erbrook_, said it stood for Remorseless
Plunderer. Some one told this to Packenham, and although he gave the big
Dutchman a bad beating for it, the thing travelled all over the South
Seas and made him very wroth. So then he got Nerida to sew another half
turn in red to the loop of the P, and thereby made it into a B.

"That'll do fine," he said to Denison. '"Bob Packenham' instead of
'Robert Packenham,' eh?"

"Ye-s," answered, Denison thoughtfully, "I daresay it will be all
right." And a month later, when Captain Bully Hayes came on board the
_Indiana_ in Funafuti Lagoon, he gravely told Packenham that a lot of
people were saying the letters stood for "Bloody Pirate."

But all this has nothing to do with this story.

As I have said, the brig was running before a stiff southerly gale.
Packenham came on deck, and flinging his six feet of muscular manhood
upon the up-ended flaps of the skylight, had just lit his cigar when
Alan the bos'un came aft and said that the peak of Tutuila was looming
high right ahead, thirty miles away.

"Bully old ship!" said the skipper, "give the _Indiana_ a good breeze
that catches her fair and square in the stern and she'll run like a
scared dog with a tin-pot tied to his tail. Denison, you sleepy beast,
come up on deck and look at Samoa the Beautiful, where every prospect
pleases and only the German trader is vile."

And so as he and Denison sat aft on the skylight drinking their
afternoon coffee and smoking their Manilas, and the brown-skinned native
crew sat below in the dark and stuffy foc's'le and gambled for tobacco,
the _Indiana_ foamed and splashed and rolled before the gale till she
ran under the lee of the land into a sea of transparent green, whose
gentle rollers scarce broke in foam as they poured over the weed-clad
ledges of the barrier-reef into the placid waters or the islet-studded
lagoon encompassing the mainland about the village of Sa Lotopa.

Then as some of the merry-hearted kanaka crew ranged the cable, and
others ran aloft to clew-up the sails, Packenham steered the brig
between a narrow reef-bound passage till she brought up abreast a
sweeping curve of sandy beach, shining white under the wooded spurs of
a mountain peak two thousand feet above. Back from the beach and showing
golden-brown among the sunlit green lay the thatched houses of a native
village, and as the brig came head to wind, and the cable clattered
through the hawse-pipes, the brown-skinned people