T'S like that down there. One minute you can be in blue water, with never a hint of trouble, and the next piled high and dry on the fangs of a coral reef.
Simultaneously with the impact, Strode crawled out of the cockpit and along the sloping deck. The cutter had slithered on to the reef, listed to port, and now lay on her bilge in half a fathom of water. The tide was on the ebb, but there was no surf, which about adjusted the balance of fortune. It remained to sit tight and pray for eight feet on the flood.
Strode contrived to douse sail, and was clambering
overboard to discover just what he had done to himself, when a canoe full of paddling Kanakas, with a white man at the steering oar, shot out from the island that lay invitingly green not a mile distant.
The canoe made fast on the lagoon side of the reef, and the white man came splashing and lurching over the treacherous coral. Even at that distance he cut an extraordinary figure. He was tall, and so thin that in his sagging ducks he looked like a length of tape fluttering in the breeze. He stopped a few yards distant, propped himself more securely on his spindle shanks, and raised a gaunt and bearded face to the stranded cutter.
"What's all this?" he demanded, as though haranguing a trespasser in his back yard.
"I'm not sure yet," said Strode.
"But what made you do it? There's a pass half a mile further north."
"Charts," said Strode. "There's nothing on them about reefs in these parts, let alone a pass."
"Charts!" The living skeleton snorted his scorn. "What's the good of charts? Where's your look-out?"
"Haven't got one," said Strode.
"Where's your crew?"
"Haven't that, either."
"Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"Wait for the tide," said Strode, "Won't you come aboard?"
The cutter was listed at an angle that made it necessary to crawl most of the way, but in time the two men reached the saloon settee. Here it transpired, over a carefully-manipulated glass, that the skeleton's name was Tatham, and that he was growing vanilla on the neighbouring island.
"You must come ashore for a spell and let my tame carpenter put you to rights," he suggested pleasantly enough. "It doesn't look to me as if you've done much more than frayed your keel and stove in a plank or two. We have a dry-dock of sorts."
Strode was vaguely suspicious. Tatham's manner, as well as his appearance, was dead against him. His eyes seemed never still, his mouth twitched, and his short, clipped utterance gave the impression that he was eternally afraid of saying too much. However, one meets all sorts in this entertaining old world of ours, and Strode had learnt to await developments before coming to definite conclusions.
Certainly Tatham knew what to do in an emergency, and was not long about doing it. The tide had no sooner turned than he unfurled himself from the settee, fluttered up through the fo'castle hatch, and summoned his crew. It came, splashing and yelling across the reef like a marine cavalry charge, and stood at attention waist-deep while Tatham addressed it in fluent bêche-de-mer. Then, as though "by numbers," blocks and tackle were rigged across the reef, and when the cutter began to lift, twelve hefty Kanakas dug their toes into the coral and pulled as one. The cutter moved, and continued to move. To the accompaniment of a demoniac chorus and sundry bumpings, she traversed the reef and slid into deep water on the other side.
"There!" said Tatham.
"Thanks," said Strode, and they went up to the house.
It was a neat little place, run with extraordinary efficiency by an army of Solomon "boys."
"Catch 'em young, treat 'em firm but square, and you can't better them," Tatham observed over a refresher on the verandah. "I want you," he added in a curiously eager way he had, "to notice things."
"I am," said Strode, "and it seems to me you do yourself uncommonly well."
Tatham's glance traversed his legs, outstretched before him like railway lines, and came to rest on the immense buffers of his feet.
"I hope so," he said. "But I don't want to influence you one way or another. Just form your own opinion, and let me have it plump and plain when I ask for it, that's all."
"Opinion of what?" Strode asked.
"Me, mostly," said Tatham. "I won't say any more now, if you don't mind. It's your first impressions I'm after, and they're too valuable to spoil." His mouth twitched into a smile. "It's all right," he added reassuringly, "I'm not daft."
"I never said you were," Strode defended.
"No, you're too polite for that. Haven't been in these parts long enough. But I could see it occurred to you, all the same."
