For a week the schooner stayed at anchor in the lagoon, the whole of which time Broncho sat playing poker in the store of an old Yankee retired whaleman, from whom and the gloomy Commissioner he succeeded in taking a nice little pile of Chilian dollars, to his great delight. Meanwhile, the rest of the castaways roamed the island, watched the diving, or whiled away the days in hammocks under the schooner's awning. But at length the schooner was headed back for Papeete. With a fair wind, a quick run was made to the famous island, and at sunrise one morning Jack and Loyola found themselves gazing eagerly at the well-known mountain ridges behind Papeete, with their bright green foliage and scattered cocoa-palms, and the magnificent Diadem rising rugged and glorious above them. The schooner, running in through the Little Pass, brought up opposite the little islet of Motu Uta, once the residence of a queen, and afterwards a leper station. Little more remains to be told. Jack and Loyola were married about a month after their arrival, Bucking Broncho officiating as best man, whilst Bill Benson and a crowd of his shipmates--for the _Dido_ had turned up unexpectedly--gave a go to the proceedings such as only British bluejackets are capable of. As Jack and Loyola were so well known at Papeete, and had a host of friends in this Paradise of the Pacific, as it is so rightly called, the wedding went off with great _éclat_, natives, whites, and the French officials attending _en masse_. Shortly after these festivities Bill Benson was carried away in his little gunboat on a hunt for Dago Charlie and his slippery schooner. Jack and Loyola settled down at Papeete, the rover intending, directly he could arrange his money matters in far-off England, to start in the Island trade with a schooner of his own. Jim and Tari remained with the happy couple as a kind of bodyguard, but after several lazy months in this happy land, Broncho began to long for the more active life of his beloved plains; and though the others did their best to persuade him to remain with them, he one day took his passage in the barquentine _Tropic Bird_ for San Francisco, and, as he put it, "hit the trail for his own pastures." It was a sad parting between the old shipmates. Broncho's last words to Jack as they wrung each other's hands at the gangway, the San Francisco packet already heeling to the breeze, with the old original whaleboat splashing and bobbing at the foot of the ladder, were: "So long, old bunkie. We've camped around together quite a spell. I jest loathes leavin' the outfit, but pull my freight I must. This old longhorn is jest itchin' to paw the earth again, an' lock horns in the old game. I hungers for the feel of a pony 'tween my legs, an' the smell o' the cattle. It's natur', pard, an' that's all thar is to it, though it shore twangs my heartstrings in toomultuous discord. Adios!" * * * * *