There came a tug at the side--, two muscular brown hands gripped it close to my left, and a sleek, black, wet head showed its top between them. Two bright, blue eyes that held deep within them a laughing deviltry looked into mine, and a long, lithe body drew itself gently over the thwart and seated its dripping self at my feet. "Much obliged," said this man from the sea. "I knew somebody was sure to come along when the O'Keefe banshee didn't show up." "The what?" I asked in amazement. "The O'Keefe banshee--I'm Larry O'Keefe. It's a far way from Ireland, but not too far for the O'Keefe banshee to travel if the O'Keefe was going to click in." I looked again at my astonishing rescue. He seemed perfectly serious. "Have you a cigarette? Mine went out," he said with a grin, as he reached a moist hand out for the little cylinder, took it, lighted it. I saw a lean, intelligent face whose fighting jaw was softened by the wistfulness of the clean-cut lips and the honesty that lay side by side with the deviltry in the laughing blue eyes; nose of a thoroughbred with the suspicion of a tilt; long, well-knit, slender figure that I knew must have all the strength of fine steel; the uniform of a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps of Britain's navy. He laughed, stretched out a firm hand, and gripped mine. "Thank you really ever so much, old man," he said. I liked Larry O'Keefe from the beginning--but I did not dream as the Tonga boys pulled us back to the Suwarna bow that liking was to be forged into man's strong love for man by fires which souls such as his and mine--and yours who read this--could never dream. Larry! Larry O'Keefe, where are you now with your leprechauns and banshee, your heart of a child, your laughing blue eyes, and your fearless soul? Shall I ever see you again, Larry O'Keefe, dear to me as some best beloved younger brother? Larry! CHAPTER VII Larry O'Keefe Pressing back the questions I longed to ask, I introduced myself. Oddly enough, I found that he knew me, or rather my work. He had bought, it appeared, my volume upon the peculiar vegetation whose habitat is disintegrating lava rock and volcanic ash, that I had entitled, somewhat loosely, I could now perceive, Flora of the Craters. For he explained naively that he had picked it up, thinking it an entirely different sort of a book, a novel in fact--something like Meredith's Diana of the Crossways, which he liked greatly. He had hardly finished this explanation when we touched the side of the Suwarna, and I was forced to curb my curiosity until we reached the deck. "That thing you saw me sitting on," he said, after he had thanked the bowing little skipper for his rescue, "was all that was left of one of his Majesty's best little hydroairplanes after that cyclone threw it off as excess baggage. And by the way, about where are we?" Da Costa gave him our approximate position from the noon reckoning.