ink he wouldn't strike a mosquito that was biting him,"
Sheldon said when Young had gone on board. "All the Norfolk Islanders
that have descended from the _Bounty_ crowd are that way. But look at
Young. Only three years ago, when he first got the _Minerva_, he was
lying in Suu, on Malaita. There are a lot of returned Queenslanders
there--a rough crowd. They planned to get his head. The son of their
chief, old One-Eyed Billy, had recruited on Lunga and died of dysentery.
That meant that a white man's head was owing to Suu--any white man, it
didn't matter who so long as they got the head. And Young was only a
lad, and they made sure to get his easily. They decoyed his whale-boat
ashore with a promise of recruits, and killed all hands. At the same
instant, the Suu gang that was on board the _Minerva_ jumped Young. He
was just preparing a dynamite stick for fish, and he lighted it and
tossed it in amongst them. One can't get him to talk about it, but the
fuse was short, the survivors leaped overboard, while he slipped his
anchor and got away. They've got one hundred fathoms of shell money on
his head now, which is worth one hundred pounds sterling. Yet he goes
into Suu regularly. He was there a short time ago, returning thirty boys
from Cape Marsh--that's the Fulcrum Brothers' plantation."

"At any rate, his news to-night has given me a better insight into the
life down here," Joan said. "And it is colourful life, to say the least.
The Solomons ought to be printed red on the charts--and yellow, too, for
the diseases."

"The Solomons are not always like this," Sheldon answered. "Of course,
Berande is the worst plantation, and everything it gets is the worst. I
doubt if ever there was a worse run of sickness than we were just getting
over when you arrived. Just as luck would have it, the _Jessie_ caught
the contagion as well. Berande has been very unfortunate. All the old-
timers shake their heads at it. They say it has what you Americans call
a _hoodoo_ on it."

"Berande will succeed," Joan said stoutly. "I like to laugh at
superstition. You'll pull through and come out the big end of the horn.
The ill luck can't last for ever. I am afraid, though, the Solomons is
not a white man's climate."

"It will be, though. Give us fifty years, and when all the bush is
cleared off back to the mountains, fever will be stamped out; everything
will be far healthier. There will be cities and towns here, for the