g on the clouded horizon, and thought of the sick in the
hospital. Here was something waiting his hand to be done, and it was not
in his nature to lie down and sleep, or die, when any task remained
undone.

The boss-boys were called and given their orders to rope down the
hospital with its two additions. He remembered the spare anchor-chain,
new and black-painted, that hung under the house suspended from the floor-
beams, and ordered it to be used on the hospital as well. Other boys
brought the coffin, a grotesque patchwork of packing-cases, and under his
directions they laid Hughie Drummond in it. Half a dozen boys carried it
down the beach, while he rode on the back of another, his arms around the
black's neck, one hand clutching a prayer-book.

While he read the service, the blacks gazed apprehensively at the dark
line on the water, above which rolled and tumbled the racing clouds. The
first breath of the wind, faint and silken, tonic with life, fanned
through his dry-baked body as he finished reading. Then came the second
breath of the wind, an angry gust, as the shovels worked rapidly, filling
in the sand. So heavy was the gust that Sheldon, still on his feet,
seized hold of his man-horse to escape being blown away. The _Jessie_
was blotted out, and a strange ominous sound arose as multitudinous
wavelets struck foaming on the beach. It was like the bubbling of some
colossal cauldron. From all about could be heard the dull thudding of
falling cocoanuts. The tall, delicate-trunked trees twisted and snapped
about like whip-lashes. The air seemed filled with their flying leaves,
any one of which, stem-on could brain a man. Then came the rain, a
deluge, a straight, horizontal sheet that poured along like a river,
defying gravitation. The black, with Sheldon mounted on him, plunged
ahead into the thick of it, stooping far forward and low to the ground to
avoid being toppled over backward.

"'He's sleeping out and far to-night,'" Sheldon quoted, as he thought of
the dead man in the sand and the rainwater trickling down upon the cold
clay.

So they fought their way back up the beach. The other blacks caught hold
of the man-horse and pulled and tugged. There were among them those
whose fondest desire was to drag the rider in the sand and spring upon
him and mash him into repulsive nothingness. But the automatic pistol in
his belt with its rattling, quick-dealing death, and the automatic, death-
defying