I forgot the incident in the whirl of happenings that followed, but the Fijian had a longer memory.  Late that afternoon he was holding the wheel with Soma, the big Kanaka who had jerked the knife at me, and as I stopped to peer at the binnacle he beckoned me toward him.

“That was me that sing,” he shrieked, as I put down my head.  “I tell damn big lie you an’ Miss Herndon.”

“Why?” I asked, amused at the peculiar manner in which he tried to express his gratitude for the rescue of the morning.

“Big Jacky tell me not say anything,” he screamed.  “He tell it to me one big secret all that talk about waterfall.  Tell me not to tell any one.  You know why?”

I glanced at Soma and found that he was straining his ears to catch the words the other was shrieking, and as I was more than suspicious of him, I promptly closed the conversation.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” I roared.

The Fijian nodded and I fought my way forward, wondering as I clung to the rigging what the pupil of the Maori had to tell me about the song.

The wind had ceased somewhat on the morning of the third day, but the snaky rollers were still racing after the flying yacht.  A watery sun peeped out from between the driving cloud masses, the rays glinting through the heads of the waves that curled menacingly as the battered yacht drove through them.

Newmarch hailed me from the poop when I came on deck, and there was a peculiar look upon his scrawny features as he addressed me.

“Do you know that nigger you rescued?” he asked.

“Toni?”

“Yes.”

“What about him?”

“You did your heroic stunt for nothing,” he remarked.  “The fool can’t be found, so I guess he went overboard in the night.”

The news came as a shock to me.  Toni’s last question that he had put as he clung to the wheel with Soma had flashed through my mind several times through the night.  He had asked it in a manner that insinuated that I might be interested in the reasons why Big Jacky, his companion on the wharf at Levuka, wished the whereabouts of the white waterfall to remain a secret, and now his disappearance blocked my inquiries.  I felt annoyed with myself for not listening to what the Fijian had to say at the moment he confessed that he had lied, and then the face of the listening Soma came up before my mental eye.  Soma was a person that I was beginning to cordially dislike.

I turned to Newmarch and fired a question at him.

“Do you think he was helped overboard?”

“Why, no,” he said slowly.  “Why do you think that?”

“Oh, nothing,” I replied.  “I thought his narrow escape of the morning would have made him careful.”

It was a few hours after this conversation that I had my first chance of speaking to Edith Herndon since the moment we had run into the disturbance.  The girl poked her head out of the companionway, and I hastened to assist her out on deck.  It was her first sight of the damage which the storm had done to the yacht, and she gave a cry of alarm as she looked at the splintered spars and the cordage that cracked in the wind like the whips of invisible devils.