ar friend Brown was. He only stayed an
hour, and then cleared out again.9'

"Did he die suddenly?" the supercargo asked, his mind still bent on
Lupton's strange visitor.

"No. Just before daylight he called me to him--with my boy. He took the
boy's hand and said he'd have been glad to have lived after all. He had
been happy in a way with me and the children here in Mururea. Then he
asked to see Teremai and Lorani. They both cried when they saw he was a
goin'--all native-blooded people do that if they cares anything at all
about a white man, and sees him dyin'."

"Have you any message, or anything to say in writin', sir?" I says to
him.

He didn't answer at once, only took the girls' hands in his, and kisses
each of 'em on the face, then he says, "No, Lupton, neither. But send
the children away now. I want you to stay with me to the last--which
will be soon."

Then he put his hand under his pillow, and took out a tiny little
parcel, and held it in his closed hand. *****

"Mr. Lupton, I ask you before God to speak honestly. Have you, or have
you not, ever heard of me, and why I came here to die, away from the
eyes of men?"

"No, sir," I said. "Before God I know no more of you now than the day I
first saw you."

"Can you, then, tell me if the native soul-doctor who came here last
night is a friend of Captain Peese? Did he see Peese when I landed here?
Has he talked with him?"

"No. When you came here with Peese, the soul-seer was away at another
island. And as for talking with him, how could he? Peese can't speak two
words of Paumotu."

He closed his eyes a minute. Then he reached out his hand to me and
said, "Look at that; what is it?"

It was the little black thing that the Man Who Sees Beyond gave him, and
was a curious affair altogether. "You know what an _aitu taliga_ is?"
asked Lupton.

"Yes; a 'devil's ear'--that's what the natives call fungus."

*****

"Well," continued Lupton, "this was a piece of dried fungus, and yet it
wasn't a piece of fungus. It was the exact shape of a human heart--just
as I've seen a model of it made of wax. That hadn't been its natural
shape, but the sides had been brought together and stitched with human
hair--by the soul-doctor, of course. I looked at it curiously enough,
and gave it back to him. His fingers closed round it again."

"What is it?" he says again.

"It's a model of a human heart," says I, "made of fungus."

"My God!" he says, "how could he know?" The