the side into the boat.

"Now then, down with you," growled the beachcomber, and Carey and the
doctor had to go, leaving Bostock with his eyes far more wide open than
usual.

"I wish the doctor would talk to me," said Carey to himself as he took
his seat in the well-formed whale-boat, which he rightly supposed must
have come ashore somewhere on this ocean king's dominions. "He is so
horribly quiet."

Then the boy looked at Black Jack and his three companions, who as soon
as their ruler was in his place, gun in hand, thrust out their oars and
began rowing with the skill and jerk of men-o'-war's men.

A minute later he was watching the outrigger canoe being paddled along
quickly, its occupants trailing mother-o'-pearl baits behind, and soon
after he saw them hook and drag in a fish.

Then Carey turned to gaze at the shore they were approaching with a
bitter feeling of resentment arising as he thought of all their labour
in the hot sunshine, collecting and piling up the great pearl shells,
and more bitterly still as he dwelt upon the tubs of liquid and
liquefying oysters which would, he did not doubt, now have quite a thick
deposit of pearls at their bottoms.

"Oh, it does seem so hard for that ruffian to get them!" he said to
himself, and he sat there with his teeth set, gazing straight before
him, till he caught Black Jack's eyes twinkling laughingly at him as
that individual shone like a well-polished pair of boots, and glistened
in the sun, while he lustily pulled stroke.

As soon as he caught Carey's eye he laughed loudly, and in the most
perfectly good-humoured way, as if they were the very best of friends,
and when the beachcomber was looking another way he raised one hand to
go through the pantomime of licking treacle off his fingers and rubbing
his front, to the delight of his toiling companions.

It did Carey good, and he smiled back, and nodded.

"I don't believe they'd hurt me," he said to himself. "They're just
like a lot of schoolboys, only so much uglier."

The beachcomber made a movement, and the blacks' faces were in a flash
like so much carved ebony, and they rowed on, choosing as if from old
habit the way into the canal-like passage among the rocks, and leaping
out at the home-made wharf. Here they held the boat steady in a regular
naval style, while their chief and his companions stepped out, the
former using the black backs for support, for big and strong as he was
his obese state made