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“You have a plan?” he says. “Well, Bill, what is it?”

“It’s a plan to get a plan,” I said. “What chance would you have as things are now?”

“Chance?” he inquires.

“You’d be in irons and aboard, before you’d know what had happened to you,” I said.

He looked at me a long time and then heaved a sigh.

“I’d do for myself first,” he said. “They’ll never put me in the dock so long as I have a pistol and the will to use it on myself.”

“I think me and Tom could improve on that,” said I.

“This island’s too small to hide in,” he said. “No background,” he said. “I was looking for a place where there was mountains and inland country–and maybe caves.”

“You never could make a success of it by yourself,” I said. “You couldn’t in an island made to order, with electric buttons and trapdoors let into the granite. But me and you and Tom might, and if you’ve the mind to, we will.”

He was kind of over his panic by this time, and I guess he saw the sense of it all.

“Bill,” he said, “it’s a weight off my mind to have you know the truth. Fetch along Tom, and I’ll do anything you two say, for I’ve nearly split my old head trying to find a way out; but what could I do single handed?”

“Tom’s a corker,” I said. “He’s got an imagination like a box factory. If I was in a tight place like yours, I’d sail the world around just to find Tom Riley.”

“Let’s call him in, then,” he says, “for, as things are now, if they should strike this island, I’m a dead man!” And with that he took up his flute again and fluted very thoughtful and low, while I made a line for Tom’s station.

Tom was as happy as a lawyer with his first case. He hurried along, with a bottle of beer in each pocket and a memorandum book to write in, and just gloried in the whole business. It was like one of his own yarns come true, and he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. He took hold right off; and it was pleasant to watch Old Dibs setting back on a grave, with the comfortable air of a man that’s being taken charge of by experts. I won’t go into all that we arranged and didn’t do, it being enough to say what we did, Tom beginning a bit wild about putting contact mines in the channel and importing a submarine boat from Sydney, and coming down gradual to what the poet calls human nature’s daily food. This was, to rig a platform in a giant fao tree that stood in the middle of the island, about three miles down the coast, and fix it up with food and things, for Old Dibs to camp in.

The idea was to hide him till dark in the attic of my house, and then to put him up the tree for as long as the ship stayed by us. Tom said I could easily stand off my house being searched for a few hours, even if it was a man-of-war that come, telling them they might do it to-morrow. Then Tom said we’d have to take Iosefo, the native pastor, into it part way, making him preach from the pulpit and order the people to deny all knowledge of Old Dibs if they were asked questions about him by strangers. Tom said the important thing was to gain the first day’s start; for though it wasn’t in reason to expect the whole island, man, woman, and child, to keep the secret, we might be pretty sure it wouldn’t leak out under twenty-four hours. Then, last of all, we were to make away with all Old Dibs’s trunks, packing what clothes he had, and that into camphor-wood chests, which would occasion no remark, specially if they were covered over on the top with trade dresses and hats, and such like.