it?"

"Put you ashore at Attu-Attu."

"And in the meantime?"

"In the meantime..." Duncan paused. An increase of weight in the wind
rippled his hair. The stars overhead vanished, and the Samoset swung
four points off her course in the careless steersman's hands. "In the
meantime throw your halyards down on deck and look to your wheel. I'll
call the men."

The next moment the squall burst upon them. Captain Dettmar, springing
aft, lifted the coiled mainsail halyards from their pins and threw them,
ready to run, on the deck. The three islanders swarmed from the tiny
forecastle, two of them leaping to the halyards and holding by a single
turn, while the third fastened down the engineroom, companion and
swung the ventilators around. Below, Lee Goom and Toyama were lowering
skylight covers and screwing up deadeyes. Duncan pulled shut the cover
of the companion scuttle, and held on, waiting, the first drops of rain
pelting his face, while the Samoset leaped violently ahead, at the same
time heeling first to starboard then to port as the gusty pressures
caught her winged-out sails.

All waited. But there was no need to lower away on the run. The
power went out of the wind, and the tropic rain poured a deluge over
everything. Then it was, the danger past, and as the Kanakas began to
coil the halyards back on the pins, that Boyd Duncan went below.

"All right," he called in cheerily to his wife. "Only a puff."

"And Captain Dettmar?" she queried.

"Has been drinking, that is all. I shall get rid of him at Attu-Attu."

But before Duncan climbed into his bunk, he strapped around himself,
against the skin and under his pajama coat, a heavy automatic pistol.

He fell asleep almost immediately, for his was the gift of perfect
relaxation. He did things tensely, in the way savages do, but the
instant the need passed he relaxed, mind and body. So it was that he
slept, while the rain still poured on deck and the yacht plunged and
rolled in the brief, sharp sea caused by the squall.

He awoke with a feeling of suffocation and heaviness. The electric fans
had stopped, and the air was thick and stifling. Mentally cursing
all Lorenzos and storage batteries, he heard his wife moving in the
adjoining stateroom and pass out into the main cabin. Evidently heading
for the fresher air on deck, he thought, and decided it was a good
example to imitate. Putting on his slippers and tucking a pillow and a
blanket under his arm, he followed