He looked long at the name.  Joan Lackland—­just an assemblage of letters, of commonplace letters, but an assemblage that generated a subtle and heady magic.  It crept into his brain and twined and twisted his mental processes until all that constituted him at that moment went out in love to that scrawled signature.  A few commonplace letters—­yet they caused him to know in himself a lack that sweetly hurt and that expressed itself in vague spiritual outpourings and delicious yearnings.  Joan Lackland!  Each time he looked at it there arose visions of her in a myriad moods and guises—­coming in out of the flying smother of the gale that had wrecked her schooner; launching a whale-boat to go a-fishing; running dripping from the sea, with streaming hair and clinging garments, to the fresh-water shower; frightening four-score cannibals with an empty chlorodyne bottle; teaching Ornfiri how to make bread; hanging her Stetson hat and revolver-belt on the hook in the living-room; talking gravely about winning to hearth and saddle of her own, or juvenilely rattling on about romance and adventure, bright-eyed, her face flushed and eager with enthusiasm.  Joan Lackland!  He mused over the cryptic wonder of it till the secrets of love were made clear and he felt a keen sympathy for lovers who carved their names on trees or wrote them on the beach-sands of the sea.

Then he came back to reality, and his face hardened.  Even then she was on the wild coast of Malaita, and at Poonga-Poonga, of all villainous and dangerous portions the worst, peopled with a teeming population of head-hunters, robbers, and murderers.  For the instant he entertained the rash thought of calling his boat’s-crew and starting immediately in a whale-boat for Poonga-Poonga.  But the next instant the idea was dismissed.  What could he do if he did go?  First, she would resent it.  Next, she would laugh at him and call him a silly; and after all he would count for only one rifle more, and she had many rifles with her.  Three things only could he do if he went.  He could command her to return; he could take the Flibberty-Gibbet away from her; he could dissolve their partnership;—­any and all of which he knew would be foolish and futile, and he could hear her explain in terse set terms that she was legally of age and that nobody could say come or go to her.  No, his pride would never permit him to start for Poonga-Poonga, though his heart whispered that nothing could be more welcome than a message from her asking him to come and lend a hand.  Her very words—­“lend a hand”; and in his fancy, he could see and hear her saying them.