"Why, how did you come to know our names?" he exclaimed, astonished. "You must be as sharp as a lynx, Captain."
"That's not an answer to my question I asked you," I replied with as much sternness as I could put into my voice, looking at the poor fellow's starved white face. "But as a special favor to a deserving fellow-creature, I don't mind telling you. I'm as sharp as a lynx, as you say, and a trifle sharper: for no lynx would have looked for your names on the flap of your shirts—There, that'll do now; don't try to talk; just answer me quietly. Where do you come from, and where do you want us to go to?"
Martin lifted up his face and answered with becoming brevity, "Tanaki."
"That's better!" I said. "That's the sort of way a fellow ought to answer, when he's more than half-starved with a week at sea. But the next thing is, where's Tanaki?"
"It's one of the group that used to be called the Duke of Cumberland's Islands," the boy answered faintly, yet overflowing with eagerness. "They lie just beyond the Ellice Archipelago, nearly on the line of a hundred and eighty, as you go towards the Union Group along the parallel of"....
"Now, my dear boy," I said, "if you run on like that, as I said before, I shall have to turn you adrift again in your open boat at the mercy of the ocean. Do be quiet, won't you, and let me look up your island?"
"We can't be quiet," Master John Knox put in eagerly, "when we know they're going to murder our father and mother and Calvin and Miriam, on Wednesday morning."
"Just you hold your tongue, sir," I said, pushing him down again on his bunk, "and wait till you're spoken to. Now, not another word, either of you, till I've consulted my chart. Jim, hand down the Admiralty sheets again, there's a good fellow, will you?"
Jim handed them down, and we commenced our scrutiny at once. We soon found the Duke of Cumberland's Islands, and as good luck would have it, found we were steering as straight as an arrow for them. The direction of the wind had not misled us. But no such place as Tanaki could we still find anywhere.
"It used to be called 'The Long Reef,'" Martin said, looking up; "but now we call it by the native name, Tanaki."