



Produced by David Widger





THE STRANGE ADVENTURE OF JAMES SHERVINTON

By Louis Becke

T. FISHER UNWIN, 1902

LONDON


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CHAPTER I

The night was close and stifling, and the dulled bellowing of the surf
on the weather side of the island told me that the calm was about to
break at last, and in another hour or so the thirsty, sandy soil would
be drenched with the long-expected rain, and the drooping palms and
pandanus trees wave their wearied branches to the cooling trade-wind
once more.

I rose from my rough bed of cane-work and mats, and, lighting my pipe,
went outside, walked down to the beach, and seating myself on a canoe,
looked out upon the wide expanse of ocean, heaving under a dark and
lowering sky, and wondered moodily why I was ever such an idiot as to
take charge of a trading station on such a God-forsaken place as Tarawa
Island in the Gilbert Group.

My house--or rather the collection of thatched huts which formed the
trading station--stood quite apart from the native village, but not so
far that I could not hear the murmur of voices talking in their deep,
hoarse, guttural tongue, and see, moving to and fro on the beach, the
figures of women and children sent