“At any rate, his news to-night has given me a better insight into the life down here,” Joan said.  “And it is colourful life, to say the least.  The Solomons ought to be printed red on the charts—­and yellow, too, for the diseases.”

“The Solomons are not always like this,” Sheldon answered.  “Of course, Berande is the worst plantation, and everything it gets is the worst.  I doubt if ever there was a worse run of sickness than we were just getting over when you arrived.  Just as luck would have it, the Jessie caught the contagion as well.  Berande has been very unfortunate.  All the old-timers shake their heads at it.  They say it has what you Americans call a hoodoo on it.”

“Berande will succeed,” Joan said stoutly.  “I like to laugh at superstition.  You’ll pull through and come out the big end of the horn.  The ill luck can’t last for ever.  I am afraid, though, the Solomons is not a white man’s climate.”

“It will be, though.  Give us fifty years, and when all the bush is cleared off back to the mountains, fever will be stamped out; everything will be far healthier.  There will be cities and towns here, for there’s an immense amount of good land going to waste.”

“But it will never become a white man’s climate, in spite of all that,” Joan reiterated.  “The white man will always be unable to perform the manual labour.”

“That is true.”

“It will mean slavery,” she dashed on.

“Yes, like all the tropics.  The black, the brown, and the yellow will have to do the work, managed by the white men.  The black labour is too wasteful, however, and in time Chinese or Indian coolies will be imported.  The planters are already considering the matter.  I, for one, am heartily sick of black labour.”

“Then the blacks will die off?”

Sheldon shrugged his shoulders, and retorted,—­

“Yes, like the North American Indian, who was a far nobler type than the Melanesian.  The world is only so large, you know, and it is filling up—­”

“And the unfit must perish?”

“Precisely so.  The unfit must perish.”

In the morning Joan was roused by a great row and hullabaloo.  Her first act was to reach for her revolver, but when she heard Noa Noah, who was on guard, laughing outside, she knew there was no danger, and went out to see the fun.  Captain Young had landed Satan at the moment when the bridge-building gang had started along the beach.  Satan was big and black, short-haired and muscular, and weighed fully seventy pounds.  He did not love the blacks.  Tommy Jones had trained him well, tying him up daily for several hours and telling off one or two black boys at a time to tease him.  So Satan had it in for the whole black race, and the second after he landed on the beach the bridge-building gang was stampeding over the compound fence and swarming up the cocoanut palms.

“Good morning,” Sheldon called from the veranda.  “And what do you think of the nigger-chaser?”