unning in a wide circle, his broad red face slewed over his left
shoulder. "Go it, Paddy! go it, Paddy!"

"Kape off me, you baste!" shouted Paddy. "Holy Mary, Mother of God!
I'll land you a kick wid me fut if yiz come nigh me. Em'leen! Em'leen!
come betune us!"

He tripped, and over he went on the sand, the indefatigable Dick
beating him with a little switch he had picked up to make him continue.

"I'm better now, but I'm near wore out," said Mr Button, sitting up on
the sand. "But, bedad, if I'm chased by any more things like them it's
into the say I'll be dashin'. Dick, lend me your arum."

He took Dick's arm and wandered over to the shade of the trees. Here
he threw himself down, and told the children to leave him to sleep.
They recognised that the game was over and left him. And he slept for
six hours on end; it was the first real sleep he had had for several
days. When he awoke he was well, but very shaky.

CHAPTER XIX

STARLIGHT ON THE FOAM

Mr Button saw no more rats, much to Dick's disappointment. He was off
the drink. At dawn next day he got up, refreshed by a second sleep, and
wandered down to the edge of the lagoon. The opening in the reef faced
the east, and the light of the dawn came rippling in with the flooding
tide.

"It's a baste I've been," said the repentant one, "a brute baste."

He was quite wrong; as a matter of fact, he was only a man beset and
betrayed.

He stood for a while, cursing the drink, "and them that sells it." Then
he determined to put himself out of the way of temptation. Pull the
bung out of the barrel, and let the contents escape?

Such a thought never even occurred to him--or, if it did, was instantly
dismissed; for, though an old sailor-man may curse the drink, good rum
is to him a sacred thing; and to empty half a little barrel of it into
the sea, would be an act almost equivalent to child-murder. He put the
cask into the dinghy, and rowed it over to the reef. There he placed it
in the shelter of a great lump of coral, and rowed back.

Paddy had been trained all his life to rhythmical drunkenness. Four
months or so had generally elapsed between his bouts--sometimes six; it
all depended on the length of the voyage. Six months now elapsed before
he felt even an inclination to look at the rum cask, that tiny dark
spot away on the reef. And it was just as well, for during those six
months another whale-ship arrived, watered and was avoided.

"Blisther it!" sa