“Who in hell’s telling this, you or me?” the skipper demanded wrathfully.

“Well, she did, didn’t she?” insisted the mate.

“Yes, she did, if you want to make so sure of it.  And while you’re about it, you might as well repeat what she said to you when you said you wouldn’t recruit on the Poonga-Poonga coast for twice your screw.”

Sparrowhawk’s sun-reddened face flamed redder, though he tried to pass the situation off by divers laughings and chucklings and face-twistings.

“Go on, go on,” Sheldon urged; and Munster resumed the narrative.

“‘What we need,’ says she, ’is the strong hand.  It’s the only way to handle them; and we’ve got to take hold firm right at the beginning.  I’m going ashore to-night to fetch Kina-Kina himself on board, and I’m not asking who’s game to go for I’ve got every man’s work arranged with me for him.  I’m taking my sailors with me, and one white man.’  ’Of course, I’m that white man,’ I said; for by that time I was mad enough to go to hell and back again.  ‘Of course you’re not,’ says she.  ’You’ll have charge of the covering boat.  Curtis stands by the landing boat.  Fowler goes with me.  Brahms takes charge of the Flibberty, and Sparrowhawk of the Emily.  And we start at one o’clock.’

“My word, it was a tough job lying there in the covering boat.  I never thought doing nothing could be such hard work.  We stopped about fifty fathoms off, and watched the other boat go in.  It was so dark under the mangroves we couldn’t see a thing of it.  D’ye know that little, monkey-looking nigger, Sheldon, on the Flibberty—­the cook, I mean?  Well, he was cabin-boy twenty years ago on the Scottish Chiefs, and after she was cut off he was a slave there at Poonga-Poonga.  And Miss Lackland had discovered the fact.  So he was the guide.  She gave him half a case of tobacco for that night’s work—­”

“And scared him fit to die before she could get him to come along,” Sparrowhawk observed.

“Well, I never saw anything so black as the mangroves.  I stared at them till my eyes were ready to burst.  And then I’d look at the stars, and listen to the surf sighing along the reef.  And there was a dog that barked.  Remember that dog, Sparrowhawk?  The brute nearly gave me heart-failure when he first began.  After a while he stopped—­wasn’t barking at the landing party at all; and then the silence was harder than ever, and the mangroves grew blacker, and it was all I could do to keep from calling out to Curtis in there in the landing boat, just to make sure that I wasn’t the only white man left alive.

“Of course there was a row.  It had to come, and I knew it; but it startled me just the same.  I never heard such screeching and yelling in my life.  The niggers must have just dived for the bush without looking to see what was up, while her Tahitians let loose, shooting in the air and yelling to hurry ’em on.  And then, just as sudden, came the silence again—­all except for some small kiddie that had got dropped in the stampede and that kept crying in the bush for its mother.