“I suppose you will go back to Von, now?”
Sheldon queried.
“Nothing of the sort. Dad planned to go
to the Solomons. I shall look about for some
land and start a small plantation. Do you know
any good land around here? Cheap?”
“By George, you Yankees are remarkable, really
remarkable,” said Sheldon. “I should
never have dreamed of such a venture.”
“Adventure,” Joan corrected him.
“That’s right—adventure it
is. And if you’d gone ashore on Malaita
instead of Guadalcanar you’d have been kai-kai’d
long ago, along with your noble Tahitian sailors.”
Joan shuddered.
“To tell the truth,” she confessed, “we
were very much afraid to land on Guadalcanar.
I read in the ‘Sailing Directions’ that
the natives were treacherous and hostile. Some
day I should like to go to Malaita. Are there
any plantations there?”
“Not one. Not a white trader even.”
“Then I shall go over on a recruiting vessel
some time.”
“Impossible!” Sheldon cried. “It
is no place for a woman.”
“I shall go just the same,” she repeated.
“But no self-respecting woman—”
“Be careful,” she warned him. “I
shall go some day, and then you may be sorry for the
names you have called me.”
It was the first time Sheldon had been at close quarters
with an American girl, and he would have wondered
if all American girls were like Joan Lackland had
he not had wit enough to realize that she was not at
all typical. Her quick mind and changing moods
bewildered him, while her outlook on life was so different
from what he conceived a woman’s outlook should
be, that he was more often than not at sixes and sevens
with her. He could never anticipate what she
would say or do next. Of only one thing was
he sure, and that was that whatever she said or did
was bound to be unexpected and unsuspected.
There seemed, too, something almost hysterical in
her make-up. Her temper was quick and stormy,
and she relied too much on herself and too little
on him, which did not approximate at all to his ideal
of woman’s conduct when a man was around.
Her assumption of equality with him was disconcerting,
and at times he half-consciously resented the impudence
and bizarreness of her intrusion upon him—rising
out of the sea in a howling nor’wester, fresh
from poking her revolver under Ericson’s nose,
protected by her gang of huge Polynesian sailors,
and settling down in Berande like any shipwrecked
sailor. It was all on a par with her Baden-Powell
and the long 38 Colt’s.
