scurrying here and there and everywhere as if in a game of tag with some
invisible playfellow.

But he was reading the full report which many men had written on the
ground. A white man had been there, he learned, and a number of blacks.
Here a black had climbed a coconut tree and cast down the nuts. There a
banana tree had been despoiled of its clustered fruit; and, beyond, it
was evident that a similar event had happened to a breadfruit tree. One
thing, however, puzzled him--a scent new to him that was neither black
man's nor white man's. Had he had the necessary knowledge and the wit of
eye-observance, he would have noted that the footprint was smaller than a
man's and that the toeprints were different from a Mary's in that they
were close together and did not press deeply into the earth. What
bothered him in his smelling was his ignorance of talcum powder. Pungent
it was in his nostrils, but never, since first he had smelled out the
footprints of man, had he encountered such a scent. And with this were
combined other and fainter scents that were equally strange to him.

Not long did he interest himself in such mystery. A white man's
footprints he had smelled, and through the maze of all the other prints
he followed the one print down through a breach of sea-wall to the sea-
pounded coral sand lapped by the sea. Here the latest freshness of many
feet drew together where the nose of a boat had rested on the beach and
where men had disembarked and embarked again. He smelled up all the
story, and, his forelegs in the water till it touched his shoulders, he
gazed out across the lagoon where the disappearing trail was lost to his
nose.

Had he been half an hour sooner he would have seen a boat, without oars,
gasoline-propelled, shooting across the quiet water. What he did see was
an _Arangi_. True, it was far larger than the _Arangi_ he had known, but
it was white, it was long, it had masts, and it floated on the surface of
the sea. It had three masts, sky-lofty and all of a size; but his
observation was not trained to note the difference between them and the
one long and the one short mast of the _Arangi_. The one floating world
he had known was the white-painted _Arangi_. And, since, without a
quiver of doubt, this was the _Arangi_, then, on board, would be his
beloved Skipper. If _Arangis_ could resurrect, then could Skippers
resurrect, and in utter faith that the head of nothingness he had last
seen