3_.

"A sealing schooner," Grief said. "But what a sealer's doing in these
waters is beyond me."

"Treasure-hunters, maybe?" Snow speculated. "The _Sophie Sutherland_ and
the _Herman_ were sealers, you remember, chartered out of San Francisco
by the chaps with the maps who can always go right to the spot until
they get there and don't."

III

After a giddy night of grand and lofty tumbling, in which, over a big
and dying sea, without a breath of wind to steady her, the Uncle Toby
rolled every person on board sick of soul, a light breeze sprang up
and the reefs were shaken out. By midday, on a smooth ocean floor, the
clouds thinned and cleared and sights of the sun were obtained. Two
degrees and fifteen minutes south, the observation gave them. With a
broken chronometer longitude was out of the question.

"We're anywhere within five hundred and a thousand miles along that
latitude line," Grief remarked, as he and the mate bent over the chart.

"Leu-Leu is to the south'ard somewhere, and this section of ocean is all
blank. There is neither an island nor a reef by which we can regulate
the chronometer. The only thing to do--"

"Land ho, skipper!" the Tongan called down the companionway.

Grief took a quick glance at the empty blank of the chart, whistled his
surprise, and sank back feebly in a chair.

"It gets me," he said. "There can't be land around here. We never
drifted or ran like that. The whole voyage has been crazy. Will you
kindly go up, Mr. Snow, and see what's ailing Jackie."

"It's land all right," the mate called down a minute afterward. "You can
see it from the deck--tops of cocoanuts--an atoll of some sort. Maybe
it's Leu-Leu after all."

Grief shook his head positively as he gazed at the fringe of palms, only
the tops visible, apparently rising out of the sea.

"Haul up on the wind, Mr. Snow, close-and-by, and we'll take a look.
We can just reach past to the south, and if it spreads off in that
direction we'll hit the southwest corner."

Very near must palms be to be seen from the low deck of a schooner, and,
slowly as the _Uncle Toby_ sailed, she quickly raised the low land above
the sea, while more palms increased the definition of the atoll circle.

"She's a beauty," the mate remarked. "A perfect circle.... Looks as if
it might be eight or nine miles across.... Wonder if there's an entrance
to the lagoon.... Who knows? Maybe it's a brand new find."

They coasted up the west side o