Selden whirled around to find a black-skinned native standing impassive behind him. At the same instant a steel grip locked his wrists. "Not that!" he gasped, struggling. "My God, man, you wouldn't! You daren't!"
"No? And yet you said you knew my little methods." "Honest" Wetherbee shifted a thumb to his throat and smiled into his face. "I've a mind to show you, deacon—shall I—how far I have come and how cleverly I have covered my tracks?... Hya, you fella boy—that fella boat all ready? Then bear a hand her one time. We've got a passenger."
Now, it is a fact that no one knows or is ever likely to know the actual explanation for the wreck of the Brisbane steamer, which left Thursday Island that night and came to grief some two hours later on Tribulation Shoals. Other craft have gone the same way from natural causes, and Thursday has kept no suspect tradition of them. The only man who might have denied the yarn as afterward colored in local legend—and incidentally a libel on his own memory—was the pilot who had her in charge. And he never came back, drunk or sober. But the records declare that about four o'clock of a fair enough morning, wind and sea then running high, the 2,000-ton Fernshawe went clear off her course among the graveyards where a coral ledge stripped her plates as neatly as a butcher's knife lays open a carcass. She sank inside of five minutes, and her survivors were hurried.
Neither has any one ever told the true adventures of the Fancy Free, the flash little lugger that happened somehow to be missing from week-end rendezvous at the same hour. Her crew were mostly inarticulate, and those who might have talked of strange comings and goings were "black fella boy know nothing." Her passenger spent the night praying in the bilge; and as for her commander, he left no report. But it is equally certain that when the next dawn spread the iridescence of a pigeon's breast over those empty waters it struck out the hull and spars of Captain Wetherbee's vessel, anchored fair between the tips of two sunken masts.
Captain Wetherbee himself straddled the deck in diving rig, and while a native helper held ready his great gleaming copper helm he mocked a limp, bedraggled, white-faced creature that clung by the rail.
"You'll note for yourself, Brother Seldom," he was saying. "Not a trace of evidence. We've not been spied. The lantern is sunk. These poor cattle haven't a glimmer. Here are we, and there are the pearls, twenty thousand pounds' worth—just overside. Within three hours I'll be off on the pearling banks about my business, and I never heard of any lost steamer. Next week, or any time I choose, I'll be walking the streets of Thursday to hear the news. And who so surprised as Captain Wetherbee, that hardworking man? 'Honest' Wetherbee, with a fortune in his belt to dispose at leisure!"...
His pallid face took a diabolic glow in the first sun.
"Except yourself, of course," he added. "You're evidence. King's evidence. I'm not forgetting you. I'll even give you your chance. Are you coming, old 50 per cent? Yes—down there! With me! Hell—what kind of an adversary do you call yourself? Come on and share. Now's your time to get level and change your luck once for all. Fight it out with me—what? No?... Damn it, deacon, I thought you were going to be amusing.... I'll knock your silly head in when I come back."
He climbed to the ladder, but a final odd fancy occurred to him, a parting twist to the other's torment; and he summoned the big negro mate.