rmed. Send the young man there with the boat."

So it was that Brown, thrilling with all the romance and adventure he
had read and guessed and never lived, took his place in the sternsheets
of a whaleboat, loaded with rifles and cartridges, rowed by four Baiatea
sailors, steered by a golden-brown, sea-swimming faun, and directed
through the warm tropic darkness toward the half-mythical love island of
Fuatino, which had been invaded by twentieth century pirates.

II

If a line be drawn between Jaluit, in the Marshall Group, and
Bougainville, in the Solomons, and if this line be bisected at two
degrees south of the equator by a line drawn from Ukuor, in the
Carolines, the high island of Fuatino will be raised in that sun-washed
stretch of lonely sea. Inhabited by a stock kindred to the Hawaiian,
the Samoan, the Tahitian, and the Maori, Fuatino becomes the apex of the
wedge driven by Polynesia far to the west and in between Melanesia and
Micronesia. And it was Fuatino that David Grief raised next morning,
two miles to the east and in direct line with the rising sun. The same
whisper of a breeze held, and the _Rattler_ slid through the smooth sea
at a rate that would have been eminently proper for an island schooner
had the breeze been thrice as strong.

Fuatino was nothing else than an ancient crater, thrust upward from the
sea-bottom by some primordial cataclysm. The western portion, broken
and crumbled to sea level, was the entrance to the crater itself, which
constituted the harbour. Thus, Fuatino was like a rugged horseshoe, the
heel pointing to the west. And into the opening at the heel the Rattler
steered. Captain Glass, binoculars in hand and peering at the chart made
by himself, which was spread on top the cabin, straightened up with an
expression on his face that was half alarm, half resignation.

"It's coming," he said. "Fever. It wasn't due till to-morrow. It always
hits me hard, Mr. Grief. In five minutes I'll be off my head. You'll
have to con the schooner in. Boy! Get my bunk ready! Plenty of blankets!
Fill that hot-water bottle! It's so calm, Mr. Grief, that I think you
can pass the big patch without warping. Take the leading wind and shoot
her. She's the only craft in the South Pacific that can do it, and I
know you know the trick. You can scrape the Big Rock by just watching
out for the main boom."

He had talked rapidly, almost like a drunken man, as his reeling brain
battled with the rising s