later found himself laughing aloud. He had surely
reached the limit of disaster. Barring earthquake
or tidal-wave, the worst had already befallen him.
The Flibberty-Gibbet was certainly safe in
Mboli Pass. Since nothing worse could happen,
things simply had to mend. So it was, shivering
under his blankets, that he laughed, until the house-boys,
with heads together, marvelled at the devils that
were in him.
By the second day of the northwester, Sheldon was
in collapse from his fever. It had taken an
unfair advantage of his weak state, and though it
was only ordinary malarial fever, in forty-eight hours
it had run him as low as ten days of fever would have
done when he was in condition. But the dysentery
had been swept away from Berande. A score of
convalescents lingered in the hospital, but they were
improving hourly. There had been but one more
death—that of the man whose brother had
wailed over him instead of brushing the flies away.
On the morning of the fourth day of his fever, Sheldon
lay on the veranda, gazing dimly out over the raging
ocean. The wind was falling, but a mighty sea
was still thundering in on Berande beach, the flying
spray reaching in as far as the flagstaff mounds, the
foaming wash creaming against the gate-posts.
He had taken thirty grains of quinine, and the drug
was buzzing in his ears like a nest of hornets, making
his hands and knees tremble, and causing a sickening
palpitation of the stomach. Once, opening his
eyes, he saw what he took to be an hallucination.
Not far out, and coming in across the Jessie’s
anchorage, he saw a whale-boat’s nose thrust
skyward on a smoky crest and disappear naturally,
as an actual whale-boat’s nose should disappear,
as it slid down the back of the sea. He knew
that no whale-boat should be out there, and he was
quite certain no men in the Solomons were mad enough
to be abroad in such a storm.
But the hallucination persisted. A minute later,
chancing to open his eyes, he saw the whale-boat,
full length, and saw right into it as it rose on the
face of a wave. He saw six sweeps at work, and
in the stern, clearly outlined against the overhanging
wall of white, a man who stood erect, gigantic, swaying
with his weight on the steering-sweep. This he
saw, and an eighth man who crouched in the bow and
gazed shoreward. But what startled Sheldon was
the sight of a woman in the stern-sheets, between
the stroke-oar and the steersman. A woman she
was, for a braid of her hair was flying, and she was
just in the act of recapturing it and stowing it away
beneath a hat that for all the world was like his own
“Baden-Powell.”
The boat disappeared behind the wave, and rose into
view on the face of the following one. Again
he looked into it. The men were dark-skinned,
and larger than Solomon Islanders, but the woman, he
could plainly see, was white. Who she was, and
what she was doing there, were thoughts that drifted
vaguely through his consciousness. He was too
sick to be vitally interested, and, besides, he had
a half feeling that it was all a dream; but he noted
that the men were resting on their sweeps, while the
woman and the steersman were intently watching the
run of seas behind them.
