ed to
the side. He shouted to Red, but in a moment he was seized and flung
overboard. Helpless, he swam round to his canoe which was drifting a
little way off, and pushed it on to the reef. He climbed in and, sobbing
all the way, paddled back to shore."

"What had happened was obvious enough. The whaler, by desertion or
sickness, was short of hands, and the captain when Red came aboard had
asked him to sign on; on his refusal he had made him drunk and kidnapped
him."

"Sally was beside herself with grief. For three days she screamed and
cried. The natives did what they could to comfort her, but she would not
be comforted. She would not eat. And then, exhausted, she sank into a
sullen apathy. She spent long days at the cove, watching the lagoon, in
the vain hope that Red somehow or other would manage to escape. She sat
on the white sand, hour after hour, with the tears running down her
cheeks, and at night dragged herself wearily back across the creek to
the little hut where she had been happy. The people with whom she had
lived before Red came to the island wished her to return to them, but
she would not; she was convinced that Red would come back, and she
wanted him to find her where he had left her. Four months later she was
delivered of a still-born child, and the old woman who had come to help
her through her confinement remained with her in the hut. All joy was
taken from her life. If her anguish with time became less intolerable it
was replaced by a settled melancholy. You would not have thought that
among these people, whose emotions, though so violent, are very
transient, a woman could be found capable of so enduring a passion. She
never lost the profound conviction that sooner or later Red would come
back. She watched for him, and every time someone crossed this slender
little bridge of coconut trees she looked. It might at last be he."

Neilson stopped talking and gave a faint sigh.

"And what happened to her in the end?" asked the skipper.

Neilson smiled bitterly.

"Oh, three years afterwards she took up with another white man."

The skipper gave a fat, cynical chuckle.

"That's generally what happens to them," he said.

The Swede shot him a look of hatred. He did not know why that gross,
obese man excited in him so violent a repulsion. But his thoughts
wandered and he found his mind filled with memories of the past. He went
back five and twenty years. It was when he first came to the island,
wear