The three white men were standing before a small palm-thatched deck house which was their home on the Malay proa _Kuching_. Curator Baldwin of the National Museum was their leader. He was a tall, rangy giant of a man, his sinewy frame clad in tropical khaki, with the inevitable puttees of the East accentuating the muscular leanness of his long legs. One placed him easily--mining engineer or leader of a scientific field party, captain of his team in college days, most likely, that commanding sort of man to whom exploration in dangerous out-of-the-way places is all in the day’s work. And the choleric blue eyes that looked a man in the eye from under his pith helmet, the sunburnt face with its gray mustache and firm chin, warned the casual stranger that here was the last man in the world to trifle with. The two youths beside him were scarcely less noteworthy. Their resolute, weather-tanned young faces bespoke the hardy outdoorsmen, of the same breed, but younger, as the curator. Dwight was tall and spare, with a keen hatchet face and merry gray-green eyes that twinkled at one when he talked, yet they could grow hard and cold as ice in time of peril. Nicky was stout; habitually good-humored, habitually chuckling over the least joke, and always finding one and making himself the butt of it on every occasion. They were a great team; always “joshing” each other, always differing on every conceivable subject, yet devoted to each other and to the curator, whom they adored as an athlete and admired as a scientist. For two years they had been his assistants on expeditions in Africa and in British Guiana. He had picked them for this trip because of their tried and proven resourcefulness in facing conditions as they found them in wild lands. As unlike, physically, as two boys could be, they were alike in one thing--their sturdy independence of character. Original in everything they did, they copied no one, neither in their outdoor equipment nor in their ways of living when in the jungle. The Malay proa on which the party was sailing bore the house flag of the museum floating from the end of her seventy-foot foreyard. In these days of interisland steamers you will not see so many of her type, once the most common craft of the Banda Sea. Her sails were huge mats of palm-fiber; her masts tripods of bamboo; and her body, built on Ke’ by the greatest boat builders of the Malay Archipelago, was of hewn logs, doweled together along their edges and secured by ribs of teak bent in and lashed with rattan to projections on her planks. There was not an iron nail or a spike in her anywhere, but the curator had chartered her for the museum’s field expeditions among the islands as the best ship for the purpose, for her crew of Javanese and Bugis cost but their rations of rice and fish, with a small wage, and she could sail anywhere and be repaired at any island with native palm and rattan.