“Right as rain,” said Martinsen.

  “Good. Then it’s time we kept our promises—the one you made to me and the one I made to myself.”

  Martinsen, interrupted at a game of solitaire on the veranda, must have expected something of the sort, but even so he needed a moment to gird himself. With the utmost deliberation he turned another card and examined it. Then, “Promise?” he said softly, with an upward glance. “Why, of course. A statement from that housekeeper of yours—that’s what we agreed on, isn’t it? But such a thing will take time.”

  “I don’t want a statement from the girl,” Doc said. “I want one from you.”

  Well! Over Martinsen’s round and ruddy face spread a look of such genuine incredulity as to lay bare the man’s soul.

  It was a lecture, that look. Plain as day it said, Now see here: a statement from a no-account serving girl is one thing, and perhaps I’d have gone to the bother of getting it for you if an opportunity turned up. But a statement from Matt Martinsen…what a laugh!

  The trader laughed.

  “You refuse?” Doc said quietly.

  “You’re out of your mind!” returned Martinsen gruffly. “I didn’t file the complaint against you; the girl did. What kind of fool do you take me for?”

  “A healthy one, at least,” Doc said. “I’ve made certain of that. So—”

  Say this for Martinsen: he was no man to run from a fight. He rose to meet this one with a crooked grin, and began in the age-old tradition by upending the table against his adversary’s legs. And having staggered Doc with his initial thrust, he quickly pursued his advantage. In the twinkling of an eye, with a knee in his groin and an elbow under his ribs, Doc was against the rail, white of face and gasping.

  But the lightning jab was not enough. Doc recovered and threw him off, and then back and forth they went, locked in a contest as primitive as an island legend. The flimsy floor heaved under them like a sea in storm. The hotel seemed likely to topple about their heads.

  I hold no brief for the philosopher who says right makes might. Before our anxious eyes, first one and then the other had the upper hand. Up and down the veranda they fought, on the steps, in the dust of the road. It was either man’s battle until the end.

  In the end, toe to toe in the roadway, they battered each other with leaden fists until one went down and stayed. The one to go was Martinsen.

  Doc Harty looked to us for help and we carried the man to a chair. And once more Doc stood before him, this time in triumph with pen and paper on the table.

  “Write,” said Doc.

  Martinsen slowly raised a battered face. “No.”

  “Write, I tell you! A confession that you put Loliti up to it!”

  “Why should I?” the trader retorted. “You’ve thrashed me. But to get a confession you’ll have to hold a gun at my head and threaten to use it—and you’re not the sort to make such an act convincing.” Wearily he stood up, and the puffed lips turned a grin. “Go to blazes,” he said amiably. So much for the philosophers!

  Doc Harty stood silent. What could he do? What could any man do, short of murder? He lifted his hands and looked, puzzled, at the skinned knuckles, let them fall again and turned away. Down the steps he went. Across the road.

  Martinsen, with a laugh, turned to go upstairs. And there by the staircase, awaiting him, stood his daughter.

  She had come in the back way to avoid the storm on the veranda, I suppose. No matter; she had been there long enough to witness the final act of the drama. That was certain. Hands on hips, she faced him—no longer the young lady raised by a maiden aunt in Sydney, but a true daughter of Matt Martinsen himself. A less groggy Martinsen would have recognized the change and behaved accordingly.

  He didn’t. “Darlin’!” he cooed, advancing on her. “Run up and pack my things, like a good girl. We’re leavin’.”

  “You’re leaving. I’m not,” said she, not budging.

  He halted. “What did you say?”

  “I said you can leave if you wish to, Matt Martinsen. I’m staying!” Tall and straight she faced him, her bright eyes hurling the challenge. “I’m staying here in Teala to marry the man I love!”

  Martinsen looked and saw she meant it, and over his face for the second time that evening spread the look of incredulity. “No,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “No.…”

  “He’s twice the man you are,” she said, driving the knife deep with her deadly calm, “no matter what you’ve made of him with your lies. And if he won’t have me, then I’ll sit on his doorstep until the whole world knows I want him.”

  “I—I won’t permit it,” Martinsen mumbled.

  “Stop me then, if you can,” she said, and went past him.

  He let her go.

  He sat. How long? Trefflan, Pawley and I, we asked one another later how long and could not agree on an answer. How long is forever? With chin on chest and gaze fixed blankly on the floor, he sat, the lamplight dimly registering the mask of defeat that hardened like concrete on his face.

  At last he looked at us. “Something to write with,” he said. “If you will.”

  I took him pen and paper.

  He wrote. He signed his name and we, as witnesses, signed ours. Rising, he read carefully what was written, then passed the paper to me.

  “My wedding present,” he said with a sigh. “Give it to them, if you’ll be so kind.”

  Ten minutes later we watched him go down the road with his bag, and when last we saw him he stood on deck, gazing shoreward, as the Witch said farewell to Teala for the final time.

  THE MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE, by Hugh B. Cave

  The route by which Mr. Weldon Witherby arrived at Fortune Island is, to say the least, rather obscure.

  He began, apparently, in Rangoon, where in some minor political post he was viewed with at least a measure of respect. What happened to him there—a woman, perhaps, or a letter from home, or the shattering of his aspirations by some bit of official chicanery—need not have been a tremendous thing. Some men are so constituted that a mere shift in the direction of a light breeze will bowl them over.

  At any rate, he left Rangoon quite suddenly and appeared some months later in Darvel Bay, which is Borneo, calling himself Whitby—until an exchange of solemn letters between government officials turned the black light of his past upon him and sent him on his way again.

  He paused in Balikpapan, but rebelled at the taste of petroleum in his evening gin. He bobbed up in Celebes, across the Straat Makassar, to make his way afoot from Manado to Baoe-baoe—a remarkable achievement for one without a guilder in his pocket or even a decent pocket to put one in. And then, like a lemming plunging headlong into the sea, he vanished.

  Many hungerings later, this sad little man turned up in Dili, dead drunk and three-quarters starved. At that stage of his journey his pace had slowed to something less than a crawl and the digressions were many.

  A year or so later he arrived at Fortune Island aboard a very ancient coastal steamer, in the capacity of assistant to the Chinese proprietor of its ’tween-decks trading store. And he was put ashore because he was ill.

  Now you know as much about Weldon Witherby’s search for oblivion, and the reason for it, as is known anywhere, and a good deal more than did the four inhabitants of Fortune Island when he arrived in their midst. As a matter of fact, the four were not even aware that their number had been augmented until the steamer which dumped him had departed. For though Fortune is tiny, it happens also to be a mountain-top jutting fanglike from the sea, and at the time of Witherby’s coming the four occupants were industriously digging on the far side of the mountain.

  They were scratching, stubbornly and angrily, for treasure.

  If the truth be known, Witherby had been put ashore on Fortune to die, to save his captain the inconvenience of a burial at sea. He was sick enough to die, and by all logic he should have. But he didn’t.

  Having slept out the worst of his sickness on the beach, he waked as from the dead to wonder where he was, and at three o’clock of a bright, moon-silvered morning, philosophically rose and walked. He walked until he found a softer bed under the fang of the mountain, and slept again. At dawn he emerged to blink at the sea.

  The island looked as though it was uninhabited. Likely it was waterless and all but barren of things to eat. No ship would stop unsignaled, and—this being a region frequented by only the most bohemian of vessels—none was likely to investigate even if signaled. So, decided Witherby, he was marooned.

  This settled, he hitched up his trousers and went looking for food. He had long since ceased to be surprised by the things Fate did to him.

  * * * *

  He was discovered an hour later when one of the four inhabitants of Fortune, a black-bearded fellow named LeClair, saw him shuffling along the beach. The figure Witherby cut was not impressive. His feet were bare. Tattered khaki trousers and a frayed rag of undershirt were all the clothes he owned.

  LeClair watched him for a time in amazement; then the black-bearded fellow hurried to his companions to tell the startling news. They were breakfasting, and the tidings came like a spear hurled into their midst.

  “A white man, here?” echoed Morton, spitting out a mouthful of scalding tea. “You gone crazy, Frenchy?”

  “It iss the heat and too much of this damn digging,” declared Selinger, rocking back on his buttocks. “I haf said all along we should take a rest.”

  “Rest, be damned,” muttered the one called Java Jones, rising high and thin to stand egg-bald in the sunlight. “I’ll do my resting at Batavia, thanks, at the Hotel des Indes. Come now, Frenchy, out with it! What’re you trying to tell us?”

  So LeClair told it again and invited them to go with him.

  When Mr. Witherby first saw them he was seated on the beach with a bit of volcanic rock in his fist, leisurely cracking open the last of a handful of clams and mussels. He was not unhappy. He felt better than he had for days. The presence of four white men on his uninhabited island puzzled him, though, and when they lined up before him he greeted them with only a cautious nod.

  “Who might you be?” demanded Morton ominously. “And how’d you manage to get here to this Godforsaken spot?”

  Witherby explained as best he could.

  LeClair eyed him with suspicion. “What d’ye want here?”

  “Why, nothing,” said Witherby.

  “You haf nudding and you want nudding, eh?” said Selinger. “How do you expec’ to live, I should like to know, without food or water?”

  “Oh, I’ll try to get along.”

  “He’s balmy,” declared Java Jones. “Let him be. Or toss him to the squid and be done with him.”

  But Selinger, who had suffered more than the others from the toil and heat of the past weeks, thrust himself forward and planted himself before little Mr. Witherby with arms akimbo and a malignant smile upon his blistered lips. “We haf food and drink’ enough to gif you some,” said he, “but you will haf to earn it, my friend. You will haf to work!”

  Morton did not like that. “Now wait a minute, Dutch. We can’t have no stranger nosin’ around—”

  “He can dig, no? He does not haf to know what we dig for. And he can cook, maybe, and keep clean the camp.” Selinger turned to LeClair and Java Jones for their approval, and found them nodding. Again he faced the little man on the rock.

  “Well, Mister Widderby, what haf you to say?”

  Mr. Witherby looked at them. All four, he observed, were cut from the same cloth, and a coarser weave would be hard to find. Moreover, he knew two of them by reputation, and what he knew was not encouraging.

  The bald one, Java Jones, was owner and captain of a decrepit schooner, Lily by name, which had uglied the waters of every port from Serang to Samarai. By profession he was a hunter of treasure—all sorts of treasure, from the money-belt on a wreck-imprisoned corpse six fathoms deep to a wench who might fetch a price from the proprietor of some waterfront institution of pleasure.

  If Jones’ ship had brought them, one thing was certain: These four were on Fortune Island to harvest wealth of some sort.

  Mr. Witherby knew Selinger, too, though the Dutchman would have been surprised if so informed. They had met one steaming day in Fakfak, which is a town where two whites, meeting, might be expected to display at least the mutual interest of shipwrecked sailors bumping heads in mid-Pacific. But in Fakfak Mr. Witherby had been penniless and Selinger up to his thick red neck in a scheme to acquire pearls without paying for them—and so the Dutchman’s reply to the little man’s pitiful plea for assistance had been a rude caress with the back of his hand.

  As for LeClair and the one called Morton, Witherby did not know them, even by repute. But if their lots were cast with those of the two he did know, it was safe to assume they were blackguards also.

  But could he afford to reject their offer? Supposing he did. For a time, no doubt, he might keep himself alive with shellfish and maintain a moist tongue with almost-fresh water from holes scooped in the sand. But not for long. And these four, if they possessed a camp and provisions, must also own the means of quitting the island when their work was finished.

  Mr. Witherby did not relish the prospect of dying alone on a sunbaked needle of rock in the middle of a lonely sea. He chose the lesser evil. “Very well,” he decided, “I’ll work for my keep.”

  And thus for Weldon Witherby began an interlude of trial and tribulation unparalleled by anything he had previously lived through.

  II

  It was apparent from the first that he was not to be accepted by the others as an equal, or even as a fellow human being. He had contracted to pay for his keep with labor, and labor they demanded of him from sun-up until the last bit of driftwood turned to ash in the evening fire.

  He cooked for them and was cursed when the meals were not to their taste. He fashioned a broom and daily swept the camp. He managed to make a mansion of sorts out of what had been a pigsty, yet they complained of the time it took him.

  He foraged for fresh delicacies to lighten their diet. Turtle-eggs he brought them, and fish and clams. And one day he returned in triumph from the hunt, with lobsters enough to go the rounds. But his own food, fresh or otherwise, was more often than not snatched and divided among his employers, while they derided him for his lack of industry.

  “Y’r lazy, that’s what you are!” accused LeClair. “Sneaky lazy, always slippin’ off to busy y’rself with easy jobs. We ought to cut y’r rations, y’ miserable monkey!”

  “Dig!” said Java Jones bitterly. “That’s why you were hired—to dig! And you do less of it than any of us!” Actually, he dug more than any of them, for when they pressed a shovel into his hands he could rest only at the risk of having a chunk of rock or bit of driftwood hurled at his head. He dug hour after hour, day after day, his hands gloved with blisters and head throbbing in the blowtorch blast of the sun.

  And for what? Why, for a treasure that would not be his if he found it.

  Two weeks of his servitude had passed before he learned what he dug for. Not that he lacked a normal curiosity; but the Fates had long since taught him the value of a still tongue, and so he waited patiently for his questions to be answered without his asking them.

  Selinger answered them in an outburst of rage one day.

  “I t’ink we are crazy!” shouted the Dutchman. “For a month now we dig, dig, dig, all over the damn island, and how do we know for sure that this drunken fellow from the Gulbrason was giving us the truth? How do we know this iss the right island?”

  “Stow it,” grumbled Java Jones. “Dig, dig, dig—”

  “Shut up!”

  But Selinger had spoken, and Mr. Witherby had all the information he needed. He knew about the Gulbrason. Who didn’t? Her disappearance, months before, had been discussed in half the points through which he had wandered.

  She had been a coaster, this Gulbrason, engaged like the rest of her humble breed in transporting commonplace cargoes and occasional passengers from one miserable port of call to another. But on this last spectacular voyage of hers she had carried, in addition to her captain and crew of four, only one man and a trunk.

  The passenger’s name had been McKillop, it was said, and he was a Scot, and he had come out of the black heart of Papua near Daru with diamonds. Many curious eyes had seen the diamonds with which he paid the Gulbrason’s captain to transport him through the Arafura to Timor.

  But no one had ever again seen the Gulbrason.

  Mr. Witherby, on his leisurely journey into oblivion, had heard no end of speculation concerning the fate of the Gulbrason and her treasure. That she had poked her ancient nose into the year’s worst storm was fairly certain, considering her date of departure from Daru and her probable route. That she had foundered with all on board was considered likely. Now, however, it was apparent that all of her crew had not perished. One, at least, had survived. And somewhere along the way Selinger or LeClair or Morton or Java Jones, or all of them together, had heard a tale to send them treasure-hunting.

  * * * *

  Mr. Witherby wondered idly what had happened. Perhaps the Gulbrason had gone down near Fortune Island, or been smashed to bits against it. Some surviving member of her crew might have dragged her treasure ashore and buried it. As for the fellow’s ultimate departure from Fortune, that was not too difficult to reconstruct. He had built a raft, probably, of the ship’s wreckage, and salvaged provisions enough to keep him alive on the journey.

  Presumably the treasure would be safe, hidden in Fortune’s lonely sands, until he chose to return for it. He need only keep his mouth shut.

  But he had neglected to shut his mouth tight enough.

  Mr. Witherby wondered one other thing: Where was the ship which had brought Java Jones and his three loot-seekers to Fortune? He got the answer to that a few days later, when still another of the quartet—this time Morton—flew into a rage.

  “Why don’t the Lily come back?” bellowed Morton, turning from a long and sullen inspection of the sea. “With her here, at least we’d have fresh drinkin’ water and food that’s fit to eat! Who told ’em to stay away this long, anyway?”