“I did,” said Java Jones. “And I’d a reason for it.”

  “What reason?”

  “Well, several, you might say. First off, that fool from the Gulbrason no doubt blabbed to others beside us, and while maybe they wouldn’t know Fortune Island from his description of it, they just might come close. With the Lily anchored here, we’d as well put up a signboard to welcome ’em. And second,” said Jones over the curl of his lower lip, “I’d a hunch you’d want to quit if the diamonds didn’t pop right up and kiss you. So I made certain you’d stick it out a while.”

  It made no difference to Witherby. He cooked and swept and dug. The sun broiled him, the shovel rubbed his hands raw, the hot sand baked his blistered feet. An ache, an agony, grew inside him, consuming him. He was nearing the end of his long, dreary march to oblivion. Even LeClair’s monkey commanded more respect than he, was given more to eat. They used him, of course, as an escape valve for their own pent-up resentments, because it was a good deal safer to cuff Witherby than to snarl at one another. Seeing his exhaustion, they made him work the harder. Knowing him to be hungry, they whittled down his rations, then laughed at him when, to keep alive, he crept from the camp evenings and crawled about the island in search of purslane and gnetum seeds and other scraggly growing things to munch raw when the cramps bent him.

  On these pitiful scrabblings for food, LeClair’s monkey usually accompanied him. Why? They had something in common, perhaps. Witherby was at rope’s end. His utter abjectness may have awakened in the monkey a feeling of kinship, for the monk was a grotesque little beast, moldy as an old hair sofa, scarred from quivering nose to twitching tail-tip by the missiles it had failed to duck during its precarious life among humans.

  The monkey had no name, and for a long time Witherby sought to invent one. “We might call you Willy,” he would say, limping along the shore in the moonlight with the monk perched on his shoulder and squeezing its hot little head against his pallid cheek. “I had a friend in Gorontalo once by that name, and we’d a gay time together until the constabulary nabbed him for stealing. Or Davy, now—how would that be? There was a lad name of Davy in Koepang who saw me through a sickness…”

  But no name out of the past quite seemed to suit, and so he took to calling the monk “Little One.” And many a night they sat somewhere on the black spine of rock that was Fortune Island, watching the wink of phosphorus on the empty sea while swapping monkey-squeaks and man-musings in their solitude.

  Mr. Weldon Witherby, once of Rangoon, had arrived at last on the bottom rung of the ladder. He could go no lower. He was sick, friendless, and penniless. His status in life had become that of a galley-slave who, when no longer useful, would certainly be dropped over the side. And his sole companion was a monkey.

  That he and the monk were still alive when the Lily returned to Fortune was something of a miracle, for she took her own good time, and during the last week before her return neither slave nor monkey was offered a share of the dwindling food supply. The digging had been abandoned by then. The four treasure-seekers asked only one thing more of Fortune: to be quit of the place.

  * * * *

  The Lily brought to Fortune two items of consequence: a falling barometer and a woman. The first was no surprise to the island’s inhabitants. All that day their bleak prison had lain like a charred cinder in a fiery furnace, the still air so hot it scorched the lungs; yet the merciless sun was not red but a muddy saffron, the sky not blue but the exact shade of the revolver-barrel protruding from LeClair’s belt. That a storm was due they were unhappily aware. The Lily’s glass merely made it official.

  As for the woman, she was a bit of extra business picked up by the Lily’s crew as casually as other men might pluck a coin from the dust while strolling. Witherby saw her when she was brought ashore in triumph by Markey, the mate, who had captained the vessel.

  “She’ll fetch a fancy price at China John’s,” said Markey, leering. “Snatched her when she came aboard to peddle, we did. And she took some snatchin’, I can tell you!”

  The girl spat at him.

  She was nineteen or twenty, Witherby guessed, but of course her age was of little value in judging her; in the islands it’s how you live, not how long, that matters. From the looks of her she had fought them every foot of the voyage.

  Under the grime, though, and the rag of flowered cotton that covered her, she was remarkable for her beauty. A half-caste, she was, certainly: the end product, perhaps, of a chance meeting between some vagrant white, like Witherby, and an island wench. But half-caste or no, she had the look in her eye of one who would battle the devil himself for her rights. And Mr. Witherby, having visited the place known as China John’s, pitied her from the bottom of his heart.

  “What’s your name?” Java Jones asked as she stood glowering at them.

  “It’s a queer one,” said the leering Markey, “so we’d best give her a new one. How would ‘Sally’ do!”

  “No,” said LeClair. “It’s time there was a mam’selle in that place. Call her ‘Jeanette.’”

  So they made a game of naming her, while the girl faced them with lips squeezed tight and eyes flashing defiance. Until, surprisingly, Mr. Witherby interrupted.

  Said Witherby thoughtfully, “Omnia ad Dei gloriam.”

  They blinked at him. “What kind of talk is that?” demanded Jones.

  “Only Latin,” Witherby murmured. “I once knew it rather well. It means, of course, ‘All things to the glory of God.’ Because she is beautiful. Surely you can see that!”

  “Omnia Dei—give us it again, Worthless.”

  “Omnia ad Dei gloriam,” repeated Witherby slowly, his solemn gaze on the girl.

  “Gloriam,” echoed Java Jones. “That’s all right, that is. Gloriam. It’s a good name.” He stepped toward her, nodding. “And now that you got a name, sister, it’s time you learned pretty manners to go with it, say I. Because in the morning we clear out of this rotten hole, and I’ve my heart set on a pleasant voyage home.”

  As he reached for her and grasped her wrist, she whirled on him, and white teeth flashed to his arm. With a yelp of pain, Java Jones took back his hand as though it had touched the sun. Then, bellowing, he swung a fist.

  Mr. Witherby, wincing, went quickly away. He was still absent some two hours later when the storm broke.

  III

  They had expected the storm, but it took them by surprise, all the same. That was because the usual preamble was missing. No whispered warnings danced ahead of this upheaval; the first challenge was a full-voiced bellow. One moment air and sea were still as a stopped clock; then the black cask of the sky burst its seams and loosed on them a deluge, the wind sprang screaming from a hidden lair, and the sea rose up, thundering, to batter the island to which they clung. And these things occurred not one after another, in rational progression, but all in the mocking wink of a monstrous eye.

  In an instant the camp at the base of Fortune’s rocky fang was gone, wrenched from its moorings as if the manila lines that held it had been no stronger than the strands of a spider’s web. The wind sucked it up with a noisy gulp and they saw it no more. In a moment more, they themselves were crawling like flies on the face of the mountain, or creeping crablike along its battered base, seeking shelter where they could find it, each man for himself. For even the Lily was gone then, scudding like a frightened wraith over the boiling sea.

  LeClair was first to go. Terror sent him on hands and knees over slippery rocks to a niche in the mountain base that promised shelter, but into his refuge poured a sea that drowned him. The gay waves rolled him into the open again, made sport of him, and left him face down on the beach.

  Then Morton. He sought the heights, but the wind plucked him from his climb and, like a seaman torn screaming from the main skysail-yard of a stricken ship, he plummeted to his finish. The others, Selinger and Java John, Markey and the girl Gloriam and the Lily’s crew fled this way and that, screaming or cursing or sobbing out their terrors.

  And what of Mr. Witherby? That unhappy soul, when the typhoon arrived at Fortune, was seated with LeClair’s monkey on a sheltered bit of beach some distance from the camp, pondering, as might be expected, man’s inhumanity to man. The storm upon him, he merely clutched the monkey closer and sat where he was—until the sea discovered his retreat and hissed in to drive him out.

  He went then along the shore, grimly battling the wind for possession of the whimpering ball of hair that clung to him for protection. He was frightened, but where could a man go in such a place? Not up, or the howling wind-demons would flay the flesh from his bones. Not into the rock itself, or the sea would follow and drown him. So, then, the problem was simplified. If he found a sheltered spot, he would duck into it. If not, he would keep on walking.

  * * * *

  He came presently to the remains of Morton, flattened at the base of the cliff, and transferred from the dead man’s pocket to his own a half-eaten square of chocolate. And then he discovered LeClair, on the beach where the waves had tossed him, and acquired some cigarettes and a revolver—both wet but potentially usable. And then Witherby saw the boat.

  Precisely what little Mr. Witherby hoped to do in such a storm with a small boat and a pair of oars is not known. Perhaps he thought to row himself and his monkey out to the Lily and cut her loose, on the chance of finding a way out of his servitude. He knew the Lily was unmanned, and at that time he was unaware she had been swept away. At any rate, he saw the boat and ran to it; he tucked the monkey into it, and, with strength he had not known he possessed, he contrived to launch the craft, during a sudden lull in the storm’s fury.

  She was a cork, that boat. She defied the mountainous waves to upset her. With Witherby tugging at the oars, she bore her two forlorn passengers, man and monkey, inch by straining inch past the foaming rocks at the island’s tip and into the clear.

  But then the storm returned with renewed vigor, and Witherby perceived the futility of his efforts. He stopped rowing. With the monkey in his arms he huddled in the bottom of the boat and let the typhoon take him. Drowning, after all, was more pleasant to contemplate than a return to his previous status of slave.

  Drowning, however, was not to be his lot. The green waves bowled him along through the remainder of that devilish day, into the nightmare night that followed. His boat climbed their swollen sides with the tenacity of a crag-rat, plummeted from their crests with the grace of a plunging gull.

  * * * *

  Then the night was over, and the storm with it, and Witherby looked out on a watery world colored red by a friendly sun. “Little One,” he said in wonderment, “look at us. We’re alive!” Little One’s reply was an ecstatic squeal.

  But Witherby was too wise in the ways of Fate to be long fooled.

  “Alive,” he amended, “but for how long? Who’s to lead us out of here?” There they were, in a boat on an empty ocean. The wind had passed. The sea was calming after its orgiastic excesses. But the calm was more frightening than the tumult.

  During the awful hours of storm there had been hope of ultimate salvation behind the terrors of each passing moment. The boat, after all, was being blown somewhere and might in the end fetch up against land. Now peace had fallen from heaven, but in peace lay peril. For Mr. Witherby and Little One had only half a bar of chocolate to see them through the torments of hunger. Of water they had none at all. They would perish unless they reached land in a day or two.

  Where was land? Witherby had not the faintest notion. How far they had been blown from Fortune Island, or in what direction, he knew not. The climbing sun told him where east lay—but he had no way of knowing what lay eastward. The world about him was all water, metal-bright, blinding, and boundless. And as the hours passed, the sun grew hot.

  Witherby took up the oars and began to row. Presently he gave up. What was the use of rowing?

  “Little One,” he said flatly, “we’re done for, I’m afraid. There’s not a thing we can do but sit and wait.”

  And so began for Weldon Witherby the last and most wretched lap of the downhill journey which had begun for him in Rangoon. Fortune Island had not, after all, been the bottom rung of the ladder. Fate had tucked another one under him, giving him, you might say, the full treatment.

  He was to be broiled alive. His departure from earth was to be no mere plunge over the finish line, but spectacular as a session at the Inquisition. Fate had the tools for it—a white-hot ball of sun, a dead-calm sea, and a shadeless boat. Witherby contributed his empty belly and a parched tongue. And for good measure there was Little One, who suffered as Witherby suffered and made the hours hideous with his whining.

  That day ended somehow, and during the night, when it was cooler, Witherby sat at the oars again. His efforts scarcely moved the boat, but he pulled steadily, and between the dismal creaks of the oarlocks he talked to the monkey to keep it quiet. He told Little One of his aimless wanderings along the great dark wailing-wall of the southern islands, and of the ignominies he had endured along the way. No bitterness embellished the tale; Witherby simply strung the facts together in their proper sequence, bead fashion, and dangled the necklace before the monkey in hope of amusing it for a time. He told of the cuffings he had received in Madjene and the bootings in Boetoeng, of losing his last guilder in Boeroe and eating dead fish on the beach at Ambon. He told of sickness and taunts, of hunger, of being stripped naked and tossed into gutters by irate purveyors of drinks who resented his wheedling; and of the café proprietor who had draped a live krait about his neck, while he was drunk, to amuse the customers. But in fairness to Fate, Witherby told also of the times along the way when, incredibly, he had stubbed his toe on luck of a better sort—as, for example, his finding of an unopened fifth of Scotch whisky on the shore near Fakfak, and his lavish two-weeks’ stay in the home of a Mrs. Buxton, at Moresby, who had mistaken him for someone she once knew. “And what,” Witherby asked of the monkey finally, “does it all add up to, would you say? Why, it’s silly, that’s all. What’s a man to do if the Fates insist on dancing him up and down on a string in such fashion? What’s a man meant for, d’you suppose?”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Witherby, becoming philosophical as he tugged that strange boat over that strange moonlit sea, on and on toward nothing and nowhere. “A man’s got to take it as he finds it, and keep as steady on his feet as he’s able. Because the fact is, my friend, we’re put here for a purpose we know nothing about until it’s accomplished—if we know it then—and there’s nothing we can do to alter the plan one jot.

  “Take that fellow Enrikson that I’ve told you about—the one whose cutter went down in the Solomons. He was put here to fill the empty cookpot of some starving aborigine, and for no other reason. But did he know it? Not until they popped him into boiling water, he didn’t. Or consider my friend Davy, in Koepang, who nursed me through a sickness and got sick himself and died. He was put here to keep me going, no doubt, though God knows why.

  “And what are we here for? Who knows? Maybe we won’t ever find out, though at the moment it looks as if both of us were meant to feed the sharks. If true, we’ve been brought a long way, I’d say, to do a paltry little. Or don’t you know we’ve been followed by sharks for the past hour, Little One?”

  Thus he philosophized, while rowing or while resting between spells of tugging at the oars. It was a harmless diversion. As for its worth to the shriveled-up ball of matted fur that sat by his feet, whining up at him, that was questionable. The monk was hungry and thirsty, and talk was a poor substitute for food and drink.

  Then came the morning and the searing sun again. And more sharks. He watched them, swimming alongside in the sunlight, and shuddered. They were so efficient, those sharks, so gruesomely sure of themselves. He hated and feared them, and the thought of being destined to fill the stomach of one, or chewed up into small bloody bits and shared among the lot of them, made his own stomach twist with revulsion.

  With only a vague notion, yet, of the terrors that lay ahead, Witherby pulled from his pocket the revolver he had taken from LeClair’s corpse, and examined it.

  It had been thoroughly drenched and the cylinder was sticky with salt. And, obviously, LeClair had been careless about keeping it loaded, for Witherby’s exploring thumb discovered only one cartridge. One bullet against so many sharks? He sighed and put the weapon back into his pocket.

  So that day passed, like the previous one, the sea a boundless waste of gleaming metal made white hot by the relentless sun, the boat moving only when Witherby seized the oars and moved it, which was seldom. And with hunger gnawing like a monstrous rat at his vitals, and thirst squatting like a hot cinder in his mouth, the man abandoned even his attempts to converse with the monkey. It was the end and he knew it. And what could he do about it? Why, nothing.

  Well, he could do something, perhaps. Through the hideous hours of hunger and thirst, his stiff fingers fumbled with the revolver, again and again extracting the lone cartridge and replacing it. He could not throw himself overboard to put an end to the awful suffering, for with the sharks lying there in wait, such a move would be equivalent to casting himself alive into a gigantic meat-grinder. But with LeClair’s gun, if the thing would still function, he might cheat some of the agonies.

  All through that day and through the long night that followed, while lying racked with pain in the bottom of the boat, little Mr. Witherby pondered the problem and worked toward a decision. And listened, with a heart full of pity, to the whimperings of his small companion.

  The night passed. The sun rose from a glittering sea. Witherby put forth all his strength and struggled to his knees to look about. But nothing had changed. The sea was still shoreless and the sharks still waited.

  For the last time, Witherby tucked the cartridge back into the cylinder of LeClair’s revolver. He popped the muzzle of the gun into his mouth and clamped his cracked lips upon it. And then, remembering, he turned to say farewell to the monkey which for so long had been his sole companion in misery.