re directed to fetch handcuffs, and, one by one, the
Lunga runaways were haled down out of their trees and made fast. Sheldon
ironed them in pairs, and ran a steel chain through the links of the
irons. Gogoomy was given a lecture for his mutinous conduct and locked
up for the afternoon. Then Sheldon rewarded the plantation hands with an
afternoon's holiday, and, when they had withdrawn from the compound,
permitted the Port Adams men to descend from the trees. And all
afternoon he and Joan loafed in the cool of the veranda and watched them
diving down and emptying their sunken canoes of the sand and rocks. It
was twilight when they embarked and paddled away with a few broken
paddles. A breeze had sprung up, and the _Flibberty-Gibbet_ had already
sailed for Lunga to return the runaways.

CHAPTER XII--MR. MORGAN AND MR. RAFF

Sheldon was back in the plantation superintending the building of a
bridge, when the schooner _Malakula_ ran in close and dropped anchor.
Joan watched the taking in of sail and the swinging out of the boat with
a sailor's interest, and herself met the two men who came ashore. While
one of the house-boys ran to fetch Sheldon, she had the visitors served
with whisky and soda, and sat and talked with them.

They seemed awkward and constrained in her presence, and she caught first
one and then the other looking at her with secret curiosity. She felt
that they were weighing her, appraising her, and for the first time the
anomalous position she occupied on Berande sank sharply home to her. On
the other hand, they puzzled her. They were neither traders nor sailors
of any type she had known. Nor did they talk like gentlemen, despite the
fact that there was nothing offensive in their bearing and that the
veneer of ordinary social nicety was theirs. Undoubtedly, they were men
of affairs--business men of a sort; but what affairs should they have in
the Solomons, and what business on Berande? The elder one, Morgan, was a
huge man, bronzed and moustached, with a deep bass voice and an almost
guttural speech, and the other, Raff, was slight and effeminate, with
nervous hands and watery, washed-out gray eyes, who spoke with a faint
indefinable accent that was hauntingly reminiscent of the Cockney, and
that was yet not Cockney of any brand she had ever encountered. Whatever
they were, they were self-made men, she concluded; and she felt the
impulse to shudder at thought of falling into their ha