suit him?"

"Would he come, Warren? He--or, rather, that pretty wife of his--seems
bent upon going away in the schooner to the Carolines."

"Aye," said the skipper, "that's it. If it were any other vessel I
wouldn't care." Then suddenly:

"That fellow Motley (the supercargo) is a damned scoundrel--capable of
any villainy where a woman is concerned. Did you ever hear about old
Raymond's daughter down at Mangareva?"

I had heard the story very often. By means of a forged letter
purporting to have been written by her father--an old English trader in
the Gambier Group--Motley had lured the beautiful young half-blood away
from a school in San Francisco, and six months afterwards turned her
adrift on the streets of Honolulu. Raymond was a lonely man, and
passionately attached to his only child; so no one wondered when,
reaching California a year after and finding her gone, he shot himself
in his room at an hotel.


* * * * *


"I will ask him, anyway," I said; and as we went back into the house
the ALIDA shot past our line of vision through the coco-palms, and
brought up inside the brig.

"Taplin," I said, "would you care about taking one of our stations to