out that girl, so that one wouldn't forget her
easily, certainly not in three years. And then, you know, Harber had
had her letters. Not many of them. Perhaps a dozen to the year.

Pitifully few, but they were filled with a wonderful fascination
against which the realities of his wandering life had been powerless
to contend. Like a slender cable they bound him--they held him!

Well, he was in Sydney now, standing on the water-front, beneath a
bright-blue Australian sky, watching the crinkling water in the
Circular Quay as it lifted and fell mightily but easily, and seeing
the black ships ... ah, the ships! Those masterful, much more than
human, entities that slipped about the great world nosing out, up
dark-green tropical rivers in black, fir-bound fjords, through the
white ice-flows of the Arctics, all its romance, all its gold! Three
years hadn't dulled the keen edge of his appetite for all that;
rather had whetted it.

Nevertheless, as he stood there, he was thinking to himself that
he must have done with wandering; the old saw that a rolling
stone gathered no moss was cropping up sharply, warningly, in
his mind. He had in the three years, however--and this is rather
remarkable--accumulated about three thousand dollars. Three thousand
dollars! Why, in this quarter of the world, three thousand dollars
should be like three thousand of the scriptural mustard-seed--they
should grow a veritable forest!

What was puzzling him, however, was where to plant the seed. He was
to meet here a man who had a plan for planting in the islands. There
were wild rumours afloat of the fortunes that could be made in
rubber and vanilla out in the Papuan "Back Beyond." Harber was only
half inclined to believe them, perhaps; but half persuaded is well
along the way.

He heard his name called, and, turning, he saw a man coming toward
him with the rolling gait of the seaman. As he came closer, Harber
observed the tawny beard, the sea-blue eyes surrounded by the fine
wrinkles of humour, the neat black clothing, the polished boots, and,
above all, the gold earrings that marked the man in his mind as
Farringdon, the sea-captain who had been anxious to meet him.

Harber answered the captain's gleam of teeth with one of his own,
and they turned their backs upon the water and went to Harber's room,
where they could have their fill of talk undisturbed. Harber says
they talked all that afternoon and evening, and well into the next
morning, ent