have_ covered my tracks?... Hya, you fella boy--that fella boat all
ready? Then bear a hand her one time. We've got a passenger."

* * * * *

Now, it is a fact that no one knows or is ever likely to know the actual
explanation for the wreck of the Brisbane steamer, which left Thursday
Island that night and came to grief some two hours later on Tribulation
Shoals. Other craft have gone the same way from natural causes, and
Thursday has kept no suspect tradition of them. The only man who might
have denied the yarn as afterward colored in local legend--and
incidentally a libel on his own memory--was the pilot who had her in
charge. And he never came back, drunk or sober. But the records declare
that about four o'clock of a fair enough morning, wind and sea then
running high, the 2,000-ton _Fernshawe_ went clear off her course among
the graveyards where a coral ledge stripped her plates as neatly as a
butcher's knife lays open a carcass. She sank inside of five minutes,
and her survivors were hurried.

Neither has any one ever told the true adventures of the _Fancy Free_,
the flash little lugger that happened somehow to be missing from
week-end rendezvous at the same hour. Her crew were mostly inarticulate,
and those who might have talked of strange comings and goings were
"black fella boy know nothing." Her passenger spent the night praying in
the bilge; and as for her commander, he left no report. But it is
equally certain that when the next dawn spread the iridescence of a
pigeon's breast over those empty waters it struck out the hull and spars
of Captain Wetherbee's vessel, anchored fair between the tips of two
sunken masts.

Captain Wetherbee himself straddled the deck in diving rig, and while a
native helper held ready his great gleaming copper helm he mocked a
limp, bedraggled, white-faced creature that clung by the rail.

"You'll note for yourself, Brother Seldom," he was saying. "Not a trace
of evidence. We've not been spied. The lantern is sunk. These poor
cattle haven't a glimmer. Here are we, and there are the pearls, twenty
thousand pounds' worth--just overside. Within three hours I'll be off on
the pearling banks about my business, and I never heard of any lost
steamer. Next week, or any time I choose, I'll be walking the streets of
Thursday to hear the news. And who so surprised as Captain Wetherbee,
that hardworking man? 'Honest' Wetherbee, with a fortune in his belt to
di