slid out from the shore into the still waters of
the lagoon, the lieutenant glanced down at the manacled figure of his
prisoner.

"Let him sit up, Adams, and take the irons off. He can't lie there like
a trussed fowl; and see if one of you can't stop that bleeding."

Adams bent down, and unlocking the handcuffs lifted him up.

Then, quick as thought, Jim Swain, dashing him aside, sprang overboard
and dived towards the shore.

"Quick! Show a light," said the officer, standing up in the stern,
pistol in hand, waiting for the man to rise.

A long narrow streak of light showed his figure not ten feet away from
the beach. In another minute he would touch the shore.

"Stop!" cried the officer. "Swim another yard and you are a dead man."

But the half-caste kept steadily on. Again Fenton's warning cry rang
out, then he slowly raised his pistol and fired.

The shot told, for as the half-caste rose to his feet he staggered. And
then he sped up the steep beach towards the thick scrub beyond.

As he panted along with the blood streaming from a bullet wound in his
side, his sister's hand seized him by the arm.

"Jim, Jim!" she gasped, "only a little more, and we------"

And then half a dozen muskets flashed, and the two figures went down
together and lay motionless on the bloodied sand.

Fenton jumped ashore and looked at them. "Both dead," he said,
pityingly, to old Swain, who with a number of natives now stood beside
him.

"Aye, sir," said the trader, brokenly, "both. An' now let me be with my
dead."

*****

But neither Ema nor Jim Swain died, though both were sorely wounded; and
a month later they with their father sailed away to Samoa.

LEASSE

There were only a score or so of houses in Leasse village--curious
saddle-backed structures, with steeply pitched roofs of gray and yellow
thatch, rising to a sharp point fore and aft; and in all the twenty not
more than one hundred natives--men, women, and children--dwelt. At the
back of the village the dense mountain forest began, and all day long
one might hear the booming notes of the gray wood-pigeons and the shrill
cries of the green and golden parrakeets as they fed upon the rich
purple berries of the _masa'oi_ and the inflorescence of the coco-palms.
In front, and between two jutting headlands of coral rock, with sides
a-green with climbing masses of _tupa_ vine, lay a curving beach of
creamy sand; westward the sea, pale green a mile from the shore, and