ship is more likely to forget his pants
than these bills which guarantee his character. I've known men drown to
save them: bad men, too; but this is the shipmaster's honour. And here
this Captain Trent--not hurried, not threatened with anything but a free
passage in a British man-of-war--has left them all behind! I don't want
to express myself too strongly, because the facts appear against me, but
the thing is impossible."

Dinner came to us not long after, and we ate it on deck, in a grim
silence, each privately racking his brain for some solution of the
mysteries. I was indeed so swallowed up in these considerations, that
the wreck, the lagoon, the islets, and the strident sea-fowl, the strong
sun then beating on my head, and even the gloomy countenance of the
captain at my elbow, all vanished from the field of consciousness. My
mind was a blackboard, on which I scrawled and blotted out hypotheses;
comparing each with the pictorial records in my memory: cyphering with
pictures. In the course of this tense mental exercise I recalled and
studied the faces of one memorial masterpiece, the scene of the saloon;
and here I found myself, on a sudden, looking in the eyes of the Kanaka.

"There's one thing I can put beyond doubt, at all events," I cried,
relinquishing my dinner and getting briskly afoot. "There was that
Kanaka I saw in the bar with Captain Trent, the fellow the newspapers
and ship's articles made out to be a Chinaman. I mean to rout his
quarters out and settle that."

"All right," said Nares. "I'll lazy off a bit longer, Mr. Dodd; I feel
pretty rocky and mean."

We had thoroughly cleared out the three after-compartments of the ship:
all the stuff from the main cabin and the mate's and captain's quarters
lay piled about the wheel; but in the forward stateroom with the two
bunks, where Nares had said the mate and cook most likely berthed,
we had as yet done nothing. Thither I went. It was very bare; a few
photographs were tacked on the bulkhead, one of them indecent; a single
chest stood open, and, like all we had yet found, it had been partly
rifled. An armful of two-shilling novels proved to me beyond a doubt
it was a European's; no Chinaman would have possessed any, and the most
literate Kanaka conceivable in a ship's galley was not likely to have
gone beyond one. It was plain, then, that the cook had not berthed aft,
and I must look elsewhere.

The men had stamped down the nests and driven the birds fro