All that morning and all that day Schumer kept the hands busy at work bringing the shell across the lagoon and storing it aboard the Southern Cross. Some of it was rafted over and some brought in the whaleboat. Schumer superintended everything himself, and now that speed was urgent he proved what he could do as a driver.

Never did a Yankee stevedore work a set of hands harder. His voice acted as a whiplash, and his energy infected everybody.

Next day it was the same, so that at sundown the last of the shell was on board, the locking bars secured, and nothing remained but to take on the water.

"We can do that to-night," said Schumer, "and if this wind holds, though there is not much of it, you will be able to start at sunup. It will be slack tide about then. Now, if you will come up to the house, I will give you the last details of what you have to do in Sydney. There is nothing like having everything cut and dried."

They went up to the house, and Schumer at once plunged into accounts. He had tabulated a list of all the stores required, and he had written down the main points in Floyd's program, even to the address of a house where he could stay.

[Pg 215]Hakluyt looked on while the two men talked, and, when they had finished, the three went out, Hakluyt and Schumer to see to the watering of the vessel and Floyd to find Isbel.

It was a night of the full moon, a hot, almost windless, night filled with the scent of flowers and the song of the reef.

The moon hung almost in the zenith, the apex of a pyramid of light, and under the silent whiteness of the moon the island lay clipping the vast pond of the lagoon in its arms as a mistress holds her lover.

Hakluyt and Schumer had taken the boat to fetch the water casks, and from away out over the water came the sound of the oars. The fellows over at the fishing camp were singing, untired by their day's work, and now and then on a stronger puff of wind a snatch of their song came over the lagoon water, and, just for a moment, as Floyd stood by the water edge, all his trouble of mind lifted from him—for a moment. The brilliant light, the beauty of the scene before him, the snatch of song from the fishing camp, and the perfume of the flower-scented wind seemed to open doors in his m............