t using a crowbar as a wedge he
endeavored to put matters on a straightforward footing.

"A little while ago," he said, "you seemed to imply that I had assumed
the name of Jenks."

But Miss Deane's confidential mood had gone. "Nothing of the kind," she
said, coldly. "I think Jenks is an excellent name."

She regretted the words even as they fell from her lips. The sailor
gave a mighty wrench with the bar, splitting the log to its clustering
leaves.

"You are right," he said. "It is distinctive, brief, dogmatic. I cling
to it passionately."

Soon afterwards, leaving Iris to the manufacture of sago, he went to
the leeward side of the island, a search for turtles being his
ostensible object. When the trees hid him he quickened his pace and
turned to the left, in order to explore the cavity marked on the tin
with a skull and cross-bones. To his surprise he hit upon the remnants
of a roadway--that is, a line through the wood where there were no
well-grown trees, where the ground bore traces of humanity in the shape
of a wrinkled and mildewed pair of Chinese boots, a wooden sandal, even
the decayed remains of a palki, or litter.

At last he reached the edge of the pit, and the sight that met his eyes
held him spellbound.

The labor of many hands had torn a chasm, a quarry, out of the side of
the hill. Roughly circular in shape, it had a diameter of perhaps a
hundred feet, and at its deepest part, towards the cliff, it ran to a
depth of forty feet. On the lower side, where the sailor stood, it
descended rapidly for some fifteen feet.

Grasses, shrubs, plants of every variety, grew in profusion down the
steep slopes, wherever seeds could find precarious nurture, until a
point was reached about ten or eleven feet from the bottom. There all
vegetation ceased as if forbidden to cross a magic circle.

Below this belt the place was a charnel-house. The bones of men and
animals mingled in weird confusion. Most were mere skeletons. A few
bodies--nine the sailor counted--yet preserved some resemblance of
humanity. These latter were scattered among the older relics. They wore
the clothes of Dyaks. Characteristic hats and weapons denoted their
nationality. The others, the first harvest of this modern Golgotha,
might have been Chinese coolies. When the sailor's fascinated vision
could register details he distinguished yokes, baskets, odd-looking
spades and picks strewed amidst the bones. The animals were all of one
type, small