rest," he said to Grief. "It will be a long swim to-night.
As for this cook-man, I will take him now to the higher places where my
brothers live with the goats."

IV

"It is well that you swim as a man should, Big Brother," Mauriri
whispered.

From the lava glen they had descended to the head of the bay and taken
to the water. They swam softly, without splash, Mauriri in the lead. The
black walls of the crater rose about them till it seemed they swam
on the bottom of a great bowl. Above was the sky of faintly luminous
star-dust. Ahead they could see the light which marked the Rattler, and
from her deck, softened by distance, came a gospel hymn played on the
phonograph intended for Pilsach.

The two swimmers bore to the left, away from the captured schooner.
Laughter and song followed on board after the hymn, then the phonograph
started again. Grief grinned to himself at the appositeness of it as
"Lead, Kindly Light," floated out over the dark water.

"We must take the passage and land on the Big Rock," Mauriri whispered.
"The devils are holding the low land. Listen!"

Half a dozen rifle shots, at irregular intervals, attested that Brown
still held the Rock and that the pirates had invested the narrow
peninsula.

At the end of another hour they swam under the frowning loom of the Big
Rock. Mauriri, feeling his way, led the landing in a crevice, up which
for a hundred feet they climbed to a narrow ledge.

"Stay here," said Mauriri. "I go to Brown. In the morning I shall
return."

"I will go with you, Brother," Grief said.

Mauriri laughed in the darkness.

"Even you, Big Brother, cannot do this thing. I am the Goat Man, and
I only, of all Fuatino, can go over the Big Rock in the night.
Furthermore, it will be the first time that even I have done it. Put out
your hand. You feel it? That is where Pilsach's dynamite is kept. Lie
close beside the wall and you may sleep without falling. I go now."

And high above the sounding surf, on a narrow shelf beside a ton of
dynamite, David Grief planned his campaign, then rested his cheek on his
arm and slept.

In the morning, when Mauriri led him over the summit of the Big Rock,
David Grief understood why he could not have done it in the night.
Despite the accustomed nerve of a sailor for height and precarious
clinging, he marvelled that he was able to do it in the broad light of
day. There were places, always under minute direction of Mauriri, that
he leaned f