me's sake. It was a man's game, the rough
contacts and fierce give and take of the adventurers of his own blood
and of half the bloods of Europe and the rest of the world, and it was a
good game; but over and beyond was his love of all the other things
that go to make up a South Seas rover's life--the smell of the reef;
the infinite exquisiteness of the shoals of living coral in the
mirror-surfaced lagoons; the crashing sunrises of raw colours spread
with lawless cunning; the palm-tufted islets set in turquoise deeps;
the tonic wine of the trade-winds; the heave and send of the orderly,
crested seas; the moving deck beneath his feet, the straining canvas
overhead; the flower-garlanded, golden-glowing men and maids of
Polynesia, half-children and half-gods; and even the howling savages of
Melanesia, head-hunters and man-eaters, half-devil and all beast.

And so, favoured child of the sun, out of munificence of energy and
sheer joy of living, he, the man of many millions, forbore on his far
way to play the game with Harrison J. Griffiths for a paltry sum. It was
his whim, his desire, his expression of self and of the sun-warmth that
poured through him. It was fun, a joke, a problem, a bit of play on
which life was lightly hazarded for the joy of the playing.

IV

The early morning found the _Wonder_ laying close-hauled along the coast
of Guadalcanal She moved lazily through the water under the dying breath
of the land breeze. To the east, heavy masses of clouds promised a
renewal of the southeast trades, accompanied by sharp puffs and rain
squalls. Ahead, laying along the coast on the same course as the
_Wonder_, and being slowly overtaken, was a small ketch. It was not the
_Willi-Waw_, however, and Captain Ward, on the _Wonder_, putting down
his glasses, named it the _Kauri_.

Grief, just on deck from below, sighed regretfully.

"If it had only been the _Willi-Waw_" he said.

"You do hate to be beaten," Denby, the supercargo, remarked
sympathetically.

"I certainly do." Grief paused and laughed with genuine mirth. "It's my
firm conviction that Griffiths is a rogue, and that he treated me quite
scurvily yesterday. 'Sign,' he says, 'sign in full, at the bottom, and
date it,' And Jacobsen, the little rat, stood in with him. It was rank
piracy, the days of Bully Hayes all over again."

"If you weren't my employer, Mr. Grief, I'd like to give you a piece of
my mind," Captain Ward broke in.

"Go on and spit it