Page:Guy Boothby--A Bid for Fortune.djvu/25

Rh life that any woman could possibly have desired. She, poor soul, died of fever in the Philippines, and he went to the bottom in the schooner "Helen of Troy," a degree west of the Line Islands, that same year; struck the tail end of a cyclone, it was thought, and went down, lock, stock, and barrel, leaving only one man to tell the tale. So I lost father and mother in the same twelve months, and that being so, when I put my cabbage-tree on my head it covered, as far as I knew, all my family in the world.

Any way you look at it it's calculated to give you a turn, at fifteen years of age, to know that there's not a living soul on the face of God's globe that you can take by the hand, and call relation. That old saying about "blood being thicker than water," is a pretty true one, I reckon: friends may be kind—they were so to me—but after all they're not the same thing, nor can they be as your own kith and kin.

However, I had to look my trouble in the face and stand up to it as a man should, and I suppose this kept me from brooding as much over my loss as I should otherwise have done. Anyway, ten days after the news reached me, I had shipped aboard the "Little Emily," trading schooner, for Papeete, booked for five years among the islands, where I was to learn to water copra and lay the foundation of the strange career that I am going to tell you about in this book.

After my time expired and I had served my Trading Company on half the mudbanks of the Pacific, I returned to Australia and went up inside the Great Barrier Reef to Somerset—the pearling station that had just come into existence on Cape York. They were good days there then, before all the new-fangled laws that now regulate the pearling trade had come into force, and