arm around
him, she half forced, half supported him to the port quarter, where his
boat was slopping against the side. He wanted to resist; he wanted to
cry out and tell her the truth, but a strange, leaden powerlessness
benumbed him. He got into the dinghy, drew in the dripping painter she
cast after him, and watched her ease the sheet and set the vessel
scudding for the passage. With her black hair flying in the wind, her
bare arms resting lightly on the wheel, her straight, girlish, supple
figure bending with the heel of the deck, she never faltered nor looked
back as the water whitened and boiled in the schooner's wake.

* * * * *

Gregory came to himself in his own cabin. Cracroft, the mate, was
bending over him with a bottle of whisky. The Malita steward was chafing
his naked feet. Overhead the rush and roar of the gale broke pitilessly
on his ears.

"The _Edelweiss_!" he gasped; "the _Edelweiss_!"

"Went down an hour ago, sir," said Cracroft grimly.

A SON OF EMPIRE

Raka-hanga is a dot of an island in the mid-Pacific, and so far from
anywhere that it doesn't belong to a group--as most islands do--but is
all by its lonesome in the heave and roll of the emptiest ocean in the
world. In my time it was just big enough to support two traders, not
counting old man Fosby, who had sort of retired and laid down life's
burden in a Kanaka shack, where if he did anything at all it was making
bonito hooks for his half-caste family or playing the accordion with his
trembly old fingers.

It was me and Stanley Hicks that divided the trade of the place, which
was poor to middling, with maybe a couple of hundred tons of copra a
year and as much pearl shell as the natives cared to get. It was deep
shell, you understand, and sometimes a diver went down and never came
up, and you could see him shimmering down below like the back of a
shark, as dead as a doornail. Nobody would dive after that, and a whole
year might pass with the Kanakas still holding back unless there was a
church assessment or a call for something special like a sewing machine
or a new boat. It averaged anywhere from five tons to sixty, and often,
as I said, nothing at all.

I had got rooted in Raka-hanga, and so had Stanley Hicks, and though we
both had ideas of getting away and often talked of it, we never
did--being like people half asleep in a feather bed, with life drifting
on unnoticed, and the wind rustling in