ds
the abandoned body of the tale it loomed up big amongst the glittering
shallows of the coast, lonely but not forbidding. There was nothing
about it of a grim derelict. It had an air of expectant life. One after
another I made out the familiar faces watching my approach with faint
smiles of amused recognition. They had known well enough that I was
bound to come back to them. But their eyes met mine seriously as was
only to be expected since I, myself, felt very serious as I stood
amongst them again after years of absence. At once, without wasting
words, we went to work together on our renewed life; and every moment
I felt more strongly that They Who had Waited bore no grudge to the man
who however widely he may have wandered at times had played truant only
once in his life.

1920. J. C.

CONTENTS

PART I. THE MAN AND THE BRIG

PART II. THE SHORE OF REFUGE

PART III. THE CAPTURE

PART IV. THE GIFT OF THE SHALLOWS

PART V. THE POINT OF HONOUR AND THE POINT OF PASSION

PART VI. THE CLAIM OF LIFE AND THE TOLL OF DEATH

PART I. THE MAN AND THE BRIG

The shallow sea that foams and murmurs on the shores of the thousand
islands, big and little, which make up the Malay Archipelago has been
for centuries the scene of adventurous undertakings. The vices and the
virtues of four nations have been displayed in the conquest of that
region that even to this day has not been robbed of all the mystery
and romance of its past--and the race of men who had fought against
the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Dutch and the English, has not been
changed by the unavoidable defeat. They have kept to this day their
love of liberty, their fanatical devotion to their chiefs, their
blind fidelity in friendship and hate--all their lawful and unlawful
instincts. Their country of land and water--for the sea was as much
their country as the earth of their islands--has fallen a prey to the
western race--the reward of superior strength if not of superior virtue.
To-morrow the advancing civilization will obliterate the marks of a long
struggle in the accomplishment of its inevitable victory.

The adventurers who began that struggle have left no descendants. The
ideas of the world changed too quickly for that. But even far into the
present century they have had successors. Almost in our own day we have
seen one of them--a true adventurer in his devotion to his impulse--a
man of high mind and of pure heart, lay the foundatio