I liked Larry O'Keefe from the beginning—but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man's strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine—and yours who read this—could never dream.
Larry! Larry O'Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laughing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O'Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry!
CHAPTER VII
Larry O'Keefe
Pressing back the questions I longed to ask, I introduced myself. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, a novel in fact—something like Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, which he liked greatly.
He had hardly finished this explanation when we touched the side of the Suwarna, and I was forced to curb my curiosity until we reached the deck.
"That thing you saw me sitting on," he said, after he had thanked the bowing little skipper for his rescue, "was all that was left of one of his Majesty's best little hydroairplanes after that cyclone threw it off as excess baggage. And by the way, about where are we?"
Da Costa gave him our approximate position from the noon reckoning.
O'Keefe whistled. "A good three hundred miles from where I left the H.M.S. Dolphin about four hours ago," he said. "That squall I rode in on was some whizzer!