setting in, and I did not
want our boat to be carried back into the lagoon again. Then I turned to
the prisoner, and asked him if he could tell me why he ought not to be
shot. He made a gesture of utter indifference, and said he didn't care.
Did I think he was a coward, he asked? Could he not have swum ashore?
The king would kill him to-morrow.

Pitying the poor wretch, I gave him a pipe, tobacco, and matches, and
told him to help my men put the dead and wounded men on the reef, as
I wanted the boat. The people at the fishing village, who had been
watching the fight throughout from a safe distance, were within sight,
so telling the prisoner he must go to them and get them to carry their
dead and wounded up to the houses before the tide covered the reef
again, I sent him off with Tematau, Tepi, and Niabon. Their gruesome
task was soon done, and the boat rid of her ensanguined cargo; then as
soon as she came alongside again, I called Niabon on board, and telling
her to steer, went into the smaller boat and took the _Lucia_ in tow.

As we slowly crept out through the passage, we saw the fisher folk come
down to the reef, and, lifting up the three dead men, carry them away,
others following with the wounded. It was not a pleasant sight to see,
nor even to think of, now that it was all over, and so we none of us
spoke as we tugged at the oars.

We got outside at last, and then ceased towing, as a light air carried
us well clear of the outer reef. Coming alongside, we stepped on board,
after having pulled out the boat's plug. Then we watched her drift
astern to fill.

At dawn when I was awakened, after a good four hours' sleep, Apamama was
thirty miles astern of us, and we were running free before a nice cool
breeze, steering N.W. for Kusaie Island, the eastern outlier of the
Carolines, eight hundred miles away.

The two women had not heard me move, and were both sound asleep, their
faces close together and their arms intertwined.

CHAPTER XIII

We were thirteen long weary days between Apamama Lagoon and Kusaie,
whose misty blue outline we hailed with delight when we first sighted it
early one afternoon, forty miles away.

Calms and light winds had delayed us greatly, for as we crawled further
northward, we were reaching the limit of the south-east trades, which,
at that time of the year, were very fickle and shifty. Not a single sail
of any description had we seen, though we kept a keen lookout night and
day