s with an immense relief.

"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account
of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
missing.

"If there is," he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of
the clerk's wages."

And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by
Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's
safe.

But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.

It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the
wild young days, and where we were once more--principally on a holiday,
incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look
over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at
Savo, having run in to trade for curios.

Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of
burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from
making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard
in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There
were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The
schooner was a hundred yards away.

I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to
scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of
the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch
and disappeared. A shark had got him.

The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the
bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with
my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could
barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled
sidewise, throwing them back into the water.

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting
to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers
elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now
and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks.
The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was
taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly
beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing.
He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil,
head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching in
a heart-rending way. He was carried along