iths cried, springing to his feet in a sudden gust
of rage. "You faked those leading lights! You've wrecked me, and by--"

"Steady! Steady!" Grief's voice was cool and menacing. "I'll trouble you
for that twelve hundred, please."

To Griffiths, a vast impotence seemed to descend upon him. He was
overwhelmed by a profound disgust--disgust for the sunlands and the
sun-sickness, for the futility of all his endeavour, for this blue-eyed,
golden-tinted, superior man who defeated him on all his ways.

"Jacobsen," he said, "will you open the cash-box and pay this--this
bloodsucker--twelve hundred pounds?"

Chapter Two--THE PROUD GOAT OF ALOYSIUS PANKBURN

I

Quick eye that he had for the promise of adventure, prepared always for
the unexpected to leap out at him from behind the nearest cocoanut
tree, nevertheless David Grief received no warning when he laid eyes on
Aloysius Pankburn. It was on the little steamer _Berthe_. Leaving his
schooner to follow, Grief had taken passage for the short run across
from Raiatea to Papeete. When he first saw Aloysius Pankburn, that
somewhat fuddled gentleman was drinking a lonely cocktail at the tiny
bar between decks next to the barber shop. And when Grief left the
barber's hands half an hour later Aloysius Pankburn was still hanging
over the bar still drinking by himself.

Now it is not good for man to drink alone, and Grief threw sharp
scrutiny into his pass-ing glance. He saw a well-built young man of
thirty, well-featured, well-dressed, and evidently, in the world's
catalogue, a gentleman. But in the faint hint of slovenliness, in
the shaking, eager hand that spilled the liquor, and in the nervous,
vacillating eyes, Grief read the unmistakable marks of the chronic
alcoholic.

After dinner he chanced upon Pankburn again. This time it was on deck,
and the young man, clinging to the rail and peering into the distance
at the dim forms of a man and woman in two steamer chairs drawn closely
together, was crying, drunkenly. Grief noted that the man's arm was
around the woman's waist. Aloysius Pankburn looked on and cried.

"Nothing to weep about," Grief said genially.

Pankburn looked at him, and gushed tears of profound self-pity.

"It's hard," he sobbed. "Hard. Hard. That man's my business manager. I
employ him. I pay him a good screw. And that's how he earns it."

"In that case, why don't you put a stop to it?" Grief advised.

"I can't. She'd shut off my whiskey