in a dinghy, and made a voyage of fifteen hundred miles to the Marshall
Group; Collier, of Tahiti, when the barque of which he was mate was
seized by the native passengers off Peru Island and every white man of
the crew but himself was murdered, blew up the vessel's main deck and
killed seventy of the treacherous savages. Then, with but three native
seamen and two little native girls to assist him, he sailed the barque
back safely to Tahiti. And wherever men gathered together in the South
Seas--in Levuka, in Apia, in Honolulu, in Papeite--you would hear them
talk of "Barney Watt," and "Cameron," and "Jack Collier."

Should I, "Jim Sherry," ever succeed in doing something similar? Would
Fate be kind to me and give me a chance to distinguish myself, not only
among my fellows, but to make my name known to that outside world from
which in a fit of sullen resentment I had so long severed myself?

As I sat on the mat-covered canoe, moody yet feverish, the first squall
of rain came sweeping shoreward from the darkened sea-rim, and in a
few minutes my burning skin was drenched and cooled from head to foot.
Heedless of the storm, however, I remained without moving, watching the
curling, phosphorescent breakers tumbling on the reef and listening with
a feeling of pleasure to the rush and seethe of the rain squalls as they
swept through the dense groves of coco-palms behind me.

Presently I rose, and walking over to my boat-shed, which was but a few
yards distant, I endeavoured to close the rough wooden doors so as
to prevent the rain from blowing in and flooding the ground. But my
strength was not equal to the task, for a puff of more than usual
violence not only tore the handle of the door from my hand, but blew me
inside the house.