will be a respectable plantation."

Joan nodded but remained silent. She was too occupied in glimpsing the
vision of the one lone white man as she had first seen him, helpless from
fever, a collapsed wraith in a steamer-chair, who, up to the last heart-
beat, by some strange alchemy of race, was pledged to mastery.

"It is a pity," she said. "But the white man has to rule, I suppose."

"I don't like it," Sheldon assured her. "To save my life I can't imagine
how I ever came here. But here I am, and I can't run away."

"Blind destiny of race," she said, faintly smiling. "We whites have been
land robbers and sea robbers from remotest time. It is in our blood, I
guess, and we can't get away from it."

"I never thought about it so abstractly," he confessed. "I've been too
busy puzzling over why I came here."

CHAPTER VIII--LOCAL COLOUR

At sunset a small ketch fanned in to anchorage, and a little later the
skipper came ashore. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced young fellow of
twenty, but he won Joan's admiration in advance when Sheldon told her
that he ran the ketch all alone with a black crew from Malaita. And
Romance lured and beckoned before Joan's eyes when she learned he was
Christian Young, a Norfolk Islander, but a direct descendant of John
Young, one of the original _Bounty_ mutineers. The blended Tahitian and
English blood showed in his soft eyes and tawny skin; but the English
hardness seemed to have disappeared. Yet the hardness was there, and it
was what enabled him to run his ketch single-handed and to wring a
livelihood out of the fighting Solomons.

Joan's unexpected presence embarrassed him, until she herself put him at
his ease by a frank, comradely manner that offended Sheldon's sense of
the fitness of things feminine. News from the world Young had not, but
he was filled with news of the Solomons. Fifteen boys had stolen rifles
and run away into the bush from Lunga plantation, which was farther east
on the Guadalcanar coast. And from the bush they had sent word that they
were coming back to wipe out the three white men in charge, while two of
the three white men, in turn, were hunting them through the bush. There
was a strong possibility, Young volunteered, that if they were not caught
they might circle around and tap the coast at Berande in order to steal
or capture a whale-boat.

"I forgot to tell you that your trader at Ugi has been murdered," he said
to Sheldon. "Five