Page:Barbour--Joan of the ilsand.djvu/191

Rh leile, you come along, bring Peter Pan and Maromi."

The rest of the hands, greatly puzzled, and chattering like a flock of magpies, went back into their sleeping-house, but the three blacks chosen were stationed outside the house as a sort of bodyguard, lest another attack should be made. The first rays of the sun began to glint through the trees an hour later while Joan and the two men were finishing an early breakfast. Already the black crew had finished their morning meal, and were squatting round their hut, awaiting orders.

"It's ten thousand to one they're hiding in the Wilderness," Chester declared. "so we should be wasting our time looking anywhere else."

The Wilderness, a patch of rough land embracing perhaps a square mile all told, lay to the extreme north-west of Tao Tao. For plantation purposes it was almost useless, so it still remained in its virgin state—wild, covered with coral dust and sand, and overgrown with a mass of brushwood. Here and there were natural clearings where even the pando bushes failed to make a successful struggle for existence, but there were patches of tangled shrub which offered a far better hiding place than the cultivated groves of palms.

"We can drive the whole district," said Keith.

"That's the only way," agreed Chester. "Pity