The Swede did not bother to investigate in detail the food and
water supply. A hasty round of the schooner convinced him that
she had at least a month's supply of food and water. Only one
thought surged through his mind, and that was the awful necessity
for haste. The anchor came in with a rush, the Kanaka boys
chanting a song that sounded to Neils like a funeral dirge, and
Neils went below and turned the gasoline engines wide open. The
_Maggie II_ swung around and with a long streak of opalescent
foam trailing behind her swung down the bay and faded at last in
the ghostly moonlight beyond Diamond Head; after which Neils
Halvorsen, with murder in his eye and a tarred rope's end in his
horny fist, went down into the cabin and talked to the man who
posed as Captain Scraggs. In the end he got a confession. Fifteen
minutes later he emerged, smiling grimly, gave the Kanaka boy at
the wheel the course, and turned in to sleep the sleep of the
conscience-free and the weary.




CHAPTER XXVII


Darkness was creeping over the beach at Tuvana-tholo before Mr.
Gibney could smother the despair in his heart sufficient to spur
his jaded imagination into working order. For nearly an hour the
three castaways had sat on the beach in dumb horror, gazing
seaward. They were not alone in this, for a little further up the
beach the two Fiji Islanders sat huddled on their haunches,
gazing stupidly first at the horizon and then at their white