206

MEANING--CHASE YOURSELF 221

THE WICKS OF MACASSAR 239

DOUBLOON GOLD 253

THE PRACTICING OF CHRISTOPHER 284

AMOK 308

THE FOURTH MAN

The raft might have been taken for a swath of cut sedge or a drifting
tangle of roots as it slid out of the shadowy river mouth at dawn and
dipped into the first ground swell. But while the sky brightened and the
breeze came fresh offshore it picked a way among shoals and swampy
islets with purpose and direction, and when at last the sun leaped up
and cleared his bright eye of the morning mist it had passed the wide
entrance to the bay and stood to open sea.

It was a curious craft for such a venture, of a type that survives here
and there in the obscure corners of the world. The coracle maker would
have scorned it. The first navigating pithecanthrope built nearly as
well with his log and bush. A mat of pandanus leaves served for its sail
and a paddle of niaouli wood for its helm. But it had a single point of
real seaworthiness. Its twin floats, paired as a catamaran, were woven
of reed bundles and bamboo sticks upon triple rows of bladders. It was
light as a bladder itself, elastic, fit to ride any weather. One other
quality this raft possessed which recommended it beyond all comfort and
all safety to its present crew. It was very nearly invisible. They had
only to unstep its mast and lie flat in the cup of its soggy platform
and they could not be spied half a mile away.

Four men occupied the raft. Three of them were white. Their bodies had
been scored with brambles and blackened with dried blood, and on wrist
and ankle they bore the dark and wrinkled stain of the gyves. The hair
upon them was long and matted. They wore only the rags of blue canvas
uniforms. But they were whites, members of the superior race--members of
a highly superior race according to those philosophers who rate the
criminal aberration as a form of genius.

The fourth was the man who had built the raft and was now sailing it.
There was nothing superior about him. His skin was a layer of soot. His
prognathous jaw carried out the angle of a low forehead. No line of
beauty redeemed his lean limbs and knobby joints. Nature had set upo