“But when the robbers fell to cheating one another, I got my first clues to the state of affairs. One of the robbed robbers came to me after dark, with facts, figures, and assertions. I knew I was ruined if I went to law. The judges were corrupt like everything else. But I did do one thing. In the dead of night I went to Ericson’s house. I had the same revolver I’ve got now, and I made him stay in bed while I overhauled things. Nineteen hundred and odd francs was what I carried away with me. He never complained to the police, and he never came back on board. As for the rest of the gang, they laughed and snapped their fingers at me. There were two Americans in the place, and they warned me to leave the law alone unless I wanted to leave the Miélé behind as well.
“Then I sent to New Zealand and got a German mate. He had a master’s certificate, and was on the ship’s papers as captain, but I was a better navigator than he, and I was really captain myself. I lost her, too, but it’s no reflection on my seamanship. We were drifting four days outside there in dead calms. Then the nor’wester caught us and drove us on the lee shore. We made sail and tried to clew off, when the rotten work of the Tahiti shipwrights became manifest. Our jib-boom and all our head-stays carried away. Our only chance was to turn and run through the passage between Florida and Ysabel. And when we were safely through, in the twilight, where the chart shows fourteen fathoms as the shoalest water, we smashed on a coral patch. The poor old Miélé struck only once, and then went clear; but it was too much for her, and we just had time to clear away in the boat when she went down. The German mate was drowned. We lay all night to a sea-drag, and next morning sighted your place here.”
“I suppose you will go back to Von, now?” Sheldon queried.
“Nothing of the sort. Dad planned to go to the Solomons. I shall look about for some land and start a small plantation. Do you know any good land around here? Cheap?”
“By George, you Yankees are remarkable, really remarkable,” said Sheldon. “I should never have dreamed of such a venture.”
“Adventure,” Joan corrected him.
“That’s right—adventure it is. And if you’d gone ashore on Malaita instead of Guadalcanal you’d have been kai-kai’d long ago, along with your noble Tahitian sailors.”
Joan shuddered.
“To tell the truth,” she confessed, “we were very much afraid to land on Guadalcanal. I read in the ‘Sailing Directions’ that the natives were treacherous and hostile. Some day I should like to go to Malaita. Are there any plantations there?”
“Not one. Not a white trader even.”