or fallen into the sea long ago."

"Aye," said the trader, meditatively, "that vahine has saved my life,
but I'm not goin' to sacrifice my dignity as a white man. If ye let go
everything, the damn' natives'll walk over ye, and ye'll make nothin'
out o' them."

Lovaina had occasionally called me Dixey, and had explained that I was
the "perfec' im'ge" of a man of that name, and that he owned a little
cutter which traded to Raiaroa, on which atoll he lived. I walked
like him, was of the same size, and had the "same kin' funny face."

She piqued my curiosity, and so when I found him at the round table
of the Polonsky-Llewellyn group at the Cercle Bougainville, I looked
him over narrowly. His name was Dixon,--Lovaina never got a name
right,--an Englishman, a wanderer, with an Eton schooling, short,
solidly built, with a bluff jaw and a keen, blue eye. He was not
good-looking. He had learned the nickname given me, and was in such
a happy frame of mind that he ordered drinks for the club.

"I'm lucky to be here at all," he said seriously. "I have a seven-ton
cutter, and left the Paumotus four days ago for Papeete. We had
eight tons of copra in the hold, filling it up within a foot of the
hatch. Eight miles off Point Venus the night before last, at eleven
o'clock, we hoped for a bit of wind to reach port by morning. It
was calm, and we were all asleep but the man at the wheel, when
a waterspout came right out of the clear sky,--so the steersman
said,--and struck us hard. We were swamped in a minute. The water
fell on us like your Niagara. Christ! We gave up for gone, all of us,
the other five all kanakas. We heeled over until the deck was under