master--to the left!"

I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on
board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant
he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting
blood.

"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that
thrilled in his voice.

Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by
that name.

"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.

Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in
the captain's arms.

And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in
the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of
a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of
which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the
other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow
fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora
Bora.

THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS

There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of
islands. On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But to
the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in
the rough, the Solomons may indeed prove terrible.

It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about,
that loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a
poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant
ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks
to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons
are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for
collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to
catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a
tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is
equally true that on some islands, such as Malaita, the profit and loss
account of social intercourse is calculated in homicides. Heads are a
medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely valuable. Very often a
dozen villages make a jack-pot, which they fatten moon by moon, against
the time when some brave warrior presents a white man's head, fresh and
gory, and claims the pot.

All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have
lived in the S