iving
men because he asked very naturally:

"How did she get away?"

"The lady wasn't on the sandbank," explained Lingard, curtly.

"What sandbank?" muttered Jorgenson, perfunctorily. . . . "Is the yacht
looted, Tom?"

"Nothing of the kind," said Lingard.

"Ah, many dead?" inquired Jorgenson.

"I tell you there was nothing of the kind," said Lingard, impatiently.

"What? No fight!" inquired Jorgenson again without the slightest sign of
animation.

"No."

"And you a fighting man."

"Listen to me, Jorgenson. Things turned out so that before the time came
for a fight it was already too late." He turned to Mrs. Travers still
looking about with anxious eyes and a faint smile on her lips. "While I
was talking to you that evening from the boat it was already too late.
No. There was never any time for it. I have told you all about myself,
Mrs. Travers, and you know that I speak the truth when I say too late.
If you had only been alone in that yacht going about the seas!"

"Yes," she struck in, "but I was not alone."

Lingard dropped his chin on his breast. Already a foretaste of noonday
heat staled the sparkling freshness of the morning. The smile had
vanished from Edith Travers' lips and her eyes rested on Lingard's bowed
head with an expression no longer curious but which might have appeared
enigmatic to Jorgenson if he had looked at her. But Jorgenson looked at
nothing. He asked from the remoteness of his dead past, "What have you
left outside, Tom? What is there now?"

"There's the yacht on the shoals, my brig at anchor, and about a hundred
of the worst kind of Illanun vagabonds under three chiefs and with two
war-praus moored to the edge of the bank. Maybe Daman is with them, too,
out there."

"No," said Jorgenson, positively.

"He has come in," cried Lingard. "He brought his prisoners in himself
then."

"Landed by torchlight," uttered precisely the shade of Captain
Jorgenson, late of the Barque Wild Rose. He swung his arm pointing
across the lagoon and Mrs. Travers turned about in that direction.

All the scene was but a great light and a great solitude. Her gaze
travelled over the lustrous, dark sheet of empty water to a shore
bordered by a white beach empty, too, and showing no sign of human life.
The human habitations were lost in the shade of the fruit trees, masked
by the cultivated patches of Indian corn and the banana plantations.
Near the shore the rigid lines of two stockaded forts could be