As I sat thinking the cabin grew suddenly dark and from above came a shouting and patter of feet. Down upon us swept one of the abrupt, violent squalls that are met with in those latitudes. I lashed Huldricksson fast in the berth and ran up on deck.
The long, peaceful swells had changed into angry, choppy waves from the tops of which the spindrift streamed in long stinging lashes.
A half-hour passed; the squall died as quickly as it had arisen. The sea quieted. Over in the west, from beneath the tattered, flying edge of the storm, dropped the red globe of the setting sun; dropped slowly until it touched the sea rim.
I watched it — and rubbed my eyes and stared again. For over its flaming portal something huge and black moved, like a gigantic beckoning finger!
Da Costa had seen it, too, and he turned the Suwarna straight toward the descending orb and its strange shadow. As we approached we saw it was a little mass of wreckage and that the beckoning finger was a wing of canvas, sticking up and swaying with the motion of the waves. On the highest point of the wreckage sat a tall figure calmly smoking a cigarette.
We brought the Suwarna to, dropped a boat, and with myself as coxswain pulled toward a wrecked hydroairplane. Its occupant took a long puff at his cigarette, waved a cheerful hand, shouted a greeting. And just as he did so a great wave raised itself up behind him, took the wreckage, tossed it high in a swelter of foam, and passed on. When we had steadied our boat, where wreck and man had been was — nothing.
There came a tug at the side — two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them. Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet.
“Much obliged,” said this man from the sea. “I knew somebody was sure to come along when the O’Keefe banshee didn’t show up.”
“The what?” I asked in amazement.
“The O’Keefe banshee — I’m Larry O’Keefe. It’s a far way from Ireland, but not too far for the O’Keefe banshee to travel if the O’Keefe was going to click in.”
I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious.
“Have you a cigarette? Mine went out,” he said with a grin, as he reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it.
I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt; long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain’s navy.
He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine.
“Thank you really ever so much, old man,” he said.
I liked Larry O’Keefe from the beginning — but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man’s strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine — and yours who read this — could never dream.
Larry! Larry O’Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laughing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O’Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry!
CHAPTER VII
LARRY O’KEEFE
Pressing back the questions I longed to ask, I introduced myself. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, a novel in fact — something like Meredith’s Diana of the Crossways, which he liked greatly.
He had hardly finished this explanation when we touched the side of the Suwarna, and I was forced to curb my curiosity until we reached the deck.
“That thing you saw me sitting on,” he said, after he had thanked the bowing little skipper for his rescue, “was all that was left of one of his Majesty’s best little hydroairplanes after that cyclone threw it off as excess baggage. And by the way, about where are we?”
Da Costa gave him our approximate position from the noon reckoning.
O’Keefe whistled. “A good three hundred miles from where I left the H.M.S. Dolphin about four hours ago,” he said. “That squall I rode in on was some whizzer!
“The Dolphin,” he went on, calmly divesting himself of his soaked uniform, “was on her way to Melbourne. I’d been yearning for a joy ride and went up for an alleged scouting trip. Then that blow shot out of nowhere, picked me up, and insisted that I go with it.
“About an hour ago I thought I saw a chance to zoom up and out of it, I turned, and BLICK went my right wing, and down I dropped.”
“I don’t know how we can notify your ship, Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I said. “We have no wireless.”
“Doctair Goodwin,” said Da Costa, “we could change our course, sair — perhaps —”
“Thanks — but not a bit of it,” broke in O’Keefe. “Lord alone knows where the Dolphin is now. Fancy she’ll be nosing around looking for me. Anyway, she’s just as apt to run into you as you into her. Maybe we’ll strike something with a wireless, and I’ll trouble you to put me aboard.” He hesitated. “Where are you bound, by the way?” he asked.
“For Ponape,” I answered.
“No wireless there,” mused O’Keefe. “Beastly hole. Stopped a week ago for fruit. Natives seemed scared to death at us — or something. What are you going there for?”
Da Costa darted a furtive glance at me. It troubled me.
O’Keefe noted my hesitation.
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said. “Maybe I oughn’t to have asked that?”
“It’s no secret, Lieutenant,” I replied. “I’m about to undertake some exploration work — a little digging among the ruins on the Nan–Matal.”
I looked at the Portuguese sharply as I named the place. A pallor crept beneath his skin and again he made swiftly the sign of the cross, glancing as he did so fearfully to the north. I made up my mind then to question him when opportunity came. He turned from his quick scrutiny of the sea and addressed O’Keefe.
“There’s nothing on board to fit you, Lieutenant.”
“Oh, just give me a sheet to throw around me, Captain,” said O’Keefe and followed him. Darkness had fallen, and as the two disappeared into Da Costa’s cabin I softly opened the door of my own and listened. Huldricksson was breathing deeply and regularly.
I drew my electric-flash, and shielding its rays from my face, looked at him. His sleep was changing from the heavy stupor of the drug into one that was at least on the borderland of the normal. The tongue had lost its arid blackness and the mouth secretions had resumed action. Satisfied as to his condition I returned to deck.
O’Keefe was there, looking like a spectre in the cotton sheet he had wrapped about him. A deck table had been cleated down and one of the Tonga boys was setting it for our dinner. Soon the very creditable larder of the Suwarna dressed the board, and O’Keefe, Da Costa, and I attacked