sound issued. A look of the most intense surprise
spread upon his round face. He stood swaying a moment, and collapsed
like a huge hinged toy when the string is cut.

Dubosc stooped and caught the bottle again, looking down at his big
adversary, who sprawled in brief convulsion and lay still, a bluish scum
oozing between his teeth....

"Yes, the best man wins," repeated the doctor, and laughed as he in turn
raised the flask for a draft.

"The best wins!" echoed a voice in his ear.

Fenayrou, writhing up and striking like a wounded snake, drove the knife
home between his shoulders.

The bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the platform, and there,
while each strove vainly to reach it, it poured out its treasure in a
tiny stream that trickled away and was lost.

* * * * *

It may have been minutes or hours later--for time has no count in
emptiness--when next a sound proceeded from that frail slip of a raft,
hung like a mote between sea and sky. It was a phrase of song, a
wandering strain in half tones and fluted accidentals, not unmelodious.
The black Canaque was singing. He sang without emotion or effort, quite
casually and softly to himself. So he might sing by his forest hut to
ease some hour of idleness. Clasping his knees and gazing out into
space, untroubled, unmoved, enigmatic to the end, he sang--he sang.

And, after all, the ship came.

She came in a manner befitting the sauciest little tops'l schooner
between Nukahiva and the Pelews--as her owner often averred and none
but the envious denied--in a manner worthy, too, of that able Captain
Jean Guibert, the merriest little scamp that ever cleaned a pearl bank
or snapped a cargo of labor from a scowling coast. Before the first
whiff out of the west came the _Petite Suzanne_, curtsying and skipping
along with a flash of white frill by her forefoot, and brought up
startled and stood shaking her skirts and keeping herself quite daintily
to windward.

"And 'ere they are sure enough, by dam!" said the polyglot Captain Jean
in the language of commerce and profanity. "Zose passengers for us, hey?
They been here all the time, not ten mile off--I bet you, Marteau. Ain't
it 'ell? What you zink, my gar?"

His second, a tall and excessively bony individual of gloomy outlook,
handed back the glasses.

"More bad luck. I never approved of this job. And now--see?--we have had
our voyage for nothing. What misfortune!"

"Marteau, i