or
forty dollars and a jug of whiskey! Unfortunately, Pomfrey's temper once
more got the better of his judgment. With a scathing exposition of the
laws under which the Indian and white man equally lived, and the legal
punishment of kidnaping, he swept what he believed was the impostor from
his presence. He was scarcely alone again before he remembered that his
imprudence might affect the girl's future access to him, but it was too
late now.

Still he clung to the belief that he should see her when the prospectors
had departed, and he hailed with delight the breaking up of the camp
near the "sweat-house" and the disappearance of the schooner. It seemed
that their gold-seeking was unsuccessful; but Pomfrey was struck, on
visiting the locality, to find that in their excavations in the sand at
the estuary they had uncovered the decaying timbers of a ship's small
boat of some ancient and obsolete construction. This made him think
of his strange dream, with a vague sense of warning which he could not
shake off, and on his return to the lighthouse he took from his shelves
a copy of the old voyages to see how far his fancy had been affected
by his reading. In the account of Drake's visit to the coast he found a
footnote which he had overlooked before, and which ran as follows: "The
Admiral seems to have lost several of his crew by desertion, who were
supposed to have perished miserably by starvation in the inhospitable
interior or by the hands of savages. But later voyagers have suggested
that the deserters married Indian wives, and there is a legend that a
hundred years later a singular race of half-breeds, bearing unmistakable
Anglo-Saxon characteristics, was found in that locality." Pomfrey fell
into a reverie of strange hypotheses and fancies. He resolved that,
when he again saw Olooya, he would question her; her terror of these men
might be simply racial or some hereditary transmission.

But his intention was never fulfilled. For when days and weeks had
elapsed, and he had vainly haunted the river estuary and the rocky
reef before the lighthouse without a sign of her, he overcame his
pride sufficiently to question Jim. The man looked at him with dull
astonishment.

"Olooya gone," he said.

"Gone!--where?"

The Indian made a gesture to seaward which seemed to encompass the whole
Pacific.

"How? With whom?" repeated his angry yet half-frightened master.

"With white man in ship. You say YOU no want Olooya--forty dol