, and
locked the door on him. A minute later he was clinging to the
Jacob's ladder, the canoe shot in to the side of the vessel at
his gruff command and passed on shoreward without missing a
stroke of the paddle. An hour later, accompanied by three Kanaka
sailors picked up at random along the waterfront, Neils Halvorsen
was pulled out to the _Maggie II_. Her crew had not returned and
the bogus captain was still triced hard and fast in the cabin.

The Swede did not bother to investigate in detail the food and
water supply. A hasty round of the schooner convinced him that
she had at least a month's supply of food and water. Only one
thought surged through his mind, and that was the awful necessity
for haste. The anchor came in with a rush, the Kanaka boys
chanting a song that sounded to Neils like a funeral dirge, and
Neils went below and turned the gasoline engines wide open. The
_Maggie II_ swung around and with a long streak of opalescent
foam trailing behind her swung down the bay and faded at last in
the ghostly moonlight beyond Diamond Head; after which Neils
Halvorsen, with murder in his eye and a tarred rope's end in his
horny fist, went down into the cabin and talked to the man who
posed as Captain Scraggs. In the end he got a confession. Fifteen
minutes later he emerged, smiling grimly, gave the Kanaka boy at
the wheel the course, and turned in to sleep the sleep of the
conscience-free and the weary.

CHAPTER XXVII

Darkness was creeping over the beach at Tuvana-tholo before Mr.
Gibney could smother the despair in his heart sufficient to spur
his jaded imagination into working order. For nearly an hour the
three castaways had sat on the beach in dumb horror, gazing
seaward. They were not alone in this, for a little further up the
beach the two Fiji Islanders sat huddled on their haunches,
gazing stupidly first at the horizon and then at their white
captors. It was the sight of these two worthies that spurred Mr.
Gibney's torpid brain to action.

"Didn't you say, Mac, that when we left these two cannibals alone
on this island that it would develop into a case of dog eat dog
or somethin' of that nature?"

Captain Scraggs sprang to his feet, his face white with a new
terror. However, he had endured so much since embarking with Mr.
Gibney on a life of wild adventure that his nerves had become
rather inured to impending death, and presently his fear gave way
to an overmastering rage. He hurled his ha