Island Nights Entertainments | Page 4

after gin? Lay you five to two they take six cases."
When these two traders came aboard I was pleased with the looks of
them at once, or, rather, with the looks of both, and the speech of one. I
was sick for white neighbours after my four years at the line, which I
always counted years of prison; getting tabooed, and going down to the
Speak House to see and get it taken off; buying gin and going on a
break, and then repenting; sitting in the house at night with the lamp for
company; or walking on the beach and wondering what kind of a fool
to call myself for being where I was. There were no other whites upon
my island, and when I sailed to the next, rough customers made the
most of the society. Now to see these two when they came aboard was
a pleasure. One was a negro, to be sure; but they were both rigged out
smart in striped pyjamas and straw hats, and Case would have passed
muster in a city. He was yellow and smallish, had a hawk's nose to his
face, pale eyes, and his beard trimmed with scissors. No man knew his
country, beyond he was of English speech; and it was clear he came of
a good family and was splendidly educated. He was accomplished too;
played the accordion first-rate; and give him a piece of string or a cork
or a pack of cards, and he could show you tricks equal to any
professional. He could speak, when he chose, fit for a drawing-room;
and when he chose he could blaspheme worse than a Yankee boatswain,
and talk smart to sicken a Kanaka. The way he thought would pay best
at the moment, that was Case's way, and it always seemed to come
natural, and like as if he was born to it. He had the courage of a lion
and the cunning of a rat; and if he's not in hell to-day, there's no such
place. I know but one good point to the man: that he was fond of his
wife, and kind to her. She was a Samoa woman, and dyed her hair red,
Samoa style; and when he came to die (as I have to tell of) they found
one strange thing - that he had made a will, like a Christian, and the
widow got the lot: all his, they said, and all Black Jack's, and the most
of Billy Randall's in the bargain, for it was Case that kept the books. So
she went off home in the schooner MANU'A, and does the lady to this
day in her own place.
But of all this on that first morning I knew no more than a fly. Case
used me like a gentleman and like a friend, made me welcome to Falesa,

and put his services at my disposal, which was the more helpful from
my ignorance of the native. All the better part of the day we sat
drinking better acquaintance in the cabin, and I never heard a man talk
more to the point. There was no smarter trader, and none dodgier, in the
islands. I thought Falesa seemed to be the right kind of a place; and the
more I drank the lighter my heart. Our last trader had fled the place at
half an hour's notice, taking a chance passage in a labour ship from up
west. The captain, when he came, had found the station closed, the keys
left with the native pastor, and a letter from the runaway, confessing he
was fairly frightened of his life. Since then the firm had not been
represented, and of course there was no cargo. The wind, besides, was
fair, the captain hoped he could make his next island by dawn, with a
good tide, and the business of landing my trade was gone about lively.
There was no call for me to fool with it, Case said; nobody would touch
my things, everyone was honest in Falesa, only about chickens or an
odd knife or an odd stick of tobacco; and the best I could do was to sit
quiet till the vessel left, then come straight to his house, see old Captain
Randall, the father of the beach, take pot-luck, and go home to sleep
when it got dark. So it was high noon, and the schooner was under way
before I set my foot on shore at Falesa.
I had a glass or two on board; I was just off a long cruise, and the
ground heaved under me like a ship's deck. The world was like all new
painted; my foot went along to music; Falesa might have been Fiddler's
Green, if there is such a