husiastically finding one another the veritable salt of
the earth, honourable, level-headed, congenial, temperamentally
fitted for exactly what they had in mind--partnership.

"How much can you put in?" asked Harber finally.

"Five hundred pounds," said the captain.

"I can match you," said Harber.

"Man, but that's fine!" cried the captain. "I've been looking for
you--you, you know--_just you_--for the last two years! And when
Pierson told me about you ... why, it's luck, I say!"

It was luck for Harber, too. Farringdon, you see, knew precisely
where he wanted to go, and he had his schooner, and he knew that
part of the world, as we say, like a man knows his own buttons.
Harber, then, was to manage the plantation; they were going to set
out rubber, both Para and native, and try hemp and maybe coffee
while they waited for the Haevia and the Ficus to yield. And
Farringdon was ready to put the earnings from his schooner against
Harber's wage as manager. The arrangement, you see, was ideal.

Skip seven years with me, please. Consider the plantation affair
launched, carried, and consummated. Farringdon and Harber have sold
the rubber-trees as they neared bearing, and have sold them well.
They're out of that now. In all likelihood, Harber thinks,
permanently. For that seven years has seen other projects blossom.
Harber, says Farringdon, has "the golden touch." There has been
trading in the islands, and a short and fortunate little campaign on
the stock-market through Sydney brokers, and there has been, more
profitable than anything else, the salvaging of the Brent Interisland
Company's steamer _Pailula_ by Farringdon's schooner, in which
Harber had purchased a half-interest; so the partners are, on the
whole, rather well fixed. Harber might be rated at, perhaps, some
forty thousand pounds, not counting his interest in the schooner.

One of Janet Spencer's argosies, then, its cargo laden, is ready to
set sail for the hills of home. In short, Harber is now in one of
the island ports of call, waiting for the steamer from Fiji. In six
weeks he will be in Tawnleytown if all goes well.

It isn't, and yet it is, the same Harber. He's thirty now, lean and
bronzed and very fit. He can turn a hundred tricks now where then he
could turn one. The tropics have agreed with him. There seems to
have been some subtle affinity between them, and he almost wishes
that he weren't leaving them. He certainly wouldn't be, if it were
not f