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 cargo, the fruit at his feet and the forms tied to the grating.

Once with a dangerous and desperate effort he tried to untie them, but his weight thrown to port nearly capsized him. Then, giving the matter up and steeling his heart, he steered before a wind that had now shifted, blowing from the north.

At sunset it was blowing dead from the north and all night long it blew till the dawn rose and there before Rantan, breaking the skyline, palm tops showed and the foam of a tiny atoll singing to the sunrise.

The break was towards the north and the wind brought him through it into the little lagoon, not a mile broad, and on to the beach.

Springing on to the sand and looking wildly around him he saw nothing—only the trees, not a sign of life, only the trees in their beauty, the lagoon in its loveliness, the sky in its purity. Blue and green and the white of coral sand, all in the fresh light of the forenoon Paradise.

Having looked around him, listened and swept the sea with a last glance, he turned to the trees, cast himself in their shadow and leaving the canoe to drift away or stick, fell into a sleep profound as the sleep of the just.

He was saved—for the moment. Freed from Karolin, he had not done with Karolin yet. He had sailed for twenty hours before a five-knot breeze. Karolin was just that distance away below the horizon to the nor’-nor’-west.