ail-boat rode the shallow torquoise-tinted waters at anchor, rocking
gently just off the snowy coral reef on which we were now camping. The
youthful waitress who, for economy's sake, wore her cap, apron, collar
and cuffs over her dainty print dress, was seated by the signal fire
writing in her diary. Sometimes she thoughtfully touched her pencil point
with the tip of her tongue; sometimes she replenished the fire from a
pile of dead mangrove branches heaped up on the coral reef beside her.
Whatever she did she accomplished gracefully.

As for the man, Grue, his back remained turned toward us both and he
continued, apparently, to scan the horizon for the sail which we all
expected. And all the time I could not rid myself of the unpleasant idea
that somehow or other he was looking at me, watching attentively the
expression of my features and noting my every movement.

The smoke of our fire blew wide across leagues of shallow, sparkling
water, or, when the wind veered, whirled back into our faces across the
reef, curling and eddying among the standing mangroves like fog drifting.

Seated there near the fire, from time to time I swept the horizon with my
marine glasses; but there was no sign of Kemper; no sail broke the far
sweep of sky and water; nothing moved out there save when a wild duck
took wing amid the dark raft of its companions to circle low above the
ocean and settle at random, invisible again except when, at intervals,
its white breast flashed in the sunshine.

Meanwhile the waitress had ceased to write in her diary and now sat with
the closed book on her knees and her pencil resting against her lips,
gazing thoughtfuly at the back of Grue's head.

It was a ratty head of straight black hair, and looked greasy. The rest
of him struck me as equally unkempt and dingy--a youngish man, lean,
deeply bitten by the sun of the semi-tropics to a mahogany hue, and
unusually hairy.

I don't mind a brawny, hairy man, but the hair on Grue's arms and chest
was a rusty red, and like a chimpanzee's in texture, and sometimes a
wildly absurd idea possessed me that the man needed it when he went about
in the palm forests without his clothes.

But he was only a "poor white"--a "cracker" recruited from one of the
reefs near Pelican Light, where he lived alone by fishing and selling his
fish to the hotels at Heliatrope City. The sail-boat was his; he figured
as our official guide on this expedition--an expedition which already