for the
French group, but in South America twenty-five years ago a piaster
was a piaster. Bill was square then, as he is now, and he borrows
enough money to buy grub, and he steers right back to Papeete. Gott
im Himmel! Were the owners glad to see that schooner again? They had
given her up as gone for good when the husband told them his wife
had run away with the captain. That's how Bill got his certificate
to command vessels in this archipelago, which only Frenchmen can have."

Goeltz picked up the "Daily Commercial News" of San Francisco, and
idly read out the list of missing ships. There was only one in the
Pacific of recent date whose fate was utterly unknown. She was the
schooner El Dorado, which had left Oregon months before for Chile,
and had not been sighted in all that time. The shipping paper said:

What has become of the El Dorado, it is, of course, impossible to
say with any degree of accuracy, but one thing is almost certain,
and that is that the likelihood of her ever being heard of again is
now practically without the range of possibility. Nevertheless she
may still be afloat though in a waterlogged condition and drifting
about in the trackless wastes of the South Pacific. Then again she may
have struck one of the countless reefs that infest that portion of the
globe, some entirely invisible and others just about awash. She is now
one hundred and eighty-nine days out, and the voyage has rarely taken
one hundred days. She was reported in lat. 35:40 N., long. 126:30 W.,
174 days ago.

"There'll be no salvage on her," said Captain Pincher, "because
if she's still afloat, she ain't likely to get in the track of
any bloody steamer. I've heard of those derelic's wanderin' roun'
a bloody lifetime, especially if they're loaded with lumber. They
end up usually on some reef."

This casual conversation was the prelude to the strangest coincidence
of my life. When I awoke the next morning, I found that the big
sea had not come and that the sun was shining. My head full of
the romance of wrecks and piracy, I climbed the hill behind the
Tiare Hotel to the signal station. There I examined the semaphore,
which showed a great white ball when the mail-steamships appeared,
and other symbols for the arrivals of different kinds of craft,
men-of-war, barks, and schooners. There was a cozy house for the
lookout and his family, and, as everywhere in Tahiti, a garden of
flowers and fruit-trees. I could see Point Venus to th