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“That’s funny,” I said to Don. “He’s coming to meet us in spite of the fact that he’d much rather not. Oh, well!”

I left the schooner while she was still under way, and reached the beach before Graves came up. There were too many strange brown men to suit Don, and he kept very close to my legs. When Graves arrived the natives fell away from him as if he had been a leper. He wore a sort of sickly smile, and when he spoke the dog stiffened his legs and growled menacingly.

“Don!” I exclaimed sternly, and the dog cowered, but the spines along his back bristled and he kept a menacing eye upon Graves. The man’s face looked drawn and rather angry. The frank boyishness was clean out of it. He had been strained by something or other to the breaking-point–so much was evident.

“My dear fellow,” I said, “what the devil is the matter?”

Graves looked to right and left, and the islanders shrank still farther away from him.

“You can see for yourself,” he said curtly. “I’m taboo.” And then, with a little break in his voice: “Even your dog feels it. Don, good boy! Come here, sir!”

Don growled quietly.

“You see!”

“Don,” I said sharply, “this man is my friend and yours. Pat him, Graves.”

Graves reached forward and patted Don’s head and talked to him soothingly.

But although Don did not growl or menace, he shivered under the caress and was unhappy.

“So you’re taboo!” I said cheerfully. “That’s the result of anything, from stringing pink and yellow shells on the same string to murdering your uncle’s grandmother-in-law. Which have you done?”

“I’ve been back there in the grass,” he said, “and because–because nothing happened to me I’m taboo.”

“Is that all?”

“As far as they know–yes.”

“Well!” said I, “my business will take me back there for days at a time, so I’ll be taboo, too. Then there’ll be two of us. Did you find any curious grasses for me?”

“I don’t know about grasses,” he said, “but I found something very curious that I want to show you and ask your advice about. Are you going to share my house?”

“I think I’ll keep head-quarters on the schooner,” I said, “but if you’ll put me up now and then for a meal or for the night—-“

“I’ll put you up for lunch right now,” he said, “if you’ll come. I’m my own cook and bottle-washer since the taboo, but I must say the change isn’t for the worse so far as food goes.”

He was looking and speaking more cheerfully.

“May I bring Don?”

He hesitated.

“Why–yes–of course.”

“If you’d rather not?”

“No, bring him. I want to make friends again if I can.”

So we started for Graves’s house, Don very close at my heels.

“Graves,” I said, “surely a taboo by a lot of fool islanders hasn’t upset you. There’s something on your mind. Bad news?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “She’s coming. It’s other things. I’ll tell you by and by–everything. Don’t mind me. I’m all right. Listen to the wind in the grass. That sound day and night is enough to put a man off his feed.”

“You say you found something very curious back there in the grass?”

“I found, among other things, a stone monolith. It’s fallen down, but it’s almost as big as the Flatiron Building in New York. It’s ancient as days–all carved–it’s a sort of woman, I think. But we’ll go back one day and have a look at it. Then, of course, I saw all the different kinds of grasses in the world–they’d interest you more–but I’m such a punk botanist that I gave up trying to tell ’em apart. I like the flowers best–there’s millions of ’em–down among the grass…. I tell you, old man, this island is the greatest curiosity-shop in the whole world.”

He unlocked the door of his house and stood aside for me to go in first.

“Shut up, Don!”

The dog growled savagely, but I banged him with my open hand across the snout, and he quieted down and followed into the house, all tense and watchful.