ot in a canoe, rocked and rolled unendingly over the broad
ocean in a perpetual nightmare of fear. In the beche-de-mer that was
current among the blacks of a thousand islands and ten thousand dialects,
the _Arangi's_ procession of passengers assured her of her fate. "My
word, you fella Mary," one would say to her, "short time little bit that
big fella white marster kai-kai along you." Or, another: "Big fella
white marster kai-kai along you, my word, belly belong him walk about too
much."

Kai-kai was the beche-de-mer for "eat." Even Jerry knew that. "Eat" did
not obtain in his vocabulary; but kai-kai did, and it meant all and more
than "eat," for it served for both noun and verb.

But the girl never replied to the jeering of the blacks. For that
matter, she never spoke at all, not even to Captain Van Horn, who did not
so much as know her name.

It was late afternoon, after discovering the girl in the lazarette, when
Jerry again came on deck. Scarcely had Skipper, who had carried him up
the steep ladder, dropped him on deck than Jerry made a new
discovery--land. He did not see it, but he smelled it. His nose went up
in the air and quested to windward along the wind that brought the
message, and he read the air with his nose as a man might read a
newspaper--the salt smells of the seashore and of the dank muck of
mangrove swamps at low tide, the spicy fragrances of tropic vegetation,
and the faint, most faint, acrid tingle of smoke from smudgy fires.

The trade, which had laid the _Arangi_ well up under the lee of this
outjutting point of Malaita, was now failing, so that she began to roll
in the easy swells with crashings of sheets and tackles and thunderous
flappings of her sails. Jerry no more than cocked a contemptuous
quizzical eye at the mainsail anticking above him. He knew already the
empty windiness of its threats, but he was careful of the mainsheet
blocks, and walked around the traveller instead of over it.

While Captain Van Horn, taking advantage of the calm to exercise the
boat's crew with the fire-arms and to limber up the weapons, was passing
out the Lee-Enfields from their place on top the cabin skylight, Jerry
suddenly crouched and began to stalk stiff-legged. But the wild-dog,
three feet from his lair under the trade-boxes, was not unobservant. He
watched and snarled threateningly. It was not a nice snarl. In fact, it
was as nasty and savage a snarl as all his life had been nasty and