But that was the trouble.  She was not a man, and where would she go, and what would happen to her?

He got to his feet, lighted a cigarette, and her Stetson hat, hanging on the wall over her revolver-belt, caught his eye.  That was the devil of it, too.  He did not want her to go.  After all, she had not grown up yet.  That was why her logic hurt.  It was only the logic of youth, but it could hurt damnably at times.  At any rate, he would resolve upon one thing:  never again would he lose his temper with her.  She was a child; he must remember that.  He sighed heavily.  But why in reasonableness had such a child been incorporated in such a woman’s form?

And as he continued to stare at her hat and think, the hurt he had received passed away, and he found himself cudgelling his brains for some way out of the muddle—­for some method by which she could remain on Berande.  A chaperone!  Why not?  He could send to Sydney on the first steamer for one.  He could—­

Her trilling laughter smote upon his reverie, and he stepped to the screen-door, through which he could see her running down the path to the beach.  At her heels ran two of her sailors, Papehara and Mahameme, in scarlet lava-lavas, with naked sheath-knives gleaming in their belts.  It was another sample of her wilfulness.  Despite entreaties and commands, and warnings of the danger from sharks, she persisted in swimming at any and all times, and by special preference, it seemed to him, immediately after eating.

He watched her take the water, diving cleanly, like a boy, from the end of the little pier; and he watched her strike out with single overhand stroke, her henchmen swimming a dozen feet on either side.  He did not have much faith in their ability to beat off a hungry man-eater, though he did believe, implicitly, that their lives would go bravely before hers in case of an attack.

Straight out they swam, their heads growing smaller and smaller.  There was a slight, restless heave to the sea, and soon the three heads were disappearing behind it with greater frequency.  He strained his eyes to keep them in sight, and finally fetched the telescope on to the veranda.  A squall was making over from the direction of Florida; but then, she and her men laughed at squalls and the white choppy sea at such times.  She certainly could swim, he had long since concluded.  That came of her training in Hawaii.  But sharks were sharks, and he had known of more than one good swimmer drowned in a tide-rip.

The squall blackened the sky, beat the ocean white where he had last seen the three heads, and then blotted out sea and sky and everything with its deluge of rain.  It passed on, and Berande emerged in the bright sunshine as the three swimmers emerged from the sea.  Sheldon slipped inside with the telescope, and through the screen-door watched her run up the path, shaking down her hair as she ran, to the fresh-water shower under the house.