recruiters
combed the islands for labour. His keels plowed all ocean stretches. He
owned three steamers on regular island runs, though he rarely elected to
travel in them, preferring the wilder and more primitive way of wind and
sail.

At least forty years of age, he looked no more than thirty. Yet
beachcombers remembered his advent among the islands a score of years
before, at which time the yellow mustache was already budding silkily on
his lip. Unlike other white men in the tropics, he was there because he
liked it. His protective skin pigmentation was excellent. He had
been born to the sun. One he was in ten thousand in the matter of
sun-resistance. The invisible and high-velocity light waves failed to
bore into him. Other white men were pervious. The sun drove through
their skins, ripping and smashing tissues and nerves, till they became
sick in mind and body, tossed most of the Decalogue overboard, descended
to beastliness, drank themselves into quick graves, or survived so
savagely that war vessels were sometimes sent to curb their license.

But David Grief was a true son of the sun, and he flourished in all its
ways. He merely became browner with the passing of the years, though
in the brown was the hint of golden tint that glows in the skin of the
Polynesian. Yet his blue eyes retained their blue, his mustache its
yellow, and the lines of his face were those which had persisted through
the centuries in his English race. English he was in blood, yet those
that thought they knew contended he was at least American born. Unlike
them, he had not come out to the South Seas seeking hearth and saddle of
his own. In fact, he had brought hearth and saddle with him. His advent
had been in the Paumotus. He arrived on board a tiny schooner yacht,
master and owner, a youth questing romance and adventure along the
sun-washed path of the tropics. He also arrived in a hurricane, the
giant waves of which deposited him and yacht and all in the thick of a
cocoanut grove three hundred yards beyond the surf. Six months later he
was rescued by a pearling cutter. But the sun had got into his blood.
At Tahiti, instead of taking a steamer home, he bought a schooner,
outfitted her with trade-goods and divers, and went for a cruise through
the Dangerous Archipelago.

As the golden tint burned into his face it poured molten out of the ends
of his fingers. His was the golden touch, but he played the game, not
for the gold, but for the ga