J. Allan Dunn

“ I used to look at it when we were fishing in the lagoon or out on the inner reef. The knowledge my pearls were there, safe, kept me going, kept up my resolution to get away. Two of the men watched down on the beach each night, armed, both to prevent our stealing the boat or letting the natives get it.
“Our clothes wore out and our shoes. We went native fashion and Thompson and I got covered with yaws and coral scratches. They kept us working as long as we could stand and any of them thought of some thing for us to do. We had twenty-three masters to serve. ”

“ The Moanamanu was flung from surge to surge like a chip in a millrace. Helm and sail useless. I’ve an idea we were under bare poles, with maybe a rag of headsail.
“We lost the cruiser, inevitably. I reckon it was about two in the morning when we struck. I’m combining what I learned later with what I knew at the time, Manning. Somewhere about two in the morning we hit the outer reef of the island Steiner named Sckwarzklippen—Black Cliffs. It was a thousand to one shot that we ever struck it though currents may have helped swing us to it. It has a double reef. ”

“ Thompson is still in bad shape. He didn’t have as much surplus to lose as I did. I saw him this morning. He’s coming round. I told you they dismissed me the day before yesterday.
“Of course I found out the war had ended while we were on Schwarzklippen but I didn’t realize just what that meant. I had dreamed of getting a cruiser to go down there, or a destroyer, and seeing Steiner and his crowd rounded up. But—the war is over.
“I saw the shipping commissioner here yesterday. A man with the blood and eyes of a fish. He didn’t believe me. ”

“ The fourth, Fong, a Chinaman of placid countenance and uncertain age, acted as Manning’s cook and house-boy.
Fong was a man of parts. He had been with Manning for eight years after the diver had rescued him from a nasty bit of trouble at Singapore. For which he believed Fong, with reason, grateful. In many ways he was invaluable. He could repair a diving-suit as deftly as he could scramble eggs or make a bed. Manning trusted him at the air-pump. Fong had even gone down successfully with the suit that had the oxygen gas-tank attachment. ”

“ The natives on the island are a tribe of Melanesians under a chief named Tiburi. They have only been there for about five generations and they know nothing about the origin of the statues. They only worship them.
“Behind the statues there are caves running away back and communicating with caves on the beach below them that are filled with water, even at ebb tide. Steiner made his camp on the terrace. Thompson and I were allowed to build a grass house on the beach. They kept the whale-boat in one of the lower caves, with the oars and mast taken up to the camp when they were not used. ”

“ Let them take grub and water and let me give them their reckoning and a compass. ’Pulu is a good man and I hope they made it. They were right in the equatorial counter-current and that helped them. Neilssen they took aboard the raider.
“Thompson wasn’t backward about say ing how he felt about things and Steiner, after he had signaled the raider, told us we two were too eager to get into the fighting to be given a seat in the boats. We might get through. So we were to be kept on the schooner because they were a bit crowded on the raider. ”

“ He used the pencil again to indicate the position. “Lies between the Paumotus and the Tubuai Archipelago. Belongs to neither. The chief I bought it from owed no sovereignty to France. It was my headquarters. ”