the winds of these parts
well enough by this time. This will blow until midnight. Then calm
until dawn. After dawn a little more wind for an hour or two, then
doldrums again until late afternoon. They'll run on a rock in all
likelihood. If they do we can catch them at our leisure, supposing we
can get these islanders to paddle. If it should blow hard, then we
can't catch them anyhow. Sit down and tell us what happened, Coutlass!"

The Greek cursed and swore and pranced, but all in vain. Fred was
inexorable. We others grew calmer when the problem of who should
paddle the canoes solved itself suddenly with the arrival of fourteen
of our own men. Discovering themselves left behind, they had run along
the bank in vain hope of catching the dhow somehow--perchance of
swimming through the crocodile-infested water, and returned now
disconsolate, to leap and laugh with new hope at sight of us and of the
red meat that Kazimoto had thrown on the ground near the fire. They
came near in a cluster. Will hacked off a lump of meat for them, and
they forthwith forgot their troubles, as instantly as the birds forget
when a sparrow-hawk has done murder down a hedge-row and swooped away.

Not everything was gone after all. Kazimoto found the pots we had
cooked the rice in, and started to boil the hippo's tongue for us.

"Come, Coutlass--sit down before we eat and tell us what happened,"
Fred suggested.

The Greek paced up and down another time or two, and at last calmed
himself sufficiently to laugh at Fred's woman, who had squatted down
patiently in the shadow behind him.

"Easy for you!" he grinned savagely, squatting on the far side of the
fire. "You have a woman! Mine is God knows where! She said to
me--that hell-damned Lady Saffren Waldon said to me--we sat all three
together in the stern of the dhow, I with my arm around Rebecca, and
she said to me--"

"I'll see if I can't make a dicker for the chief's canoes," Will
interrupted. "We can hear the Greek's tale any old time."

"Trade my woman for them!" Fred suggested cheerfully. "Go on,
Coutlass!"

The Greek gritted his teeth savagely. "She said--that hell-damned Lady
Saffren Waldon said, as we sat there in the dhow, 'How about the
kicking Fred Oakes gave you on the island, Mr. Coutlass? Where is your
Greek honor?'--Do you see? She worked on my bodily bruises and my
spiritual courage at the same time--the cunning hussy! 'That Fred
Oakes will win this R