In the good old days of Thursday Island there passed as waif currency a certain local jest. When some pride of the pearling fleet was moved to approve himself, his company, and the pervading wickedness in general he was wont to state—more or less titubant on his pins the while—that the only honest men in that merry little hell had come by land. It was a useful and a harmless jest, salted with the essential fact whereby legends are preserved and made historic. But from a date it lost its savor....

At the Portugee's one night—Saturday, be sure, for it was always Saturday on Thursday with the pearlers—a gentleman from Wooloomooloo who had just adorned the traditional witticism with profane fancy found himself confronted by a quiet stranger who laid down his coat and a new law.

"I don't mind so much what you call yourselves to yourselves," he observed, while the circle shouted and spread about. "Nor your nice new magistrate, nor your missionaries, nor your artillery guard on the hill. Maybe you've overlooked the modern spread of respectability and corrugated roofings. Or maybe you know 'em better than I do. But I've come to tarry with you for a time, my friends. And, as long as I'm in your midst, any chap that says I'm not honest—and can't prove it—I'll knock seven bells out of him."

Which he did, seriatim.

Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.

Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in bÊche de mer.

Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success. Nobody questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on a pearling license. Nobody wondered when he paid off and scattered his Kanaka crew—possible links with his past—and shipped a new lot from the motley mob on the jetty.

And a motley lot he picked! His cook was Chinese; his head diver a Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp, the name of Buttermilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact—which again nobody noticed—that they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who do.

This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself might have filled a whole illustration; thewed like a colossus, crop black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an institution....

"'Im? Cap'n of the Fancy Free, that flash little lugger out beyond. 'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on shore leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might ha' owed you—that's 'is sort. And—my word!—'e's got a jab to the boko you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im. 'Honest Wetherbee'—that's 'im."

For he lived to the title. If it is honest to abide by every hampering regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices over a bit of inferior shell; to lose two weeks with your outfit in quarantine, voluntarily—that happened when the Opalton brought a hot cholera scare and her passenger list camped on Friday Island—to share your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee played it. Amazingly—as a man might play an arduous game!

Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the harbor master and was calling various pilots, navigators, and odd fish of Torres Strait by their handier names—especially the pilots. These were the rewards of reputation, and they defined Thursday's acceptance of him up to that night in the wet season when his visit ended....

A Saturday again. The northwest monsoon had broken with torrential downpour, and now the island reeked in a steam bath, as if the young moon had focused a sick, intolerable ray upon it. A high wind stormed the sands and brought no relief. The quiver of the surf beat on the senses like heat waves. A few thrashing pawpaws and palm tufts threw shadows like tormented sleepers along the beach. But up in the town Thursday took its usual "tangle," shouted and sang and drowned its fever without assuagement in the periodic crisis of the fortune hunt. A Brisbane steamer lay ready to depart with the morning tide. Meanwhile her shore goers, "seeing a bit o' life," did their possible to keep up the prevailing temperature. Only the long jetty was quiet. Here a man might stand back and away from it all and hear the single note of its turmoil and peer into the mist of its lights like a contemplative Lucifer at the verge of some lesser inferno.

And in truth there stood such a man in much that manner. He had come down soft-footed from the streets and, lingering to assure himself he had not been followed, stepped out upon the jetty where he stayed motionless and attentive. His glance roved from point to point, noting, verifying. First the outward spread twinkle of the deserted lugger fleet at anchor; then the bulk of the Brisbane steamer at the T head, with her yellow cargo flares that showed loading still in progress: and the town, all unconscious of him. Something sinister seemed to detach this big, dim figure from the restlessness of the night; brooding apart there so coolly alert and contained. He regarded Thursday for a while, and at last, alone and with himself for confidant, he made a gesture as if to seal its folly and its whole destiny with final contempt and triumph.

He was turning away with a swing of broad shoulders when another figure slipped from the shadow and moved suddenly to confront him.

"Ah—Captain Wetherbee?"

Everywhere and always up and down the earth, and more particularly in rather unhealthful corners of it, are men who have to go braced for that questioning slur, that significant little drag before the name. It is a challenge out of time and space, and at sound of it the big fellow drew up tense like a battler in a ring.

"Halvers," stated the newcomer without preamble or apology. "I'll take halvers, if you please, Captain Wetherbee."

He revealed himself as a long, weedy frame in limp linen. Both hands were jammed into his side pockets with a singular effect—against a hypothetical chill, one would have thought. Without his stoop he might have been as tall as Wetherbee, but he had shrunken like the sleeves tucked above his bony wrists. He had an air at once fearful and implacable—the doubly dangerous menace of a timid man ready to strike.

Wetherbee was aware of it, though incredulous.

"You spoke?" he inquired, from a lengthened jaw.

"I said—halvers," affirmed this extraordinary apparition. There was no mistaking the peculiar flavor in his husky voice—no mistaking, either, that at present its owner was deadly cold sober. "Don't move, captain. I've got you covered from here.... And this time I'm not afraid to shoot!"

Wetherbee continued aware of it.

"Just my little device for holding your attention," explained the newcomer, between a cough and a snuffle, the remnant of polite affectation. "I thought it out very carefully."

"Ho! You did?" queried Wetherbee.

"You used to be such a damnably abrupt sort of person yourself."

"Ho! Did I?"

"Even then. Even then, when we sat under the same pulpit—such time as you found it socially expedient to attend—it was a matter of grave doubt to me whether you took any real benefit. You were always a poor listener, Mr.—ah—Wetherbee. Whereas I—I was chosen deacon that winter, you may remember."

Wetherbee stared into the shaven, haunted face thus preposterously thrust at him across the years. Aside from the unimaginable oddity of the attack, there was cunning and unsettling purpose in it, but he yielded no nerve reaction, no start or outcry; not even a denial. And by this—had he been wise—the other might have taken warning.

"By Jove!" was all his comment.

"We've come a considerable distance," suggested the new arrival.

They looked in curious silence, each measuring that span from the edge of things. Thursday howled on one side of them and on the other wind and the sea, until the humor of it won Wetherbee to a grim chuckle.

"Well, what do they call you nowadays—deacon?"

"I'm usually known as Selden, thanks."

"Seldom?"

"I shouldn't insist: any more than you yourself, captain."

"And what are you doing here?"

"I dropped in from Samarai, meaning to catch the Brisbane steamer yonder. I've been diving up there all season. I'm a very fair diver, really; only my luck is generally so poor."

To any passer-by he must have seemed the usual loafer, with a string of woes on tap. But Wetherbee, one eye to the bulging pockets, appeared in no way bored.

"Strolling along the front, I chanced to recognize you. That was luck, if you like. I've thought so. Especially since making inquiries. I've made rather exhaustive inquiries. In fact, I believe I have your rating fairly up to date." He coughed again. "Captain Wetherbee, do you remember when we last met?"

"No," said Wetherbee shortly.

Thereupon Mr. Selden recalled that meeting, and others, and his voice trailed like a snake in the dust, looping cryptic patterns. It was one of those counts of grievance and disaster such as almost any broken fugitive among far places has to tell. Thursday can offer them by the yard, and dear at the price of a drink. He spoke of shares and deals and swindling betrayal; of hope and fortune lost, and the false lead that puts a man on the chute and sets him off for a blackleg and a wanderer. All in the clipped jargon of the markets, a common tale, but with this difference in the telling—it came away briefly, with the slow-biting venom that such a fugitive would be apt to reserve for only one out of all possible living listeners in the world. From over the hidden weapon he drove home his point; while Wetherbee stood there rooted on the jetty, like the Wedding Guest.

"... So you knifed the lot of us in the dark—everyone that trusted you—and bolted. That was your way. You sent me ashore from that last yachting party all primed to go my last penny on a dead bird. I was flattered. I used to credit your honesty more or less myself—then."

"And now?" suggested Wetherbee.

Mr. Selden, late deacon, drew a husky breath.

"Why, now—I've caught up with you. I'm the flaw in the title, at 50 per cent. I'm judgment out of the past! Verily, no man shall escape it: do you mark? No man comes so far or hides his track so cleverly, even at Thursday Island. I've got your record—as you've got mine, of course; but yours is rather worse, with a warrant pending—of which, by the way, I know the very date.... And, besides, I've nothing at all to lose. I'm only a broken diver. Nobody ever called me 'Honest' Selden or 'Honest' anything else!"

His wrists stiffened as Wetherbee took a step.

"You mean to blow, you wasp?"

"You won't make me. Blow! That's no good to me: I mean to get level. Halvers, I said—captain.... I'm in!"

"On what?"

"On your new speculation, of course." He came very close to capering. "Your latest deviltry. Don't I know your little methods? D'you think I couldn't smell it out? Public character, no suspicion, traces all removed—alibi all complete—and a clear road to the back door.

"You sneaked your crew out of town to-night. Your lugger's ready to slip cable. You've been hobnobbing all evening with the pilot you camped along with on Friday Island for two weeks—that had the Opalton—by George, I believe it was you made him a sot on the sly! I wouldn't put it past you. You used to gammon us the same way on your cursed week-end sprees. Don't I know? Haven't I reason to know?

"But you needn't have pumped him so close. I could have told you days ago what she takes aboard of her this trip."...

"The hell you could!"

"Pearls: the season's sweep. Twenty thousand pounds' worth of pearls!" recited Selden. "Eh? Twenty thousand—and I've got you by the short hairs!" His eyes shone in the moonlight with a fanatic gleam. "Thus saith the Lord God; An adversary there shall be, and he shall bring down thy strength from thee!"

Then Captain Wetherbee relaxed and laughed in his chest to match the note of the reef. "Blackmail and piracy! My colonial oath, deacon, I never saw your beat. So you've dropped to me! I go bail you asked a blessing on the enterprise!"

Selden did not deny it.

"Let's hear the rest," urged Wetherbee, while his chuckle echoed the lap of waves among dark pilings. "What's your notion? Did you picture me sticking up the consignors as they walk aboard the plank and passing you your share in a little hand bag?"

The deacon shuffled nervously.

"It can't matter how you do it."

"Can't it? Now, don't you go disappointing me." He stole a step nearer. "Those pearls have been locked in the strong room of the Brisbane steamer since early afternoon. Now then. How the devil am I—are we—to nab 'em? Come! You're the little personal Providence in this affair, at 50 per cent. Don't tell me with all your knowing you didn't know that!"

"It's your deliver," said Selden, "anyhow."

"Well, let's take counsel—I'm agreeable to have an adversary. Goodness knows I haven't had much amusement so far—the thing's been so rotten easy. By way of a text—Brother Seldom—and a point of departure: did you ever hear of the Volga? Ever hear of the Quetta or the Mecca; or a dozen of other ships lost one time or another between here and Cape Flattery?

"Pity about them too—they fell a trifle off the track. Just a few fathom off the track among these millions of reefs that will rip the heart out of anything afloat. Suppose for the sake of argument our Brisbane steamer which we're both so interested in—out there at the dock head—suppose she should happen to go wandering this trip—say, somewhere around Tribulation Passage, two hours out. Suppose she should—as a slant of luck." His voice lowered with obscurely evil suggestion. "Would it occur to you we might have any chance of salvage on those pearls?"

"I—I don't understand," stammered Selden. "The passage is lighted. There's a light on Tribulation Shoal."

"So there is. What a helpful chap you are to work with! You keep it to port as you turn the Blackbird Reef. It's a fourth order fixed dioptric—unattended. The keeper lives on Horn Island. But suppose, now—suppose that light were moved, either way?"

"Move the light!"

"In effect, merely; in effect. A man might very readily land there from the lee and blanket that light to the westward. And if that same man, with something like a discarded lightship lantern aboard his lugger, should then anchor half a mile away, and show his light at the masthead—hey? A fifty-foot elevation is visible at nearly fourteen miles twenty-five feet up. But a twenty-five-foot elevation gives a total of only eleven point four.... You begin to see the possibilities for error—particularly if the pilot of the oncoming steamer should happen to be, as you wisely suggest, a bit of a sot with a hazy eye—"

"My God! You're going to wreck her!"

"Hush!" said Wetherbee very loudly.

Selden whirled around to find a black-skinned native standing impassive behind him. At the same instant a steel grip locked his wrists. "Not that!" he gasped, struggling. "My God, man, you wouldn't! You daren't!"

"No? And yet you said you knew my little methods." "Honest" Wetherbee shifted a thumb to his throat and smiled into his face. "I've a mind to show you, deacon—shall I—how far I have come and how cleverly I have covered my tracks?... Hya, you fella boy—that fella boat all ready? Then bear a hand her one time. We've got a passenger."

Now, it is a fact that no one knows or is ever likely to know the actual explanation for the wreck of the Brisbane steamer, which left Thursday Island that night and came to grief some two hours later on Tribulation Shoals. Other craft have gone the same way from natural causes, and Thursday has kept no suspect tradition of them. The only man who might have denied the yarn as afterward colored in local legend—and incidentally a libel on his own memory—was the pilot who had her in charge. And he never came back, drunk or sober. But the records declare that about four o'clock of a fair enough morning, wind and sea then running high, the 2,000-ton Fernshawe went clear off her course among the graveyards where a coral ledge stripped her plates as neatly as a butcher's knife lays open a carcass. She sank inside of five minutes, and her survivors were hurried.

Neither has any one ever told the true adventures of the Fancy Free, the flash little lugger that happened somehow to be missing from week-end rendezvous at the same hour. Her crew were mostly inarticulate, and those who might have talked of strange comings and goings were "black fella boy know nothing." Her passenger spent the night praying in the bilge; and as for her commander, he left no report. But it is equally certain that when the next dawn spread the iridescence of a pigeon's breast over those empty waters it struck out the hull and spars of Captain Wetherbee's vessel, anchored fair between the tips of two sunken masts.

Captain Wetherbee himself straddled the deck in diving rig, and while a native helper held ready his great gleaming copper helm he mocked a limp, bedraggled, white-faced creature that clung by the rail.

"You'll note for yourself, Brother Seldom," he was saying. "Not a trace of evidence. We've not been spied. The lantern is sunk. These poor cattle haven't a glimmer. Here are we, and there are the pearls, twenty thousand pounds' worth—just overside. Within three hours I'll be off on the pearling banks about my business, and I never heard of any lost steamer. Next week, or any time I choose, I'll be walking the streets of Thursday to hear the news. And who so surprised as Captain Wetherbee, that hardworking man? 'Honest' Wetherbee, with a fortune in his belt to dispose at leisure!"...

His pallid face took a diabolic glow in the first sun.

"Except yourself, of course," he added. "You're evidence. King's evidence. I'm not forgetting you. I'll even give you your chance. Are you coming, old 50 per cent? Yes—down there! With me! Hell—what kind of an adversary do you call yourself? Come on and share. Now's your time to get level and change your luck once for all. Fight it out with me—what? No?... Damn it, deacon, I thought you were going to be amusing.... I'll knock your silly head in when I come back."

He climbed to the ladder, but a final odd fancy occurred to him, a parting twist to the other's torment; and he summoned the big negro mate.

"You see that fella white man? Mebbe he wants to go below—good; you give him that other suit. Mebbe he raises hell or touches the pump; you knock seven bells out of him. Otherwise no order. You savee?"

Buttermilk saveed with a vacant grin.

There hung for a moment after the helmet had been locked a singled-eyed and monstrous red ghoul of the sea that presently lowered itself and sank....

Wetherbee landed easily on the boat deck of the Fernshawe well away aft. It was hardly bright enough as yet above him, and he had to feel his path a foot at a time in somber green twilight. Quick fishes steered to and fro about him, silent and curious witnesses of this invasion. He gave no heed, he had no care of sharks or diamond fish or any possible danger, too intent on his errand, too elate and confident.

Balancing on his hands like an acrobat, he crawled over the edge, down to the main deck, and began to explore forward.

In one hand he held a short and heavy steel crowbar, with a fine ground tip. In the other he drew the coils of his life line and air tube. They lengthened after him as he entered by the main companion, passed the door to the saloon, and up a long, dark passage to a thwartship corridor. There, as he had known from a vague and general familiarity with its plan, was the door to the steamer's strong room. The lock proved a trifle in the nip of his powerful jimmy....

When he groped out into the passage, twenty minutes later, he carried slung to his belt, a sagging canvas bag.

It seemed to him that the ship must have moved in the interval of his search. Some shifting of cargo or fracture of the coral supports had tilted her sharply by the stern. He walked down a noticeable slope, and halfway he met a dead man, sliding on an upward current.

The stranger bobbed into him and went asprawl like a clumsy and apologetic passer-by. His sightless eyes peered into Wetherbee's with mild reproach. Wetherbee thrust him off, and he went bowing and spinning gravely on his course.

Wetherbee cared for no such matters. His nerve remained unshaken, his pulses calm, as befitted a man who had played out the end of a difficult game to rewarded success. But as he resumed his retreat down the passage he caught a glimpse of something surely quite as human and lively as himself.

The light was somewhat stronger now and flooding in through the side panel made a kind of proscenium of the landing by the main companionway. And in that space he descried a dim form facing him there, looking toward him: a man as tall as himself, clad like himself in diving rig—like himself in polished copper helmet. He knew only two helmets of that particular shape and color. One he wore. The other he had left on the deck of the Fancy Free, his spare diving gear. No man of his crew ever could have worn it, for none of them used an apparatus. Therefore he knew that Deacon Selden had come down after all to dispute the prize with him and to claim vengeance on the spot.

He exulted; he could have wished it so and not otherwise. He had meant to kill Selden anyhow. But this was the time and the place and the manner to kill him; a manner to match and to complete his crime as an artistic achievement. One blow on the helmet would crush the fellow's eardrums. And leave no trace—no trace at all! He could bear the body quite openly to Port Kennedy, and even inter it with honors for an unfortunate hand who had died in the line of duty. No trace. Everybody outgeneraled, duped, and defeated and himself free as air.

And the cream of it was: Selden was going to fight! He saw that when he took a stride and the other moved up with him. He stretched out a hand to steady for a rush. So did the other. He swung up his armed fist. The other did the like....

Laughing loud inside his casque, he flung the bar above his head, and went to meet the adversary in crashing impact.

Meanwhile, above in the sunshine, on the deck of the Fancy Free, a limp and wild-eyed gentleman, who had once been deacon in his far past, continued to call abroad with prayful fervor, if any help might come:

"The wicked man lieth in wait secretly as a lion.... Lo, he hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he hideth his wrong in his heart.... Let him be snared in his own pit: in the net which he hid is his own foot taken.... Lord, break Thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man...!"

And when the first luggers came flying from Port Kennedy to the scene of the wreck and the first investigators went below, they found the lifeless body of Captain Wetherbee, the only honest man that ever came to Thursday Island by sea, who had been drowned there: impaled among the shards and splinters of a broken mirror that had served to mask a saloon door aboard the murdered Brisbane steamer.