ion as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third
week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate
nothing for a whole day.

"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut
and kept none for yourself."

"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.

Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours
while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her
outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow
was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back
into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company
for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had
now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.

But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them
and laid them one by one.

* * * * *

When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of
their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a
shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of
Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the
heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of
thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate
drop of moisture on the point of a knife.

On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green
wall that built up slowly across the west.

Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain
triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons,
some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them
anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without
instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki,
however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over
his shoulder into the east.

The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a
restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki
must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped
the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts
and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small
outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very
lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the f