chaps, and clever with his fists as well.  He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight.  I don’t think it lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a dislocated shoulder-blade.  Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing.  He was merely a manhandler; and Bill King was something like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.

But I am running ahead of my yarn.  We shared the hatch-cover between us.  We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands.  For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the ocean.  Toward the last I was delirious most of the time; and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue.  Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea-water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.

In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves.  No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade.  He was lying beside me.  I went off again; and the next time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.

We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch-cover drifted ashore without him.  Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when we were rescued by a French cruiser and taken to Tahiti.  In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names.  In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood-brothership.  The initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.

“It is well,” he said, in Tahitian.  “For we have been mates together for two days on the lips of Death.”

“But Death stuttered.”  I smiled.

“It was a brave deed you did, master,” he replied, “and Death was not vile enough to speak.”

“Why do you ‘master’ me?” I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings.  “We have exchanged names.  To you I am Otoo.  To me you are Charley.  And between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo.  It is the way of the custom.  And when we die, if it does happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you.”

“Yes, master,” he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.

“There you go!” I cried indignantly.

“What does it matter what my lips utter?” he argued.  “They are only my lips.  But I shall think Otoo always.  Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of you.  Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you.  And beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be Otoo to me.  Is it well, master?”