White Fire

by John Oxenham

She had long and peremptory interviews with her lawyers.

And every day since, she and her husband had been out in the market-place with open purse and very definite ideas as to their requirements, and the things they had bought were very extraordinary and about as different from the usual purchases of newly-married couples as they possibly could be.

Item.—One 300-ton auxiliary schooner, built to Class 17 A.1., by Scott & Sons, Greenock; dimensions 143 O.A.; 23-½ ft. beam; 13 ft. draught; 7 ft. headroom, etc. A handsome, roomy boat, stoutly built for comfort and long voyages to the order of a financial magnate, whose health unfortunately broke down before she was quite ready for him, and forced him to seek more genial climatic, and other conditions, in Argentina.

Mr. and Mrs. Blair ran up to Greenock to inspect her, found her exactly to their liking, settled the matter in five minutes in the office inside the big gates, christened her the Torch with a hastily procured bottle of champagne, gave orders for the duplication of every piece of machinery she contained; walked out of the big gates ship-owners, and dropped in on the astonished aunties in Brisbane Street and announced that they had come for a cup of tea and to stop one night.

They stopped more than one night, however, for after tea Blair walked in to see the Rev. Archibald for a last talk and a pipe of peace. And when the Rev. Archibald recovered wind and wits from the rapid details Blair gave him of the work he was engaged on, he at once offered to find him a crew through some of the members of his church. Blair desired nothing better, and in five minutes the maid of the Manse was skipping through the dripping streets with kilted skirts to summon to instant conference some nearer members who might be able to advise in the matter. He laid his plans before them, told them to a hair the kind of men he required both for officers and crew, and went back to Brisbane Street in due course, comfortably assured in his own mind that within two days the Torch would be fitted with a crew worthy of her and the work for which she was destined.

Next day the ship-owners went out for a walk, and did not return till close on tea-time.

They had been on their honeymoon trip: past the cemetery gates, up the brae between the brown stone houses, past the pond, up the cinder path, and along that glorious walk, with the swift brown water of the Cut swirling past to its appointed work in mills and town, on the one side; and on the other, across the brimming firth, the everlasting hills, grey and green and purple and black, as the sunshine chased the shadows to their hiding-places in the glens; the full sea welling about their feet, now green, now blue; and the sky overhead bluest blue after the rain, with piles of snowy cloud passing along in solemn silence like a procession of the chariots of God.

They did not speak much, hardly a word, but walked hand in hand like a pair of country lovers, till they came to where a flat stone lay alongside the beginnings of a cabin.

And there they stopped; and looking into one another's faces by a common impulse, put their arms round one another's necks and kissed, with brimming hearts, and eyes that saw none of the glories around because of the glory within them, which was too much for either sight or sound.

The happy tears were running down Jean's cheeks, but they were swallowed up in reminiscent smiles as her husband seated her gently on one projecting rock and himself on the other.

"This is my twelfth birthday," he began; and when Miss Inquisitive looked at him out of her sweet brown eyes, still soft from their recent shower, he explained: "To all intents and purposes my life began that day I met you here, though there had been a previous troubled life in which my dear father gave me all he had to give—the desire to learn."

"And I am about two years old," she said, smiling; and when she saw that he did not understand, explained:

"After meeting you again that second time in the church, when you hardly recognised me——"

"I knew you the moment I looked into your eyes."

"I came up here the next day—I did not know why, but something drew me, and I came. And I sat down here on this stone, and saw you sitting on that stone munching oatcake and cheese, and thought what a greedy little pig I was not to have made you take some of my sandwiches——"

"You couldn't have made me. I wouldn't have touched one for——"

"I know. But I ought to have made you, all the same. And then I thought of you as you were now—that is, then, you know—and what a great, big, strong soul and body you had become, and what great things you were going to do, and how you had got your heart's desire. And then I thought of myself, and the little I had done with all my opportunities. And after that you insisted on coming into my thoughts at all times, and I could not get rid of you. And then you sailed, and I knew I should never see you again, and life felt hollow and hopeless. And then I saw in the papers about your being murdered. And then you came home, and—here we are. And oh, Ken! it is almost too good to be true."

"Not a bit of it, my dear; it is only just beginning."

Then he drew out two parcels from his pockets, and hers contained some neat little sandwiches and cookies with jam inside, and his contained oatcakes and cheese.

And, being in a raised mood, she laughed till she cried at his oatcakes and cheese, and then insisted on dividing up equally all round, and vowed that his fare was quite as good as her own.

"Of course it is," he said. "I knew that all the time. A boy on the hillsides who can't enjoy oatcakes and cheese would deserve to go empty."

When they had eaten, they still sat looking out over the water at the hills and lochs opposite. In all likelihood they would never see that fairest of scenes again, and they could not have too much of it.

And after they had sat a long time in silence, Blair, leaning forward with his arms on his knees and his eyes drinking in great draughts of delight, said, suddenly—but slowly, as though the words had to be called, or recalled, from afar, and said them, not to her or for her, but to and for something quite outside them both—said them, in fact, as though he were impelled to say them, and could not help himself—

"The hills of God stand fast and sure."

The words described those hills opposite exactly. Then a pause, and presently—

"His mighty promises endure
For ever and for evermore."

Then he fell silent again, and thoughtful, and presently—

"His Mercy is a boundless sea,
For ever flowing, full and free."

She saw it there before her just as he saw it. And after another pause—

"Through Time into Eternity."

She looked at him quietly and questioningly, but his gaze was fixed absorbedly on the opposite shore. It seemed almost as if he had forgotten her for the moment. She was content to watch him and to listen to him—

"And as the wide blue sky above,
Encircling us where'er we move."

There it was above them. The chariots had passed away. The sky was unflecked blue—

"So is His all-enfolding Love."

Then came a longer pause, and she thought he had ended, but she would not speak. And presently he began again—

"For these, Thy gifts, we thank Thee, Lord!
Hills, sea, and sky, take up the word,
And thank Thee!—thank Thee!—thank Thee, Lord."

He sat still, gazing out intently at the hills and the sea and the sky, and sat so long without a word that at last she spoke.

"Whose is that, Ken? Surely he must have sat just here, and seen just that."

He turned slowly to her, as though he found it difficult to leave those wonders beyond.

"I really do not know, dear.... They seemed to come of their own accord from somewhere. But whether I recalled them from somewhere else, or whether they came hot from the anvil, I do not know. I do not think I ever made a line of poetry in my life. There has been always so much else to be done."

"I think you must have made them," she said.

Then, in turn, she had her own amusing little monologue. For she began suddenly telling off the lochs and hills, just as he had named them to her that other day—"Loch Goil, Loch Long, Ben More, Ben Lomond, The Cobbler, Ben Ihme, Holy Loch!"

"We shall often think of them when the prospect is a very different one," he said quietly. "You never regret all that you are going to leave behind you, Jean?"

"Never for one moment, dear. I am taking with me, and going to, so very much more than I leave behind, that my heart is full of gladness," she said. "There is not room for the smallest shadow of a shadow of regret."

And they joined hands again and went on along the windings of the path, in and out of the curves and dimples of the mountain's breast, till the bold peaks of Arran rose purple in the distance, and they came to the Sheils Farm.

Blair's kinsfolk had long since left the place. He just took a look round the familiar byres and stables, and poked his head into a room whence a fresh-complexioned dairy-maid, in short blue skirts and bare feet, was busily chasing hens. He came out with a reminiscent smile on his face, and they turned down the hill towards Inverkip. He led her by the short cuts his boyish feet had known so well; past the old burying-ground, where the body-snatchers plied their gruesome trade and the village folk sat up night after night to protect their dead; past the gates of Ardgowan to the sea. And so along the shore road, with the waves splashing up among the boulders on one side, and the dark policies on the other, and the great trees meeting overhead; past the sturdy white pillar of the Cloch into Ashton, and so at last home. A honeymoon trip which neither of them ever forgot as long as they lived.

"Well, you two," said Aunt Jannet, when they came in. "We began to think you'd given us the slip and gone across the border without saying goodbye."

"We've been a long round," said Blair, "about——"

"About twelve years," said Jean.

"Then you must be starving. We expected you'd come home ravenous, and provided accordingly."

"We've been living on the fat of the land," laughed Jean; but they both fell to all the same, and proved beyond doubt that high thought and good living were by no means incompatible.

CHAPTER VIII

GOING STRONG

That same evening a burly, middle-aged man came to the house and requested audience of Mr. Blair.

He bore the unmistakable hall-mark, and Kenneth liked the looks of him and the ring of his voice.

The two men eyed one another closely as they shook hands.

"Mr. Duncan told me you were wanting a captain for your schooner, Mr. Blair. I only heard it half an hour ago, and I've come straight."

Blair nodded. "What are your qualifications? It is not everybody's job, you know."

"I know all about it, sir. And I think I'm the man for it. My name is Cathie—John Cathie. I sailed my own ship as master for over fifteen years. Quitted the sea three years ago because I'd made enough to live on and the wife wanted me to stop ashore. She died six months ago. I've neither chick nor child, and I want back to the water. When you've spent thirty-five years with live water under your feet, the land comes strange to you!"

"Ever been in the South Seas?"

"Spent ten years in the Island trade, sir. Know 'em like a book, from the Carolines to the Paumotus; and if you can find a brown man in the whole stretch that has a word against John Cathie I'll—well, you can name your own forfeit."

"And the white men?"

"Ah—there! Most of 'em all right. Some I'd like to see strung higher than Haman. But that kind's mostly yellow, though some are dirty white."

"Know the Dark Islands?"

"At a distance. I never landed there. I was only a trader then."

"And these men you'd like to see strung up like Haman, only more so, Captain Cathie?"

"You know them as well as I do, sir. Kidnappers, black-birders, treacherous devils, scum of the earth. They don't have the times they used to have, but they're not wholly cleared out yet in the outlying groups. I'll be glad to give what time's left me to helping clear them."

"You're up to steam?"

"Had five years of it."

"Any hand with a Long Tom?"

"Was gunner's mate for three years on the Blenheim before I got married, and we always carried guns in the Islands," and the bold blue eyes snapped with a touch of puzzlement. "But—I thought it was a missionary cruise you were bound on, Mr. Blair?"

"I'm a new kind of missionary, Captain Cathie. The faithful shepherd protects his flock. If the wolves try to steal his lambs, the wolves must take the consequences."

"By God, sir, I'm your man!" and the burly one jumped up with a flame in his face, because he could not sit still under the hopes that were in him.

"I'm inclined to think you may be," said Blair. "You will understand, Captain Cathie, that the master of our ship will be one of the most important links in the chain. If you will look in about this time to-morrow, you shall hear what we have decided."

"Right, sir! I'll be here." He turned back when he had reached the door. "If you should find some better man for captain, put me down for chief mate, Mr. Blair; and if I'm not good enough for that, I'll go before the mast sooner than be left out."

Blair had already decided in his own mind, but in a matter of such immense importance he could take no possible risks. His inquiries, however, only confirmed the impression he had formed. When Captain Cathie came hopefully in, the next night, the matter was settled on the spot, and he went away a new man, gripping with feet and hands the rungs of a new ladder.

Blair laid his plans fully before him, and, so far as the schooner was concerned, left him to carry them out.

Then they were back in London, and the busy days sped past, scarce long enough for all that had to be done in them.

It was the necessary business with the Colonial Office that tried him most severely. The Secretary accorded him an interview, received him with gracious warmth, listened with interest to his views, agreed that it would be a good thing for the Dark Islands to be accorded a protectorate until the time was ripe for formal annexation, but—— There were many buts, and they would have driven a less patient and less determined seeker after other men's good to despair. There was Australia; there was France; there was Germany; there was the Opposition; there was that loud-voiced party in the land which screamed at any extension of the Empire's shoes.

But upon all and everything Blair quietly brought to bear his unique personal knowledge of the conditions out there, a large common sense, and an inflexible persistence that would admit of no rebuff or turning aside.

The minister smilingly accused him of being one-eyed as regards the Dark Islands.

"Absolutely!" said Blair quietly—"one-eyed, one-hearted, and one-lived! Body, soul, and spirit I am for the Dark Islands, and I want to do all that man can do. Give me the legal right and a reasonably free hand, and, with God's help, I can do a great work out there. I do not think it need cost you a farthing. I have a revenue to start with of over £10,000 a year, and a considerable capital for initial development purposes. Within five years, with reasonable success, the islands will be self-supporting. But—I must have my foundations sure, or I cannot build as I would."

"The matter has already been debated among us, Mr. Blair," said the Secretary. "The Earl of Selsea brought it up and has made it his particular pet project. You seem to have captured his heart, and when he takes a matter of this kind in hand he sticks to it like a bulldog. But you can understand that there are many collateral issues, and we have to consider them all. I understand exactly what you want and why, and I promise you to do my utmost to bring it about. It may be some months before it can be arranged. Meanwhile, no doubt, there is much you can be doing to prepare the ground."

"There is much to be done, sir, and I will set to work on the strength of what you say. But the sooner it is definitely settled the better for us all."

"A very fine young fellow," said the Secretary to himself, before he turned to another quarter of the globe. "The kind of man I could make splendid use of if I had him to myself."

But Kenneth Blair was another Man's man.

CHAPTER IX

ARMS AND THE MAN

The Torch had been brought round from Greenock by Captain Cathie, and was lying in the London Docks close alongside Wapping Basin, an object of interest to all her neighbours.

Captain Cathie's clock had gone back at least ten years since he and Kenneth Blair struck hands in the drawing-room of the Aunties' house in Brisbane Street. He was then a fine old specimen of the very best type of retired mariner. Now he was a jovial young sea-dog, bristling with energy, and overflowing with hearty goodwill to humanity at large. He was Kenneth Blair's man to the backbone, and prepared to follow him to the death.

Jean delighted in him and he in her. She had taken Aunt Jannet Harvey down to inspect her future home, and the ladies' comments had filled Captain Cathie's cup to the brim and won his heart completely.

Jean had asked him endless questions, but not one more than he delighted in answering; and Aunt Jannet Harvey's characteristic summing-up of the whole matter had been, "Child, I feel as if I'd wasted half my life in never having been to sea before. I've always had an idea that I knew something about neatness and comfort and packing, but this"—with a wave of the hand which comprehended the cabin she was standing in, and the Torch generally, and Captain Cathie—"this puts me to shame. I shall never want to live on shore again," and Captain Cathie was repaid for all his labours. With full understanding, and thirty years' experience, and no stinting as regards money, he had laboured to adapt the ladies' rooms to their fullest possible requirements. Their delight in all they saw assured him of his success.

A few days later Blair brought down a party of friends to inspect the little ship, foremost among them the Colonial Secretary and the Earl of Selsea, who had both come straight from a Cabinet Council where the Dark Islands had been the rat in the pit.

"We're getting on by degrees," said the Secretary in the train, as he lit a cigar to counteract the atmosphere.

"It's amazing what an amount of pig-headedness there is in the world," said his friend. "You don't realise it in all its heart-breaking stolidity till you run your own head against it."

"That's so. But what can you expect when men like B—— are pitchforked into the positions they occupy? I was at Eton with B—— and at Oxford. He always was a fool and he always will be. He ought to have gone into the Church."

"I object! The Church needs the very best men it can get."

"Well, then, into the Army. He couldn't have done much mischief in either, and in the Army, at all events, there'd have been some chance of his getting licked into some kind of shape. As it is, I always want to get up and ask him to come outside into the park with me just for ten minutes or so. It was the one argument that used to prevail with him, and I've an idea it would yet. Anyway, it would do me a heap of good. He was born pig-headed and it's grown on him ever since."

"If we can once get him to see things as——"

"See? B—— never could see anything beyond the side on which his bread was buttered. Some men are born dense, and some grow denser as they grow older. B——'s both. He wants trepanning. Here's Mark Lane, and there's your Angel Gabriel on the pounce for us."

Angel Gabriel, in the person of Kenneth Blair, gave them hearty welcome, and piloted them through slums and dockyards till they stood on the deck of the Torch, where Jean, and Aunt Jannet Harvey, and Captain Cathie, were already doing the honours to a goodly company.

"It is a great enterprise you are bound upon, Mrs. Blair," said the Secretary, as Jean expounded Torch to him.

"The grandest work in the world," she said exuberantly. "If you'll only back us up and give us what we want."

"Ah! if only it rested with me. But I'm only one."

"Oh, come! Where am I?" asked Selsea.

"That makes two," acknowledged the Secretary, who would willingly, in the light of Jean's brown eyes, have taken all the credit to himself.

"And we'll soon have the rest. As for B——, if he won't toe the line, we'll worry the life out of him," which was a highly improper remark to fall from the lips of a philanthropic nobleman. But then Jean Blair's hopefully eager face and wistful eyes were upon him, and allowances must be made.

"I do hope you will," she said earnestly.

"What, worry the life out of him?" laughed the Secretary.

"H'm—yes,—if he won't toe the line."

"Hullo!" said the Secretary, as he entered the deck saloon, an exceedingly comfortable room, fitted in bird's-eye maple with fine woven cane cushions and backs to the seats instead of saddlebags or velvet plush.

But it was not at the room itself at which he exclaimed, but at the arm-racks ranged round the walls, empty at present, but full of meaning.

"Yes," said Blair quietly. "Winchesters. They're down below with the Maxim. Let me show you something else," and he led the two gentlemen along the deck to a longboat, keel up, on a stand well forward. The boat stood high and was covered with tarpaulin.

"Do you care to peep under?" he asked. And the Secretary bent and peeped, and straightened up again with raised eyebrows.

"You mean business, evidently, Mr. Blair. That's an odd passenger for a missionary ship."

"She throws a 9-lb. shell a mile and a half," said Blair, "and Captain Cathie is an old naval gunner. Yes, we mean business. But this business"—patting the long gun's cover—"only in case of absolute necessity. You quite understand the situation? I hope you have confidence in me?"

"I quite understand, and I have perfect confidence. Mr. Blair. I believe for once the right man is in the right place. We will do everything we possibly can to further your views. If we can't get all we want, we can no doubt keep our eyes closed."

Their visitors were delighted with all they saw, but all of them did not see everything. Even if one is prepared to tackle one's problems with an iron grip, it is not always highest wisdom to shake one's fist in the face of the world.

Blair showed them also the thousand and one other things he was taking out, seeds and germs of civilisation, from which he hoped a mighty harvest, and named many more which he would procure in Australia. He limned his ideas lightly, and gave them even fuller glimpse than he had ever yet done of his ultimate hopes; and, waxing eloquent, held them spellbound at the magnitude of the far-reaching possibilities. And to all, Jean's eloquent face and sparkling eyes played ready chorus, and Lord Selsea and the Secretary went away deeply impressed with what they had seen, and more with what they had heard, and most of all with what they had been made to think and hope.

"A very fine young fellow!" said the Secretary, as he neutralised the sulphur again.

"Ay!—a man, every inch of him. May he live to see his golden dreams realised!"

"I tell you what, Selsea, it's mighty refreshing to come in contact with enthusiasm such as that running in harness with sound common sense."

"Big heart and level head—a fine combination!"

"I feel as if I'd been a trip on the sea, or up on a mountain top. I wish we could swop B—— for him. Half a dozen of him in a Cabinet now—eh?"

"My dear fellow, don't! The contrast is too painful."

CHAPTER X

A BLACK OBJECT-LESSON

"It's a wonderful world!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey, for the four hundred and fourteenth time since, one by one, the Forelands and Dungeness and Beachy Head faded over the quarter as they ran down Channel. "And it gets more and more wonderful the further you go. Jean, my dear, have you ever in your dreams seen anything equal to that?"

"Never!" murmured Jean, wide-eyed and breathless, lest the smallest display of the ordinary functions of living should resolve into its natural elements the ethereal vision before them.

And yet it was only a tiny South Sea atoll, one of the myriad gleaming gems that deck the bosom of the great southern ocean in clusters, and strings, and ropes, and solitaires, from the Pelews to Pitcairn, of visible beauty indescribable, and in some cases possessed of natural latent treacherousness hardly second thereto.

It was still dusky twilight when they three climbed the companion, to taste the sweet of the dawn and watch the perpetual wonder of the coming day. They had learned already to rejoice in the dawnings as the purest and fullest revelations of Nature's exuberant largesse. The sunsets were gorgeous and magnificent beyond compare, but they had in them the elements of dissolution and decay, whereas the pure pearl splendours of the dawn sang full and true of new birth, new hopes, and the deep springs of life and joy.

Anxious as he was to get to his life's work, and grudging every moment and every league that lay between it and him, Blair had still felt it a duty to afford Jean every possible enjoyment of travel which the voyage could offer her. She was giving up much, she was going into outer exile for his sake; the chance might never come again. She should see all that was possible before the fringes fell behind them. And so they had come by way of Suez, and touched at Bombay and Ceylon, and then away to Australia and New Zealand, and then a great stretch round the outer skirts of the Australs and Paumotus, with only such stoppages as were absolutely necessary, and then straight for the work that awaited them.

"The rest of the Islands we can take by degrees," he said. "They will be our holiday grounds in the years to come. But now I am anxious to know what is going on in the Dark Islands. So very much may be happening behind that black curtain."

They were a gay and gallant company on board, not a long face among them. They were going to whatever might await them of strenuous life and heroic endeavour. No single one of them but was ready to lay down his or her life in the cause that lay so close to their hearts, and they found therein reason, not for doubts or fears, but wholly of exaltation. It was a mighty work, and they rejoiced in being chosen for it.

Blair had selected for his fellow-workers, from among a host of applicants, two young fellows whose qualifications satisfied him in every respect, and whose special training supplemented the deficiencies in his own. He is the wisest man who best knows what he knows least. The man who knows everything is generally useless at a pinch.

Well-equipped as he was in most respects—perfect, indeed, in the eyes of his wife, as was only right and proper—no man had a deeper appreciation of his own limitations than Blair himself. He had the fiery heart for the righting of wrongs, and the clear head and strong hand. But there were things beyond his ken—that is, in their very fullest compass—and in choosing his co-workers he kept these steadily in view.

For instance, he had a fair knowledge himself of medicine and rough-and-ready surgery. But he wanted very much more. And so Charles Evans, a Devonshire man, and M.D. and M.S. of London, became his medical right hand.

Then he had himself a certain aptitude for languages and dialects. He had picked up the lingua franca of the islands rapidly. But he wanted very much more. Charles Stuart, M.A., of Edinburgh, had made languages the congenial study of a lifetime which ran to nearly twenty-eight years. If any man could reduce phonetic elisions and hiatuses to written and printed symbols, Stuart was that man.

Then they were both big athletic fellows, runners and swimmers, great at games of all kinds, and handy with their hands, and they were as keen on letting light into the dark places of the earth as Blair himself. And they had both got married, at Blair's suggestion, and to the great satisfaction of the four people most immediately concerned—Evans, the Devonshire man, marrying Alison Carmichael, daughter of Dr. Carmichael of Edinburgh, and herself a medical student of no mean pretensions, and withal a good-looking, hearty girl, full of energy and spirits; and Stuart, the Scot, had married Mary Coventry, an English girl, daughter of a professor in a Lancashire theological college. She had a great natural aptitude for teaching, and was governessing when Stuart fell in love with her. She had promised to marry him when his circumstances should permit, and was cheerfully facing that very indefinite future when Blair's offer of the coveted post swept all the clouds away, and lifted her to a pinnacle of happiness which she was only becoming accustomed to by degrees.

With these four we have not very much to do. They proved most devoted assistants and pleasant and helpful companions throughout. But this is the story of Kenneth and Jean Blair, and if these others receive but slight mention, it is not because their hearts lacked fire or their lives incident, but simply through limitations of space.

So the Torch held three happy couples on their honeymoons, and Aunt Jannet Harvey played mother-in-law to them all, and kept the whole ship in high good-humour by her own energetic enjoyment of every smallest item of the day's doings.

Captain Cathie, by means of diligent search and stringent inquiry, had secured a crew after his own heart, every man a Clydesman, and some of them he had known since they were boys.

They carried a full complement. Besides himself and the mate, there were twenty men all told, stalwarts all, and Blair expected to find use for every man of them. Besides the big white whale-boats at the davits, there were two extra steam-launches in sections in the hold for inter-island work, and there were other reasons why he wanted behind him a thoroughly dependable band of tried white men instead of the usual mixture of Kanakas.

Forecasted shadows of those other reasons might have been found in the way in which he set to work, during the long weeks that lay between New Zealand and the Australs, to make marksmen of his peaceful crew. Bottles, hung from the yards, or set afloat on the sea, were their targets, and they most of them became fair shots. And one day Captain Cathie turned a cask overboard and stuck a white flag in it, and when it had floated almost out of sight he trained the long brown steel gun amidships on it, and bent and squinted carefully, and kept them so long in suspense, that the ladies screamed aloud when the gun did at last go off, and the white water flashed up close alongside the white flag.

"Within three feet, I should say, captain," said Blair, with the captain's glass at his eye. "Your hand and eye have not lost their cunning." And again and again the smiling captain displayed his prowess.

Another day he had the Maxim up and showed the men how to handle it. And cutlass drill became as regular a part of the daily routine as the fifteen-minute service that opened and closed the day.

Strange traffic indeed for a ship dedicated to peace and the spreading of the Light! But they all understood the meaning of these things, and the necessities that might arise, and the advisability of being prepared. For the very first Sunday night out from New Zealand, Blair, in that quiet, masterful fashion of his, which carried conviction once and for all into his hearers' souls and admitted of no shadow of a doubt, had taken occasion to explain the why and the wherefore of these apparent incongruities, and none of them ever forgot it.

It was a windless evening after a blistering day. The sea was like oil, with a long, slow, unbroken swell that set the little ship rolling in solemn rhythmical fashion which Stuart, the man of tongues, had long since dubbed heroic hexameters. And there, to the little company sitting facing him on deck in the gathering darkness, with an occasional sleepy "moo" from the farmyard in the bows, or the shrill squeakings of discontented piglets, and an admonitory grunt from their over-taxed mother, Blair described some of the things he had seen with his own eyes, and others which he had had direct from his dear old friend and leader, John Gerson, whose experience had been so much vaster than his own. Their hearts boiled at the mere recounting of the things he told them, and not a man or woman of them all but was ready to answer his utmost bidding in the effort to put them down.

"Ignorant these islanders are, and degraded, and the victims of horrible superstitions and practices unspeakable," he said, in closing; "but they have common living rights with the rest of us. Until those rights are secured to them, and until they learn that a white face is not necessarily the mask for a black heart, our work is futile. That security, by God's help, we intend to bring to them. If we can do it peacefully, I shall be grateful. If force is necessary, force we shall apply. But remember—we are going, not to punish, but to protect. Christ in righteous anger drove the defilers out of the Temple so that the Temple might be clean. God's Temple is here also. To the extent of our power and opportunity we will cleanse it, and by freeing these simple folk from bodily perils, we will give them the chance to redeem their souls alive."

They had swept along on the steady west wind for weeks. Now and again it dropped and left them rolling idly, with listless sails and jerking masts. But it always blew up again in time, and sent them swinging once more on their way, and at times it blew up so strong, and set up such an awkward sea, that their lives were almost battered out of them.

Blair, Evans, and Stuart apprenticed themselves to carpenter and engineers, and learned many things they did not know before. The men grew intimate with their rifles and cutlasses, the ladies talked much, read much, and they all took regular lessons in Samoan, as a foundation for the Polynesian tongues generally, from a native teacher who had been sent over to Sydney to meet them at Blair's request. His name was Matti, and he was a pleasing specimen of his kind, intelligent, painstaking, and of infinite good temper, but of a most peaceful, not to say lamb-like, disposition.

Among the many other diversions of their long voyage, Evans one day suggested that they should all be vaccinated, and was unmercifully chaffed for the idea.

"Isn't that like a young sawbones?" laughed Captain Cathie. "Just because we've got a clean bill, and he's got nothing to do, he's after making work just to keep his hand in."

But Evans persisted that they were going they knew not where, and no precautions ought to be omitted. And he talked so learnedly, and with so grave a foreboding, that by degrees they came to think he was perhaps right, and that it might be as well to be on the safe side of possibility. So, one after another, they meekly submitted their arms to the needle, and time came when they were glad of his persistence.

"Wonderful!—wonderful!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey once more that morning, in a whisper of concentrated rapture, and the others gazed at the tiny atoll without speaking, lest a breath should destroy it.

They had sighted the island the evening before, just a feathery fringe on the rim of the sea; but Captain Cathie was a devout believer in the enchantment of distance till full light of day should disclose possible pitfalls. For in these Southern Seas Nature sometimes gets ahead of the cartographers, and he had no desire to mark new reefs for the next comers with the stark ribs of his ship.

But now, in the dim of the dawn, they were wafting slowly towards it, with intent to land there for vegetables and fruit and water, and it grew visibly on their sight like a new-created thing.

Until a moment ago it had lain in the shadows. Then the eastern dimness softened, a mere quickening of hidden life, almost imperceptible, felt rather than seen. Then a soft pulsation, a throb from the heart of the coming day. The dimness trembled, a rosy softness diffused itself, and suddenly the background of the sky was filled with colour, palest green and tenderest rose and amber. And these grew and grew and deepened into crimson and gold, with swathes of diaphanous purple as the soft greens strengthened slowly into blue. And as it was above, so it was below, all duplicated in the flawless mirror of the sea. And there, between the upper and the lower glory, lay the enchanted isle gleaming darkly in the broken lights—a ring of feathery coco-palms and bosky undergrowth round an inner lagoon, a placid lake outside it, and outside that, still another protecting ring of reef dotted here and there with tiny feathered islets. A most wonderful and entrancing sight, so fairy-like and fragile that Jean felt it almost dangerous to breathe aloud.

Then the sun soared up above the sea-rim, and the atoll solidified and came out in its natural colours of dazzling white beach, and blue lagoons, and greens of every shade, from the tender tints of the budding palms to the cast-iron crests of the grey-boled giants, and the huddled mixture of the undergrowth. It lost in beauty as it gained in strength, but it looked more like solid land and less like a fairy vision, more like possible fruit and vegetables and less like a dissolving view.

All the company was on deck by this time, and all eyes were fixed on the island, as Captain Cathie in the bows conned the little ship slowly towards a wide opening in the outer reef, with a vigilant eye for hidden perils.

He had told them from the chart that it was the Three-Ringed Island of Atoa, but he had never been there himself and one could not be too cautious.

Then in the clear depths below them, as they crept slowly through the water-gate, they could see the wonderful forestry of the branching coral and the gleam of many-coloured shells, and the place was all alive with fishes of every tint and hue, sailing and darting like fragmentary rainbows.

But Captain Cathie was staring through his glasses at the distant white beach for signs of occupation, and found none. It was still early, however, and the village might be round the bend of the island. He carried the Torch in as far as he deemed safe, and then, at the word, the anchor plunged and the chain ran merrily out, and the little ship rode at rest for the first time in many days.

"Who is for the shore?" cried Blair, in the voice and manner of a jolly schoolboy offering treats.

They were all for the shore. After three weeks of continuous sailing the feel of solid ground under one's feet would be a novelty.

"Though I expect," said Aunt Jannet Harvey, "it'll be as hard to walk straight at first as it was not to walk crooked on the ship. I've got so used to walking on the sides of my feet, and balancing to the rolling, that I've almost forgotten what it feels like to walk any other way."

In ten minutes they were all speeding shorewards in one of the white whale-boats, and when Aunt Jannet Harvey cumbrously made the close acquaintance of the white beach, she found her feet no whit behind those of her younger companions in their eager activity.

They all stamped up the crunching coral with merry talk and laughter. Aunt Jannet Harvey stood at the foot of her first really intimate coco-nut tree, and gazed up the slim spire to the great benignant fronds and hanging fruit, with such intention of longing, that Jean, in a convulsion of laughter, cried—

"Do try it, auntie! I'm sure you could manage it if you tried hard."

"And if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, Aunt Jannet!" laughed Blair.

They left her still gazing, and scattered, Jean and Mary Stuart and Alison Evans diving into the undergrowth after armfuls of greenery and trailing vines, and twittering like escaped birds when, now and again, they came on treasure-trove of scarlet hibiscus blooms glowing on the green like fiery stars—or splashes of blood.

The men pressed on at once up the ridge to get a general view of their surroundings, and Captain Cathie, with a couple of his men, pulled slowly down the lagoon in search of the village.

He heard the merry calls of the explorers, and wondered at the absence of any sign of life on the island. The very sight of an approaching ship used, in his time, to bring the population to the beach. But things had changed of course since then, and byways had become highways.

The white boat jerked slowly along round the bend, and the voices ashore grew less distinct. And suddenly his lips pinched and his brow crumpled, and he gazed ahead with a fixed, angry glare which set his men wondering what they were coming to, and carried their chins to their shoulders unconsciously.

A stretch of white beach, a bristle of black posts jutting out of the cleared ground above—that was all. But Cathie's experience read them like three-feet letters on a city hoarding.

He threw up one hand and jammed the tiller hard down with the other.

"Round with her, boys!" and they were swinging back up the lagoon to get the women aboard again. For there might be sights in the brush along that ridge to shock the souls of men.

Blair, Evans, and Stuart, with Matti, the Samoan, and the rest of the boat's crew, climbed the backbone of the island, whose highest point attained an altitude of perhaps thirty feet.

They were standing looking across the flawless mirror of the central lagoon, when the Samoan broke out suddenly, "Sirs, I presume advice. Return fortwit to ship. This place is not good," and when they all turned on him in surprise, they found his brown face strained and pallid with fear, his eyes starting, and his nose dilated like a startled stag's.

"Why, Matti, what's wrong?" said Blair.

The brown man shook his head.

"I know not, sirs," and his white teeth chattered so that his chin wagged visibly. "There is evil abroad. It is in the air, in the tree-tops."

They looked up for sign of the evil, but saw only the heavy plumes of the coco-palms nodding mournfully in the breeze. Down below the air seemed heavy and somewhat sickly, and so far they had seen no sign of life on the island.

"The place seems deserted," said Evans.

"We will go on along here a bit further," said Blair, "and if there is nothing more to be seen, we'll turn back I'm afraid it's a poor look-out for fruit and vegetables," and they tramped on in silence, Matti well in the rear, reluctant to go, still more reluctant to be left.

And presently the brush thinned, and they came out on the clearing, and Blair stopped abruptly with a face as strained as Matti's, but grimmer and whiter, and Matti, stumbling up to the rear, gave a groan as though to say, "I knew it."

"God help us!" said Blair through his teeth, for they had found what Cathie had feared.

The blackened posts of the houses stuck up starkly through the sand as though in mute and pitiful appeal. Beneath them were heaps of wind-blown ashes barely covering that which they had mercifully hidden. And among the mounds as they drew near was a sound of rustling and stealthy movement, and here and there monstrous crabs, too gorged to move almost, essayed escape into their temporary burrows.

The newcomers stared wide-eyed and horror-stricken. Blair had seen it all before, and the grim white of his face gave place to grim red and black as his heart drummed furiously with righteous indignation.

"This is the horror we have come to fight," he said hoarsely. "This is what I told you of. Now you see it with your own eyes. The place has been swept bare by kidnappers. These died in defence of their homes and wives and children. Let us get back. It is no sight for the women."

He waved them away, but something caught his eye, and he went forward and bent over it with tight-pinched face for a moment, and then turned abruptly and followed the others.

But, even as he turned, a shriek from the lower brush told that it was too late to save the women from some visible knowledge of what had taken place. They turned and ran back along the ridge.

Mary Stuart, reaching for a flower, saw at her feet what she took for a fallen coco-nut, and stooped to pick it up, and then screamed aloud and sat down suddenly with a sick, white face. The others hurried up, Alison Evans and Aunt Jannet Harvey reaching her first.

"What is it, dear?" asked Aunt Jannet, and then she saw, and sat down heavily beside her.

Alison had her nerves under better control. She had seen little dead bodies before, but the sight of a murdered child is a shock to any woman. Her face was white and rigid, but she had her wits about her also.

"Take them all away," she whispered fiercely to Aunt Jannet Harvey, and Aunt Jannet, just needing that spur, scrambled up and gripped Mary Stuart by the shoulder and dragged her away as Jean came running up, asking, "What is it? What's the matter?"

"Come away, child!—come away! It is a little murdered baby. Alison is seeing to it, but it is quite dead. Let us get away. Here is the boat and Captain Cathie."

Everything was changed as the white boat plunged back across the lagoon to the ship. The men's faces were hard and angry, the women's white and pitiful. Alison Evans wept silently now. She had seen more than the others, and that soft little head, crushed in by one murderous blow against the tree, would haunt her dreams for nights to come.

The sun shone as brightly as before, but there was something pitiless in his unwinking glare. The sea was as placid and sparkling as before, but there was a fawning treachery in its very smoothness. The palms behind waved their feathers just as before, but now they were funeral plumes. The very oars no longer chirped merrily in the rowlocks, but croaked in a way that got on the women's nerves. And not one of them spoke till they were safe aboard the ship.

"Yes," nodded Blair to Cathie's look of interrogation, "we will go on at once," and the anchor chain rattled up hoarsely, and they went slowly and silently on their way, and left the beautiful island to its dead.

"I saw it from the water," said Cathie later to Blair, "and turned to get the ladies away, but I was too late. Did you see anything to give you any hint as to who it was, sir?"

"Yes. Peruvians, I should say. There was one yellow man among the dead, and they recruit mostly from these outer islands. Before God, captain, I will put a stop to this kind of work, whatever the cost may be."

"We're with you, sir, every man of us. See those men's faces!"

And grim and determined enough were the men's faces as they went about their work. For those who had seen had told those who had not seen, and the impression was a deep one.

That night Blair called them all together, and spoke of the matter in a way that went home and confirmed the spirit that had been roused in them by that holocaust on the island.

"It is devil's work, men," he wound up, "and, please God, we'll stop it. Are you with me?"

"Ay, ay, sir!" "That we are, sir!" "All the way, sir!" and so on, in tones that left no mistake about it.

"You can understand the effect of that kind of work on these islanders. It is not often so clean a sweep is made as the one we saw this morning. And where part are taken and part are left, can you wonder that those who remain hate and fear the very sight of a white face? Have they not reason? It will be our endeavour to stop these raids, and, by protecting the islanders, gradually win them over to better ways. Once we can make them see that we care for them, and think of their welfare and not our own, half the battle is won. On the one side we may have to fight—not our own countrymen, I am glad to say. These raiders come mostly from the west coast of South America, and they go to lengths which the Queenslanders rarely do. And, on the other hand, in our dealings with the natives, we must remember what they have suffered, what reason they have to mistrust us, and we must be very forbearing and longsuffering. On the one side I want you—and I shall need the whole-hearted assistance of every man of you—I want you to be bold as lions, and on the other side as mild as milk. Only so can our work be done, and it is a mighty work."

CHAPTER XI

TOO LATE

Following instructions, Captain Cathie shook out every stitch of canvas the Torch could carry, and laid her course dead for the Dark Islands. They made good way, but their progress still seemed slow to Kenneth Blair; for his fears outstripped the flight of the little ship, and, anxious as he was to reach the Islands, he still almost dreaded the cry that should tell of their sighting, in fear of what he might find there.

And grounds for fear were not lacking. The Dark Islands lay some five days distant, east by north—on the line, therefore, of the marauders' way home. From the atoll they had already raided, he judged, from the number of dwellings and general appearances, they might have got some fifty or sixty souls, not more. Their holds would still be far from full. If they had invaded the Dark Islands in similar fashion, it was a stormy reception the next comers might expect. At best it would be a negative welcome, and a matter of slow and cautious approach to their few good graces; but if the islands had been raided, the work would be thrown back for years, and all his hopes with them. He could scarce eat or sleep for thinking of it, and the pricking off of their position each day on the chart, and the calculation of the hours that still intervened between them and full knowledge of how matters lay, were matters of supremest interest and absorbing anxiety.

He could settle to none of the ordinary routine, and his evident upsetting, the causes of which they perfectly understood, disturbed them all in like fashion.

He spoke little, even to Jean, and she never once, by word or look, expressed anything but the utmost sympathy and confidence in him.

He tramped the deck day and night almost, with eager outlook over the waste of waters ahead, and never a look behind unless at the seething bubbles of their long, straight wake, which told of the speed and directness of their flight.

Once only, in these days of biting anxiety, he said to her—

"Dearest, I am poor company at present. Can you forgive me? I am on the rack about these poor souls ahead. I cannot help fearing the worst, and it means so very much to us."

"I am with you, Ken, heart and soul. We can only pray for the best. If what you fear has happened, all we can do is to do our best to right it."

He shook his head unhopefully. The idea had taken possession of him that they would arrive only to find death and desolation and the wild fury of revenge.

"Even if it is so," said his comforter, "I can see possibility of good coming out of the evil."

"It will throw us back years," he said gloomily.

"If your people have been carried off, we will follow them and release them and restore them to their homes"—there were new sparks in his eyes as she spoke like one inspired—"and that will give us the footing it might take years to obtain."

He kissed her hand.

"You give me new hopes, whatever may have happened. That is what we will attempt if the worst has taken place," and thereafter he brightened up considerably, but relaxed no whit of his anxiety to reach the islands.

They swept gallantly along on the northern fringe of the westerly wind, which maintained a propitious amplitude, and just before sunset on the fourth day, the lucent rim where sea met sky was dented with a filmy tooth which the sinking sun drew momentarily into view from the farther distance, and Captain Cathie and Blair pronounced it Kapaa'a, the highest peak in the Dark Islands.

There was not much sleep on board that night, the morrow would be so big with events. General opinion among the men ran somehow to a fight. That was, perhaps, the natural tendency of the pent-up feelings of the last few days. An outlet would be grateful, a violent outlet from choice. When a man's feelings suffer maltreatment, the natural man within him develops a violent desire to find relief in kicking, in which last word is comprehended the whole known range of methods of assault, with the exception, of course, of the circumscribed and properly debarred use of the feet.

They travelled warily that night, and the first of the dawn showed them the peaks of Kapaa'a, bold and beautiful, dead ahead, and growing bolder and still more beautiful with every graceful roll of the ship.

They hung over the sides, every man and woman of them, and eyed their future home with an eagerness which its outward aspect at once amply satisfied and further quickened.

For what they could see was grand in its opulence of crag, and cliff, and gorge, and greenery. And the clouds which wreathed the higher summits, and the gauzy films of mist, which floated along the hillsides and hung reluctantly in the tree-tops, gave promise of still daintier beauties in that which they held half hidden.

They drew in cautiously to within a mile of the outer reef, and then, not venturing the ship nearer till they should learn how matters stood inside, Blair and Evans, with a crew of ten, eight to pull and two in case of need, and Matti to interpret, shot through one of the openings in the reef on the back of a long blue roller and made straight for the white beach. They carried no visible arms, but each man of the crew had his Winchester between his feet.

The lagoon ran up into a spearhead of white sand, between two tall cliffs opposite the widest opening in the reef, as though the constant impact of the outer waves, tempered as it was by the compression of the opening and the subsequent run across the lagoon, had forced the beach inland at that spot. It was helped, however, by a river, which came down between the hills and divided the white sandspear into two equal parts.

Here, according to usage and natural proclivity, a village should have stood, but in this case did not. John Gerson had told Blair that other morning, when they came racing up the lagoon in similar brave case, that it lay up the valley near the taro fields.

His heart beat painfully as, one by one, he picked up the points which had charted themselves for ever in his memory.

There, to the left of the stream, was where they landed.

There was the rough scarp of rock round which they had followed the bristling crowd to the death.

There his former life had ended in turmoil and darkness, and the new life had begun in twilight dimness and the painful groping after broken threads.

And yet, how mercifully he had been guided! The shadowed valley had led, after all, to the fuller life and the mountain-top, and he bowed his head gratefully.

The white boat slid gently up the white beach, and so far their keen outlook had seen no sign of hostile life. But experience had taught him that appearances are deceptive, and that sometimes when least is seen most is to be feared.

They disembarked cautiously, and stood looking round. The palms about the mouth of the valley waved sombre welcome, or it might be warning. The thick brush below lay still and silent, but bright black eyes by the hundred might be watching them from it.

The very lack even of opposition was a menace, and suggestive of trickery and ambush.

"We will go round the point," said Blair at last. "And—yes, you must take your guns, men. I would have preferred not, but we don't know how matters stand."

So, leaving two in the boat, the rest shouldered their guns, and the little party went forward round the point where Kenneth Blair had been once before in his life, and almost in his death.

But no bristling mob confronted them this time. They went on step by step, with eyes for every rock and bush, and ears alert, and every nerve tight strung for the faintest hint of treachery, and Blair's face crumpled somewhat at the menace of the silence and the solitude.

Step by step they left the white beach and the friendly sea, and drew in to the blank hostility of the woods. He would a thousand times sooner have been confronted by the visible hostility of the natives. For that which is visible and tangible one may hope to cope with and subdue, but the invisible and intangible contain possibilities beyond the compassing, and the elements of unreasoning fear.

On one member of the party these were already having their effect. Perhaps on others also, but not so perceptibly. The knowledge of better things had not, in Matti, effectually eradicated the superstitions of a lifetime. Terrors of which the white men had no conception beat like bats about his soul, the indefinable terrors of bygone ages of horrors and darkness. His face was green. He sweated fears at every faltering step. His eyes bulged crablike in quest of that which he dreaded to find.

"Sirs, sirs!" he gasped, in an agonised whisper, "it is not good. I counsel——"

"Be quiet," said Blair. "We must see," and they went on warily, expecting the sudden outleap of death at every step.

But they saw nothing, heard nothing. That dreadful menacing silence brooded over the place just as it had brooded over the atoll. A flock of gay little paraquets whirred suddenly from the hillside and dived into the bush ahead, and the silence and the spell of it were broken. The paraquets started chattering and quarrelling like a school of sparrows, and Blair's danger-pointed wits suggested to him that they would not behave so if the brush was otherwise tenanted.

With a last careful inspection of the hillsides he moved forward, and the rest followed. There was a track through the brush, and the trampled ground showed signs of much traffic.

Five minutes more and they had found all they feared.

The thicket thinned and widened towards the valley and they were standing once more amid blackened ribs of houses, and heaps of ashes from which thin wisps of smoke still curled lazily. They had arrived too late!

CHAPTER XII

THE FLAMING SWORD

Blair's face was tighter and grimmer than ever as he took it all in, and the faces of the rest were sympathetically hard.

But this was no time to stand glooming. The wrong was done. Now to see if it could be righted.

He turned and led the way back to the boat, thinking too hard for speech. He knew what had to be done, but there were disquieting items in the programme for which he had been unable to make provision, and which he would gladly have escaped.

They would follow the marauders and rescue the victims—that he took as settled.

The settlement could hardly be a mild one, and he would fain have spared the women the sight of it; but there was nothing else for it—they could not possibly be left behind.

The raiders had doubtless filled their holds here to the last man. But there must be many left. They would be in hiding yet, but presently they would come out of their retreats, full of grief and anger, and it would go hard with the first white faces they encountered. The women must go with them—that was one of his troubles. And the next, supposing they caught these blood-thirsty and body-hungry rascals—and catch them they would, if it took a month's circling round—what were they to do with them when they had them?

There would probably be fighting, though the results did not trouble him. What he wanted was to put an end once and for all to this horrible traffic. The only way that suggested itself as adequate and final was to string them up to the yard-arm, every man-jago of them, and whether that might be done with impunity was more than doubtful. The only impunity he desired was for his future work. Morally, he would feel justified. And whether or no, the spirit that was in him would have borne lightly the burden of such a deed, even though its outward results to himself were personally painful and disastrous.

It took no more than two minutes after they had scrambled on board to set things in motion.

"We are too late," said Blair to the anxious waiters. "We follow at once, captain. They will have filled up here, and will make straight for home. Lay her straight for the Chincha Islands, please, and make all speed possible."

Captain Cathie had foreseen the possibility. He set their course due east for the present, and spread his wings again to the last stitch, and they swept away past the other islands, with no more than fleeting glimpses of them in the mellow distance.

Then Blair begged them to confer with him in the saloon, and laid his difficulties before them.

"I take it for granted we shall catch them," he said.

"Certainly," said the captain.

"I am distressed at thought of bringing you ladies into contact with bloodshed and violence. But there is no help for it; it would not be safe to leave you behind."

"Certainly not," said Aunt Jannet Harvey emphatically.

"We would not have been left in any case," said Jean. "Our places are by your sides," and the others quietly endorsed her.

"The next thing is this: we shall catch this ship, we shall rescue these islanders, by force if necessary. What are we to do with the crew and the ship?"

"Hang them and scuttle her," said Captain Cathie, with decision.

"That is one's natural first feeling, and possibly it would be the wisest thing in the end. And yet——"

"It is a question if we are justified in going that length," said Charles Evans gravely.

Stuart, too, shook his head doubtfully.

"Fighting in so good a cause is one thing," he said slowly, "but hanging in cold blood is another."

"Exactly," said Blair. "And that is the point of my dilemma."

"Do you know what will happen if you let 'em go?" said Cathie brusquely.

"I'm afraid I do, captain. And yet—even then—— You mean, of course, that they'll come back in larger force, and with a double incentive—plunder plus revenge."

"That's it to a T, sir, and you know it. There'll be no peace and security till they're wiped out. Wipe 'em out at once and completely, and you're all right till a new lot comes along, knowing nothing of these others, except that they never came back. And when the new lot comes we'll tackle them same way. I'm not by nature a bloodthirsty man, but if there's one thing can set me afire, it's this kind of work. I've seen so much of it. They're not men. They're scum of hell—asking your pardon, ladies!"

"Speak your mind, captain," said Aunt Jannet Harvey. "No good being mealy-mouthed when it's a question of life and death. I think they should be scuttled."

"I've no doubt we all agree as to what we would like to have done, but whether, in our position, we are justified in pronouncing and executing judgment to the extent of death—it is a difficult matter to decide."

"If you let one single man of them go, Mr. Blair, you're only breeding future trouble."

"I know it, captain. And yet—at times—I have seen the attempt to clear the future of trouble lead only to greater. Is there no alternative?"

"There's alternatives," said Cathie gloomily; "but they're only makeshifts—playing with nettles to get stung: you could fling all their arms overboard, and threaten 'em with worse if they come back. And they'll come. You could scuttle the ship and maroon 'em somewhere. You could bring 'em all back here and make 'em work. But there's trouble in it whatever you do, unless you hang 'em out of hand."

"I'm afraid there is, and I would dearly like to rid the earth of them; but——"

And Evans and Stuart felt as he did. They lacked nothing in courage, but to their minds this matter of essential right went deeper than any mere question of courage or future trouble.

Jean, and Alison Evans, and Mary Stuart listened with grave, troubled faces, but ventured no opinion. These were deeper waters than any they had ever sailed on, and they felt rather out of their depths.

"Well, we have some little time to think it over," said Blair, at last. "If any illumination comes to any of us, let the rest have the benefit of it. You will get all ready for what we may need to do, captain?"

"All's ready, sir. Long Tom's loaded, and the men are keen to square things with these rascals if we can come up with them."

"I suppose even these terrible men may have wives and children waiting for them at home," said Jean thoughtfully, as they rose.

"Like enough, ma'am," said Cathie—"and so have the brown men."

"Men like that have no right to have wives and children," said Aunt Jannet Harvey, with vehemence past grammar. "If they have they'll be better without them. They ought to be scuttled."

Nevertheless, Jean's suggestion remained in all their minds.

Never was such a bright look-out as the Torchmen kept for the Blackbirder, as they dubbed the chase. The rigging was never free from anxious gazers. It looked as though a flight of great birds had lighted on the ship.

Jean remarked on it to Aunt Jannet Harvey.

"They're fine fellows and all of one mind. See how eager they are to catch her."

"Ay, ay!" said Aunt Jannet. "They'll find her if she's to be found," and did not think it necessary to add that, through Captain Cathie, she had offered five pounds to the man who first sighted the other ship.

Blair walked the deck strenuously, mostly alone, occasionally with one of the others. And the more he walked and the more he thought, the more averse he became to the idea of hanging.

"We're doing right for right's sake in freeing these islanders," he said to Evans and Stuart one time. "If we hang those men I can't help feeling we're doing wrong for right's sake, and there we come to the old Jesuitical practice which we all condemn. We do a wrong in the belief that it will save future trouble. I don't believe we're justified. We've got to do what seems to us right now. The future is in God's hands. If trouble comes, He will show us how to meet it."

"That, I think, is highest wisdom," said Stuart. "If the trouble comes, we shall meet it with clear consciences, and clear consciences make stout hearts."

"I'm with you," said Evans. "I'd like to see them wiped out as much as Captain Cathie would, but I think we're on a higher plane in doing as you suggest. You feel sure of catching them?"

"Hopeful—and determined to do it, if it can be done. They've got at most two days' start. Less, perhaps, for the village was still smoking. They're heavily laden, and we are making good way. We cut into a belt of calms and variables soon, and there we can take to steam. And then—they don't know they're being chased. We do."

There was, however, this one element of doubt in the chase: would the raiders carry on due east, in order to get all possible out of the fairly steady westerly winds,—thereby lengthening the distance they had to cover, and having, after all, in the end, to encounter the possibly adverse winds of the coast,—or would they take their chance across the doubtful calm belt and make straight for the Peruvian coast?

It was an even question, and the board on which the game had to be played was several thousand miles square.

Blair and Cathie discussed the matter in all its bearings.

"What would I do if I was them?" summed up the captain. "Well, that would depend too. If I had two or three hundred passengers aboard, and each one worth so much alive and nothing dead, I'd want to get 'em home alive as quick as possible. If I was well stocked with provisions I might carry on with this wind for the coast. If I was anyways short I'd probably try a beat straight for home. If we don't sight them in two days we'll edge up north-east a bit; but I'm pretty sure they'll keep this wind as long as they can, and chances are we'll sight them within twenty-four hours. They're probably not hurrying, and we're making every inch we can."

But it was the morning of the third day before the welcome hail from aloft brought every soul on board into the bows, to search for the tiny mote on the horizon on which all their hopes were concentrated.

It was a very early bird who had discovered the worm. He had gone up aloft before the dawn, and, as the sun shot up, the rim of the sea was lucent like the edge of a glass plate brimming with water. An almost invisible flaw, a mere film against the light, was enough for the practised eye, and his joyful "Sail ho!" turned the ship upside-down.

Captain Cathie swung up alongside the look-out with his glasses, and was presently on deck again beaming contentedly.

"That's her right enough," he said. "A brig, and we're raising her fast. You'll see her from below here inside an hour."

"When shall we catch her up?" asked Blair anxiously.

"Perhaps by three o'clock or so," said Cathie, after a moment's consideration, but added cautiously, "if the wind holds," and, as if resenting his doubt, the sails gave an ominous warning flap.

"Right," said the captain, with a determined nod, and set the engineers to work at once to get up steam. "We'd be as well to have it on anyhow, to keep the weather gauge of him when we come up," and presently the screw was churning the merry bubbles up astern, and the chase was rising slowly on the horizon.

The brig, however, had held the wind longer than they had. It was mid-afternoon before they got within range of her, and she was still drawing slowly along with sails that bulged and flapped in desultory catspaws.

"Shall I send a shot over her, just to show we mean business?" brimmed Cathie.

"No shots unless they're absolutely necessary, captain," said Blair. "We'll hail her first. And I think you ladies had better go below. Their answer may be lead."

Aunt Jannet was for resisting.

"I want to see," said she.

"There may be things not for your seeing, Aunt Jannet," said Blair quietly, "and other things besides. Please go with the others and keep them from feeling nervous if you can."

So the ladies went below, and we may imagine to what helpful furtherance of patient waiting they betook themselves.

CHAPTER XIII

THE MAN'S MAN'S MAN

The sides of the Blackbirder were lined with sallow, scowling faces, as villainous a crew as ever gathered aboard one disreputable ship since time began.

They took in all the points of the trim little craft that nosed quietly up within speaking distance; the British flag, to which they were by nature antipathetic; the long brown gun forward, with its black mouth pointing plumb for every shifty eye of them; the glancing barrels of the Winchesters, and the steady determination of the men who carried them; the covert menace of the whole silent display. Muttered blasphemies rolled along the line of yellow faces, and the rumble of them was heard aboard the Torch.

"What you want?" shouted a burly figure, standing aft behind the deckhouse.

"Your cargo," replied Captain Cathie, patting the breach of his big gun affectionately, and the objurgations aboard the enemy broke out afresh.

"What you mean?"

"You'd better come aboard here and we'll explain."

"You better fetch me."

"Very well," said Cathie, with joy in his face.

He stooped behind his long gun for a moment, trained it carefully, and instantly its angry bellow filled sea and sky, and sent the women below to their knees. They heard a crash, aloft and below, aboard the Blackbirder, and the yells of the men as they scattered to avoid the falling spars. The smoke, drifting lazily away, showed the brig's maintopmast nipped neatly at the crosstrees, and hanging with its yards in a fantastic tangle of ropes to the deck.

"That's the first time of asking," shouted Cathie. "Are you coming?" and he bent behind his gun again.

"I kom," and they saw the black-a-vised crew set to launching a boat, with vicious side-glances at their oppressor.

Presently the dirty boat and its dirty crew lay alongside, and the burly one climbed slowly up the ladder they dropped for him.

His small eyes glared viciously out of his bloated cheeks, "like a hunted boar's," said Cathie afterwards.

"Now then! You are pirate?"

"Not at all—we're missionaries," said Cathie.

"Missi——!" and the fat one came within measurable distance of apoplexy.

"You've stolen our people. We want them back. Do you understand?"

But the Blackbirder's English was limited, and the shock of meeting missionaries of so strange a texture had bemused his wits.

Blair begged Stuart to speak to him in Spanish, and the wandering wits came back at sound of it.

"Tell him," said Blair, "that the islanders he has kidnapped are our people, and we intend to take them home again."

And Stuart put it to him so.

"If he makes any resistance we shall overcome it. What does he say?"

"He asks how you're going to take them back."

"We will see to all that presently. First, he will bring aboard here all the arms they have over yonder," said Blair, and as that sank through Stuart into the other's understanding, the little boar-eyes gleamed more viciously than ever, and the fat body rumbled with volcanic fires.

"We will give him half an hour to deliver up the arms. If they are not here then, his other mast will go. He will bring them over himself."

The little eyes glared furiously round, but found nothing but grimmest determination in the faces that hemmed him in. Possibly they did not fail to note all the other points bearing on the question. He shambled to the side with a growl in his throat, and got heavily into his boat, and was pulled across to his ship, and immediately they heard the simmering of a hot discussion tipped with sharp flakes of invective.

"They don't like it," said Captain Cathie.

The minutes passed. Now and again a scowling face turned their way, and shot a venomous white-eyed glance at them, but there were no signs of the arms coming over.

"Five minutes more," shouted Cathie at last, bubbling with excitement, and clapping the breech of his gun. "And, my goodness, I hope you'll run it out! I want that other mast," he added softly.

"Five minutes more," shouted Stuart in Spanish, so that there should be no misunderstanding.

Cathie stood watch in one hand, lanyard in the other, one foot tapping restlessly. He hungered for that other mast, and the lesson its fall would teach the yellow dogs.

At last he closed his watch with a snap, stooped to the gun, and with a roar and a rattling crash, and a blasphemous scatteration below, the foretopmast shared the devastation of the mainmast.

"Now we have them right as a trivet," said Cathie, "and they'll begin to understand where they are."

They understood, and five minutes later the boat shoved off again, bringing the spoils of war, such part of them, at all events, as they chose to surrender—some thirty muskets, as many cutlasses, and half a dozen revolvers.

"Now," said Blair, to the downcast captain of the Blackbirder, through Stuart, "you will stop here. We shall tow you back to the islands. When your cargo is discharged, you will be at liberty to go. If you ever return on this errand, you will find us waiting for you. Now, captain," to Cathie, and, at a sign from the captain, one of the white whale-boats dropped to the water, and half a dozen men jumped into her, carrying the coil of a stout hawser, which ran out over the stern of the Torch and was secured amidships.

The Torch herself swung into line ahead of the other, and the big steel gun swung slowly round till her muzzle grinned threateningly round each side of the mainmast.

"Tell those men to get back, Stuart, and say the captain waits with us," and the brig's boat pushed sulkily off. "Now, Stuart, you come with me, and Matti. We will take revolvers, though we shall not need them."

Matti shivered into the boat, and Stuart and Blair followed with four Torches carrying Winchesters, and pulled to the brig and climbed up among the truculent crew, every man of which had his knife at his back and hands that itched to get using it.

Blair called for the mate and told him curtly what he had already told the captain, and added some special instructions for his own benefit.