ted down the centuries. I recall for one thing a
stunned and throbbing aching back of the eyes and a half-conscious
gazing up at rocking stars.

At all events, when rational understanding returned to me, the sun was
glaring insufferably from a scorched zenith. I began to patch together
fragments of memory and to call loudly for Mansfield. There was no
answer, and when I attempted to rise I found myself roughly lashed to
the life-raft by several turns of a line so tightly drawn that the
sensory nerves in my legs gave no response to my movements.

My support was rocking in its lodgment between two weed-trailing
boulders, stained like verdigris and licked smooth by the lapping of the
sea. Off to my front stretched waters, so quiet that they seemed almost
tideless, though at a distance I could hear the running of surf. To look
behind involved a painful twisting of my neck, but I made the effort,
and was rewarded with the sight of land. A quarter of a mile away smooth
reaches of white sand met the water in a graciously inviting beach.
Beyond it and mounting upward from palm fringe to snow-cap rose the very
respectable proportions of a volcanic island. The coral rocks which had
caught my raft were outposts of many others that went trooping
shoreward, breaking, here and there, the surface of jade-green shallows.

From the deep turquoise of the outer sea to the white rim of the sands
ran a gamut of colorful beauty. The mountain, as symmetrically coned as
Fuji-yama, stood over it all in grave dominance. Off to the left
sponge-like cliffs broke steeply upward from the level of the beach and
about their clefts circled endless flights of gulls. There I knew the
rising tide would thunder and break itself to pieces in a thousand
plumes of spray.

But how had I reached this place and what had become of Mansfield? It
must have been he who had lashed me to the raft. From no one else on the
_Wastrel_ could I have expected better treatment than "a cutlass swipe
or an ounce of lead." Palpably, he had emerged from the battle victor,
and, save for myself, sole survivor. I conjectured that when he had
floated the raft from the partly submerged deck, he had found the spark
of life still lurking in my pulses and had made me fast upon its
timbers. Perhaps an over-trust in his ability to remain afloat had made
him less careful of himself. Possibly he had lost consciousness as we
drifted and had been washed over-side, to fall prey to the prowli