tch a surgeon from Port Moresby. Whitaker said a last
farewell to his friend, knowing in his soul that they would never meet
again. Then he composed himself to die quietly. But the following
morning brought a hapchance trading schooner to the island, and with it,
in the estate of supercargo, a crapulous Scotch gentleman who had been a
famous specialist of London before drink laid him by the heels. He
performed an heroic operation upon Whitaker within an hour, announced by
nightfall that the patient would recover, and the next day sailed with
his ship to end his days in some abandoned Australian boozing-ken--as
Whitaker learned in Sydney several months later.

In the same place, and at the same time, he received his first authentic
news of the fate of the _Adventuress_. The yacht had struck on an
uncharted reef, in heavy weather, and had foundered almost immediately.
Of her entire company, a solitary sailor managed to cling to a life-raft
until picked up, a week after the wreck, by a tramp steamship on whose
decks he gasped out his news and his life in the same breaths.

Whitaker hunted up an account of the disaster in the files of a local
newspaper. He read that the owner, Peter Stark, Esq., and his guest, H.
M. Whitaker, Esq., both of New York, had gone down with the vessel.
There was also a cable despatch from New York detailing Peter Stark's
social and financial prominence--evidence that the news had been cabled
Home. To all who knew him Whitaker was as dead as Peter Stark.

Sardonic irony of circumstance, that had robbed the sound man of life
and bestowed life upon the moribund! Contemplation wrought like a toxic
drug upon Whitaker's temper, until he was raving drunk with the black
draught of mutiny against the dictates of an Omnipotence capable of such
hideous mockeries of justice. The iron bit deep into his soul and left
corrosion there....

"There is a world outside the one you know
To which for curiousness 'Ell can't compare;
It is the place where wilful missings go,
As we can testify, for we are there."

Kipling's lines buzzed through his head more than once in the course of
the next few years; for he was "there." They were years of such
vagabondage as only the South Seas countenance: neither unhappy nor very
strenuous, not yet scarred by the tooth of poverty. Whitaker had between
four and five thousand dollars in traveller's checks which he converted
into cash while in Sydney. Memory o