The Outlaws of the Air | Page 8

entered upon his
inheritance of broad acres, mines, and ironworks, which yielded him an
income not far short of thirty thousand a year, and in addition to these a
comfortable nest-egg of nearly half a million in hard cash and good
securities.
For the last year and a half, he had been seeing the world in the
pleasantest of all fashions - cruising about from port to port, and ocean
to ocean, in his yacht, in company with his sister Violet, a pretty,
healthy, high-bred brunette between eighteen and nineteen.
Sir Harry himself was a good specimen of the typical English
gentleman, standing about five feet ten in his deck shoes, well built,
broad-shouldered, ruddy-skinned, and clear-eyed, with features that
were frank and pleasing in their open manliness, rather than strictly
handsome, and yet saved from mediocrity by that undefinable, yet
unmistakable, stamp of good breeding which distinguishes, as was once
wittily if somewhat cynically said, the man who has a grandfather from
the man who only had progenitors.
Apart from the officers and crew of the Calypso, there was only one
member of the yacht's company who needs introduction in special
terms. This was Herbert Wyndham, second lieutenant of Her Majesty's
gunboat Sandfly, an old schoolfellow and bosom friend of Sir Harry's,
and just now on a year's invalid leave in consequence of a nasty bullet
wound received in storming a stronghold of a West African slaver

chieftain, at the head of his blue-jackets. Sir Harry had picked him up at
Cape Town, when he was beginning to get about again after the fever
that had followed on his wound, and, with his sister's assistance, he
succeeded without much difficulty in persuading him to spend the rest
of his leave on a cruise to the South Seas in the Calypso.
In person, Lieutenant Wyndham was a well set-up, clean-limbed young
fellow of twenty-six, with a good-humoured face and bright hazel eyes,
which looked alertly out from under a square, strong forehead that
matched the firm chin, which, according to the modern fashion of naval
officers, was clothed with a close-clipped, neatly-trimmed beard a
shade or so lighter than the close, curly chestnut hair that formed not
the least of his personal attractions.
k As week after week passed, and neither land nor sail appeared in
sight from the decks of the half-crippled yacht, Sir Harry began to feel
a little natural anxiety for the ultimate safety of his beautiful craft and
of those near and dear to him on board her. Another such a squall or a
gale as she had already suffered from would almost infallibly wreck her
in her present state, and both he and his sailing-master would have been
glad to reach even the shelter of a coral lagoon, within which she could
take refuge until she could be thoroughly overhauled in a fashion that
was not possible out in the open sea.
But most things have an end,- even calms in the South Pacific,- and by
Christmas Eve the Calypso had at last crept out of the zone of calms
and had begun to feel the first fitful puffs of the trade winds. Then,
about an hour before sunrise on Christmas morning, the unexpected,
but none the less welcome, cry of "Land, ho!" brought everyone, from
Sir Harry himself to his sister's maid, or the "Lady-in-Waiting," as
Lieutenant Wyndham was wont to call her, tumbling out of their berths
and up on deck.
No one who has not seen the sun rise over an island in the South
Pacific can form any adequate idea of the scene that greeted the eyes of
the crew of the Calypso, as the light broadened and brightened to the
eastward in front of them. The island paradises of the South Sea are
like no other part of the earth. Their beauty is entirely their own. No

word-painting can ever do full justice to it, and the reader must
therefore fain be content with the purely geographical description,
which will follow in its proper place, of the island that was seen rising
out of the smooth sapphire sea to the poop-deck of the Calypso on
Christmas morning, 1898
In less than half an hour after the welcome hail had run along the deck,
Sir Harry and the sailing-master were eagerly scanning the land, now
about ten miles distant, through their glasses.
"What do you make it, Mr. Topline?" asked Sir Harry, after a good
long stare at the mysterious land, taking his binoculars from his eyes
and looking at the old salt with a puzzled expression.
"I can't say, Sir Harry. I've never seen the island before, and I don't
believe it's down in the chart. You see, we've got clean out of the track
of the trading vessels and mail steamers,