“Who says so?”

“Leith pointed him out to the Professor this afternoon,” answered Holman.  “I was talking to the old scientist at the time.”

I whistled softly.  If Soma was a henchman of Leith’s it was clear to me why the captain had shielded him the night he jerked the knife at me when I dropped the pin upon his woolly head, but why Toni had been put away was a mystery.

“Is it any good of attempting to convince the Professor?” I asked.

“Not a bit,” snapped Holman.  “The girls have been imploring him to turn back this last three days while we were stuck in the cabin, but he won’t listen to them.  He’s a maniac, that’s what he is.  He doesn’t know what those two women are suffering through his darned foolishness, and if he did know it wouldn’t trouble him.  If you want the real extract of selfishness you must make a puncture in a scientific guy with a hobby, and you can get as much as you want.”

“Well, I’m going along to see what happens,” I said.  “If Leith refuses to accept me I’m going just the same.”

Holman gripped my hand—­gripped it fiercely, then he left me hurriedly.

I tramped backward and forward as The Waif sailed steadily through the waves of glittering mercury.  A few days before, when I was an occupant of “The Rathole” in Levuka, life seemed to be empty and cold, but a wonderful change had come in those few days.  Although I had not spoken to Edith Herndon more than half a dozen times, it appeared to me that it was those few short conversations that had chased the loneliness and morbid thoughts from my mind.  Her very presence stimulated me in a manner that I could not express, and as I stared out across the moon-whitened ocean I started nervously at the thought which had sprung suddenly into my brain.  It was an insane thought, and I tried to laugh it away.  Edith Herndon was as far above me as the moon was above the waves that were silvered by her beams.  I pictured myself lying like a beachcomber upon the pile of pearl shell when the strange chant of the Maori and the dead Toni concerning “the way to heaven out of Black Fernando’s hell” had come to my ears, and I blessed the new influence which had come into my life.

“My way to heaven lies in this direction,” I soliloquized, and the quivering yacht went bounding on as I allowed wild dreams to race unchecked through my brain.

[Illustration]

CHAPTER VI

THE ISLE OF TEARS

A sleepy Samoan in the main cross-trees screamed a message to the deck while the pink flush of the tropical dawn was still in the sky, and The Waif plunged through the water toward the island.  One after the other the members of the expedition came on deck.  Leith stumbled up when Newmarch shouted down the information, and the big brute watched the tiny spot that came gradually nearer; the Professor danced up like an adventurous boy, and he gurgled ecstatically as he peeped over the rail; while the two girls came up arm in arm and looked in silence across the dawn-reddened waters.  Holman’s gaze travelled from the island to Leith and back again to the island as if he was trying to trace a criminal connection between the two.