ow," he said, when they had discussed the matter and threshed it out
thoroughly.

He rose, bid good-day to his friend Fountain, and Lestrange followed
him, carrying the brown paper box in his hand.

O'Sullivan's Wharf was not far away. A tall Cape Horner that looked
almost a twin sister of the ill-fated Northumberland was discharging
iron, and astern of her, graceful as a dream, with snow-white decks,
lay the Raratonga discharging copra.

"That's the boat," said Stannistreet; "cargo nearly all out. How does
she strike your fancy?"

"I'll take her," said Lestrange, "cost what it will."

CHAPTER IV

DUE SOUTH

It was on the 10th of May, so quickly did things move under the
supervision of the bedridden captain, that the Raratonga, with
Lestrange on board, cleared the Golden Gates, and made south, heeling
to a ten-knot breeze.

There is no mode of travel to be compared to your sailing-ship. In a
great ship, if you have ever made a voyage in one, the vast spaces of
canvas, the sky-high spars, the finesse with which the wind is met and
taken advantage of, will form a memory never to be blotted out.

A schooner is the queen of all rigs; she has a bounding buoyancy denied
to the square-rigged craft, to which she stands in the same
relationship as a young girl to a dowager; and the Raratonga was not
only a schooner, but the queen, acknowledged of all the schooners in
the Pacific.

For the first few days they made good way south; then the wind became
baffling and headed them off.

Added to Lestrange's feverish excitement there was an anxiety, a deep
and soul-fretting anxiety, as if some half-heard voice were telling him
that the children he sought were threatened by some danger.

These baffling winds blew upon the smouldering anxiety in his breast,
as wind blows upon embers, causing them to glow. They lasted some days,
and then, as if Fate had relented, up sprang on the starboard quarter a
spanking breeze, making the rigging sing to a merry tune, and blowing
the spindrift from the forefoot, as the Raratonga, heeling to its
pressure, went humming through the sea, leaving a wake spreading behind
her like a fan.

It took them along five hundred miles, silently and with the speed of a
dream. Then it ceased.

The ocean and the air stood still. The sky above stood solid like a
great pale blue dome; just where it met the water line of the far
horizon a delicate tracery of cloud draped the entire round of the sky