"Yes," answered the supercargo, "but he died long ago, did he not?"
"Aye, he died here, and his wife and sister too. They all lie here in this old MARAE."
And then he told the story of Brantley.
I
It was six years since Brantley, with his companions in misery, had drifted ashore at lonely Vahitahi in the Paumotu Group, and the kindly-hearted people had gazed with pitying horror upon the dreadful beings that, muttering and gibbering to each other, lay in the bottom of the boat, and pointed with long talon-like fingers to their burnt and bloody thirst-tortured lips.
And now as he sits in the doorway of his thatched house, and gazes dreamily out upon the long curve of creamy beach and wind-swayed line of palms that fringe the leeward side of his island home, Brantley passes a brown hand slowly up and down his sun-bronzed cheek, and thinks of the past.
He was so full of life—of the very joy of living—that time six years ago when he sailed from Auckland on that fateful voyage in the DORIS. It was his first voyage as captain, and the ship was his own, and even now he remembers with a curious time-dulled pang the last words of his only sister—the Doris after whom he had called his new ship—as she had kissed him farewell—"I am so glad, Fred, to hear them call you 'Captain Brantley.'"
And the voyage—the wild feverish desire to make a record passage to 'Frisco and back; the earnest words of poor old white-headed Lutton, the mate, "not to carry on so at night going through the Paumotu Group"; that awful midnight crash when the DORIS ran hopelessly into the wild boil of roaring surf on Tuanake Reef; the white, despairing faces of five of his men, who, with curses in their eyes upon his folly, were swept out of sight into the awful blackness of the night. And then the days in the boat with the six survivors! Ah! the memory of that will chill his blood to his dying day. Men have had to do that which he and the two who came through alive with him had done.