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“We didn’t know he’d sailed off with all his pardner’s pearls, did we? And when his pardner, Mandelbaum, turns up and collars our takin’s, and kicks us out in this durned canoe after we’d been workin’ months and months, our pitch wasn’t queered—was it? And all by a sharp got up to look like a sucker and be d——d to him. Well, I hopes he’ll fry in blazes if he ain’t drowned before he cashes them pearls. I ain’t given to cursin’, but I could curse a hole in this dished canoe when I thinks of the hand we give him by fallin’ into his trap and the trick he served us by settin’ it.”

“MIND!” yelled Davis.

Harman, in his mental upset, had neglected his steering, and the canoe paying off before the wind nearly flogged the mast out as Davis let go the sheet.

There are two sure ways of capsizing a South Sea canoe—letting the outrigger run under too deep and letting it tip into the air. They nearly upset her both ways before matters were righted, then pursuing again the path of the flying fish, the little canoe retook the wind, tepid and sea-scented and blowing out of the blue north-west.