Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly urged across it, and the reality of his fading strength and of the death into which he would surely end, the ancient black man slowly made his shoreward way.

CHAPTER III

In the meanwhile, Michael.  Lifted through the air, exchanged into invisible hands that drew him through a narrow diameter of brass into a lighted room, Michael looked about him in expectancy of Jerry.  But Jerry, at that moment, lay cuddled beside Villa Kennan’s sleeping-cot on the slant deck of the Ariel, as that trim craft, the Shortlands astern and New Guinea dead ahead, heeled her scuppers a-whisper and garrulous to the sea-welter alongside as she logged her eleven knots under the press of the freshening trades.  Instead of Jerry, from whom he had last parted on board a boat, Michael saw Kwaque.

Kwaque?  Well, Kwaque was Kwaque, an individual, more unlike all other men than most men are unlike one another.  No queerer estray ever drifted along the stream of life.  Seventeen years old he was, as men measure time; but a century was measured in his lean-lined face, his wrinkled forehead, his hollowed temples, and his deep-sunk eyes.  From his thin legs, fragile-looking as windstraws, the bones of which were sheathed in withered skin with apparently no muscle padding in between—­from such frail stems sprouted the torso of a fat man.  The huge and protuberant stomach was amply supported by wide and massive hips, and the shoulders were broad as those of a Hercules.  But, beheld sidewise, there was no depth to those shoulders and the top of the chest.  Almost, at that part of his anatomy, he seemed builded in two dimensions.  Thin his arms were as his legs, and, as Michael first beheld him, he had all the seeming of a big-bellied black spider.

He proceeded to dress, a matter of moments, slipping into duck trousers and blouse, dirty and frayed from long usage.  Two fingers of his left hand were doubled into a permanent bend, and, to an expert, would have advertised that he was a leper.  Although he belonged to Dag Daughtry just as much as if the steward possessed a chattel bill of sale of him, his owner did not know that his anaesthetic twist of ravaged nerves tokened the dread disease.

The manner of the ownership was simple.  At King William Island, in the Admiralties, Kwaque had made, in the parlance of the South Pacific, a pier-head jump.  So to speak, leprosy and all, he had jumped into Dag Daughtry’s arms.  Strolling along the native runways in the fringe of jungle just beyond the beach, as was his custom, to see whatever he might pick up, the steward had picked up Kwaque.  And he had picked him up in extremity.