leaned against a tree, and gave him
the letter. Attwater glanced it through.

"What does that mean?" he asked, passing it to Herrick. "Treachery?"

"O, I suppose so!" said Herrick.

"Well, tell him to come on," said Attwater. "One isn't a fatalist for
nothing. Tell him to come on and to look out."

Herrick returned to the figure-head. Half-way down the pier the clerk
was waiting, with Davis by his side.

"You are to come along, Huish," said Herrick. "He bids you to look
out--no tricks."

Huish walked briskly up the pier, and paused face to face with the young
man.

"W'ere is 'e?" said he, and to Herrick's surprise, the low-bred,
insignificant face before him flushed suddenly crimson and went white
again.

"Right forward," said Herrick, pointing. "Now, your hands above your
head."

The clerk turned away from him and towards the figure-head, as though he
were about to address to it his devotions; he was seen to heave a deep
breath; and raised his arms. In common with many men of his unhappy
physical endowments, Huish's hands were disproportionately long and
broad, and the palms in particular enormous; a four-ounce jar was
nothing in that capacious fist. The next moment he was plodding steadily
forward on his mission.

Herrick at first followed. Then a noise in his rear startled him, and he
turned about to find Davis already advanced as far as the figure-head.
He came, crouching and open-mouthed, as the mesmerised may follow the
mesmeriser; all human considerations, and even the care of his own life,
swallowed up in one abominable and burning curiosity.

"Halt!" cried Herrick, covering him with his rifle. "Davis, what are you
doing, man? You are not to come."

Davis instinctively paused, and regarded him with a dreadful vacancy of
eye.

"Put your back to that figure-head--do you hear me?--and stand fast!"
said Herrick.

The captain fetched a breath, stepped back against the figure-head, and
instantly redirected his glances after Huish.

There was a hollow place of the sand in that part, and, as it were, a
glade among the coco-palms in which the direct noonday sun blazed
intolerably. At the far end, in the shadow, the tall figure of Attwater
was to be seen leaning on a tree; towards him, with his hands over his
head, and his steps smothered in the sand, the clerk painfully waded.
The surrounding glare threw out and exaggerated the man's smallness; it
seemed no less perilous an enterprise, this that he