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ease. He considered himself a barely competent doctor—not a gifted physician like Sarah—better with things than people.
    "Too old." The old man opened his hands, revealing a fishing knife plunged into his body.
    "Jesus!" Stone gasped. "What happened to you?" Suicide was one of the plagues of the far Pacific, right up there with drink and diabetes, though they saw it most often among the young. "Is that your boat?" he asked, trying to distract him so he could examine the wound. "What did you do? Sail home and find them all gone?"
    "Not my home. I head for Tobi. Stupid old man."
    Tobi lay a hundred and fifty miles southwest.
    "From where?"
    ``Puluwat."
    "Puluwat?" Puluwat was a thousand miles east.
    The Carolinian navigators thought nothing of sailing five hundred miles without a compass for a carton of Marlboros or a good party. But the old guy had gotten himself good and lost, then compounded his shame by cracking up on the reef.
    "Why you sail alone?"
    "Sweet burial," the old man muttered.
    The navigator's death at sea.
    Gazing into the milky eyes that couldn't have seen any but the brightest stars, Stone guessed that this last voyage had been a test of do or die.
    "Excuse me a moment . . . let me just move your hands." The old man had lost a lot of blood, and as Stone touched him, he fainted with a sigh. Stone quickly ran a saline tube into his arm, and another for glucose. The knife would have to wait for Sarah. Set up an operating room right here in the fale. He started to radio the ship to ferry in his Levine tube so he could drain the stomach fluids leaking into the old man's abdomen. But it was too late.
    The navigator opened his eyes. A serene smile crossed his lips, when Stone brushed them with water. "Who you?" he asked in a hoarse whisper, even as he craned his neck again to see the sea.
    "Just a Sunday sailor, compared to you, sir."
    The weathered face rejected the compliment even as the light left his eyes. "Oh, goddammit," said Stone, hoping that Sarah was doing better. He walked among the fales, looking for a shovel. Nothing. Whoever had been here last had taken everything with them. Get a shovel from the Swan. Or maybe put the old man in his boat and sail him off into the sunset.
    A pillar of smoke caught his attention, jetting thick
    black from the Dallas Belle's massive funnel. The trade wind caught it and streamed it west. White water boiled behind the ship and it began to move.
    "That was fast."
    He walked toward the dock, watching for Veronica. But when the Dallas Belle had proceeded a thousand feet—its own length—he still couldn't see her.
    "Oh, God!" A horrific thought crashed through him. Had the ship somehow run Veronica down? Or had its giant propeller dragged her under?
    He ran to the old man's canoe. Sarah and Ronnie must have been wearing life vests. They might have been thrown clear, into the water. But as the ship wheeled, presenting a new angle of perspective, Stone slowed to a walk, stopped, stood, and stared in disbelief. He saw the Swan suspended sixty feet above the water in the sling of a deck crane. The crane swung the sloop inboard, over the gas carrier's main deck. While Michael watched, a party of seamen guided her copper red bottom onto a makeshift cradle and the Dallas Belle completed its turn and steamed away.
    "MUMMY. WE'RE MOVING!"
    "Shhhh!"
    Sarah hunched over her stethoscope, every sense tuned to the old man's heart. He had not fallen, as they had claimed on the radio. He had been shot in the chest. Medically, it was the least of his problems. Attempting to remove the bullet, his shipmates had anesthetized the already unconscious victim with morphine. Now he was deep in a narcotic depression, blood pressure plummeting, respiration so faint his lungs barely lifted his ribs.
    Sarah shot a half milligram of Narcan into his veins, then listened anxiously for the fibrillation that would tell her that the narcotic antagonist had aggravated some preexisting cardiac disease. He