“It is well,” he said.  “See that the head clerk keeps good account of it.  When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing.

“If there is,” he added fiercely, after a pause, “it must come out of the clerk’s wages.”

And all the time, as I afterward learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul’s safe.

But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.  It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild young days, and where we were once more—­principally on a holiday, incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass.  We were lying at Savo, having run in to trade for curios.

Now, Savo is alive with sharks.  The custom of the woolly-heads of burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the adjacent waters a hang-out.  It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized.  There were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or, rather, hanging to it.  The schooner was a hundred yards away.  I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream.  Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were dragged under several times.  Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared.  A shark had got him.

The three remaining savages tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of the canoe.  I yelled and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it was no use.  They were in a blind funk.  The canoe could barely have supported one of them.  Under the three it upended and rolled sidewise, throwing them back into the water.

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be picked up by the boat before I got there.  One of the savages elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks.  The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken.  I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me.  He was fully sixteen feet in length.  I saw the whole thing.  He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of water all the time, screeching in a heartrending way.  He was carried along in this fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.

I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark.  But there was another.  Whether it was the one that had attacked the natives earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know.  At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others.  I could not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him.  I was watching him when he made his first attack.  By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off.  He veered clear, and began circling about again.  A second time I escaped him by the same maneuver.  The third rush was a miss on both sides.  He sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from elbow to shoulder.