a bad fellow, Mr. Barry; but rather too fond of the wine
when it is red, or gamboge, or green, or any other damned colour. He
and I were shipmates some years ago in the Solomon Island labour trade.
He has, it seems, had a quarrel with the natives of Ponape, who
attacked him, and he and his crowd had to clear out to save their
lives. I've told him that I'll give him a passage to Providence Lagoon
with us. His natives, he tells me, are good men, and I daresay they'll
prove useful to us."

The mate gave a curt assent. "I daresay his natives will prove useful,
sir. As for the man himself, I don't think he will be much of an
acquisition, if he is to be judged by first impressions. He's as drunk
as a pig, and I don't wonder at the Ponape natives wanting to get rid
of him, for in my opinion he's nothing better than a drunken,
swaggering bully. Why, the fellow carries a brace of pistols in his
belt. No decent trader does that."

Rawlings held up his hand deprecatingly. "Don't be too hard on poor
Warner, my dear Barry. He's not as bad as he looks. I'm sure you'll
get to like each other by-and-by. Good-night."

"Good-night, sir," replied Barry courteously. "I think we had better
keep on towing until daylight."

CHAPTER V.

VELO, THE SAMOAN, PROPHESIES.

The advent of Mr. Billy Warner of Ponape with his entourage of sixteen
truculent, evil-faced Solomon Islanders was not regarded with
enthusiasm by the chief officer and the native crew of the _Mahina_.

Warner himself was an insolent, overbearing ruffian of the first water,
and yet strangely enough his retinue, whom he at times treated with the
most savage brutality, were intensely devoted to him, and every one of
them would have cheerfully given up his life to protect the drunken,
foul-mouthed, and unmitigated scoundrel who knocked them about one day
and fraternised with them the next.

Velo, who, though a Samoan, was the acknowledged leader and mentor of
the native crew--men who mostly came from the Equatorial Islands of the
South and North Pacific--was quick to convey his impressions of the
newcomers to Barry, and expressed his fears for the future.

"Trouble will come to us through these black men, these woolly-haired
eaters of men's flesh," he said to the mate in Samoan, on the following
evening. "One of them--he with the hare-lip--can speak Fijian, and
this evening he was boasting to me of all that his master hath done, of
the men he hath kill