Jacobsen watched the canoe across the low reef as it came abreast and passed on to the entrance of the passage. Griffiths, with ink-marks on right thumb and forefinger, returned on deck Fifteen minutes later the canoe came alongside. The man with the sombrero stood up.
“Hello, Griffiths!” he said. “Hello, Jacobsen!” With his hand on the rail he turned to his dusky crew. “You fella boy stop along canoe altogether.”
As he swung over the rail and stepped on deck a hint of catlike litheness showed in the apparently heavy body. Like the other two, he was scantily clad. The cheap undershirt and white loin-cloth did not serve to hide the well put up body. Heavy muscled he was, but he was not lumped and hummocked by muscles. They were softly rounded, and, when they did move, slid softly and silkily under the smooth, tanned skin. Ardent suns had likewise tanned his face till it was swarthy as a Spaniard’s. The yellow mustache appeared incongruous in the midst of such swarthiness, while the clear blue of the eyes produced a feeling of shock on the beholder. It was difficult to realize that the skin of this man had once been fair.
“Where did you blow in from?” Griffiths asked, as they shook hands. “I thought you were over in the Santa Cruz.”
“I was,” the newcomer answered. “But we made a quick passage. The Wonder’s just around in the bight at Gooma, waiting for wind. Some of the bushmen reported a ketch here, and I just dropped around to see. Well, how goes it?”
“Nothing much. Copra sheds mostly empty, and not half a dozen tons of ivory nuts. The women all got rotten with fever and quit, and the men can’t chase them back into the swamps. They’re a sick crowd. I’d ask you to have a drink, but the mate finished off my last bottle. I wisht to God for a breeze of wind.”
Grief, glancing with keen carelessness from one to the other, laughed.
“I’m glad the calm held,” he said. “It enabled me to get around to see you. My supercargo dug up that little note of yours, and I brought it along.”
The mate edged politely away, leaving his skipper to face his trouble.
“I’m sorry, Grief, damned sorry,” Griffiths said, “but I ain’t got it. You’ll have to give me a little more time.”
Grief leaned up against the companionway, surprise and pain depicted on his face.
“It does beat hell,” he communed, “how men learn to lie in the Solomons. The truth’s not in them. Now take Captain Jensen. I’d sworn by his truthfulness. Why, he told me only five days ago – do you want to know what he told me?”
Griffiths licked his lips.
“Go on.”
“Why, he told me that you’d sold out – sold out everything, cleaned up, and was pulling out for the New Hebrides.”
“He’s a damned liar!” Griffiths cried hotly.
Grief nodded.
“I should say so. He even had the nerve to tell me that he’d bought two of your stations from you – Mauri and Kahula. Said he paid you seventeen hundred gold sovereigns, lock, stock and barrel, good will, trade-goods, credit, and copra.”
Griffiths’s eyes narrowed and glinted. The action was involuntary, and Grief noted it with a lazy sweep of his eyes.
“And Parsons, your trader at Hickimavi, told me that the Fulcrum Company had bought that station from you. Now what did he want to lie for?”
Griffiths, overwrought by sun and sickness, exploded. All his bitterness of spirit rose up in his face and twisted his mouth into a snarl.
“Look here, Grief, what’s the good of playing with me that way? You know, and I know you know. Let it go at that. I have sold out, and I am getting away. And what are you going to do about it?”
Grief shrugged his shoulders, and no hint of resolve shadowed itself in his own face. His expression was as of one in a quandary.
“There’s no law here,” Griffiths pressed home his advantage. “Tulagi is a hundred and fifty miles away. I’ve got my clearance papers, and I’m on my own boat. There’s nothing to stop me from sailing. You’ve got no right to stop me just because I owe you a little money. And by God! you can’t stop me. Put that in your pipe.”
The look of pained surprise on Grief’s face deepened.
“You mean you’re going to cheat me out of that twelve hundred, Griffiths?”
“That’s just about the size of it, old man. And calling hard names won’t help any. There’s the wind coming. You’d better get overside before I pull out, or I’ll tow your canoe under.”
“Really, Griffiths, you sound almost right. I can’t stop you.” Grief fumbled in the pouch that hung on his revolver-belt and pulled out a crumpled official-looking paper. “But maybe this will stop you. And it’s something for your pipe. Smoke up.”
“What is it?”
“An admiralty warrant. Running to the New Hebrides won’t save you. It can be served anywhere.”
Griffiths hesitated and swallowed, when he had finished glancing at the document. With knit brows he pondered this new phase of the situation. Then, abruptly, as he looked up, his face relaxed into all frankness.
“You were cleverer than I thought, old man,” he said. “You’ve got me hip and thigh. I ought to have known better than to try and beat you. Jacobsen told me I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t listen to him. But he was right, and so are you. I’ve got the money below. Come on down and we’ll settle.”
He started to go down, then stepped aside to let his visitor precede him, at the same time glancing seaward to where the dark flaw of wind was quickening the water.
“Heave short,” he told the mate. “Get up sail and stand ready to break out.”
As Grief sat down on the edge of the mate’s bunk, close against and facing the tiny table, he noticed the butt of a revolver just projecting from under the pillow. On the table, which hung on hinges from the for’ard bulkhead, were pen and ink, also a battered log-book.
“Oh, I don’t mind being caught in a dirty trick,” Griffiths was saying defiantly. “I’ve been in the tropics too long. I’m a sick man, a damn sick man. And the whiskey, and the sun, and the fever have made me sick in morals, too. Nothing’s too mean and low for me now, and I can understand why the niggers eat each other, and take heads, and such things. I could do it myself. So I call trying to do you out of that small account a pretty mild trick. Wisht I could offer you a drink.”
Grief made no reply, and the other busied himself in attempting to unlock a large and much-dented cash-box. From on deck came falsetto cries and the creak and rattle of blocks as the black crew swung up mainsail and driver. Grief watched a large cockroach crawling over the greasy paintwork. Griffiths, with an oath of irritation, carried the cash-box to the companion-steps for better light. Here, on his feet, and bending over the box, his back to his visitor, his hands shot out to the rifle that stood beside the steps, and at the same moment he whirled about.
“Now don’t you move a muscle,” he commanded.
Grief smiled, elevated his eyebrows quizzically, and obeyed. His left hand rested on the bunk beside him; his right hand lay on the table.
His revolver hung on his right hip in plain sight. But in his mind was recollection of the other revolver under the pillow.
“Huh!” Griffiths sneered. “You’ve got everybody in the Solomons hypnotized, but let me tell you you ain’t got me. Now I’m going to throw you off my vessel, along with your admiralty warrant, but first you’ve got to do something. Lift up that log-book.”
The other glanced curiously at the log-book, but did not move.
“I tell you I’m a sick man, Grief; and I’d as soon shoot you as smash a cockroach. Lift up that log-book, I say.”
Sick he did look, his lean face working