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.

CHAPTER IV—­JOAN LACKLAND

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.