“Thank you,” replied Robert with equal composure, though he felt inclined to laugh at Playdon’s mystification.  “I only wished to secure a sufficient number of witnesses for a verbal declaration.  When I have a few minutes to spare I will affix a legal notice on the wall in front of our cave.”

Playdon bowed silently.  There was something in the speaker’s manner that puzzled him.  He detailed a small guard to accompany Robert and Iris, who now walked towards the beach, and asked Mir Jan to pilot him as suggested by Anstruther.

The boat was yet many yards from shore when Iris ran forward and stretched out her arms to the man who was staring at her with wistful despair.

“Father!  Father!” she cried.  “Don’t you know me?”

Sir Arthur Deane was looking at the two strange figures on the sands, and each moment his heart sank lower.  This island held his final hope.  During many weary weeks, since the day when a kindly Admiral placed the cruiser Orient at his disposal, he had scoured the China Sea, the coasts of Borneo and Java, for some tidings of the ill-fated Sirdar.

He met naught save blank nothingness, the silence of the great ocean mausoleum.  Not a boat, a spar, a lifebuoy, was cast up by the waves to yield faintest trace of the lost steamer.  Every naval man knew what had happened.  The vessel had met with some mishap to her machinery, struck a derelict, or turned turtle, during that memorable typhoon of March 17 and 18.  She had gone down with all hands.  Her fate was a foregone conclusion.  No ship’s boat could live in that sea, even if the crew were able to launch one.  It was another of ocean’s tragedies, with the fifth act left to the imagination.

To examine every sand patch and tree-covered shoal in the China Sea was an impossible task.  All the Orient could do was to visit the principal islands and institute inquiries among the fishermen and small traders.  At last, the previous night, a Malay, tempted by hope of reward, boarded the vessel when lying at anchor off the large island away to the south, and told the captain a wondrous tale of a devil-haunted place inhabited by two white spirits, a male and a female, whither a local pirate named Taung S’Ali had gone by chance with his men and suffered great loss.  But Taung S’Ali was bewitched by the female spirit, and had returned there, with a great force, swearing to capture her or perish.  The spirits, the Malay said, had dwelt upon the island for many years.  His father and grandfather knew the place and feared it.  Taung S’Ali would never be seen again.

This queer yarn was the first indication they received of the whereabouts of any persons who might possibly be shipwrecked Europeans, though not survivors from the Sirdar.  Anyhow, the tiny dot lay in the vessel’s northward track, so a course was set to arrive off the island soon after dawn.

Events on shore, as seen by the officer on watch, told their own tale.  Wherever Dyaks are fighting there is mischief on foot, so the Orient took a hand in the proceedings.