for rain. Taute prayed to the Missionary God, and his two fellow
islanders, backsliding, invoked the deities of their old heathen days.
Grief grinned and considered. But Brown, wild-eyed, with protruding
blackened tongue, cursed. Especially he cursed the phonograph that
in the cool twilights ground out gospel hymns from the deck of the
_Rattler_. One hymn in particular, "Beyond the Smiling and the Weeping,"
drove him to madness. It seemed a favourite on board the schooner, for
it was played most of all. Brown, hungry and thirsty, half out of
his head from weakness and suffering, could lie among the rocks with
equanimity and listen to the tinkling of ukuleles and guitars, and
the hulas and himines of the Huahine women. But when the voices of the
Trinity Choir floated over the water he was beside himself. One evening
the cracked tenor took up the song with the machine:

"Beyond the smiling and the weeping,
I shall be soon.
Beyond the waking and the sleeping,
Beyond the sowing and the reaping,
I shall be soon,
I shall be soon."

Then it was that Brown rose up. Again and again, blindly, he emptied his
rifle at the schooner. Laughter floated up from the men and women, and
from the peninsula came a splattering of return bullets; but the cracked
tenor sang on, and Brown continued to fire, until the hymn was played
out.

It was that night that Grief and Mauriri came back with but one calabash
of water. A patch of skin six inches long was missing from Grief's
shoulder in token of the scrape of the sandpaper hide of a shark whose
dash he had eluded.

VIII

In the early morning of another day, before the sun-blaze had gained its
full strength, came an offer of a parley from Raoul Van Asveld.

Brown brought the word in from the outpost among the rocks a hundred
yards away. Grief was squatted over a small fire, broiling a strip of
shark-flesh. The last twenty-four hours had been lucky. Seaweed and sea
urchins had been gathered. Tehaa had caught a shark, and Mauriri had
captured a fair-sized octopus at the base of the crevice where the
dynamite was stored. Then, too, in the darkness they had made two
successful swims for water before the tiger sharks had nosed them out.

"Said he'd like to come in and talk with you," Brown said. "But I know
what the brute is after. Wants to see how near starved to death we are."

"Bring him in," Grief said.

"And then we will kill him," the