‘Luckily I had the yacht’s painting altered before leaving England,’ said Bude.  ’I’ll sail her under Spanish colours, and perhaps they won’t spot her.  Any way, with the pearls—­lucky I bought a lot—­we ought to be safe enough.  But if any one of the competitors has gone for specimens of the Berbalangs, I fear, I sadly fear, the consequences.’  His face clouded; he fell into a reverie.

Logan made no reply, but puffed rings of cigarette smoke into the still blue air.  There was method in Bude’s apparent madness, but Logan suspected that there was madness in his method.

A certain coolness had not ceased to exist between the friends when, after their long voyage, they sighted the volcanic craters of the lonely isle of Cagayan Sulu and beheld the Stars and Stripes waving from the masthead of the George Washington (Captain Noah P. Funkal).

Logan landed, and noted the harmless but well-armed half-Mahometan natives of the village.  He saw the other competitors, whose ‘exhibits,’ as Miss McCabe called them, were securely stored in the George Washington—­strange spoils of far-off mysterious forests, and unplumbed waters of the remotest isles.  Occasionally a barbaric yap, or a weird yell or hoot, was wafted on the air at feeding time.  Jenkins of All Souls (whom he knew a little) Logan did not meet on the beach; he, like Bude, tarried aboard ship.  The other adventurers were civil but remote, and there was a jealous air of suspicion on every face save that of Professor Potter.  He, during the day of waiting on the island, played golf with Logan over links which he had hastily improvised.  Beyond admitting, as they played, that his treasure was in a tank, ’and as well as could be expected, poor brute, but awful noisy,’ Professor Potter offered no information.

‘Our find is quiet enough,’ said Logan.

‘Does he give you trouble about food?’ asked Mr. Potter.

‘Takes nothing,’ said Logan, adding, as he holed out, ’that makes me dormy two.’

From the rest of the competitors not even this amount of information could be extracted, and as for Captain Noah Funkal, he was taciturn, authoritative, and, Logan thought, not in a very good temper.

The George Washington and the Pendragon (so Jones Harvey had christened the yacht which under Bude’s colours sailed as The Sabrina) weighed anchor simultaneously.  If possible they were not to lose sight of each other, and they corresponded by signals and through the megalophone.

The hours of daylight on the first day of the return voyage passed peacefully at deck-cricket, as far as Logan, Bude, and such of the officers and men as could be spared were concerned.  At last night came ‘at one stride,’ and the vast ocean plain was only illuminated by the pale claritude that falls from the stars.  Logan and Bude (they had not dressed for dinner, but wore yachting suits) were smoking on deck, when, quite suddenly, a loud, almost musical, roar or hum was heard from the direction of the distant island.