, like a gigantic
beckoning finger!

Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward
the descending orb and its strange shadow. As we approached we saw it
was a little mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing
of canvas, sticking up and swaying with the motion of the waves. On
the highest point of the wreckage sat a tall figure calmly smoking a
cigarette.

We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with myself as coxswain
pulled toward a wrecked hydroairplane. Its occupant took a long puff
at his cigarette, waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting. And just
as he did so a great wave raised itself up behind him, took the
wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of foam, and passed on. When we
had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been was--nothing.

There came a tug at the side--, two muscular brown hands gripped it
close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between
them. Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing
deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently
over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet.

"Much obliged," said this man from the sea. "I knew somebody was sure
to come along when the O'Keefe banshee didn't show up."

"The what?" I asked in amazement.

"The O'Keefe banshee--I'm Larry O'Keefe. It's a far way from Ireland,
but not too far for the O'Keefe banshee to travel if the O'Keefe was
going to click in."

I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious.

"Have you a cigarette? Mine went out," he said with a grin, as he
reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.

I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the
wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by
side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a
thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt; long, well-knit, slender
figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the
uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain's navy.

He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.

"Thank you really ever so much, old man," he said.

I liked Larry O'Keefe from the beginning--but I did not dream as the
Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be
forged into man's strong love for man by fires which souls such as his
and mine--and yours who read this--could never dream.

La