It would be impossible to bring home to your mind, unless you had experienced it, the vast change which the presence of the Southern Cross made in the picture of the lagoon. Not on the retinal picture, but on the mental.

Her presence altered everything. The place became a harbor. Those spars fretting the sky, that hull making green water beneath its copper brought civilization up hand over fist from a thousand leagues down under.

Loneliness had vanished, the crying of the gulls lost its melancholy, and the sound of the surf on the reef, when one noticed it, no longer spoke of desolation.

And, just as the schooner altered the lagoon, so did the presence of her crew and the labor men alter the life on the island.

In a moment life had become all hurry and work.

Isbel reappeared regularly to help in the preparation of their food; she would be on hand when wanted for any light job, but she never sat by them now when they talked; she avoided saying a word unless absolutely obliged to, and when she spoke she no longer looked Floyd in the eyes.

"She is frightened to death of us and she loathes us," he thought. "Me just as much as him. I don't wonder, either."

[Pg 115]Schumer said nothing on the matter; perhaps he was too busy to notice the change in the girl. He certainly had his work cut out for him. On the first day he had to deal with the labor men, showing them their job. They knew nothing of pearls or the shell business, but they were like otters in the water, and they picked up the small technicalities of the labor at once.

Sru especially seemed to take to the work as though born to it, and Schumer left them under his foremanship and returned to the schooner, where he had work for the crew.

He wanted a house. He had already picked out the site for it in a little clearing of the grove well protected by the trees from possible storms. The wood was ready to his hand in the wreckage of the Tonga, which the lagoon currents had driven into the shoal water of the southern beach right opposite to the camping place.

Of course he could have cut down trees for his building material, but every tree in the grove by the camping place was a valuable asset as a shelter against the weather. To have used any of the timber from the other groves of the island would have meant not only the labor of felling and trimming trees, but of floating them off and towing across the water.

He made Mountain Joe foreman of the new industry, explaining to him carefully and minutely the whole business. All planking had to be collected, made into small rafts, and towed across the lagoon. The whaleboat was used for the purpose, and Schumer accompanied it himself on the first trip to show exactly what he wanted.

It took two days' hard work before sufficient planking had been got together, and then began the business[Pg 116] of securing and towing across the heavy timbers to be used fo............