Emmeline laughed.

Mr. Button scrambled to his feet. They followed him through the chapparel till they reached the water source. There lay the little green barrel; turned over by the restless Dick, it lay with its bung pointing to the leaves above. You could see the hollow it had made in the soft soil during the years. So green was it, and so like an object of nature, a bit of old tree-bole, or a lichen-stained boulder, that though the whalemen had actually watered from the source, its real nature had not been discovered.

Mr. Button tapped on it with the butt-end of the shell: it was nearly full. Why it had been left there, by whom, or how, there was no one to tell. The old lichen-covered skulls might have told, could they have spoken.

“We’ll rowl it down to the beach,” said Paddy, when he had taken another taste of it.

He gave Dick a sip. The boy spat it out, and made a face, then, pushing the barrel before them, they began to roll it downhill to the beach, Emmeline running before them crowned with flowers.

CHAPTER XVIII

The Rat Hunt

THEY HAD dinner at noon. Paddy knew how to cook fish, island fashion, wrapping them in leaves, and baking them in a hole in the ground in which a fire had previously been lit. They had fish and taro root baked, and green cocoa-nuts; and after dinner Mr. Button filled a big shell with rum, and lit his pipe.

The rum had been good originally, and age had improved it. Used as he was to the appalling balloon juice sold in the drinking dens of the “Barbary coast” at San Francisco, or the public-houses of the docks, this stuff was nectar.

Joviality radiated from him: it was infectious. The children felt that some happy influence had fallen upon their friend. Usually after dinner he was drowsy and “wishful to be quiet.” To-day he told them stories of the sea, and sang them songs—chantys:

“I’m a flyin’ fish sailor come back from Hong Kong,

Yeo ho! blow the man down.

Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down,

Oh, give us time to blow the man down.

You’re a dhirty black-baller come back from New York,

Yeo ho! blow the man down,

Blow the man down, bullies, blow the man down.

Oh, give us time to blow the man down.”

“Oh, give us time to blow the man down!” echoed Dick and Emmeline.

Up above, in the trees, the bright-eyed birds were watching them—such a happy party. They had all the appearance of picnickers, and the song echoed amongst the cocoa-nut trees, and the wind carried it over the lagoon to where the sea-gulls were wheeling and screaming, and the foam was thundering on the reef.

That evening, Mr. Button feeling inclined for joviality, and not wishing the children to see him under the influence, rolled the barrel through the cocoa-nut grove to a little clearing by the edge of the water. There, when the children were in bed and asleep, he repaired with some green cocoa-nuts and a shell. He was generally musical when amusing himself in this fashion, and Emmeline, waking up during the night, heard his voice borne through the moonlit cocoa-nut grove by the wind: