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The two men were lounging in the shade of the wattle walls of their reed-thatched shelter. It was built amidst a cluster of dense-growing trees, and the site looked out over the brilliant bay. They had long since eaten, and were now awaiting the cooling of the day before returning to their labours.

They were youthful adventurers, foreigners to the country in which they found themselves. They were northerners, far-northerners, from the great snow-crowned hills of Alaska. They had set out on their adventure as a result of listening to the flimsiest, most fanciful yarn that ever a half-vagrant Chinaman had dispensed out of the remote cells of his drug-laden imagination. And as a result, that day, after two-and-a-half years of marooning on a coast peopled only by none too friendly blacks, and in the heart of a jungle alive with every bug and beast and reptile of a pestilential nature, they had, at long last, proved beyond every question of doubt that Charlie Wun Lee had, for once in his life, fallen a victim to sheer veracity.