boat's-crew manned her, and Matauare and three
other Tahitians, belted with cartridges and armed with rifles, sat in the
stern-sheets where Sheldon stood at the steering-oar.

"My, I wish I could go with you," Joan said wistfully, as the boat shoved
off.

Sheldon shook his head.

"I'm as good as a man," she urged.

"You really are needed here," he replied.

"There's that Lunga crowd; they might reach the coast right here, and
with both of us absent rush the plantation. Good-bye. We'll get back in
the morning some time. It's only twelve miles."

When Joan started to return to the house, she was compelled to pass among
the boat-carriers, who lingered on the beach to chatter in queer, ape-
like fashion about the events of the night. They made way for her, but
there came to her, as she was in the midst of them, a feeling of her own
helplessness. There were so many of them. What was to prevent them from
dragging her down if they so willed? Then she remembered that one cry of
hers would fetch Noa Noah and her remaining sailors, each one of whom was
worth a dozen blacks in a struggle. As she opened the gate, one of the
boys stepped up to her. In the darkness she could not make him out.

"What name?" she asked sharply. "What name belong you?"

"Me Aroa," he said.

She remembered him as one of the two sick boys she had nursed at the
hospital. The other one had died.

"Me take 'm plenty fella medicine too much," Aroa was saying.

"Well, and you all right now," she answered.

"Me want 'm tobacco, plenty fella tobacco; me want 'm calico; me want 'm
porpoise teeth; me want 'm one fella belt."

She looked at him humorously, expecting to see a smile, or at least a
grin, on his face. Instead, his face was expressionless. Save for a
narrow breech-clout, a pair of ear-plugs, and about his kinky hair a
chaplet of white cowrie-shells, he was naked. His body was fresh-oiled
and shiny, and his eyes glistened in the starlight like some wild
animal's. The rest of the boys had crowded up at his back in a solid
wall. Some one of them giggled, but the remainder regarded her in morose
and intense silence.

"Well?" she said. "What for you want plenty fella things?"

"Me take 'm medicine," quoth Aroa. "You pay me."

And this was a sample of their gratitude, she thought. It looked as if
Sheldon had been right after all. Aroa waited stolidly. A leaping fish
splashed far out on the water. A tiny wavelet murmured