a boat anchor, and
farther towards the creek, the mouldering remains of a capstan, from the
drumhead holes of which long grey-green pendants of moss droop down upon
the weather-worn, decaying barrel, like the scanty ragged beard that
falls on the chest of some old man worn out with poverty and toil.

That is all that one may see now; for the dense, evergrowing jungle has
long since hidden or rotted all else that was left.

* * * * *

The three men were named Ford, Adams, and Stenhouse. They were
_beche-de-mer_ fishers, and for nearly a year had been living in this
savage spot--the only white men inhabiting the great island, whose
northern coast line sweeps in an irregular half-moon curve for more
than three hundred miles from Cape Stephens to within sight of the
lofty mountains of New Guinea. In pursuit of their avocation, death from
disease, or from the spears or clubs of the treacherous, betel-chewing,
stark-naked cannibals among whom they dwelt was ever near, but to the
men of their iron resolution and dauntless courage that mattered not.
Two years' labour meant for them a large sum of money--enough to enable
them to return with their wives and families and native dependents, to
those more restful islands in the Western Carolines whence they had come
a year before.

All three men were employed by one firm in Singapore, whose ship had
brought them with their families and some thirty or forty natives of Yap
to New Britain. Nine months after their landing, a small schooner had
called to replenish their supplies, and ship the cured trepang, which
by the most assiduous labour and daring enterprise they had accumulated;
and when this story opens, the schooner had been gone some weeks, and
they and their native workers were preparing their boats for another
cruise along the great barrier reef of New Britain.

Two of these men, Adams and Stenhouse, were old and tried comrades, and
in their rough way, devoted to each other. Stenhouse, the elder of
the two, had some ten years previously, while sailing along the Pelew
Island, found Adams adrift in an open boat--the sole survivor of a
shipwrecked crew of sixteen men, and had nursed him back to life and
reason. Later on, Adams had married one of Stenhouse's half-caste
daughters. Ford, too, who was an American, was connected by marriage
with Stenhouse, and nearly every one of the thirty or forty male and
female Caroline Islan