arine store dealer's that night I bought two
common cutlasses, and waited for my chance. I had learnt that Decker
went to the service club on certain evenings, and stayed very late.

"My time came the following night. I saw my man come out of the club,
and followed him closely till he entered a quiet street. Then I called
him by name. He turned and faced me and asked me angrily what I wanted.

"'I am Theodor Brandt,' I said, and handed him one of the two cutlasses
I was carrying under my overcoat.

"The man was no coward, and fought well, but in less than a minute I ran
him clean through the body. He fell in the muddy street, and by the time
I had dragged him away into the shadow of a high wooden fence
enclosing a timber yard, was dead. Half an hour later I was on board a
fishing-smack, bound for Wangeroog, one of the Frisian Islands, off the
coast. At that place I remained in safety for a month, then got away to
Amsterdam, and from there to Java. Then for the next eight-and-twenty
years, down to this very moment, I have been a wanderer on the face
of the earth. Six years after I escaped I joined an American
man-of-war--the _Iroquois_--at Canton, and when we were paid off in the
States I took out my naturalisation papers. This served me well, when,
two years afterwards, I was recognised at San Francisco by some German
bluejackets as 'Brandt, the murderer of Captain Decker,' and arrested.
Fortunately, I had money, and while the German Consul was trying hard to
get me handed over to the German naval authorities on the Pacific
Coast, my lawyers managed to get me out on bail. I got away down to
the Hawaiian Islands in a lumber ship, and--well, since then I've been
knocking around anywhere and everywhere.... Come, let us turn in."

Chapter VI

At dawn the wind had died away to a light breeze, and the sun rose to
shine upon an ocean of unspecked blue. To the eastward, the slopes of
New Britain were hidden from our view by a thick mist, only the tops of
some high mountain peaks far inland showing above, and there seemed
to be every appearance of the fine weather lasting. This gave us much
satisfaction, and after a bathe in a rocky pool on the reef, we ate our
breakfast of fish and coconut with good spirits, then filling our pipes,
went down to the inner beach to bask in the glorious sunshine.

"If this sort ot weather keeps up," I remarked to Yorke, "I'm afraid
your prediction about our seeing Guest and the cutter i