he thing. Of course, if we did spill, it
would be all right with Bryce--he was so fat that he'd just bounce--but
I was slimmer, and I knew from experience that I had very brittle bones.
Once in the Solomons, when a wild boar charged me, I lay for weeks in a
trader's hut waiting for an obdurate fracture to knit up again. Some
idea of the furious pace at which Bryce pushed the car along can be
guessed from the fact that we did the fourteen miles in something over
twenty minutes. It had been quite half-past eleven when we left the
Heads, and the clock in the car wanted a few minutes to twelve when we
sailed over the bridge and up Moorabool-street. We cleared a stationary
tram by inches, twisted in an S curve to avoid a farmer's waggon and
then, with a heart-rending grind, Bryce threw over his clutch and slowed
down to a snail-like crawl of ten miles an hour.

"This asphalt paving makes a great motor track," Bryce said to me, "but
there's speed-laws in existence here. That's the trouble of it. When a
man has a nice track he's interfered with, and when there isn't anyone
to meddle with him it's ten to one that he's crawling over something
like a corduroy road."

"Corduroy!" I said, and sat up and looked at him. I knew what he meant.
Any man who has ever travelled the heart-breaking log-roads of the
interior New Guinea goldfields does not need to be told what 'corduroy'
is. It is an ever-present memory, an astonishment and a nightmare. Bryce
did not speak from hearsay--the note in his voice told me that--but was
talking from experience garnered at great cost, both of money and
energy.

"Corduroy," he repeated after me. "Doesn't that sound familiar to you,
Carstairs?"

"It does," I said with emphasis. "But how the deuce----?" And then I
stopped dead. Bryce? Bryce? What was familiar about that name? Bryce and
New Guinea and----. I had it. And Walter Carstairs.

"Ever heard of Walter Carstairs?" I questioned.

"The minute I heard your name I knew you," Bryce said. "Ever heard of
Walter Carstairs? Why, he was the best friend I ever had. He saved my
life in the early days of the Woodlarks."

"According to the Dad," I said, looking him straight in the face, "it
was the other way about."

He laughed happily. "Jimmy, I'm losing my memory if that's so. But
whatever happened to him? I lost sight of him the last ten years or so."

"You would," I answered. "He stuck to the Islands. He had a life's work
planned out, but he got