"

"Well, come aboard and get some breakfast."

"Man, I'm going after the old fule! He's got no sail and canna be twenty
mile awa'. I'll pick him up before he gets to Milli Lagoon, which is
only saxty miles from here."

Packenham swore. "You infernal ass! Are you going to sea in a breeze
like this by yourself? Where's your crew?"

"The deevils wadna' come wi' me to look for a Papist. And I'm not going
to let the auld fule perish."

"Then come alongside and take a couple of our Savage Island boys. I can
spare them."

"No, no, captain. I'm not going tae delay ye when ye're bound to the
eastward and I'm going the ither way. Ye'll find me here safe enough
when ye come back in anither month. And I'll pick up the auld deevil and
the wee bit lassie before mid-day."

And then, with his red beard spreading out across his shoulders,
Macpherson let his boat pay off before the wind. In an hour he was out
of sight.

*****

Three weeks afterwards the _Sadie Perkins_ sperm whaler of New Bedford,
came across a boat, five hundred miles west of Maduro. In the stern
sheets lay that which had once been Macpherson, the "auld fule Papist,
and the wee bit lassie."

A MAN OF IMPULSE

Blackett, the new trader at Guadalcanar in the Solomons, was
entertaining a visitor, an old fellow from a station fifty miles
distant, who had sailed over in his cutter to "have a pitch" with
his nearest white neighbour. And the new man--new to this particular
island--made much of his grizzled visitor and listened politely to the
veteran's advice on many subjects, ranging from "doctoring" of perished
tobacco with molasses to the barter of a Tower musket for a "werry nice
gal."

*****

The new trader's house looked "snugger'n anything he'd ever seed," so
the old trader had told him; and Blackett was pleased and very liberal
with the liquor. He had been but a few months on the island, and already
his house was furnished, in a rude fashion, better than that of any
other trader in the region. He was a good host; and the captains of the
Fiji, Queensland, and Samoan "blackbirders" liked to visit him and loll
about the spacious sitting-room and drink his grog and play cards--and
tell him that his wife was "the smartest and prettiest woman in the
group."

Blackett was especially vain of the young Bonin Island half-caste
wife who had followed his varying fortunes from her home in the far
north-west Pacific to the solitary, ghostly outlier of Poly