without lyre,
Shall sing of me grievous things,
even things that were ill
to desire--_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett, whose face began to show a
little more like flesh and a little less like rotten kelp....

Whenever a fair chance offered Karaki landed on the lee of some one of
the tiny islets with which the Santa Cruz region is peppered and would
make shift to cook rice and potatoes in the tin dipper. This was risky,
for one day the islet proved to be inhabited. Two white men in a cutter
came out to stop them. Karaki could not hide his resemblance to a
runaway nigger, and he did not try to. But when the cutter approached
within fifty yards he suddenly announced himself as a runaway nigger
with a gun. He left the cutter sinking and one of the men dead.

"There's a bullet hole alongside me here," said Pellett from under the
thwart. "You'd better plug it."

Karaki plugged it and released his passenger, who sat up and began
stretching himself with a certain naive curiosity of his own body.

"So you're real," observed Pellett, staring hard at Karaki. "By George,
you _are_, and that's comfort."

He was right. Karaki was very real.

"What side you take'm this fella canoe?"

"Balbi," said Karaki, using the native word for Bougainville.

Pellett whistled. An eight-hundred-mile evasion in an open boat was a
considerable undertaking. It enlisted his respect. Moreover, he had just
had emphatic proof of the efficiency of this little black man.

"Balbi all some home b'long you?"

"Yes."

"All right, commodore," said Pellett. "Lead on. I don't know why you
shipped me for supercargo, but I'll see you through."

* * * * *

Strangely--or perhaps not so strangely--the whole Fufuti interval of his
history had been fading from his brain while the poison was ebbing from
his tissues. The Christopher Alexander Pellett that emerged was one from
earlier years: pretty much of a wreck, it was true, and a feckless,
indolent, paltry creature at best, but ordinarily human and rather more
than ordinarily intelligent.

He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet
potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in
the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours
together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this
pair--simple savage and convalescent drunkard--but there was never any
quest