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182 slowly, then another that broke through the first, and a third that enveloped them all in one ugly smother.

"Good golly," ejaculated the Maestro, "but the little kettle is steaming!"

And the smoke, beginning to crawl along the corral, ceased puffing up in rings; it rose in one dense, funnel-shaped cloud. "It's that soft Japanese coal," murmured the Maestro, "that darned Japanese coal!"

But with eyes staring ahead, as if hypnotised, he was walking down the beach. A ripple washed over his feet, then a curling comber splashed up to his knees; but he took another step, unconscious of the water now about his hips.

Suddenly he turned, and was running back up the beach toward a shed full of drying copra. He climbed one of the thick corner-posts to the roof. The nipa thatch gave beneath his weight, and it was changing ground with fierce plunging stride that he looked out to sea. But he was not high enough. The fish-corral still made inscrutable the mystery behind, and he could see only the smoke, now a sooty black, rising in heavy volutes to the green sky.

He slid down and paced the sand, trying to calm himself. But the smoke, ever more voluminous and threatening, allowed him no peace. He ran back farther up the shore to a coconut palm and tried to climb the lithe, slippery trunk. The notches cut by