Jerry did not query these appearances and disappearances. It never
entered his golden-sorrel head to be curious about the affair or to
attempt to solve it. He accepted it in much the way he accepted the
wetness of water and the heat of the sun. It was the way of life and of
the world he knew. His hazy awareness was no more than an awareness of
something--which, by the way, corresponds very fairly with the hazy
awareness of the average human of the mysteries of birth and death and of
the beyondness about which they have no definiteness of comprehension.

For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch _Arangi_, trader and
blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry's mind as
much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one
time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human
mind. Out of the nothingness men came. Into the nothingness they went.
And they came and went always on the _Arangi_.

And to the _Arangi_, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the
whaleboat under the arm of his _Mister_ Haggin, while on the beach Biddy
moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the eternal
challenge of youth to the Unknown.





CHAPTER II


From the whaleboat, up the low side of the _Arangi_, and over her six-
inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made