Between the arrival of Madame Gilbert at Tops Island and the coming of the Hedge Lawyer there interposed three or four brief weeks of happiness. Not for years had Madame been so purely and childishly happy. She had sailed away from that man-destroying white civilisation which during four desperate years of savagery had torn her own world into rags; she had descended upon an island where the joy of life reigned as King, and death had no terrors. From a Europe worn out by passion, a Europe grown old and weary and corrupt, she had flown back, as it were, to the sparkling morning of free, joyous human life. And with quick sympathy she revelled in her new experiences.

The Humming Top was moored in shelter hard by the shore of Tops Island where the tide rose and fell ten feet, and the Pacific swell rolled continuously. And with it the yacht rolled, too, continuously in spite of her sturdy bilge keels. She was long and narrow and of light draught, she was built for speed in the open sea, not for threading the labyrinths of coral reefs or for lying up indefinitely in the lee of mangrove swamps. It took all the superb skill of a Willatopy to navigate her in safety through the channels of the Coral Sea, but not even the stomach of Willatopy, sound though it was by practice and inheritance, would have relished the perpetual roll of the Humming Top at anchor. Madame cleared out of her most comfortable sea home, and took with her Marie, who had all the Frenchwoman's hatred of uneasy salt water. Sir John Toppys, at a hint from Madame months before, had purchased three large tents of the Thames pattern, oblong in shape, and with a wide air space between walls and roof. These tents were borne ashore and pitched in an agreeable clearing about a quarter of a mile from Willatopy's home. Madame desired privacy for herself, and had no wish to intrude upon that of the Family of Toppys. One tent was equipped for the use of Madame and Marie, a second contained the gear of a cook and steward, and the third was set aside for any of the officers or men who might be assigned to Madame as her shore escort. There were a score or more of native families on the island, and both Ching and Ewing set their faces against leaving Madame Gilbert unguarded in their midst. Ching hinted that head hunting, though a dying industry in the Straits, might be capable of revival under severe provocation. And Ewing, as he contemplated Madame's gorgeous copper mane shining in coils upon her bonny head, hinted that the provocation to secure so unique a specimen might prove irresistible. Madame laughed and flicked at them both the muzzle of her Webley automatic.

"I am a perfect shot," quoth she, "and if you will be reassured, I will promise to keep my gun ever beside my virtuous couch." But in spite of Madame's skill in shooting—of which she gave an impressive demonstration on the boat deck—they insisted upon the necessity for an escort I suspect that neither Ching nor Ewing could endure a long separation from their Madame Gilbert, and that both senior and junior officers welcomed a few days of respite from the ever restless Humming Top. There was never any lack of volunteers for the duty of furnishing the escort and of beguiling the ample leisure of the capacious-hearted Marie Lambert.

"Profiteering has solid advantages," observed Madame to me, "for those who draw upon its unfathomable resources of ill-gotten wealth. That dear old John Toppys of Wigan said nothing to me at the time, but it appeared that he dredged London and Southampton for the latest and most luxurious of camp equipment. Our tents had floor boards covered with thick rubber, and strewn with extravagantly costly rugs. There were beds with the springiest of mattresses, adjustable rest chairs, dressing tables, and the dinkiest of toilet apparatus. Unbeknownst, as Ching expressed it—Sir John had laid down for my use a camp toilet service in solid silver—and with silver at famine prices!—and had stuck in a card requesting me to honour it with my gracious acceptance, for keeps. You see, I had told him that I was a forlorn widow! He had not overlooked equipment for my maid. Every conceivable device for cooking and serving food in camp had been thought of and provided, including Primus stoves, and the men's tent—though less like a bower of Venus than my own—was good enough for anyone below the exalted standing of a goddess. Even Ching and Ewing, who had managed to decide in their wise heads that I was not Sir John Toppys' wayward mistress, opened their eyes at his lavish provision for my comfort. When he saw his own tent, Alexander became, if possible, more convinced a business man than ever. 'Wealth is power,' said he gravely, 'even in a desert island. I have done no so badly with the dopes and the legitimate trade, but I must do a power of robbery yet before I can count dollars with Sir John Toppys.' We camped out on Tops Island, but there was not much of roughing it about Sir John's notions of camp life."

Madame had won the heart of the Widow Toppys when as a beautiful white stranger she had clasped the little creature to the bosom of her wet trench coat, and she speedily gained also the hearts of the two "useless daughters," scorned by Roger Gatepath. They were twins, very light in colour, aged about sixteen. Their names, as locally rendered, were Joytopy and Crytopy. Queer names. Mrs. Toppys, who spoke an English of her own in the halting accent to which the middle-aged Roger Gatepath had lingered to listen, explained that one of the girls in her early infancy had been the most joyous, smiling angel that ever came down from Heaven. The other twin had howled unceasingly. The Hon. William Toppys had called one Joy and the other Cry, and had dug up real names which would suggest the infantile characteristics. The girls had been christened Joyce and Chrystal, but Joytopy and Crytopy they had always remained. When Madame met them there was much bubbling joy and little cry about either of them. They frisked about in their short voluminous petticoats of stripped banana leaf, wearing bright beads round their necks, and short-lived tropical flowers in their dusky hair. The girls were not pretty by European standards, and the blue eyes of Toppys had passed them by. But there was a glow of splendid health on their pale brown skin, and the lithe grace of free tropical creatures about their fully developed figures.

These girls had never worn European clothes. Will Toppys, true to his theory that the mystery of woman, which has played so devastating a role in human history, is due to the seduction of clothes, always insisted that his daughters should wear the native petticoats. They were enough for decency, said he, but not enough to excite the smallest curiosity. Especially as the native girls, amphibious as their men folk, always stripped bare when plunging into the sea. But though Joy and Cry had never worn, never even seen, the contents of a European draper's shop, they showed the most fascinated interest in the toilet fripperies of Madame Gilbert. It was some little time before she could induce them to enter her tent. To them it suggested a trap of canvas of which one pulled the string and smothered the incautious entrant. But gradually she won their confidence. With instinctive courtesy they never would approach her dwelling unless by direct invitation, and when within moved about gravely and spoke seldom. Madame to them was a remote royal personage. The silver toilet service did not move them—thinking that silver was always money, they called the precious metal bright tin—and the Persian rugs were an encumbrance to the feet. They hinted also that the floor coverings and hangings would in time prove a happy hunting ground for insects and other vermin of the woods. But when one day Madame opened a trunk and spread before their astonished eyes the glories of her underwear, they instantly fell down and worshipped. They had never seen such garments, they had not the slightest notion of how to put them on, yet the beautiful texture and soft feel of the feminine things bowled them over instantly. Perhaps it was the instinct of clothes in their white blood bursting forth; perhaps it was some deeper, more universal, instinct which makes women of all races kin. I don't know. But Madame assures me, and I believe her, that at the first sight and touch of her "things," Joy and Cry bowed their frizzy heads and did obeisance. They did more than that a few days later. Coming home late one afternoon after a turtle hunt with Willatopy, Madame found Joy and Cry in her tent posturing before the deeply interested eyes of her maid Marie. The banana petticoats lay neglected on the floor, where they had been tossed, and the girls were clad in French frillies with which Marie had invested them. Madame was angry, and the girls shrank away from her. In rapid, furious French, Madame scarified that thoughtless, warm-hearted maid of hers, and warned her to leave the girls alone as she had warned her to leave Willatopy alone. Robbed by Madame's stern orders of the fascinating frillies, the girls resumed their own petticoats and sadly withdrew. The incident worried Madame not a little, and she spoke very plainly and seriously to Marie about it. It showed by how frail a tie these half-white feminine creatures were held to the simple native habit of life which their white father had laid down for them. I had nearly written "native life and customs," but checked when I remembered a discovery which Madame had made concerning these girls. Though they dressed like natives, and lived in all other respects the lives of natives, there was a subconscious force in their white blood which cut them off from familiar commerce with native boys. Girls and widows in the Torres Straits follow their inclinations, the girls of their hearts, the widows—one is told—more commonly of their mature avarice. Married women, by immemorial and most potent custom, are chaste as Junos. But from this most universal of social customs these two girls, Joy and Cry, tacitly yet resolutely stood apart. Their own mother was astonished; she could not comprehend an abstinence which consorted so queerly, to her mind, with their vigorous healthy natures. Yet it was so, as she almost tearfully assured Madame.

"But surely you should be glad," said Madame, puzzled and inclined towards laughter at the woeful visage of little Mrs. Toppys. "Their father, had he lived, would have honoured his daughters for this—exclusiveness."

"But how will they ever claim husbands?" wailed the Hula woman from New Guinea. "How ever can they ask a boy in marriage if already they are known to be so cold and unnatural?" It is the woman who proposes marriage in the Straits, and the man who, after full consideration, gives or withholds his assent.

Madame soothed the disconsolate widow, and went away smiling. Grant had declared that all the vices and diseases in the Torres Straits were the gift of the white man, but the instinctive aloofness of Joy and Cry revealed to the uncomprehending world of Tops Island that some hidden virtue after all sprang from the white strain in their blood.

Madame, a hardy investigator and always frank in her dealings with mankind, tackled Willatopy, the brother of Joy and Cry, and the lover of numberless brown girls whom his blue eyes vanquished at sight.

"My brown girls, they are nothing," declared this easy-mannered Don Juan, "but Joy and Cry are the daughters of my father, the Great White Chief. They are not meat for the scum of Baru. The boys here, what are they but tillers of my garden when they work and whipping blocks for my stick when they don't? I am rich, I do not work. These others I make work for me, and pay in white silver from my banker. They are the dirt under my feet, and if one of them drew near to Joy or Cry, to speak to them without my leave, I would let out his blood upon the sand, and would smoke his head over the fire in my cookhouse."

There was nothing of the modern democrat about Willatopy.

As he imagined to himself, and declared to Madame, the fate of a native island suitor for the temporary favours of his sisters, he drew forth one of the deadly trench daggers which Alexander, a trader in hardware for the Islands, had given him in a moment of expansion. I beg the pardon of Alexander Ewing, man of business. He had sold two daggers to Willatopy at "trade prices," at a tremendous discount which had made them seem to him like gifts.

These two trench daggers, which had attracted Willatopy as "just the things for sharks," bring me to the display before my patient readers of Willatopy the Sportsman. He was rich, he did no work. He paid reluctant impecunious native boys to cut his bananas and plant their rhizomes—even the bountiful banana needs some culture—to sow and reap vegetables in his garden, to feed his fowls and pigs, and to keep fresh and sweet the sago palm thatch of his hut. But though he did no work, Willatopy was an indefatigable sportsman. Incidentally, it is true, he supplied the family with fish and dugong and turtle, but in his code—which had a recognisable family likeness to the code of his father's country—fishing and hunting and shooting, whatever their yield in food, were not to be confounded with loathsome and derogatory Work. The labour which they exacted was Sport, and rich man that he was he could pour out his sweat over them and still remain proudly and unstainedly idle.

At Auckland, Alexander had fallen in with brother Scots, who seemed to be flourishing in exile, though they lamented, in the manner of their great race, the harsh fate which had separated them from a beloved country to which they had no intention whatever to return. These brother Scots of Alexander's had assured him that any kind of iron or steel junk would yield fabulous profits in the Islands, and he after cautiously testing the advice by taking counsel of mere English New Zealanders, had gone all out on hardware. Much that he bought at old iron prices was surplus war material, and included sword bayonets and trench daggers. Never had such lovely killing knives been seen in the Straits, and the traders of Thursday Island just rose at them. Alexander sold out at a rate of profit which made even him gasp, and he was a business man who could stand a great deal of profit without turning a hair. Willatopy's trench daggers were sweet weapons. They slipped over the fingers, and were gripped in the fist, so that the six-inch blades stood out as deadly steel extensions of the forearm. With the ordinary dagger one stabs up or down with a blade held at right angles to the wrist, but with trench daggers one hits out as in boxing, and delivers a blow with the weight of the body behind it. When Willatopy first put the two daggers on his hands and hit out, right, left, Ewing bolted behind the smoke stack.

"They are just the thing for sharks," commented Willie with approval.

"Then take them off, boy, till you meet the sharks," implored our cautious Alexander.

Soon after Madame had been installed in her tents, after much going and coming at high tide through the "lubbers' hole" of the bar—she held that one hair-raising journey through the surf was enough for honour—Willatopy summoned his gracious lady to witness the first trial of the daggers.

"There are plenty of sharks in the bay," said he, "fine sharks, as big as a whaleboat."

"But what do you want with daggers?" inquired Madame, vaguely recalling pictures of shark fishing with ropes and hooks.

"To kill the sharks with," explained Willatopy. "One hits, so and so, under the side fins."

"But surely you don't mean to go into the water among the sharks?" gasped Madame, who had she been a loyal representative of the Baronet of Wigan should have welcomed any hazard to the life of the Heir of Topsham.

"Of course," said Willatopy, grinning. "Sharks are just clumsy sheep. No good, Madame. One at a time is no sport at all, but if I can get two at once, one with each dagger, there should be fun. So and so." He hit out as he had done before Ewing, and Madame skipped like a she-goat. Willie with a dagger on each fist was a most alarming neighbour.

Madame became reconciled to the expedition with difficulty. To her it was a wanton trifling with death for Willatopy, however expert a swimmer, to venture with two bits of steel on his fists into the shark-infested bay. She had all the white woman's dread of the man-eating shark, and could not get contact with Willatopy's indifference. But when Mrs. Toppys had assured her that a shark, properly approached, is as harmless as a seal, and the two girls were not sufficiently interested to look on at the hunting, she consented to be present herself. But she made conditions. The yacht's dinghy in which she was going must be rowed by two sailors and a third must stand in the bows with a dugong spear ready to interpose should Willatopy seem to be in grievous peril. The Heir of Toppys grinned at these childish precautions. To him they were just a white woman's foolishness.

The dinghy was rowed out to a part of the bay which was known to Willatopy as good shark country, and the boy busied himself in tying scraps of cord to the grips of the daggers and to his own wrists. He wanted to make sure that the daggers would not get adrift when he opened his hands in swimming, and would be ready in place at the moment when his fists closed. He was not excited in the least degree; his one feeling was a mild desire to test the efficiency of trench daggers as shark killers. When he had brought the lifeboat through the big rollers on the bar, he had been visibly exalted; now on the eve of shark killing he was no more than placidly interested in the efficacy of his twin daggers.

He slipped over the side of the dinghy, and the rowers lay on their oars. He had told them to give him room, at least a hundred yards, lest the sharks might be frightened away. I think that that direction eased Madame's mind more than all his previous protestations. Sharks must be far less terrible than she had supposed if they could be frightened away by a dinghy.

Madame, herself a good swimmer by European standards, watched Willie amazed. She had never supposed that a human being could swim with that perfect ease and swift smoothness. His brown body lay down in the water as if it loved it, and a bow wave rose and curled over the almost buried head. He swam on his side with a tremendous reach forward and thrust of his powerful right arm, and the drive of his legs was a revelation in the possibilities of marine propulsion. Madame could not see how he breathed, for his head was cuddled down on the left shoulder, though breathe he must have done somehow.

"I can't properly describe it," said Madame to me afterwards. "He was a human torpedo. He went forward in one continuous smooth rush with that clear bow wave curling over his head."

At a little distance, which to Madame looked too far for safety—she still placed an emergency trust in the dugong spear—Willatopy's head rose up and he stopped. Balancing himself in the water by imperceptible movements of hands and legs, Willatopy was hanging out his body as a bait for timid sharks. It was not long before one swooped down upon so attractive a prey. Madame saw the feather of water flung up by a black moving fin, while Willatopy, peering far down into the clear waters of the bay, was on the alert against an attack more subtle.

"Silly beast," murmured he, and his fists tightened on the trench daggers. The black fin ran up and then disappeared as the shark rolled over to strike upwards with those triple rows of teeth which are set at some distance behind and below the snout. A shark must attack its prey belly upwards, and strike from below; if its mouth were in its snout like a crocodile's it would be a much more dangerous foe. The shark rolled over and struck upwards. Willatopy's head vanished, his brown body curled over lazily, and he dived exactly as a dolphin dives. A long swooping flash downwards. The shark broke the surface where Willie's head had been, and Willatopy reappeared where the black fin had been. Shark and boy had changed places, and, if Madame had been nearer, she might have seen the grin spread out on Willatopy's face. The shark twisted its long body about, again rolled over and again struck upwards. Grinning contemptuously, Willatopy slipped downwards under the rising shark, and appeared again behind its tail.

"Why doesn't he kill the brute?" muttered Madame.

"I don't rightly understand," replied the man with the fatuous spear.

"It looks 'orrible dangersome to me, ma'am. I can't 'ardly believe the nigger boy will come back alive."

Once or twice more the shark struck at Willie, and once or twice more the boy evaded the stroke, but made no attack himself. Then all saw for what he waited. Another black fin, with a curling feather rising before it, came sliding up to take part in the sport. Madame, frightened, was now on her feet. Had time permitted, she would, I think, have disobeyed Willatopy's instructions, and urged the boat forward to his assistance. But there was no time. The first shark was attacking again, and the second was rapidly approaching. Willatopy no longer delayed action. He evaded as before the upward stroke of shark number one, and then, before the beast could turn, twisted about under water and rose beneath the belly of shark number two. Right, left, both daggers went home under the fin. Turning without coming to the surface for breath—he could stay nearly two minutes under water—Willatopy swooped back at his first opponent, slipped under it as he had done with the other, and again shot out both fists—so and so. He came up between the two big fish in water reddened by their blood, and watched warily for further signs of activity. But both sharks were dead; he had struck very swiftly, but he had struck home truly.

Willatopy swam easily towards the boat. Shark hunting, especially with the very efficient trench daggers, was a sport which rapidly palled, and he had done with it. But it had not quite done with him. When he was some twenty yards from the motionless boat, a third shark, more cunning than his two fellows, rose at Willie from the depths without giving him warning on the surface. But Willatopy was not caught yet. One swims with very clearly skinned eyes in shark-infested waters, and the boy saw the shark's shadow before its body was near enough to be dangerous. The shark rising belly upwards could not see the boy drop downwards like a stone, and when it did sight him, the stroke had failed, and Willatopy had dived under the boat. Madame leaning out over the side glared down into the clear, almost still, water. She saw what is rarely seen, an under-water fight between a man and a shark, and she saw, moreover, how fully Willatopy was justified in his self-confidence. The white body of the great fish shot by the dark form of the lithe, quickly manoeuvring boy, who, as it went past, flashed out two blows, right and left, as if he were a boxer side-stepping and countering an opponent's rush. Madame could not see the daggers rip home, but she saw the blood spurt from the side of the shark and its huge body writhe and shudder. Then up came Willatopy's head not six feet from the boat, and he swung himself in over the stern. The dead shark, still quivering, rolled slowly up to the surface, and floated there beside its slayer. The body after allowing for the immersed portions, was a good deal longer than the sixteen foot dinghy.

"They are good knives," said Willatopy, pulling the trench knives off his fists, and unfastening the retaining cords. "They are good knives, just the things for sharks. But sharks are silly sheep, Madame, hardly worth the trouble of killing." He pointed to the three big bodies, each floating in its own red pool, and laughed. "Two at once and then the third. One kills them just like the sheep that they are. There is no danger at all, not one little bit."

* * * * * * *

But though Joy and Cry would not trouble to come out of their hut to see Willatopy kill sharks in the bay, they skipped like schoolgirls at the promise of a dance, when offered a fishing trip to the Great Barrier. They were Hulas of New Guinea, whose savage ancestors had for countless ages fished the waters to leeward of the Barrier. It was the great kindly sea farm of the Hulas, it had grown with them through more thousands of years than mankind can count, and it will stand there, grand, massive and mysterious, long after the last Hula has vanished from the earth. The abrupt north end of the Barrier was some ten miles distant—Madame could hear in her tent the everlasting thunder of the surf against its outer wall—and thence it wound southwards, skirting the North Queensland coast though never touching it, for twelve hundred wave-swept miles. Inshore, from Brisbane to Cape York, there interpose deep navigable channels, starred with islands, and through the Barrier itself are cut gaps here and there by which the hardy navigator may pass in safety from the outside Pacific Ocean to the inner channels. By such a passage, Willatopy, the boy of twelve, had steered his father's yawl with his father's corpse lashed to its deck.

The Barrier is a long, narrow, tortuous wall of which the outer face—where the coral polyps love to cling in the foaming surf of the Pacific—drops down almost sheer for hundreds of feet. On the inner side the water is more shallow and broken up by reefs. This wall, twelve hundred miles long, is not more than a quarter of a mile wide on its coping, and in some stretches is no more than a hundred feet. For hundreds of thousands of years the madrepores have been working upon it, each one living out his tiny life in the whirl of the surf, and then dying, to leave his skeleton of lime as one more brick in the gigantic masonry.

The coral polyp, species madrepore, of the Barrier is a patient, courageous little seaman. He is born and bred in the wide ocean. He cannot endure the boredom of life in the still, tame, waters below the hundred-foot level; he cannot exist above the low tidal mark, and his salt soul withers in the muddy freshness of river mouths. I love Darwin's romantic theory of the Barrier, though later authorities have cast doubts upon its sufficiency. Project your mind back, says Darwin, some few hundreds of thousands of years to the time when the Queensland coast was much higher out of the water than it is now in these degenerate days. Imagine the land slowly sinking, a few inches maybe in a century, and there you are! The Great Barrier, skirting the coast yet never touching it, is explained. The coral polyps, which cannot support life except between low water mark and twenty fathoms, can only build fringing reefs along the shore. Wherever a river or stream comes down there is a gap, for the coral polyps cannot live away from their native salt. We have then a fringing reef, cut transversely with gaps, and this reef continually rises in height from the sea bottom as the land slowly sinks. Each foot of subsidence gives to the polyps an added foot of water in which to live and multiply. The Æons pass, the land subsides, and presently a water-filled channel opens out between the original fringing reef and the shore. As the land sinks still further, the channel widens, and is ever widening. The fringing reef has become a barrier of which the base on the sea floor is always sinking, and the coping of the roof always rising, built up by madrepore skeletons. Against the edge of the new shore a new fringing reef is built up. And so on through the long centuries. That is Darwin's theory. There are others, less imaginative and more mechanical, but my instinct rejects them. I feel that Charles Darwin, though himself a very bad sailor, has alone done full and sympathetic justice to the splendid sea instincts of the bold madrepores. They scorn the ease of shelter and shallows. Theirs is the open coast on which the wild waves break; they make the long fringe of it one vast coral tomb, and when the land sinks they turn that ancient fringing tomb into a vast outer Barrier. The madrepore is a true sea architect, and no peddling theory of under-water detritus, slowly accumulating as a foundation for his masonry, would deceive him into building on the rubbish.

Willatopy took charge of the expedition to the Great Barrier. He was well equipped with gear, for being very rich and not consenting to do any work, he bought his nets in Thursday Island. The one which he dragged out of store looked as if it would hold enough fish to feed the Island for twelve months. It was sixty feet long and about ten feet wide. One edge was weighted and the other buoyed, and draw ropes were arranged so that the whole net could be pulled into one long narrow bag. For the service of the fishing party he commandeered the motor launch and two whaleboats.

"We will go out with the ebb and come back on the flood," said he, "and the jolly little motor boat shall tow the whalers. When we arrive, the motor boat shall be anchored in safety while we fish from the whaleboats. We shall want"—he spoke as confidently as if the resources of the Humming Top were as unreservedly at his call as were those of Tops Island—"we shall want six strong sailors for each boat, and an engineer to look after the motor. I don't understand motors."

"May we have the boats and men?" asked Madame sweetly of Ching, who had come ashore to pay his regular morning visit. He was responsible for Madame's safety on the Island, and nothing would persuade him that her pretty head was not in grievous peril. The Skipper belonged to the dark adventurous past.

"You are the owner," growled he, "and if you choose to butt my boats on the reefs it is your responsibility, Madame Gilbert."

"Willatopy is a first-rate pilot," said she. "I will trust the boats with him."

The Skipper swore under his breath. "It is not my boats I think of, but of your foolishness, Madame. You will spoil that Moor until he gets outside of himself, and then you will be sorry for the rest of your life. Once a savage always a savage. He is a grand pilot of the Straits, because he has lived in them and sailed them all his life. But in everything else he is a naked savage. Go away fishing if you please; you will be safe with my men."

Ching turned sulkily away. He grudged Willatopy that local knowledge of the Coral Sea which he would never have opportunity to accumulate for himself, and above all he grudged him Madame's undisguised favours. Madame landed a parting dig in the middle of the Skipper's back.

"Willatopy may be a Moor," said she, "whatever a Moor may be. But you can't look him in the eyes and protest that he isn't a Toppys." That was the worst of the poor Skipper's troubles. He had served the Family for twenty-five years, he had all the Devon man's respect for the landed gentry of his native county, and he was subjected almost nightly to the veiled hints of Alexander Ewing. Why had Madame Gilbert sailed for the Torres Straits, and did she and Sir John know that the Willatopy whom they had found was there waiting to be found? It was not only the naked savagery of Willatopy which made Captain Ching long to destroy him.

Madame, the girls, and Willatopy went forth to the yacht in the dinghy, passing the bar at nearly high water, and there joined the procession of boats which lay waiting for them. The second engineer took charge of the motor engine, Willatopy himself grasped the tiller, Joy and Cry bubbling with eagerness to travel in a "buzz boat," clambered into the bows, and the adventurers set forth for the Great Barrier, which a page or two back I have ventured to describe. It was early morning. The sun shone as it shone every day throughout that gracious southern winter. Its rays had a shrewd bite in them which one never feels in the moist English summer, so that Madame never ventured to confront them at high noon without the protection of a helmet. The wind was blowing up from the south-east as it always did, freshening every moment, and urging on the tireless Pacific rollers. The string of boats rose and fell as Willatopy drove them across the swell, and every now and then a wave would break over the bows, and the warm salt spray lash across the faces of the passengers. Madame Gilbert, in her bathing dress and thin trench coat, was equipped to laugh at the lashing of salt water, and the skins of the half-castes glistened as it soaked into them. Willatopy at a hint from Madame—though he raised his eyebrows in surprise—had put on the holiday trousers of Thursday Island. But he warned her that when the serious business of fishing called for his professional attention, the absurd usages of civilisation would go scat.

"That is right," explained Madame, "in the water. But on land or in a boat you should be dressed—slightly. Your father was an English gentleman, Willatopy."

"My father said," quoted Willatopy, "without clothes there is no curiosity. Sin came into the world with clothes."

"Yes," drawled Madame. "But that was a long time ago. And sin having come we have got to put up with it. I prefer you in trousers, Willatopy."

"As my lady pleases," said he, and Madame started. It was a strange sentence to come from so very dark a mouth, and she wondered where he had heard it. Then she remembered that it was Marie's English formula in acknowledgment of an instruction. Willatopy never came to her tent without invitation, and, so far as she knew, had never met Marie except in the officers' mess of the yacht. Where could he have heard her use just that phrase? Had Marie, in her clandestine French fashion, constituted herself the instructress of Willatopy in polite usages as she herself understood them? Violet lightning began to flash from Madame's eyes, and she determined to be very watchful of the movements of that maid of hers. Ever since her confidential talk with Grant of Thursday Island she had felt that the presence of Marie in the yacht and on the Island was a danger. Marie was a promiscuous little she-devil wholly devoid of moral scruples. If in defiance of Madame's warning she indulged her esoteric tastes for Willatopy's brown skin and bright blue eyes, grave mischief might be done before it could be stopped. "If she does," murmured Madame, through her gritting teeth, "I will send her back to France to be shot. And I will give myself the pleasure of attending her execution. There is no weak masculine softness about me."

The water had fallen below its full height when Madame caught her first glimpse of the famous Barrier, and the Pacific swell, urged against the outer face by the south-east trade wind, was meeting the tidal flow and tossing great spumes of spray high into the air. Over the whole width of the reef the water boiled and roared, and masses of coral limestone, tons in weight, were flung about like small stones. Although the madrepores cannot live above the level of low water, the Barrier was several feet higher, and here comes in the mechanical theory of Chamisso and his followers to modify the beautiful simplicity of Darwin's hypothesis of subsidence. By force of the swell which beats perpetually on the outer wall, where the polyps flourish in surf, and where their millions of tiny skeletons are perpetually adding to the structure, lumps are being torn off and piled upon the coping of the wall. These lumps under the solvent action of sun and water become cemented into masses, so that the purity of the original madrepore design is partially lost. The Barrier has risen higher than the polyps unaided could have built it. The sea is no respecter of coral graveyards. In this way the interior of purely coral islands may have become heaped up by masses torn by the sea from the fringing reefs and flung high up the shore.

Though the Barrier broke the full force of the Pacific rollers, enough of water swirled over it to set the string of boats tossing and bucking in the tide rips of the sheltered western face. Willatopy ordered the whaleboats to be cast off, and the motor launch to be anchored some half a mile short of the reefs. The second engineer remained on board of her, but the Topy family and Madame Gilbert transferred their wet persons to one of the whaleboats. The long net was dragged out and stretched between the boats, which drifted slowly on parallel courses towards the Barrier. Between them ran the line of floats which marked the upper edge of the net. As the boats moved rather faster than the heavily weighted net, it sagged between them, pulling out into a long wide-mouthed bag from the jaws of which the fish feeding in the shallows could not readily escape. The net was carried forward in this fashion until the boats which were controlling it had reached the inner shelving edge of the reef, and the depth of water had come down to about ten feet, which, it may be recalled, was the depth to which the weighted edge of the net descended. Then the fun began, for the drag-rope on the lower edge became entangled in the rough coral lumps on the sea floor, and the fish which had been herded between the net's capacious jaws began to skurry forth through the opening avenues of escape. To Madame this overflow, as it were, seemed to matter little, for, between the boats, the fish were leaping in hundreds, even thousands, and even if half of them won a way to freedom, there would be far more left than the Humming Top or Tops Island could possibly consume. But the family of Topy had other views. The moment had arrived for which these amphibians had waited and hoped; anyone, white or brown, could trap sea fish in a net; it was vouchsafed to them alone, hereditary fishers of Hula, to pursue escaping fish into their own depths, and to catch them directly by hand and teeth.

When the lower drag-rope caught and strained, Willatopy directed both boats to anchor, and cried out to his sisters in native dialect. What he said in words Madame did not know, but what he meant was instantly made plain. Up leapt the three Topys, away went trousers and banana-skin petticoats, and the three of them, bare as when they were born, and revelling in their supreme sea skill, streaked overboard. The one dark body and the two light ones flashed over the gunwale, and took the water like seals. Down they went to where gaps opened between the net and the sea floor, and the fish were struggling to escape. The human fish swooped upon the sea natives, and grappled them with claws and teeth. These were no small feeble, defenceless fish; the least of them weighed a pound and a half, and the erectile spines near the tail fins made them in their own element opponents worthy even of the Hula Topys. Avoiding the spines, the Topys, boy and girls of equal skill and quickness, grabbed the elusive fish by the gills, and when both hands were full, buried their sharp white fangs in the backs of them.

"I shall never forget that sight," said Madame to me. "Down they would all flash for a few seconds, and then the three black heads shot up and fish in torrents poured into the boat. Blood ran from their mouths, and from the bitten backs of the captured fish. Often and often they shot up, all three of them, with a two-pounder in each hand, and another gripped in their jaws. We poor white folk are proud if we can by artifice tickle a trout in its lair and ravish it from a hole with our hands. These Hula Topys caught those fish in the free open sea. They never seemed to miss their swoop, for they stayed down a few seconds only at each dive, and never came up with empty hands. Their diving was a revelation. There was no effort in it, no clumsy heaving up of the loins and extravagant splashing. Their brown bodies rolled over and vanished with as little fuss as the diving of a seal. Perhaps that is the nearest word to describe what I saw. The Topys were just seals. Their frizzy hair plastered down by the water gave them, too, something of the look of seals. All the while they never paused for breath. It was up and down, up and down, without ceasing, for fully a quarter of an hour, and the fish came aboard in a torrent. Our bottom boards were covered before the Topys ceased. And then it was the girls who stopped to rest, not that indefatigable Willatopy. Joy and Cry swung in over the high sharp bows and sat down panting on the forward thwart." Madame laughed a little to herself before she resumed the description. "I was interested to observe," she went on, "that the girls were tattooed in deep blue patterns down the centre line of the body and on the upper part of their thighs. And this interested me, for Willatopy had no tattoo marks at all. The pattern was identical on both girls, a series of light brown saltires on a blue ground resembling Alexander's Scottish St. Andrew's Cross. It was curious that the Hon. William Toppys should have permitted his daughters to submit to the Hula tribal markings while his son was excluded. But perhaps men are not tattooed in the tribe though most of the brown Melanesian boys on Tops Island had some face markings. What struck me most vividly was the effect of the tattooing in removing the appearance of bareness. If the Topy girls had been tattooed from breast to knee they would have appeared to the casual eye to have been wearing tight bathing dresses, woven in blue and brown checks. There is a lot to be said for tattooing. Though my dear men turned their bashful backs there was no suggestion at all of immodesty about Joy and Cry. I loved their admirable, unconscious simplicity."

When the whaleboats had been loaded with fish to their utmost capacity, the unwanted remainder were allowed to go free, and the net was hauled in and coiled down. It was the hand and mouth fishing which the Toppys really loved, the savage sport, not the larder which absorbed their interests. The net was the means to an end—the penning up of fish so that Willie and his sisters might attack them in their native element. The party lunched by the Barrier while waiting for the tide to turn, and at slack water Willatopy suggested that Madame, already clad in her silk bathing gear, should go over the side with him. Madame was willing, but dreaded sharks. She was quite fearless when confronted by risks which she understood, but the thought of swimming with sharks smelling at her toes made the brave lady's blood run cold. For her daily swims off the Island she always kept to a small narrow creek warranted by Willatopy to be shark-proof.

"Sharks are nothing," remonstrated Willie. "They will not come where there are so many boats, and if they do I will drive them away."

"But you have no daggers here, Willie," objected Madame. "Even you cannot shoo away sharks with bare hands."

One of the sailors offered his sheath knife, but Willatopy put it aside. "If a silly shark comes by I will borrow it," said he. "There will be time enough."

Spurred by all this easy indifference—though she saw herself being gobbled up by a huge shark while Willatopy was strolling off to borrow the sailor's knife—Madame flung aside the trench coat and her sun helmet and stood forth as a reluctant sacrifice for the honour of the white race. Though it may have really been a case of heroism without risk, in her terrified imagination the seas swarmed with black shark fins. Over she went, and following her went Willatopy and the girls.

"I can swim a bit," said Madame, "and rather fancied myself at home. But those brown seals made rings around me. While I lumbered noisily along they would frisk to and fro, now behind, now in front, now on either side. Whenever they pleased, they would join me in half a dozen swift vivid strokes. My progress was exactly like that of an elderly fat woman down a field with three terriers sporting about her. It was a humiliating spectacle. I did my best; I swam as fast as I could, and when I got back to the boat I was puffing like an asthmatic grampus. Willatopy was good enough to say that I had quite a useful leg drive and might learn to swim some day if I stuck at it. He regarded me much as a plus golfer does his thirty-six handicap grandmother. I knew better than to show those Topys that ungainly agitated sprawl which in Europe we call diving from the surface. But though the swimming was a humiliation I enjoyed sitting in the sun to dry."

They returned as they had come, the motor launch towing the whaleboats, and were sped homewards by the welling flood tide. Madame, though she knew it not, was nearing the end of her brief spell of irresponsible happiness. While they had been disporting themselves off the Barrier, Fate had rung up the curtain for the Final Act in the drama of Willatopy. It was an Act which was long in the playing, but the end loomed inevitable almost from the opening bars of the overture. As the string of boats merrily buzzed into the narrow bay, they all saw that the Humming Top no longer lay there alone. Within the entrance moored to the opposite bank was a small schooner which had just come in, for the crew were even at that moment stowing her lowered sails upon the deck.

"What is that ship?" asked Madame, her brows gathering into an uneasy frown. The Island had seemed so much the private property of the Topys and of the Humming Top that the presence of a stranger schooner became an unmannerly intrusion. Especially so weather-beaten and dirty a schooner as that one over there.

"Trading schooners often shelter here for the night while on a round of the islands," explained Willatopy. "My yawl does all the Baru trade that there is."

But Madame Gilbert, in spite of this satisfying explanation of the schooner's presence in the bay, continued to look upon the vessel with disfavour. If one schooner dropped in thus unceremoniously, another might come, and another. Some day strangers might land, strangers from Thursday Island or from the big world beyond Thursday Island. The splendid steam yacht at its moorings and Madame's luxurious camp outfit in the woods were not common objects of the shore to be accepted in the Straits without explanation. And they would use up a lot of explanation, and still leave the curious unsatisfied. There was too much of Toppys about the Island and the yacht for their conjunction to be wholly a matter of chance. Grant, Willatopy's banker, already knew much, and had guessed the rest. He was safe, for his own reasons. But others coming might carry away to Thursday Island, and thence to the big world beyond Thursday Island, a story of the Toppys yacht afloat, and of the Topy family ashore; and some might—some certainly would—connect the one with the other. From that discovery to a peering into local registers would be, for our inquisitive white race, a brief step. Too many people knew the Toppys secret already, and too many more must presently get some hint of it. It was not much of a secret after all. Madame frowned at the dirty schooner and shrugged her shoulders. It was not her secret anyway, though she had done her best to keep it.