Code of Honor (Australian Destiny Book #1) by Sandra Dengler Page A

dinner?”
    “The potatoes will nae be ready for a while yet. I just put them on.”
    “Then cut yourself a slab of this. It’s good stuff.”
    She did so, and her breastbone tickled just a bit. Samantha Connolly might not be the paragon of goodness others claimed she was. But Mr. Sloan was right in this regard: the not-at-all-good Samantha could bake a good loaf of bread.

Chapter Eight
    Coral Reef
    “Is that it?” Luke Vinson pointed at a distant green blob on the line between sea and sky.
    “Mebbe so.” Burriwi shrugged and grinned with what looked like four dozen huge teeth. Luke often wondered if the aboriginal mouth contained the normal complement of thirty-two. Sometime, when the moment was right, he’d ask one of these people if he could please count his teeth. It probably wouldn’t harm his relationship with them; they all thought he was nineteen and six to the quid anyway. One more crazy request wouldn’t matter.
    This was not the moment, however. Their little one-master thunked along from swell to swell, hitting the wind chop exactly wrong for a smooth sail. Keeping one hand draped over the tiller, Burriwi slackened the boom guy the slightest bit and studied the results aloft with a critical eye. He let it out a mite more. The trim looked perfect already to Luke, but then Lucas Vinson, native of Manitoba’s Red River country, was hopelessly a landlubber, painfully at sea when on the sea.
    Burriwi’s blue-black potbelly burgeoned up over his loincloth. When he worked for Sloan, Luke noticed, he wore pants, unless it was a difficult tracking job. If his forest skills were the talents needed, he reverted to the forest ways, became at one with the dark and moody jungle. Today his equally prodigious skills as a seaman were on call, and he was as casual, as bright, as lighthearted as the coral sea over which they bounded.
    The other sailors on this cruise, introduced to Luke as Burriwi’s nephew and two grandsons, giggled and yabbered like school chums, and indeed this was something of a school outing. What these youths learned today they would one day show their children and perhaps their children’s children—if the race survived that long.
    And the race’s survival was number two on Luke’s list of priorities, a very close second place to the gospel itself.
    Luke nodded toward the three up front. “Do you ever let the boys sail?”
    “Sure.” Somewhere behind the beetling brows, dark eyes twinkled. “Day like today, perfect. Wind’s right, sea’s easy, everything’s apples. Anybody can sail today. You can sail today. Me, I’m gonna enjoy this easy sailing. Have a good time. Now rough days, when you’re tacking against the wind and everything’s going rats, that’s when I give them the tiller. They learn how to sail best then y’see, eh? Wouldn’ learn nothing today.”
    Luke smiled. “Don’t you suppose they might enjoy this fine sailing once?”
    “Let ’em take the boat out then. Today’s mine.” And indeed the man looked consummately content, a sailor attuned to the sea. Luke felt a sudden stab of envy, not at all a Christian attitude. Luke had never felt at ease in a place the way this man so obviously did, not even back home in Manitoba. And Burriwi was equally at comfort in the forest. Could it be that this unlettered aborigine would have fit in just as easily in Manitoba or Princeton or wherever else the Lord’s inscrutable hand happened to drop him? Was his unity with his world a phenomenon of the so-called primitive mind, generalized, or of the man himself?
    Social philosophy was pushed to the wings of Luke’s thoughts, for the sea itself had just taken center stage. They were in very shallow water here. The blue sea color had altered itself to a random patchwork of blues, greens and grays. The shining surface ripples prevented a clear view, but Luke could make out a fantasy below of yard-wide coral blobs and ridges.
    “Dibbie, which way’s the tide going?” Burriwi