Jerry did not query these appearances and disappearances.  It never entered his golden-sorrel head to be curious about the affair or to attempt to solve it.  He accepted it in much the way he accepted the wetness of water and the heat of the sun.  It was the way of life and of the world he knew.  His hazy awareness was no more than an awareness of something—which, by the way, corresponds very fairly with the hazy awareness of the average human of the mysteries of birth and death and of the beyondness about which they have no definiteness of comprehension.

For all that any man may gainsay, the ketch Arangi, trader and blackbirder in the Solomon Islands, may have signified in Jerry’s mind as much the mysterious boat that traffics between the two worlds, as, at one time, the boat that Charon sculled across the Styx signified to the human mind.  Out of the nothingness men came.  Into the nothingness they went.  And they came and went always on the Arangi.

And to the Arangi, this hot-white tropic morning, Jerry went on the whaleboat under the arm of his Mister Haggin, while on the beach Biddy moaned her woe, and Michael, not sophisticated, barked the eternal challenge of youth to the Unknown.

CHAPTER II

From the whaleboat, up the low side of the Arangi, and over her six-inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin made it easily with Jerry still under his arm.  The deck was cluttered with an exciting crowd.  Exciting the crowd would have been to untravelled humans of civilization, and exciting it was to Jerry; although to Tom Haggin and Captain Van Horn it was a mere commonplace of everyday life.

The deck was small because the Arangi was small.  Originally a teak-built, gentleman’s yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angle-ironed, sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze, she had been sold into the Solomon Islands’ trade for the purpose of blackbirding or nigger-running.  Under the law, however, this traffic was dignified by being called “recruiting.”