John Crane, known far and wide throughout the islands of Polynesia as one whose name was a synonym not merely for wealth but for a rugged integrity in his dealings with brown man and white alike, lay asleep aboard his ocean-going yacht in the Port of Havre, France. Suddenly he sat upright in bed. He was not only awake, but instantly alert. It was the habit of years—a great many of them; the training of a lifetime passed amidst surroundings where, as he was wont to say himself, a man had to learn to sleep awake if he wanted to awake alive.
Some one was knocking at his stateroom door.
He reached out his hand with an irascible jerk, and pushed the button of the electric-light switch. Under a fringe of very heavy and shaggy grey eyebrows his blue eyes, sharp and steely, blinked for an instan
