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The Princess by Jack London
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•Die Prinzessin - Ein Feuer brannte fröhlich im Dschungelcamp, und neben dem Feuer räkelte sich ein fröhlich erscheinender, wenn auch schrecklich aussehender Mann. •Dies war ein Hobo-Dschungel, aufgeschlagen in einen schmalen Waldstreifen, der zwischen einem Eisenbahndamm und dem Ufer eines Flusses lag. •Aber der Mann war kein Hobo. •Er was so tief in den sozialen Abgrund gesunken, dass ein anständiger Hobo sich nicht mit ihm an das gleiche Feuer setzen würde. •Eine Schwulenkatze, die auf der "Straße" ein unwissender Neuling ist, könnte wohl mit ihm zusammen sitzen, aber nur lange genug, bis sie es besser wüsste. •Selbst niedere Landstreicher und Bettelärsche hätten diesen Mann nach einer Begegnung gemieden. •Ein echter Hobo, ein paar Punks oder ein Haufen zäher Straßenkinder hätten seine Lumpen nach irgendwelchen verirrten Pennies oder Nickels durchsuchen und ihn in die Dunkelheit hinauswerfen können. •Selbst ein betrunkener Alkoholiker hätte sich für grenzenlos überlegen gehalten.

•Weil dieser Mann so eine Mischung aus Trampland war, ein Vollalkoholiker, der zu einem Bettelarsch degeneriert war, mit so wenig Selbstachtung, dass er niemals hochkochen wird, und mit so wenig Stolz, dass er aus einer Mülltonne essen wird. •Er war wirklich eine furchtbare Erscheinung. •Er hätte vielleicht sechzig Jahre alt sein können, er hätte neunzig sein können. •Seine Kleider hätten vielleicht von einem Lumpensammler weggeworfen worden sein können. •Neben ihm ein entrolltes Bündel, das aus einem zerlumpten Mantel bestand, und eine leere und von Rauch geschwärzte Tomatenbüchse, eine leere und verbeulte Kondensmilch-Dose, etwas Hundefutter, teilweise in braunes Papier gewickelt und offensichtlich von einer Metzgerei erbettelt, eine Karotte, die auf der Straße von einem Wagenrad überrollt worden war, drei grünliche-krebsgeschwürige und verfaulte Kartoffeln und ein süßes Brötchen, von dem schon ein Bissen fehlte und das aus der Gosse gerettet worden war, so wie es vom Gossendreck, der ihn noch überkrustete, zum Patent angemeldet war.

•Ein gewaltiger Backenbart, in einem schmutzigen Grau und seit Jahren ungetrimmt, sproß in seinem Gesicht. •Dieser starke Haarwuchs hätte weiß sein sollen, aber es war Sommer und das Haar war schon einige Zeit keinem Regenguss mehr ausgesetzt gewesen. •Was von dem Gesicht erkennbar war, sah aus, als ob es irgendwann eine Handgranate aufgehalten hätte. •Die Nase war so vielfältig missgestaltet in ihrer geheilten Zerrissenheit, dass es keinen Nasenrücken gab, während eine Nasenöffnung, von der Größe einer Erbse, nach unten offen war, und die andere, von der Größe eines Rotkehlcheneis, nach oben in den Himmel zeigte. •Ein Auge von normaler Größe, dunkelbraun und benebelt, wölbte sich bis zum Lidrand vor und tränte wie aus Senilität ausgiebig und ununterbrochen. •Das andere Auge, kaum größer als das eines Eichhörnchens und so unheimlich glänzend, drehte sich schief in die haarige Narbe einer knochenzerschmetterten Augenbraue. •Und er hatte nur einen Arm.

•Aber er war fröhlich. •Auf seinem Gesicht wurde in schwachem Grad sinnliches Vergnügen dargestellt, als er sich lethargisch mit einer Hand an den Rippen kratzte. •Er wischte seine Essensreste mit der Hand beiseite, beriet sich mit sich, dann zog er eine zwölf Unzen Drogistenflasche aus seiner inneren Manteltasche. •Die Flasche war mit einer farblosen Flüssigkeit gefüllt, dessen Betrachtung sein kleines Auge aufleuchten und seine Bewegungen schneller werden ließ. •Nachdem er eine Tomatendose aufgenommen hatte, erhob er sich, ging den kurzen Pfad zum Fluss hinunter und kehrte zurück, die Dose mit schmutzigem Flusswasser gefüllt. •In der Kondensmilchdose mischte er einen Teil Wasser mit zwei Teilen der Flüsigkeit aus der Flasche. •Diese farblose Flüssigkeit war Drogistenalkohol und ist im Trampland schlechthin als "Alki" bekannt.

•Schleppende Schritte, die von der Seite des Eisenbahndamms herunterkamen, beunruhigten ihn, bevor er trinken konnte. •Er stellte die Dose sorgfältig auf den Boden zwischen seinen Beinen und deckte sie mit seinem Hut ab, und wartete beklommen was auch immer ihm drohte.

•Aus der Dunkelheit tauchte ein Mann auf, so schmutzstarrend, zerlumpt wie er. •Der Neuankömmling, der sowohl fünfzig als auch sechzig sein konnte, war grotesk fett. •Er wölbte sich überall. •Er bestand aus Fettringen. •Seine knollige Nase hatte die Größe und Form einer Rübe. •Seine Augenlider wölbten sich vor und seine blauen Augen wölbten sich im Wettbewerb mit ihnen. •An vielen Stellen waren die Nähte seiner Kleidung über den Körperwölbungen geplatzt. •Seine Waden wuchsen in seine Füße, da die kaputten, dehnbaren Seiten seiner knöchelhohen Schuhe vollständig mit seinem Fett angeschwollen waren. •Er hatte nur einen Arm, von dessen Schulter ein kleines und zerfleddertes Bündel hing, mit dem trockenen, verkrusteten Dreck vom Außenbelag des letzten Platzes, an dem er seinen Schlafplatz aufgeschlagen hatte. •Er schritt mit zögernder Vorsicht heran, vergewisserte sich der Unbedenklichkeit des Mannes neben dem Feuer und gesellte sich dazu.

•"Hallo, Großvater," grüßte der Neuankömmling, hielt dann inne, um das auffallende, in den Himmel gerichtete Nasenloch anzustarren. •"Sag mal, Backenbart, wie schaffst du es, den Tau der Nacht aus deiner Nase zu halten?"

•Backenbart knurrte etwas Unverständliches tief in seiner Kehle und spuckte ins Feuer, als Zeichen, dass ihn die Frage nicht erfreute.

•"Um Gottes Willen," gluckste der fette Mann, "wenn dich da draußen ein Regenschauer ohne Regenschirm erwischt, wirst du sicherlich ertrinken, oder?"

•"Hör auf, Fettsack, hör auf," murmelte Backenbart müde. •"Dieses Geschwätz ist mir nicht neu. •Sogar die Bullen schenken es mir."

•"Aber trinken kannst du noch, hoffe ich", beschwichtigte Fatty ihn und lud ihn gleichzeitig ein, als er mit der einen Hand geschickt an den Schlaufenknoten zog, die sein Bündel zusammenhielten.

•Aus dem Bündel brachte er eine Zwölfunzen-Flasche Alki ans Tageslicht. •Schritte, die die Böschung herunterkamen, alarmierten ihn, und so versteckte er die Flasche unter seinem Hut auf dem Boden zwischen seinen Beinen.

•Aber der nächste Ankömmling erwies sich nicht nur als einer ihresgleichen, sondern hatte auch nur einen Arm. •Er war von so abschreckendem Aussehen, dass die Begrüßungen aus nichts mehr als Grunzlauten bestand. •Grobknochig, groß, ausgemergelt bis zur Leichenhaftigkeit, sein Gesicht ein dreckiger Totenkopf, er war genau so abstoßend ein Albtraum des Greisenalters, wie Doré es sich immer vorgestellt hatte. •Sein zahnloser, dünnlippiger Mund war ein grausamer und verbitterter Schlitz unter einer großen gebogenen Nase, die fast bis zum Kinn ging und wie der Schnabel eines Bussards war. •Seine eine Hand, hager und verkrümmt, war eine Klaue. •Die grauen Knopfaugen, ungerührt und unbeirrbar, waren so bitter wie der Tod, so düster wie der absolute Nullpunkt und unbarmherzig. •Seine Gegenwart war ein Frostschauer und brachte Whiskers und Fatty instinktiv einander näher, als Deckung gegen seine unvermutete Bedrohung. •Auf eine Gelegenheit achtend, schob Backenbart vorsichtig ein mehrpfündiges Felsstück in die Nähe seiner Hand, falls sich die Notwendigkeit zum Handeln ergeben sollte. •Fettsack machte das gleiche.

•Dann setzten sich beide, die Lippen leckend, schuldbewusst betroffen, während die starren Augen des Schrecklichen sich in sie bohrten, jetzt in den Einen, nun in den Anderen und dann nach unten zu den Felsstücken ihrer Einsatzbereitschaft.

•"Huh!" •sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their cave-man's weapons.

•"Huh!" •the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat pocket with swift definiteness. •"Nicht die geringste Chance hättet ihr beiden billigen Penner gegen mich."

•Die Kralle kam zum Vorschein, einsatzbereit, einen sechspfündigen Eisenwurfring zu packen.

•"Wir suchen keinen Ärger, Slim", bibberte Fatty.

•"Wer zur Hölle bist du, dass du mich "Slim" nennst?" •kam die knurrige Antwort.

•"Ich? •Ich bin nur Fatty und ich habe dich niemals zuvor gesehen--" " Und ich nehme an, das ist Whiskers dort, mit der lustigen und feierlichen künstlichen Bräune, die in seine Augenbraue geht und dem Gottvergibuns-Nasenspaß - der über seine ganze Visage reitet.

•" Ich werde es tun, ich werde es tun", murmelte Whiskers unbehaglich. •"Ein Name ist in meinem Alter so gut wie jeder andere, finde ich. •Und jeder händigt es mir sowieso aus. •Und ich brauche einen Schirm, wenn es regnet, um nicht zu ersaufen und all den Rest davon."

•"Ich bin nicht an Gesellschaft gewöhnt - mag sie nicht", knurrte Slim. •"Wenn ihr Typen also in der Nähe bleiben wollt, passt auf, was ihr tut, das ist alles, passt auf, was ihr tut."

•Er fischte einen Zigarrenstummel aus seiner Tasche, selbstverständlich aus der Gosse geangelt und gebrauchsfertig, um ihn zum Kauen in seinen Mund zu stecken. •Dann änderte er seine Meinung, schaute seine Kumpane wild an und wickelte sein Bündel aus. •In seiner Hand tauchte eine Apothekerflasche Alki auf.

•"Nun", knurrte er, "ich nehme an, ich muss euch billigen Rochen etwas zu Trinken geben, wenn ich nicht mehr als genug für eine gute Versteinerung für mich selbst habe."

•In seinem verwelkten Gesicht bahnte sich beinahe das Aufflackern ein weiches Lichtes an, als er sah, wie die anderen stolz ihre Hüte hoben und ihre eigenen Vorräte vorzeigten.

•"Here's some water for the mixin's," Whiskers said, proffering his tomato-can of river slush. •"Stockyards just above," he added apologetically. •"But they say--" "Huh!" •Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. •"I've drunk worse'n stockyards in my time."

•Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.

•Whiskers war der erste, der es wagte.

•"I've sat in at many a finer drinking," he bragged.

•"With the pewter," Slim sneered.

•"With the silver," Whiskers corrected.

•Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.

•Fatty nickte.

•"Beneath the salt," said Slim.

•"Above it," came Fatty's correction. •"I was born above it, and I've never travelled second class. •First or steerage, but no intermediate in mine."

•"Yourself?" •Whiskers queried of Slim.

•"In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her," Slim answered, solemnly, without snarl or sneer.

•"In the pantry?" •Fatty insinuated.

•Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for their rocks.

•"Now don't let's get feverish," Fatty said, dropping his own weapon. •"We aren't scum. •We're gentlemen. •Let's drink like gentlemen."

•"Let it be a real drinking," Whiskers approved.

•"Let's get petrified," Slim agreed. •"Many a distillery's flowed under the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let's forget the long road we've travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which every gentleman went to bed when we were young."

•"My father done it--did it," Fatty concurred and corrected, as old recollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and correct usage.

•The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated their tin cans of alcohol.

•By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a- glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names. •But their English had improved. •They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land ceased from their lips.

•"It's my constitution," Whiskers was explaining. •"Very few men could go through what I have and live to tell the tale. •And I never took any care of myself. •If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true, I'd have been dead long ago. •Mit Euch beiden ist es dasselbe. •Look at us, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don't dare, sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put half the young ones on their backs in hospital."

•He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.

•"And we've had our fun," he boasted, "and speaking of sweethearts and all," he cribbed from Kipling, "'We've rogued and we've ranged--'" "'In our time,'" Slim completed the crib for him.

•"I should say so, I should say so," Fatty confirmed. •"And been loved by princesses--at least I have."

•"Go on and tell us about it," Whiskers urged. •"The night's young, and why shouldn't we remember back to the roofs of kings?"

•Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about in his mind for the best way to begin.

•"It must be known that I came of good family. •Percival Delaney, let us say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford once upon a time--not for scholarship, I am frank to admit; but the gay young dogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would remember him--" "My people came over with the Conqueror," Whiskers interrupted, extending his hand to Fatty's in acknowledgment of the introduction.

•"What name?" •Fatty queried. •"I did not seem quite to catch it."

•"Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. •The name will serve as well as any."

•Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.

•"Oh, well, while we're about it . •. •. " •Fatty urged.

•"Bruce Cadogan Cavendish," Slim growled morosely. •"Go on, Percival, with your princesses and the roofs of kings."

•"Oh, I was a rare young devil," Percival obliged, "after I played ducks and drakes at home and sported out over the world. •And I was some figure of a man before I lost my shape--polo, steeple-chasing, boxing. •I won medals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more than several swimming records from the quarter of a mile up. •Women turned their heads to look when I went by. •The women! •God bless them!"

•And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his bulgy hand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry vault of the sky.

•"And the Princess!" •he resumed, with another kiss to the stars. •"She was as fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high- spirited and courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. •Lord, Lord, in the water she was a mermaid, a sea-goddess. •And when it came to blood, beside her I was parvenu. •Her royal line traced back into the mists of antiquity.

•"She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. •Tawny golden was she, with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees was blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency that gives to woman's hair its charm. •Oh, there were no kinks in it, any more than were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy. •For she was Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal Polynesian."

•Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim, alias Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject: "Huh! •Maybe you didn't shine in scholarship, but at least you gleaned a vocabulary out of Oxford."

•"And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the lexicon of Love," Percival was quick on the uptake.

•"It was the island of Talofa," he went on, "meaning love, the Isle of Love, and it was her island. •Her father, the king, an old man, sat on his mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all day and most of the night, out of grief, sheer grief. •She, my princess, was the only issue, her brother having been lost in their double canoe in a hurricane while coming up from a voyage to Samoa. •And among the Polynesians the royal women have equal right with the men to rule. •In fact, they trace their genealogies always by the female line."

•To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt affirmation.

•"Ah," said Percival, "I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the Isle of Love."

•He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-size drink of druggist's alcohol, and to her again kissed her hand.

•"But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near enough. •When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not there. •I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear and delightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and beckoned on by the very goddess of love."

•"Some vocabulary," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey Delarouse. •But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. •He kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.

•"No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. •Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. •Ah! •Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover's ardency.

•"It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first interested her. •It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. •And it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.

•"We were squidding that day, out on the reef--you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. •With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he closed his tentacles around fist, stick and arm.--Then you had him, and came to the surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in the centre of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. •. •. •. •And to think I used to do that!"

•Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.

•"Why, I've pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of water. •I could stay down four minutes. •I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor. •And I could back-dive with a once- over and go in feet-first from eighty feet above the surface--" "Quit it, delete it, cease it," Chauncey Delarouse admonished testily. •"Tell of the Princess. •That's what makes old blood leap again. •Almost can I see her. •Was she wonderful?"

•Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.

•"I have said she was a mermaid. •She was. •I know she swam thirty- six hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a double-squall. •I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell in each hand. •She was wonderful. •As a woman she was ravishing, sublime. •I have said she was a sea-goddess. •She was. •Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!

•"And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her. •Mad--I know I was mad for her. •We would step over the side from the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool and colour, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalize me to further madness. •And at last, down, far down, I lost myself and reached for her. •She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I saw the laughter on her face as she fled. •She fled deeper, and I knew I had her for I was between her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of the bottom she made a churning with her squid stick. •It was the old trick to escape a shark. •And she worked it on me, rolling the water so that I could not see her. •And when I came up, she was there ahead of me, clinging to the side of the canoe and laughing.

•"Almost I would not be denied. •But not for nothing was she a princess. •She rested her hand on my arm and compelled me to listen. •We should play a game, she said, enter into a competition for which should get the more squid, the biggest squid, and the smallest squid. •Since the wagers were kisses, you can well imagine I went down on the first next dive with soul aflame.

•"I got no squid. •Never again in all my life have I dived for squid. •Perhaps we were five fathoms down and exploring the face of the reefwall for lurking places of our prey, when it happened. •I had found a likely lair and just proved it empty, when I felt or sensed the nearness of something inimical. •I turned. •There it was, alongside of me, and no mere fish-shark. •Fully a dozen feet in length, with the unmistakable phosphorescent cat's eye gleaming like a drowning star, I knew it for what it was, a tiger shark.

•"Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral fissure with her squid stick, was the Princess, and the tiger shark was heading directly for her. •My totality of thought was precipitated to consciousness in a single all-embracing flash. •The man-eater must be deflected from her, and what was I, except a mad lover who would gladly fight and die, or more gladly fight and live, for his beloved? •Remember, she was the woman wonderful, and I was aflame for her.

•"Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. •And the man-eater turned on me. •You know the South Seas, and you know that the tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail. •The combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on--if by combat may be named such a one-sided struggle.

•"The Princess unaware, caught her squid and rose to the surface. •The man-eater rushed me. •I fended him off with both hands on his nose above his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he backed me against the sharp coral. •The scars are there to this day. •Whenever I tried to rise, he rushed me, and I could not remain down there indefinitely without air. •Whenever he rushed me, I fended him off with my hands on his nose. •And I would have escaped unharmed, except for the slip of my right hand. •Into his mouth it went to the elbow. •His jaws closed, just below the elbow. •You know how a shark's teeth are. •Once in they cannot be released. •They must go through to complete the bite, but they cannot go through heavy bone. •So, from just below the elbow he stripped the bone clean to the articulation of the wrist-joint, where his teeth met and my good right hand became his for an appetizer.

•"But while he was doing this, I drove the thumb of my left hand, to the hilt into his eye-orifice and popped out his eye. •This did not stop him. •The meat had maddened him. •He pursued the gushing stump of my wrist. •Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm. •Then he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the meat off the bone from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met and he was free of his second mouthful of me. •But, at the same time, with my good arm, I thumbed out his remaining eye."

•Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere he resumed.

•"From above, those in the canoe had beheld the entire happening and were loud in praise of my deed. •To this day they still sing the song of me, and tell the tale of me. •And the Princess." •His pause was brief but significant. •"The Princess married me. •. •. •. •Oh, well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and . •. •. "

•He completed the sentence and the tale by burying his face in the down-tilted mouth of the condensed milk can and by gurgling the corrosive drink down his throat in thirsty gulps.

•After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers, took up the tale.

•"Far be it from me to boast of no matter what place of birth I have descended from to sit here by this fire with such as . •. •. •as chance along. •I may say, however, that I, too, was once a considerable figure of a man. •I may add that it was horses, plus parents too indulgent, that exiled me out over the world. •I may still wonder to query: 'Are Dover's cliffs still white?'"

•"Huh!" •Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered. •"Next you'll be asking: 'How fares the old Lord Warden?'"

•"And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a constitution that was iron," Whiskers hurried on. •"Here I am with my three score and ten behind me, and back on that long road have I buried many a youngster that was as rare and devilish as I, but who could not stand the pace. •I knew the worst too young. •And now I know the worst too old. •But there was a time, alas all too short, when I knew, the best.

•"I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my heart. •She was truly a princess, Polynesian, a thousand miles and more away to the eastward and the south from Delaney's Isle of Love. •The natives of all around that part of the South Seas called it the Jolly Island. •Their own name, the name of the people who dwelt thereon, translates delicately and justly into 'The Island of Tranquil Laughter.' •On the chart you will find the erroneous name given to it by the old navigators to be Manatomana. •The seafaring gentry the round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden. •And the missionaries for a time called it God's Witness--so great had been their success at converting the inhabitants. •As for me, it was, and ever shall be, Paradise.

•"It was MY Paradise, for it was there my Princess lived. •John Asibeli Tungi was king. •He was full-blooded native, descended out of the oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua which was the primeval sea home of the race. •Also was he known as John the Apostate. •He lived a long life and apostasized frequently. •First converted by the Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the native priests, executed a few of the recalcitrant ones, and sent all his subjects to church.

•"Next he fell for the traders, who developed in him a champagne thirst, and he shipped off the Catholic priests to New Zealand. •The great majority of his subjects always followed his lead, and, having no religion at all, ensued the time of the Great Licentiousness, when by all South Seas missionaries his island, in sermons, was spoken of as Babylon.

•"But the traders ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and after several years he fell for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and the trading crowd so spick and span that he would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of doors on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief traders one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his schooner's decks on the Sabbath morn.

•"That was the time of the Blue Laws, but perhaps it was too rigorous for King John. •Off he packed the Methodists, one fine day, exiled several hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking to Methodism, and, of all things, invented a religion of his own, with himself the figure-head of worship. •In this he was aided and abetted by a renegade Fijian. •This lasted five years. •Maybe he grew tired of being God, or maybe it was because the Fijian decamped with the six thousand pounds in the royal treasury; but at any rate the Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his entire kingdom went Wesleyan. •The pioneer Wesleyan missionary he actually made prime minister, and what he did to the trading crowd was a caution. •Why, in the end, King John's kingdom was blacklisted and boycotted by the traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the people went bankrupt, and King John couldn't borrow a shilling from his most powerful chief.

•"By this time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant, and spiritually atavistic. •He fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans, called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, held a general love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty and high tariff, and as for himself went back to the worship of his ancestors, dug up the idols, reinstated a few octogenarian priests, and observed the tabus. •All of which was lovely for the traders, and prosperity reigned. •Of course, most of his subjects followed him back into heathen worship. •Yet quite a sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans remained true to their beliefs and managed to maintain a few squalid, one-horse churches. •But King John didn't mind, any more than did he the high times of the traders along the beach. •Everything went, so long as the taxes were paid. •Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to become a Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet- spirited, club-footed Baptist missionary, King John did not object. •All he insisted on was that these wandering religions should be self-supporting and not feed a pennyworth's out of the royal coffers.

•"And now the threads of my recital draw together in the paragon of female exquisiteness--my Princess."

•Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the ground his half-full condensed milk can with which he had been absently toying, and kissed the fingers of his one hand audibly aloft.

•"She was the daughter of Queen Mamare. •She was the woman wonderful. •Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal. •She WAS ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and modest as a violet, as fragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender, were as asphodels on the sward of heaven. •She was all flower, and fire, and dew. •Hers was the sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of the dove. •And she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout in her belief in her mother's worship, which was the worship introduced by Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. •But make no mistake. •She was no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham. •All of exquisite deliciousness of woman was she. •She was woman, all woman, to the last sensitive quivering atom of her - "And I? •I was a wastrel of the beach. •The wildest was not so wild as I, the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd. •It was esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. •I was the only living man, white, brown, or black, who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark. •And on a black night I have done it under reefs in a gale of wind. •Well, anyway, I had a bad reputation on a beach where there were no good reputations. •I was reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight or frolic; and the trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies from the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under the table. •I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides. •It was a great drinking. •He died of it, and we laded him aboard ship, pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own place. •A sample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach of Manatomana.

•"And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but look upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her. •It was the real thing. •I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got only madder. •I reformed. •Think of that! •Think of what a slip of a woman can do to a busy, roving man!--By the Lord Harry, it's true. •I reformed. •I went to church. •Hear me! •I became converted. •I cleared my soul before God and kept my hands-- I had two then--off the ribald crew of the beach when it laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was my game.

•"I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to a religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion ever since. •I discharged my best captain for immorality. •So did I my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. •For the same reason I discharged my chief clerk. •And for the first time in the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. •I built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined street squarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith. •And I made him my pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey pot of sweetnesses and goodnesses. •And he was a man, through and through a man. •And he died long after like a man, which I would like to tell you about, were the tale of it not so deservedly long.

•"It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible for my expressing my faith in works, and especially in that crowning work, the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother's church.

•"'Our poor church,' she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting. •I had been converted only a fortnight. •'It is so small its congregation can never grow. •And the roof leaks. •And King John, my hard-hearted father, will not contribute a penny. •Yet he has a big balance in the treasury. •And Manatomana is not poor. •Much money is made and squandered, I know. •I hear the gossip of the wild ways of the beach. •Less than a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling at cards, than the cost of the upkeep of our poor church for a year.'

•"And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the light. •(I'd had an infernal run of bad luck.) •I told her I had not tasted liquor since, nor turned a card. •I told her that the roof would be repaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by her from the congregation. •But she was filled with the thought of a great revival that Ebenezer Naismith could preach--she was a dear saint--and she spoke of a great church, saying: "'You are rich. •You have many schooners, and traders in far islands, and I have heard of a great contract you have signed to recruit labour for the German plantations of Upolu. •They say, next to Sweitzer, you are the richest trader here. •I should love to see some use of all this money placed to the glory of God. •It would be a noble thing to do, and I should be proud to know the man who would do it.'

•"I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and that I would build a church great enough in which to house it.

•"'As big as the Catholic church?' •she asked.

•"This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entire population was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire with love, and I told her that the church I would build would be even bigger.

•"'But it will take money,' I explained. •'And it takes time to make money.'

•"'You have much,' she said. •'Some say you have more money than my father, the King.

•"'I have more credit,' I explained. •'But you do not understand money. •It takes money to have credit. •So, with the money I have, and the credit I have, I will work to make more money and credit, and the church shall be built.'

•"Work! •I was a surprise to myself. •It is an amazement, the amount of time a man finds on his hands after he's given up carousing, and gambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach. •And I didn't waste a second of all my new-found time. •Instead I worked it overtime. •I did the work of half a dozen men. •I became a driver. •My captains made faster runs than ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes, who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf and dawdle along the way. •And I saw to it that my supercargoes did see to it.

•"And good! •By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt. •My conscience got so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry it around with me. •Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before. •And I compounded the interest as well.

•"Work! •I planted sugar cane--the first commercial planting on Manatomana. •I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane. •And I sent a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and a German who said he knew the field-end of cane. •And he did, and he charged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold of the mill-end. •I installed the mill myself, with the help of several mechanics I brought up from Queensland.

•"Of course there was a rival. •His name was Motomoe. •He was the very highest chief blood next to King John's. •He was full native, a strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes. •He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace. •He went back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me. •The worst of it was that most of them were true. •He even made a voyage to Apia to find things out--as if he couldn't find a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana! •And he sneered at my failing for religion, and at my going to prayer- meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting. •He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him. •He threatened me, and I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head. •You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted her more.

•"She used to play the piano. •So did I, once. •But I never let her know after I'd heard her play the first time. •And she thought her playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! •You know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. •And now I'll tell you something funnier. •Her playing WAS wonderful to me. •The gates of heaven opened to me when she played. •I can see myself now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. •Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it. •It kind of brought her within my human reach. •Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss. •My weariness fell from me. •I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as my love for God. •And do you know, into my fond lover's fancy continually intruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her. " •--That's right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like. •But I tell you that's love that I've been describing. •That's all. •It's love. •It's the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man. •And I know what I'm talking about. •It happened to me."

•Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrow like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.

•"The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with the back of his hand. •"It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and I was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding. •Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in such succession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more was being planted and the ratoons were springing up.

•"I had my troubles the first several days. •If it wasn't one thing the matter with the mill, it was another. •On the fourth day, Ferguson, my engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to remedy his own troubles. •I was bothered by the feeder. •After having the niggers (who had been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-cutting squads. •So I was all alone at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, just as I discovered what was the matter with the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up.

•"He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the rest of the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a navvy. •And, the rollers now white from the lime, I'd just seen what was wrong. •The rollers were not in plumb. •One side crushed the cane well, but the other side was too open. •I shoved my fingers in on that side. •The big, toothed cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers. •And yet, suddenly, they did. •With the grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn in, and pulped to--well, just pulp. •And, like a slick of cane, I had started on my way. •There was no stopping me. •Ten thousand horses could not have pulled me back. •There was nothing to stop me. •Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was doomed to feed through.

•"It did hurt. •It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all. •Quite detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in. •O engineer hoist by thine own petard! •O sugar-maker crushed by thine own cane-crusher!

•"Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased from his face by an expression of solicitude. •Then the beauty of the situation dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned. •No, I didn't expect anything of him. •Hadn't he tried to knock me on the head? •What could he do anyway? •He didn't know anything about engines.

•"I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the engine, but the roar of the machinery drowned my voice. •And there I stood, up to the elbow and feeding right on in. •Yes, it did hurt. •There were some astonishing twinges when special nerves were shredded and dragged out by the roots. •But I remember that I was surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse.

•"Motomoe made a movement that attracted my attention. •At the same time he growled out loud, as if he hated himself, 'I'm a fool.' •What he had done was to pick up a cane-knife--you know the kind, as big as a machete and as heavy. •And I was grateful to him in advance for putting me out of my misery. •There wasn't any sense in slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and already my arm was pulped half way from elbow to shoulder, and the pulping was going right on. •So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.

•"'Get your head out of the way, you idiot!' •he barked at me.

•"And then I understood and obeyed. •I was a big man, and he took two hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder and dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.

•"Yes, the sugar paid--enormously; and I built for the Princess the church of her saintly dream, and . •. •. •she married me."

•He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.

•"Alackaday! •Shuttlecock and battle-dore. •And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle. •Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien flag that floats over the bungalow of the British Government House. •. •. "

•Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympathetically drank out of his own small can. •Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with implacable bitterness. •He was a man who preferred to drink by himself. •Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played twitches of mockery that caught Fatty's eye. •And Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was within reach, challenged.

•"Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish? •It's your turn."

•The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty's until he physically betrayed uncomfortableness.

•"I've lived a hard life," Slim grated harshly. •"What do I know about love passages?"

•"No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them," Fatty wheedled.

•"And what of it?" •Slim snarled. •"It's no reason for a gentleman to boast of amorous triumphs."

•"Oh, go on, be a good fellow," Fatty urged. •"The night's still young. •We've still some drink left. •Delarouse and I have contributed our share. •It isn't often that three real ones like us get together for a telling. •Surely you've got at least one adventure in love you aren't ashamed to tell about--" Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to debate whether or not he should brain the other. •He sighed, and put back the quoit.

•"Very well, if you will have it," he surrendered with manifest reluctance. •"Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution. •And right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the both of you down when you were at your prime. •Like you two, my beginnings were far distant and different. •That I am marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood there is no discussion . •. •. •unless either of you care to discuss the matter now . •. •. "

•His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit. •Neither of his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his menace.

•"It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. •"But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. •For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless. •I was running blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili--" "It was you who cleaned out the entire population of--" Fatty exploded, ere he could check his speech.

•The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and flashed back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.

•"Proceed," Fatty sighed. •"I . •. •. •I have quite forgotten what I was going to say."

•"Beastly funny country over that way," the narrator drawled with perfect casualness. •"You've read this Sea Wolf stuff--" "You weren't the Sea Wolf," Whiskers broke in with involuntary positiveness.

•"No, sir," was the snarling answer. •"The Sea Wolf's dead, isn't he? •And I'm still alive, aren't I?"

•"Of course, of course," Whiskers conceded. •"He suffocated head- first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back."

•"As I was saying--and I don't like interruptions," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, "it's a beastly funny country over that way. •I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn't at all, for the Solomons are high islands. •Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred. •The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in Taka-Tiki. •And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.

•"It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory- nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. •Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig. •To the westward it was fierce--funny little black kinky- heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling over with wealth--" "Jack-pots?" •Fatty queried. •At sight of an irritable movement, he added: "You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you."

•"They're all head-hunters. •Heads are valuable, especially a white man's head. •They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with them. •Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes. •Whoever brings in a white man's head takes the pot. •If there aren't openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous proportions. •Beastly funny, isn't it?

•"I know. •Didn't a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? •And didn't I win a pot myself? •It was this way. •We were lying at Lango-lui at the time. •I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my boat-steerer. •He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. •He cut the dead mate's head off and sneaked ashore in the might, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him. •He opened the pot with the mate's head, and got it, too. •Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot."

•"How big was the pot?" •Whiskers asked. •"I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid."

•"To commence with," Slim answered, "there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom. •That was two hundred dollars right there. •There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself. •And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. •I split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper. •Johnny never complained. •He'd never had so much wealth all at one time in his life. •Besides, I gave him a couple of the mate's old shirts. •And I fancy the mate's head is still there decorating the canoe- house."

•"Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian," Whiskers observed.

•"But a lucrative burial," Slim retorted. •"I had to feed the rest of the mate over-side to the sharks for nothing. •Think of feeding an eight-hundred-dollar head along with it. •It would have been criminal waste and stark lunacy.

•"Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the westward. •And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki- Tiki, except that I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour, and for my manner of collecting them had two British ships of war combing the Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar.

•"Typhoon season. •We caught it. •The Merry Mist was my schooner's name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon. •I never saw such seas. •They pounded that stout craft to pieces, literally so. •The sticks were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst had passed, the covering boards began to go. •We just managed to repair what was left of one boat and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went down barely enough to get away. •And we outfitted that boat in a hurry. •The carpenter and I were the last, and we had to jump for it as he went down. •There were only four of us--" "Lost all the niggers?" •Whiskers inquired.

•"Some of them swam for some time," Slim replied. •"But I don't fancy they made the land. •We were ten days' in doing it. •And we had a spanking breeze most of the way. •And what do you think we had in the boat with us? •Cases of square-face gin and cases of dynamite. •Funny, wasn't it? •Well, it got funnier later on. •Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a little salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit--enough to keep us alive to Tagalag.

•"Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island I've ever beheld. •It shows up out of the sea so as you can make its fall twenty miles off. •It is a volcano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a segment of the crater wall broken out. •This gives sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes a fine sheltered harbour. •And that's all. •Nothing lives there. •The outside and the inside of the crater are too steep. •At one place, inside, is a patch of about a thousand coconut palms. •And that's all, as I said, saving a few insects. •No four-legged thing, even a rat, inhabits the place. •And it's funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts, not even a coconut crab. •The only meat-food living was schools of mullet in the harbour--fattest, finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on.

•"And the four of us landed on the little beach and set up housekeeping among the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite and square-face. •Why don't you laugh? •It's funny, I tell you. •Try it some time.--Holland gin and straight coconut diet. •I've never been able to look a confectioner's window in the face since. •Now I'm not strong on religion like Chauncey Delarouse there, but I have some primitive ideas; and my concept of hell is an illimitable coconut plantation, stocked with cases of square-face and populated by ship-wrecked mariners. •Funny? •It must make the devil scream.

•"You know, straight coconut is what the agriculturists call an unbalanced ration. •It certainly unbalanced our digestions. •We got so that whenever hunger took an extra bite at us, we took another drink of gin. •After a couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a squarehead sailor, got an idea. •It came when he was full of gin, and we, being in the same fix, just watched him shove a cap and short fuse into a stick of dynamite and stroll down toward the boat.

•"It dawned on me that he was going to shoot fish if there were any about; but the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined there and hoped he'd have luck.

•"About half an hour after he disappeared we heard the explosion. •But he didn't come back. •We waited till the cool of sunset, and down on the beach found what had become of him. •The boat was there all right, grounded by the prevailing breeze, but there was no Olaf. •He would never have to eat coconut again. •We went back, shakier than ever, and cracked another square-face.

•"The next day the cook announced that he would rather take his chance with dynamite than continue trying to exist on coconut, and that, though he didn't know anything about dynamite, he knew a sight too much about coconut. •So we bit the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse, and picked him a good fire-stick, while he jolted up with a couple more stiff ones of gin.

•"It was the same programme as the day before. •After a while we heard the explosion and at twilight went down to the boat, from which we scraped enough of the cook for a funeral.

•"The carpenter and I stuck it out two days more, then we drew straws for it and it was his turn. •We parted with harsh words; for he wanted to take a square-face along to refresh himself by the way, while I was set against running any chance of wasting the gin. •Besides, he had more than he could carry then, and he wobbled and staggered as he walked.

•"Same thing, only there was a whole lot of him left for me to bury, because he'd prepared only half a stick. •I managed to last it out till next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I got sufficient courage to tackle the dynamite. •I used only a third of a stick-- you know, short fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of a safety match. •That's where I mended my predecessors' methods. •Not using the match-head, they'd too-long fuses. •Therefore, when they spotted a school of mullet; and lighted the fuse, they had to hold the dynamite till the fuse burned short before they threw it. •If they threw it too soon, it wouldn't go off the instant it hit the water, while the splash of it would frighten the mullet away. •Funny stuff dynamite. •At any rate, I still maintain mine was the safer method.

•"I picked up a school of mullet before I'd been rowing five minutes. •Fine big fat ones they were, and I could smell them over the fire. •When I stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick in the other, my knees were knocking together. •Maybe it was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was the result of all of them, but at any rate I was all of a shake. •Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick to the dynamite. •Then I did, heard the match-head splutter, and let her go.

•"Now I don't know what happened to the others, but I know what I did. •I got turned about. •Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw the strawberry away and pop the stem into your mouth? •That's what I did. •I threw the fire-stick into the water after the mullet and held on to the dynamite. •And my arm went off with the stick when it went off. •. •. •. "

•Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to mix himself a drink, but found it empty. •He stood up.

•"Heigh ho," he yawned, and started down the path to the river.

•In several minutes he was back. •He mixed the due quantity of river slush with the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and stared with bitter moodiness into the fire.

•"Yes, but . •. •. " •Fatty suggested. •"What happened then?"

•"Oh," sad Slim. •"Then the princess married me, of course."

•"But you were the only person left, and there wasn't any princess . •. •. " •Whiskers cried out abruptly, and then let his voice trail away to embarrassed silence.

•Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.

•Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse looked at each other. •Quietly, in solemn silence, each with his one arm aided the one arm of the other in rolling and tying his bundle. •And in silence, bundles slung on shoulders, they went away out of the circle of firelight. •Not until they reached the top of the railroad embankment did they speak.

•"No gentleman would have done it," said Whiskers.

•"No gentleman would have done it," Fatty agreed.

•Glen Ellen, California, September 26, 1916.
unit 1
The Princess A fire burned cheerfully in the jungle camp, and beside the fire lolled a cheerful-seeming though horrible-appearing man.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 2
This was a hobo jungle, pitched in a thin strip of woods that lay between a railroad embankment and the bank of a river.
1 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 3
But no hobo was the man.
1 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 4
So deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that a proper hobo would not sit by the same fire with him.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 5
A gay-cat, who is an ignorant new-comer on the "Road," might sit with such as he, but only long enough to learn better.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 6
Even low down bindle-stiffs and stew-bums, after a once-over, would have passed this man by.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 7
A genuine hobo, a couple of punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared road- kids might have gone through his rags for any stray pennies or nickels and kicked him out into the darkness.
2 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 8
Even an alki-stiff would have reckoned himself immeasurably superior.
2 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 9
For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an alki-stiff that has degenerated into a stew-bum, with so little self-respect that he will never "boil-up," and with so little pride that he will eat out of a garbage can.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 10
He was truly horrible-appearing.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 11
He might have been sixty years of age; he might have been ninety.
1 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 12
His garments might have been discarded by a rag-picker.
2 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 13
Beside him, an unrolled bundle showed itself as consisting of a ragged overcoat and containing an empty and smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and battered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown paper and evidently begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been run over in the street by a wagon-wheel, three greenish- cankered and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun with a mouthful bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as was made patent by the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 14
A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-dirty and untrimmed for years, sprouted from his face.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 15
This hirsute growth should have been white, but the season was summer and it had not been exposed to a rain-shower for some time.
2 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 16
What was visible of the face looked as if at some period it had stopped a hand-grenade.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 17
The nose was so variously malformed in its healed brokenness that there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward to the sky.
2 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 18
One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept copiously and continuously.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 19
The other eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a bone-crushed eyebrow.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 20
And he had but one arm.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 21
Yet was he cheerful.
1 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 22
On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 23
He pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 24
The bottle was full of a colourless liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn brighter and quickened his movements.
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 25
Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river water.
2 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 26
In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with two parts of fluid from the bottle.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 27
This colourless fluid was druggist's alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as "alki."
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 28
Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment, alarmed him ere he could drink.
2 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 29
Placing the can carefully upon the ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously whatever impended.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 30
Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 31
The new- comer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely fat.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 32
He bulged everywhere.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 33
He was composed of bulges.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 34
His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 35
His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them.
2 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 36
In many places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of body.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 37
His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 38
One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 39
He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, and joined him.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 40
"Hello, grandpa," the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at the other's flaring, sky-open nostril.
2 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 41
"Say, Whiskers, how'd ye keep the night dew out of that nose o' yourn?"
2 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 42
Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question.
2 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 43
"For the love of Mike," the fat man chuckled, "if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you'd sure drown, wouldn't you?"
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 44
"Can it, Fatty, can it," Whiskers muttered wearily.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 45
"They ain't nothin' new in that line of chatter.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 46
Even the bulls hand it out to me."
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 47
"But you can still drink, I hope"; Fatty at the same time mollified and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his bundle.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 48
From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 49
Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.
3 Translations, 5 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 50
But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk, but likewise to have only one arm.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 51
So forbidding of aspect was he that greetings consisted of no more than grunts.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 52
Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death's head, he was as repellent a nightmare of old age as ever Dore imagined.
2 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 53
His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 54
His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon.
1 Translations, 3 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 55
The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless.
2 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 56
His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 57
Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close to his hand if need for action should arise.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 58
Fatty duplicated the performance.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 59
Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one, now into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their preparedness.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 60
"Huh!"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 61
sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their cave-man's weapons.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 62
"Huh!"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 63
the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat pocket with swift definiteness.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 64
"A hell of a chance you two cheap bums 'd have with me."
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 65
The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron quoit.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 66
"We ain't lookin' for trouble, Slim," Fatty quavered.
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 67
"Who in hell are you to call me 'Slim'?"
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 68
came the snarling answer.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 69
"Me?
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 70
I'm just Fatty, an' seein' 's I never seen you before--" "An' I suppose that's Whiskers, there, with the gay an' festive lamp tan-going into his eyebrow an' the God-forgive-us nose joy- riding all over his mug?"
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 71
"It'll do, it'll do," Whiskers muttered uncomfortably.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 72
"One monica's as good as another, I find, at my time of life.
2 Translations, 4 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 73
And everybody hands it out to me anyway.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 74
And I need an umbrella when it rains to keep from getting drowned, an' all the rest of it."
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 75
"I ain't used to company--don't like it," Slim growled.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 76
"So if you guys want to stick around, mind your step, that's all, mind your step."
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 77
He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self-evidently shot from the gutter, and prepared to put it in his mouth to chew.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 78
Then he changed his mind, glared at his companions savagely, and unrolled his bundle.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 79
Appeared in his hand a druggist's bottle of alki.
1 Translations, 2 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 80
"Well," he snarled, "I suppose I gotta give you cheap skates a drink when I ain't got more'n enough for a good petrification for myself."
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 81
Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent in his withered face as he beheld the others proudly lift their hats and exhibit their own supplies.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 82
"Here's some water for the mixin's," Whiskers said, proffering his tomato-can of river slush.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 83
"Stockyards just above," he added apologetically.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 84
"But they say--" "Huh!"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 85
Slim snapped short, mixing the drink.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 86
"I've drunk worse'n stockyards in my time."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 87
Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 88
Whiskers was the first to brazen it.
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 89
"I've sat in at many a finer drinking," he bragged.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 90
"With the pewter," Slim sneered.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 91
"With the silver," Whiskers corrected.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 92
Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 93
Fatty nodded.
1 Translations, 1 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 94
"Beneath the salt," said Slim.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 95
"Above it," came Fatty's correction.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 96
"I was born above it, and I've never travelled second class.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 97
First or steerage, but no intermediate in mine."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 98
"Yourself?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 99
Whiskers queried of Slim.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 100
"In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her," Slim answered, solemnly, without snarl or sneer.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 101
"In the pantry?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 102
Fatty insinuated.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 103
Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for their rocks.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 104
"Now don't let's get feverish," Fatty said, dropping his own weapon.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 105
"We aren't scum.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 106
We're gentlemen.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 107
Let's drink like gentlemen."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 108
"Let it be a real drinking," Whiskers approved.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 109
"Let's get petrified," Slim agreed.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 110
"Many a distillery's flowed under the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let's forget the long road we've travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which every gentleman went to bed when we were young."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 111
"My father done it--did it," Fatty concurred and corrected, as old recollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and correct usage.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 112
The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated their tin cans of alcohol.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 113
By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a- glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 114
But their English had improved.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 115
They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land ceased from their lips.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 116
"It's my constitution," Whiskers was explaining.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 117
"Very few men could go through what I have and live to tell the tale.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 118
And I never took any care of myself.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 119
If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true, I'd have been dead long ago.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 120
And it's the same with you two.
1 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity 7 years, 2 months ago
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unit 121
Look at us, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don't dare, sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put half the young ones on their backs in hospital."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 122
He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 123
"And we've had our fun," he boasted, "and speaking of sweethearts and all," he cribbed from Kipling, "'We've rogued and we've ranged--'" "'In our time,'" Slim completed the crib for him.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 124
"I should say so, I should say so," Fatty confirmed.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 125
"And been loved by princesses--at least I have."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 126
"Go on and tell us about it," Whiskers urged.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 127
"The night's young, and why shouldn't we remember back to the roofs of kings?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 128
Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about in his mind for the best way to begin.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 129
"It must be known that I came of good family.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 130
Percival Delaney, let us say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford once upon a time--not for scholarship, I am frank to admit; but the gay young dogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would remember him--" "My people came over with the Conqueror," Whiskers interrupted, extending his hand to Fatty's in acknowledgment of the introduction.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 131
"What name?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 132
Fatty queried.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 133
"I did not seem quite to catch it."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 134
"Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 135
The name will serve as well as any."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 136
Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 137
"Oh, well, while we're about it .
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 138
.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 139
. "
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 140
Fatty urged.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 141
"Bruce Cadogan Cavendish," Slim growled morosely.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 142
"Go on, Percival, with your princesses and the roofs of kings."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 143
"Oh, I was a rare young devil," Percival obliged, "after I played ducks and drakes at home and sported out over the world.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 144
And I was some figure of a man before I lost my shape--polo, steeple-chasing, boxing.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 145
I won medals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more than several swimming records from the quarter of a mile up.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 146
Women turned their heads to look when I went by.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 147
The women!
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 148
God bless them!"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 149
And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his bulgy hand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry vault of the sky.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 150
"And the Princess!"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 151
he resumed, with another kiss to the stars.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 152
"She was as fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high- spirited and courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 153
Lord, Lord, in the water she was a mermaid, a sea-goddess.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 154
And when it came to blood, beside her I was parvenu.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 155
Her royal line traced back into the mists of antiquity.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 156
"She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 157
Tawny golden was she, with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees was blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency that gives to woman's hair its charm.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 158
Oh, there were no kinks in it, any more than were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 159
For she was Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal Polynesian."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 160
Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim, alias Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject: "Huh!
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 161
Maybe you didn't shine in scholarship, but at least you gleaned a vocabulary out of Oxford."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 162
"And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the lexicon of Love," Percival was quick on the uptake.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 163
"It was the island of Talofa," he went on, "meaning love, the Isle of Love, and it was her island.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 164
Her father, the king, an old man, sat on his mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all day and most of the night, out of grief, sheer grief.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 165
She, my princess, was the only issue, her brother having been lost in their double canoe in a hurricane while coming up from a voyage to Samoa.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 166
And among the Polynesians the royal women have equal right with the men to rule.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 167
In fact, they trace their genealogies always by the female line."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 168
To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt affirmation.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 169
"Ah," said Percival, "I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the Isle of Love."
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unit 170
He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-size drink of druggist's alcohol, and to her again kissed her hand.
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unit 171
"But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near enough.
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unit 172
When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not there.
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unit 173
I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear and delightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and beckoned on by the very goddess of love."
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unit 174
"Some vocabulary," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey Delarouse.
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unit 175
But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred.
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unit 176
He kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.
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unit 177
"No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach.
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unit 178
Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through.
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unit 179
Ah!
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unit 180
Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover's ardency.
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unit 181
"It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first interested her.
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unit 182
It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her.
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unit 183
And it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.
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unit 184
"We were squidding that day, out on the reef--you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing.
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unit 185
With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he closed his tentacles around fist, stick and arm.--Then you had him, and came to the surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in the centre of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe.
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unit 186
.
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unit 187
.
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unit 188
.
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unit 189
And to think I used to do that!"
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unit 190
Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.
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unit 191
"Why, I've pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of water.
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unit 192
I could stay down four minutes.
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unit 193
I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor.
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unit 194
And I could back-dive with a once- over and go in feet-first from eighty feet above the surface--" "Quit it, delete it, cease it," Chauncey Delarouse admonished testily.
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unit 195
"Tell of the Princess.
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unit 196
That's what makes old blood leap again.
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unit 197
Almost can I see her.
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unit 198
Was she wonderful?"
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unit 199
Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.
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unit 200
"I have said she was a mermaid.
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unit 201
She was.
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unit 202
I know she swam thirty- six hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a double-squall.
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unit 203
I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell in each hand.
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unit 204
She was wonderful.
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unit 205
As a woman she was ravishing, sublime.
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unit 206
I have said she was a sea-goddess.
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unit 207
She was.
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unit 208
Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!
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unit 209
"And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her.
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unit 210
Mad--I know I was mad for her.
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unit 211
We would step over the side from the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool and colour, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalize me to further madness.
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unit 212
And at last, down, far down, I lost myself and reached for her.
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unit 213
She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I saw the laughter on her face as she fled.
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unit 214
She fled deeper, and I knew I had her for I was between her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of the bottom she made a churning with her squid stick.
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unit 215
It was the old trick to escape a shark.
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unit 216
And she worked it on me, rolling the water so that I could not see her.
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unit 217
And when I came up, she was there ahead of me, clinging to the side of the canoe and laughing.
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unit 218
"Almost I would not be denied.
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unit 219
But not for nothing was she a princess.
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unit 220
She rested her hand on my arm and compelled me to listen.
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unit 221
We should play a game, she said, enter into a competition for which should get the more squid, the biggest squid, and the smallest squid.
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unit 222
Since the wagers were kisses, you can well imagine I went down on the first next dive with soul aflame.
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unit 223
"I got no squid.
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unit 224
Never again in all my life have I dived for squid.
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unit 225
Perhaps we were five fathoms down and exploring the face of the reefwall for lurking places of our prey, when it happened.
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unit 226
I had found a likely lair and just proved it empty, when I felt or sensed the nearness of something inimical.
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unit 227
I turned.
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unit 228
There it was, alongside of me, and no mere fish-shark.
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unit 229
Fully a dozen feet in length, with the unmistakable phosphorescent cat's eye gleaming like a drowning star, I knew it for what it was, a tiger shark.
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unit 230
"Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral fissure with her squid stick, was the Princess, and the tiger shark was heading directly for her.
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unit 231
My totality of thought was precipitated to consciousness in a single all-embracing flash.
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unit 232
The man-eater must be deflected from her, and what was I, except a mad lover who would gladly fight and die, or more gladly fight and live, for his beloved?
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unit 233
Remember, she was the woman wonderful, and I was aflame for her.
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unit 234
"Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs.
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unit 235
And the man-eater turned on me.
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unit 236
You know the South Seas, and you know that the tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail.
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unit 237
The combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on--if by combat may be named such a one-sided struggle.
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unit 238
"The Princess unaware, caught her squid and rose to the surface.
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unit 239
The man-eater rushed me.
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unit 240
I fended him off with both hands on his nose above his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he backed me against the sharp coral.
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unit 241
The scars are there to this day.
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unit 242
Whenever I tried to rise, he rushed me, and I could not remain down there indefinitely without air.
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unit 243
Whenever he rushed me, I fended him off with my hands on his nose.
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unit 244
And I would have escaped unharmed, except for the slip of my right hand.
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unit 245
Into his mouth it went to the elbow.
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unit 246
His jaws closed, just below the elbow.
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unit 247
You know how a shark's teeth are.
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unit 248
Once in they cannot be released.
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unit 249
They must go through to complete the bite, but they cannot go through heavy bone.
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unit 250
So, from just below the elbow he stripped the bone clean to the articulation of the wrist-joint, where his teeth met and my good right hand became his for an appetizer.
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unit 251
"But while he was doing this, I drove the thumb of my left hand, to the hilt into his eye-orifice and popped out his eye.
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unit 252
This did not stop him.
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unit 253
The meat had maddened him.
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unit 254
He pursued the gushing stump of my wrist.
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unit 255
Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm.
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unit 256
Then he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the meat off the bone from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met and he was free of his second mouthful of me.
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unit 257
But, at the same time, with my good arm, I thumbed out his remaining eye."
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unit 258
Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere he resumed.
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unit 259
"From above, those in the canoe had beheld the entire happening and were loud in praise of my deed.
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unit 260
To this day they still sing the song of me, and tell the tale of me.
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unit 261
And the Princess."
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unit 262
His pause was brief but significant.
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unit 263
"The Princess married me.
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unit 264
.
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unit 265
.
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unit 266
.
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unit 267
Oh, well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and .
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unit 268
.
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unit 269
. "
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unit 270
He completed the sentence and the tale by burying his face in the down-tilted mouth of the condensed milk can and by gurgling the corrosive drink down his throat in thirsty gulps.
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unit 271
After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers, took up the tale.
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unit 272
"Far be it from me to boast of no matter what place of birth I have descended from to sit here by this fire with such as .
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unit 273
.
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unit 274
.
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unit 275
as chance along.
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unit 276
I may say, however, that I, too, was once a considerable figure of a man.
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unit 277
I may add that it was horses, plus parents too indulgent, that exiled me out over the world.
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unit 278
I may still wonder to query: 'Are Dover's cliffs still white?'"
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unit 279
"Huh!"
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unit 280
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered.
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unit 281
"Next you'll be asking: 'How fares the old Lord Warden?'"
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unit 282
"And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a constitution that was iron," Whiskers hurried on.
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unit 283
"Here I am with my three score and ten behind me, and back on that long road have I buried many a youngster that was as rare and devilish as I, but who could not stand the pace.
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unit 284
I knew the worst too young.
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unit 285
And now I know the worst too old.
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unit 286
But there was a time, alas all too short, when I knew, the best.
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unit 287
"I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my heart.
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unit 288
She was truly a princess, Polynesian, a thousand miles and more away to the eastward and the south from Delaney's Isle of Love.
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unit 289
The natives of all around that part of the South Seas called it the Jolly Island.
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unit 290
Their own name, the name of the people who dwelt thereon, translates delicately and justly into 'The Island of Tranquil Laughter.'
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unit 291
On the chart you will find the erroneous name given to it by the old navigators to be Manatomana.
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unit 292
The seafaring gentry the round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden.
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unit 293
And the missionaries for a time called it God's Witness--so great had been their success at converting the inhabitants.
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unit 294
As for me, it was, and ever shall be, Paradise.
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unit 295
"It was MY Paradise, for it was there my Princess lived.
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unit 296
John Asibeli Tungi was king.
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unit 297
He was full-blooded native, descended out of the oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua which was the primeval sea home of the race.
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unit 298
Also was he known as John the Apostate.
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unit 299
He lived a long life and apostasized frequently.
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unit 300
First converted by the Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the native priests, executed a few of the recalcitrant ones, and sent all his subjects to church.
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unit 301
"Next he fell for the traders, who developed in him a champagne thirst, and he shipped off the Catholic priests to New Zealand.
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unit 302
The great majority of his subjects always followed his lead, and, having no religion at all, ensued the time of the Great Licentiousness, when by all South Seas missionaries his island, in sermons, was spoken of as Babylon.
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unit 303
"But the traders ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and after several years he fell for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and the trading crowd so spick and span that he would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of doors on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief traders one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his schooner's decks on the Sabbath morn.
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unit 304
"That was the time of the Blue Laws, but perhaps it was too rigorous for King John.
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unit 305
Off he packed the Methodists, one fine day, exiled several hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking to Methodism, and, of all things, invented a religion of his own, with himself the figure-head of worship.
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unit 306
In this he was aided and abetted by a renegade Fijian.
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unit 307
This lasted five years.
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unit 308
Maybe he grew tired of being God, or maybe it was because the Fijian decamped with the six thousand pounds in the royal treasury; but at any rate the Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his entire kingdom went Wesleyan.
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unit 309
The pioneer Wesleyan missionary he actually made prime minister, and what he did to the trading crowd was a caution.
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unit 310
Why, in the end, King John's kingdom was blacklisted and boycotted by the traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the people went bankrupt, and King John couldn't borrow a shilling from his most powerful chief.
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unit 311
"By this time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant, and spiritually atavistic.
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unit 312
He fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans, called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, held a general love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty and high tariff, and as for himself went back to the worship of his ancestors, dug up the idols, reinstated a few octogenarian priests, and observed the tabus.
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unit 313
All of which was lovely for the traders, and prosperity reigned.
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unit 314
Of course, most of his subjects followed him back into heathen worship.
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unit 315
Yet quite a sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans remained true to their beliefs and managed to maintain a few squalid, one-horse churches.
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unit 316
But King John didn't mind, any more than did he the high times of the traders along the beach.
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unit 317
Everything went, so long as the taxes were paid.
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unit 318
Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to become a Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet- spirited, club-footed Baptist missionary, King John did not object.
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unit 319
All he insisted on was that these wandering religions should be self-supporting and not feed a pennyworth's out of the royal coffers.
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unit 320
"And now the threads of my recital draw together in the paragon of female exquisiteness--my Princess."
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unit 321
Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the ground his half-full condensed milk can with which he had been absently toying, and kissed the fingers of his one hand audibly aloft.
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unit 322
"She was the daughter of Queen Mamare.
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unit 323
She was the woman wonderful.
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unit 324
Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal.
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unit 325
She WAS ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and modest as a violet, as fragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender, were as asphodels on the sward of heaven.
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unit 326
She was all flower, and fire, and dew.
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unit 327
Hers was the sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of the dove.
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unit 328
And she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout in her belief in her mother's worship, which was the worship introduced by Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary.
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unit 329
But make no mistake.
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unit 330
She was no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham.
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unit 331
All of exquisite deliciousness of woman was she.
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unit 332
She was woman, all woman, to the last sensitive quivering atom of her - "And I?
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unit 333
I was a wastrel of the beach.
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unit 334
The wildest was not so wild as I, the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd.
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unit 335
It was esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker.
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unit 336
I was the only living man, white, brown, or black, who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark.
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unit 337
And on a black night I have done it under reefs in a gale of wind.
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unit 338
Well, anyway, I had a bad reputation on a beach where there were no good reputations.
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unit 339
I was reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight or frolic; and the trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies from the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under the table.
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unit 340
I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides.
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unit 341
It was a great drinking.
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unit 342
He died of it, and we laded him aboard ship, pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own place.
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unit 343
A sample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach of Manatomana.
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unit 344
"And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but look upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her.
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unit 345
It was the real thing.
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unit 346
I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got only madder.
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unit 347
I reformed.
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unit 348
Think of that!
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unit 349
Think of what a slip of a woman can do to a busy, roving man!--By the Lord Harry, it's true.
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unit 350
I reformed.
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unit 351
I went to church.
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unit 352
Hear me!
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unit 353
I became converted.
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unit 354
I cleared my soul before God and kept my hands-- I had two then--off the ribald crew of the beach when it laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was my game.
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unit 355
"I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to a religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion ever since.
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unit 356
I discharged my best captain for immorality.
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unit 357
So did I my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana.
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unit 358
For the same reason I discharged my chief clerk.
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unit 359
And for the first time in the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock.
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unit 360
I built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined street squarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith.
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unit 361
And I made him my pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey pot of sweetnesses and goodnesses.
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unit 362
And he was a man, through and through a man.
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unit 363
And he died long after like a man, which I would like to tell you about, were the tale of it not so deservedly long.
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unit 364
"It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible for my expressing my faith in works, and especially in that crowning work, the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother's church.
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unit 365
"'Our poor church,' she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting.
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unit 366
I had been converted only a fortnight.
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unit 367
'It is so small its congregation can never grow.
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unit 368
And the roof leaks.
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unit 369
And King John, my hard-hearted father, will not contribute a penny.
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unit 370
Yet he has a big balance in the treasury.
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unit 371
And Manatomana is not poor.
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unit 372
Much money is made and squandered, I know.
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unit 373
I hear the gossip of the wild ways of the beach.
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unit 374
Less than a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling at cards, than the cost of the upkeep of our poor church for a year.'
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unit 375
"And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the light.
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unit 376
(I'd had an infernal run of bad luck.)
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unit 377
I told her I had not tasted liquor since, nor turned a card.
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unit 378
I told her that the roof would be repaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by her from the congregation.
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unit 379
But she was filled with the thought of a great revival that Ebenezer Naismith could preach--she was a dear saint--and she spoke of a great church, saying: "'You are rich.
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unit 380
You have many schooners, and traders in far islands, and I have heard of a great contract you have signed to recruit labour for the German plantations of Upolu.
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unit 381
They say, next to Sweitzer, you are the richest trader here.
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unit 382
I should love to see some use of all this money placed to the glory of God.
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unit 383
It would be a noble thing to do, and I should be proud to know the man who would do it.'
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unit 384
"I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and that I would build a church great enough in which to house it.
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unit 385
"'As big as the Catholic church?'
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unit 386
she asked.
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unit 387
"This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entire population was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire with love, and I told her that the church I would build would be even bigger.
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unit 388
"'But it will take money,' I explained.
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unit 389
'And it takes time to make money.'
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unit 390
"'You have much,' she said.
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unit 391
'Some say you have more money than my father, the King.
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unit 392
"'I have more credit,' I explained.
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unit 393
'But you do not understand money.
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unit 394
It takes money to have credit.
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unit 395
So, with the money I have, and the credit I have, I will work to make more money and credit, and the church shall be built.'
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unit 396
"Work!
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unit 397
I was a surprise to myself.
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unit 398
It is an amazement, the amount of time a man finds on his hands after he's given up carousing, and gambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach.
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unit 399
And I didn't waste a second of all my new-found time.
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unit 400
Instead I worked it overtime.
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unit 401
I did the work of half a dozen men.
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unit 402
I became a driver.
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unit 403
My captains made faster runs than ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes, who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf and dawdle along the way.
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unit 404
And I saw to it that my supercargoes did see to it.
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unit 405
"And good!
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unit 406
By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt.
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unit 407
My conscience got so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry it around with me.
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unit 408
Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before.
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unit 409
And I compounded the interest as well.
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unit 410
"Work!
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unit 411
I planted sugar cane--the first commercial planting on Manatomana.
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unit 412
I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane.
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unit 413
And I sent a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and a German who said he knew the field-end of cane.
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unit 414
And he did, and he charged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold of the mill-end.
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unit 415
I installed the mill myself, with the help of several mechanics I brought up from Queensland.
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unit 416
"Of course there was a rival.
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unit 417
His name was Motomoe.
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unit 418
He was the very highest chief blood next to King John's.
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unit 419
He was full native, a strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes.
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unit 420
He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace.
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unit 421
He went back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me.
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unit 422
The worst of it was that most of them were true.
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unit 423
He even made a voyage to Apia to find things out--as if he couldn't find a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana!
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unit 424
And he sneered at my failing for religion, and at my going to prayer- meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting.
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unit 425
He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him.
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unit 426
He threatened me, and I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head.
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unit 427
You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted her more.
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unit 428
"She used to play the piano.
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unit 429
So did I, once.
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unit 430
But I never let her know after I'd heard her play the first time.
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unit 431
And she thought her playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl!
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unit 432
You know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff.
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unit 433
And now I'll tell you something funnier.
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unit 434
Her playing WAS wonderful to me.
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unit 435
The gates of heaven opened to me when she played.
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unit 436
I can see myself now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss.
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unit 437
Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it.
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unit 438
It kind of brought her within my human reach.
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unit 439
Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss.
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unit 440
My weariness fell from me.
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unit 441
I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as my love for God.
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unit 442
And do you know, into my fond lover's fancy continually intruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her. "
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unit 443
--That's right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like.
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unit 444
But I tell you that's love that I've been describing.
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unit 445
That's all.
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unit 446
It's love.
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unit 447
It's the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man.
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unit 448
And I know what I'm talking about.
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unit 449
It happened to me."
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unit 450
Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrow like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.
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unit 451
"The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with the back of his hand.
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unit 452
"It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and I was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding.
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unit 453
Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in such succession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more was being planted and the ratoons were springing up.
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unit 454
"I had my troubles the first several days.
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unit 455
If it wasn't one thing the matter with the mill, it was another.
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unit 456
On the fourth day, Ferguson, my engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to remedy his own troubles.
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unit 457
I was bothered by the feeder.
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unit 458
After having the niggers (who had been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-cutting squads.
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unit 459
So I was all alone at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, just as I discovered what was the matter with the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up.
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unit 460
"He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the rest of the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a navvy.
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unit 461
And, the rollers now white from the lime, I'd just seen what was wrong.
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unit 462
The rollers were not in plumb.
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unit 463
One side crushed the cane well, but the other side was too open.
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unit 464
I shoved my fingers in on that side.
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unit 465
The big, toothed cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers.
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unit 466
And yet, suddenly, they did.
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unit 467
With the grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn in, and pulped to--well, just pulp.
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unit 468
And, like a slick of cane, I had started on my way.
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unit 469
There was no stopping me.
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unit 470
Ten thousand horses could not have pulled me back.
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unit 471
There was nothing to stop me.
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unit 472
Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was doomed to feed through.
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unit 473
"It did hurt.
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unit 474
It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all.
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unit 475
Quite detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in.
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unit 476
O engineer hoist by thine own petard!
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unit 477
O sugar-maker crushed by thine own cane-crusher!
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unit 478
"Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased from his face by an expression of solicitude.
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unit 479
Then the beauty of the situation dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned.
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unit 480
No, I didn't expect anything of him.
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unit 481
Hadn't he tried to knock me on the head?
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unit 482
What could he do anyway?
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unit 483
He didn't know anything about engines.
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unit 484
"I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the engine, but the roar of the machinery drowned my voice.
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unit 485
And there I stood, up to the elbow and feeding right on in.
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unit 486
Yes, it did hurt.
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unit 487
There were some astonishing twinges when special nerves were shredded and dragged out by the roots.
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unit 488
But I remember that I was surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse.
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unit 489
"Motomoe made a movement that attracted my attention.
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unit 490
At the same time he growled out loud, as if he hated himself, 'I'm a fool.'
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unit 491
What he had done was to pick up a cane-knife--you know the kind, as big as a machete and as heavy.
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unit 492
And I was grateful to him in advance for putting me out of my misery.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 493
There wasn't any sense in slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and already my arm was pulped half way from elbow to shoulder, and the pulping was going right on.
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unit 494
So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.
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unit 495
"'Get your head out of the way, you idiot!'
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unit 496
he barked at me.
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unit 497
"And then I understood and obeyed.
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unit 498
I was a big man, and he took two hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder and dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.
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unit 499
"Yes, the sugar paid--enormously; and I built for the Princess the church of her saintly dream, and .
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unit 500
.
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unit 501
.
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unit 502
she married me."
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unit 503
He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.
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unit 504
"Alackaday!
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unit 505
Shuttlecock and battle-dore.
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unit 506
And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle.
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unit 507
Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien flag that floats over the bungalow of the British Government House.
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unit 508
.
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unit 509
. "
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unit 510
Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympathetically drank out of his own small can.
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unit 511
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with implacable bitterness.
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unit 512
He was a man who preferred to drink by himself.
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unit 513
Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played twitches of mockery that caught Fatty's eye.
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unit 514
And Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was within reach, challenged.
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unit 515
"Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish?
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unit 516
It's your turn."
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unit 517
The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty's until he physically betrayed uncomfortableness.
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unit 518
"I've lived a hard life," Slim grated harshly.
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unit 519
"What do I know about love passages?"
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unit 520
"No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them," Fatty wheedled.
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unit 521
"And what of it?"
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unit 522
Slim snarled.
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unit 523
"It's no reason for a gentleman to boast of amorous triumphs."
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unit 524
"Oh, go on, be a good fellow," Fatty urged.
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unit 525
"The night's still young.
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unit 526
We've still some drink left.
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unit 527
Delarouse and I have contributed our share.
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unit 528
It isn't often that three real ones like us get together for a telling.
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unit 529
Surely you've got at least one adventure in love you aren't ashamed to tell about--" Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to debate whether or not he should brain the other.
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unit 530
He sighed, and put back the quoit.
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unit 531
"Very well, if you will have it," he surrendered with manifest reluctance.
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unit 532
"Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution.
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unit 533
And right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the both of you down when you were at your prime.
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unit 534
Like you two, my beginnings were far distant and different.
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unit 535
That I am marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood there is no discussion .
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unit 536
.
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unit 537
.
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unit 538
unless either of you care to discuss the matter now .
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unit 539
.
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unit 540
. "
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unit 541
His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit.
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unit 542
Neither of his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his menace.
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unit 543
"It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion.
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unit 544
"But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag.
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unit 545
For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless.
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unit 546
I was running blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili--" "It was you who cleaned out the entire population of--" Fatty exploded, ere he could check his speech.
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unit 547
The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and flashed back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.
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unit 548
"Proceed," Fatty sighed.
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unit 549
"I .
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 550
.
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unit 551
.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 552
I have quite forgotten what I was going to say."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 553
"Beastly funny country over that way," the narrator drawled with perfect casualness.
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unit 554
"You've read this Sea Wolf stuff--" "You weren't the Sea Wolf," Whiskers broke in with involuntary positiveness.
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unit 555
"No, sir," was the snarling answer.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 556
"The Sea Wolf's dead, isn't he?
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 557
And I'm still alive, aren't I?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 558
"Of course, of course," Whiskers conceded.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 559
"He suffocated head- first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back."
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unit 560
"As I was saying--and I don't like interruptions," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, "it's a beastly funny country over that way.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 561
I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn't at all, for the Solomons are high islands.
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unit 562
Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred.
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unit 563
The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in Taka-Tiki.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 564
And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.
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unit 565
"It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory- nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it.
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unit 566
Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig.
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unit 567
To the westward it was fierce--funny little black kinky- heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling over with wealth--" "Jack-pots?"
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unit 568
Fatty queried.
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unit 569
At sight of an irritable movement, he added: "You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you."
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unit 570
"They're all head-hunters.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 571
Heads are valuable, especially a white man's head.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 572
They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with them.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 573
Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes.
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unit 574
Whoever brings in a white man's head takes the pot.
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unit 575
If there aren't openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous proportions.
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unit 576
Beastly funny, isn't it?
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 577
"I know.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 578
Didn't a Holland mate die on me of blackwater?
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 579
And didn't I win a pot myself?
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 580
It was this way.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 581
We were lying at Lango-lui at the time.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 582
I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my boat-steerer.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 583
He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 584
He cut the dead mate's head off and sneaked ashore in the might, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 585
He opened the pot with the mate's head, and got it, too.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 586
Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot."
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unit 587
"How big was the pot?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 588
Whiskers asked.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 589
"I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 590
"To commence with," Slim answered, "there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 591
That was two hundred dollars right there.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 592
There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 593
And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 594
I split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper.
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unit 595
Johnny never complained.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 596
He'd never had so much wealth all at one time in his life.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 597
Besides, I gave him a couple of the mate's old shirts.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 598
And I fancy the mate's head is still there decorating the canoe- house."
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 599
"Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian," Whiskers observed.
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unit 600
"But a lucrative burial," Slim retorted.
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unit 601
"I had to feed the rest of the mate over-side to the sharks for nothing.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 602
Think of feeding an eight-hundred-dollar head along with it.
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unit 603
It would have been criminal waste and stark lunacy.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 604
"Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the westward.
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unit 605
And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki- Tiki, except that I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour, and for my manner of collecting them had two British ships of war combing the Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar.
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unit 606
"Typhoon season.
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unit 607
We caught it.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 608
The Merry Mist was my schooner's name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon.
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unit 609
I never saw such seas.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 610
They pounded that stout craft to pieces, literally so.
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unit 611
The sticks were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst had passed, the covering boards began to go.
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unit 612
We just managed to repair what was left of one boat and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went down barely enough to get away.
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unit 613
And we outfitted that boat in a hurry.
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unit 614
The carpenter and I were the last, and we had to jump for it as he went down.
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unit 615
There were only four of us--" "Lost all the niggers?"
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unit 616
Whiskers inquired.
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unit 617
"Some of them swam for some time," Slim replied.
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unit 618
"But I don't fancy they made the land.
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unit 619
We were ten days' in doing it.
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unit 620
And we had a spanking breeze most of the way.
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unit 621
And what do you think we had in the boat with us?
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unit 622
Cases of square-face gin and cases of dynamite.
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unit 623
Funny, wasn't it?
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 624
Well, it got funnier later on.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 625
Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a little salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit--enough to keep us alive to Tagalag.
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unit 626
"Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island I've ever beheld.
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unit 627
It shows up out of the sea so as you can make its fall twenty miles off.
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unit 628
It is a volcano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a segment of the crater wall broken out.
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unit 629
This gives sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes a fine sheltered harbour.
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unit 630
And that's all.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 631
Nothing lives there.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 632
The outside and the inside of the crater are too steep.
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unit 633
At one place, inside, is a patch of about a thousand coconut palms.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 634
And that's all, as I said, saving a few insects.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 635
No four-legged thing, even a rat, inhabits the place.
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unit 636
And it's funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts, not even a coconut crab.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 637
The only meat-food living was schools of mullet in the harbour--fattest, finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on.
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unit 638
"And the four of us landed on the little beach and set up housekeeping among the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite and square-face.
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unit 639
Why don't you laugh?
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unit 640
It's funny, I tell you.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 641
Try it some time.--Holland gin and straight coconut diet.
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unit 642
I've never been able to look a confectioner's window in the face since.
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unit 643
Now I'm not strong on religion like Chauncey Delarouse there, but I have some primitive ideas; and my concept of hell is an illimitable coconut plantation, stocked with cases of square-face and populated by ship-wrecked mariners.
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unit 644
Funny?
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unit 645
It must make the devil scream.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 646
"You know, straight coconut is what the agriculturists call an unbalanced ration.
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unit 647
It certainly unbalanced our digestions.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 648
We got so that whenever hunger took an extra bite at us, we took another drink of gin.
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unit 649
After a couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a squarehead sailor, got an idea.
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unit 650
It came when he was full of gin, and we, being in the same fix, just watched him shove a cap and short fuse into a stick of dynamite and stroll down toward the boat.
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unit 651
"It dawned on me that he was going to shoot fish if there were any about; but the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined there and hoped he'd have luck.
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unit 652
"About half an hour after he disappeared we heard the explosion.
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unit 653
But he didn't come back.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 654
We waited till the cool of sunset, and down on the beach found what had become of him.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 655
The boat was there all right, grounded by the prevailing breeze, but there was no Olaf.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 656
He would never have to eat coconut again.
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unit 657
We went back, shakier than ever, and cracked another square-face.
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unit 658
"The next day the cook announced that he would rather take his chance with dynamite than continue trying to exist on coconut, and that, though he didn't know anything about dynamite, he knew a sight too much about coconut.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 659
So we bit the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse, and picked him a good fire-stick, while he jolted up with a couple more stiff ones of gin.
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unit 660
"It was the same programme as the day before.
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unit 661
After a while we heard the explosion and at twilight went down to the boat, from which we scraped enough of the cook for a funeral.
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unit 662
"The carpenter and I stuck it out two days more, then we drew straws for it and it was his turn.
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unit 663
We parted with harsh words; for he wanted to take a square-face along to refresh himself by the way, while I was set against running any chance of wasting the gin.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 664
Besides, he had more than he could carry then, and he wobbled and staggered as he walked.
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unit 665
"Same thing, only there was a whole lot of him left for me to bury, because he'd prepared only half a stick.
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unit 666
I managed to last it out till next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I got sufficient courage to tackle the dynamite.
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unit 667
I used only a third of a stick-- you know, short fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of a safety match.
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unit 668
That's where I mended my predecessors' methods.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 669
Not using the match-head, they'd too-long fuses.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 670
Therefore, when they spotted a school of mullet; and lighted the fuse, they had to hold the dynamite till the fuse burned short before they threw it.
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unit 671
If they threw it too soon, it wouldn't go off the instant it hit the water, while the splash of it would frighten the mullet away.
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unit 672
Funny stuff dynamite.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 673
At any rate, I still maintain mine was the safer method.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 674
"I picked up a school of mullet before I'd been rowing five minutes.
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unit 675
Fine big fat ones they were, and I could smell them over the fire.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 676
When I stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick in the other, my knees were knocking together.
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unit 677
Maybe it was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was the result of all of them, but at any rate I was all of a shake.
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unit 678
Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick to the dynamite.
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unit 679
Then I did, heard the match-head splutter, and let her go.
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unit 680
"Now I don't know what happened to the others, but I know what I did.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 681
I got turned about.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 682
Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw the strawberry away and pop the stem into your mouth?
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unit 683
That's what I did.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 684
I threw the fire-stick into the water after the mullet and held on to the dynamite.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 685
And my arm went off with the stick when it went off.
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unit 686
.
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unit 687
.
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unit 688
. "
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unit 689
Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to mix himself a drink, but found it empty.
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unit 690
He stood up.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 691
"Heigh ho," he yawned, and started down the path to the river.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 692
In several minutes he was back.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 693
He mixed the due quantity of river slush with the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and stared with bitter moodiness into the fire.
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unit 694
"Yes, but .
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unit 695
.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 696
. "
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 697
Fatty suggested.
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 698
"What happened then?"
0 Translations, 0 Upvotes, Last Activity None
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unit 699
"Oh," sad Slim.
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unit 700
"Then the princess married me, of course."
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unit 701
"But you were the only person left, and there wasn't any princess .
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unit 702
.
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unit 703
. "
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unit 704
Whiskers cried out abruptly, and then let his voice trail away to embarrassed silence.
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unit 705
Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.
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unit 706
Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse looked at each other.
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unit 707
Quietly, in solemn silence, each with his one arm aided the one arm of the other in rolling and tying his bundle.
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unit 708
And in silence, bundles slung on shoulders, they went away out of the circle of firelight.
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unit 709
Not until they reached the top of the railroad embankment did they speak.
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unit 710
"No gentleman would have done it," said Whiskers.
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unit 711
"No gentleman would have done it," Fatty agreed.
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unit 712
Glen Ellen, California, September 26, 1916.
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The Princess

A fire burned cheerfully in the jungle camp, and beside the fire lolled a cheerful-seeming though horrible-appearing man. This was a hobo jungle, pitched in a thin strip of woods that lay between a railroad embankment and the bank of a river. But no hobo was the man. So deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that a proper hobo would not sit by the same fire with him. A gay-cat, who is an ignorant new-comer on the "Road," might sit with such as he, but only long enough to learn better. Even low down bindle-stiffs and stew-bums, after a once-over, would have passed this man by. A genuine hobo, a couple of punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared road- kids might have gone through his rags for any stray pennies or nickels and kicked him out into the darkness. Even an alki-stiff would have reckoned himself immeasurably superior.

For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an alki-stiff that has degenerated into a stew-bum, with so little self-respect that he will never "boil-up," and with so little pride that he will eat out of a garbage can. He was truly horrible-appearing. He might have been sixty years of age; he might have been ninety. His garments might have been discarded by a rag-picker. Beside him, an unrolled bundle showed itself as consisting of a ragged overcoat and containing an empty and smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and battered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly wrapped in brown paper and evidently begged from some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been run over in the street by a wagon-wheel, three greenish- cankered and decayed potatoes, and a sugar-bun with a mouthful bitten from it and rescued from the gutter, as was made patent by the gutter-filth that still encrusted it.

A prodigious growth of whiskers, greyish-dirty and untrimmed for years, sprouted from his face. This hirsute growth should have been white, but the season was summer and it had not been exposed to a rain-shower for some time. What was visible of the face looked as if at some period it had stopped a hand-grenade. The nose was so variously malformed in its healed brokenness that there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of a pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a robin's egg, tilted upward to the sky. One eye, of normal size, dim-brown and misty, bulged to the verge of popping out, and as if from senility wept copiously and continuously. The other eye, scarcely larger than a squirrel's and as uncannily bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had but one arm.

Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild degree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he lethargically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a twelve-ounce druggist bottle from his inside coat-pocket. The bottle was full of a colourless liquid, the contemplation of which made his little eye burn brighter and quickened his movements. Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down the short path to the river, and returned with the can filled with not-nice river water. In the condensed milk can he mixed one part of water with two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colourless fluid was druggist's alcohol, and as such is known in tramp-land as "alki."

Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the railroad embankment, alarmed him ere he could drink. Placing the can carefully upon the ground between his legs, he covered it with his hat and waited anxiously whatever impended.

Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy ragged as he. The new- comer, who might have been fifty, and might have been sixty, was grotesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was composed of bulges. His bulbous nose was the size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. In many places the seams of his garments had parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat of him. One arm only he sported, from the shoulder of which was suspended a small and tattered bundle with the mud caked dry on the outer covering from the last place he had pitched his doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the fire, and joined him.

"Hello, grandpa," the new-comer greeted, then paused to stare at the other's flaring, sky-open nostril. "Say, Whiskers, how'd ye keep the night dew out of that nose o' yourn?"

Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his throat and spat into the fire in token that he was not pleased by the question.

"For the love of Mike," the fat man chuckled, "if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an umbrella you'd sure drown, wouldn't you?"

"Can it, Fatty, can it," Whiskers muttered wearily. "They ain't nothin' new in that line of chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me."

"But you can still drink, I hope"; Fatty at the same time mollified and invited, with his one hand deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his bundle.

From within the bundle he brought to light a twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Footsteps coming down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid the bottle under his hat on the ground between his legs.

But the next comer proved to be not merely one of their own ilk, but likewise to have only one arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that greetings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge-boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a dirty death's head, he was as repellent a nightmare of old age as ever Dore imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close to his hand if need for action should arise. Fatty duplicated the performance.

Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily embarrassed, while the unblinking eyes of the terrible one bored into them, now into one, now into another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their preparedness.

"Huh!" sneered the terrible one, with such dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on their cave-man's weapons.

"Huh!" the other repeated, reaching his one talon into his side coat pocket with swift definiteness. "A hell of a chance you two cheap bums 'd have with me."

The talon emerged, clutching ready for action a six-pound iron quoit.

"We ain't lookin' for trouble, Slim," Fatty quavered.

"Who in hell are you to call me 'Slim'?" came the snarling answer.

"Me? I'm just Fatty, an' seein' 's I never seen you before--"

"An' I suppose that's Whiskers, there, with the gay an' festive lamp tan-going into his eyebrow an' the God-forgive-us nose joy- riding all over his mug?"

"It'll do, it'll do," Whiskers muttered uncomfortably. "One monica's as good as another, I find, at my time of life. And everybody hands it out to me anyway. And I need an umbrella when it rains to keep from getting drowned, an' all the rest of it."

"I ain't used to company--don't like it," Slim growled. "So if you guys want to stick around, mind your step, that's all, mind your step."

He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self-evidently shot from the gutter, and prepared to put it in his mouth to chew. Then he changed his mind, glared at his companions savagely, and unrolled his bundle. Appeared in his hand a druggist's bottle of alki.

"Well," he snarled, "I suppose I gotta give you cheap skates a drink when I ain't got more'n enough for a good petrification for myself."

Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent in his withered face as he beheld the others proudly lift their hats and exhibit their own supplies.

"Here's some water for the mixin's," Whiskers said, proffering his tomato-can of river slush. "Stockyards just above," he added apologetically. "But they say--"

"Huh!" Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. "I've drunk worse'n stockyards in my time."

Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their solitary hands, the three things that had once been men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed shame as if at self-exposure.

Whiskers was the first to brazen it.

"I've sat in at many a finer drinking," he bragged.

"With the pewter," Slim sneered.

"With the silver," Whiskers corrected.

Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on Fatty.

Fatty nodded.

"Beneath the salt," said Slim.

"Above it," came Fatty's correction. "I was born above it, and I've never travelled second class. First or steerage, but no intermediate in mine."

"Yourself?" Whiskers queried of Slim.

"In broken glass to the Queen, God bless her," Slim answered, solemnly, without snarl or sneer.

"In the pantry?" Fatty insinuated.

Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and Whiskers and Fatty for their rocks.

"Now don't let's get feverish," Fatty said, dropping his own weapon. "We aren't scum. We're gentlemen. Let's drink like gentlemen."

"Let it be a real drinking," Whiskers approved.

"Let's get petrified," Slim agreed. "Many a distillery's flowed under the bridge since we were gentlemen; but let's forget the long road we've travelled since, and hit our doss in the good old fashion in which every gentleman went to bed when we were young."

"My father done it--did it," Fatty concurred and corrected, as old recollections exploded long-sealed brain-cells of connotation and correct usage.

The other two nodded a descent from similar fathers, and elevated their tin cans of alcohol.

By the time each had finished his own bottle and from his rags fished forth a second one, their brains were well-mellowed and a- glow, although they had not got around to telling their real names. But their English had improved. They spoke it correctly, while the argo of tramp-land ceased from their lips.

"It's my constitution," Whiskers was explaining. "Very few men could go through what I have and live to tell the tale. And I never took any care of myself. If what the moralists and the physiologists say were true, I'd have been dead long ago. And it's the same with you two. Look at us, at our advanced years, carousing as the young ones don't dare, sleeping out in the open on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or rheumatism that would put half the young ones on their backs in hospital."

He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty took up the tale.

"And we've had our fun," he boasted, "and speaking of sweethearts and all," he cribbed from Kipling, "'We've rogued and we've ranged--'"

"'In our time,'" Slim completed the crib for him.

"I should say so, I should say so," Fatty confirmed. "And been loved by princesses--at least I have."

"Go on and tell us about it," Whiskers urged. "The night's young, and why shouldn't we remember back to the roofs of kings?"

Nothing loth, Fatty cleared his throat for the recital and cast about in his mind for the best way to begin.

"It must be known that I came of good family. Percival Delaney, let us say, yes, let us say Percival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford once upon a time--not for scholarship, I am frank to admit; but the gay young dogs of that day, if any be yet alive, would remember him--"

"My people came over with the Conqueror," Whiskers interrupted, extending his hand to Fatty's in acknowledgment of the introduction.

"What name?" Fatty queried. "I did not seem quite to catch it."

"Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The name will serve as well as any."

Both completed the handshake and glanced to Slim.

"Oh, well, while we're about it . . . " Fatty urged.

"Bruce Cadogan Cavendish," Slim growled morosely. "Go on, Percival, with your princesses and the roofs of kings."

"Oh, I was a rare young devil," Percival obliged, "after I played ducks and drakes at home and sported out over the world. And I was some figure of a man before I lost my shape--polo, steeple-chasing, boxing. I won medals at buckjumping in Australia, and I held more than several swimming records from the quarter of a mile up. Women turned their heads to look when I went by. The women! God bless them!"

And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque of manhood, put his bulgy hand to his puffed lips and kissed audibly into the starry vault of the sky.

"And the Princess!" he resumed, with another kiss to the stars. "She was as fine a figure of a woman as I was a man, as high- spirited and courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. Lord, Lord, in the water she was a mermaid, a sea-goddess. And when it came to blood, beside her I was parvenu. Her royal line traced back into the mists of antiquity.

"She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. Tawny golden was she, with golden-brown eyes, and her hair that fell to her knees was blue-black and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency that gives to woman's hair its charm. Oh, there were no kinks in it, any more than were there kinks in the hair of her entire genealogy. For she was Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, royal Polynesian."

Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory of her, and Slim, alias Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, took advantage to interject:

"Huh! Maybe you didn't shine in scholarship, but at least you gleaned a vocabulary out of Oxford."

"And in the South Seas garnered a better vocabulary from the lexicon of Love," Percival was quick on the uptake.

"It was the island of Talofa," he went on, "meaning love, the Isle of Love, and it was her island. Her father, the king, an old man, sat on his mats with paralysed knees and drank squareface gin all day and most of the night, out of grief, sheer grief. She, my princess, was the only issue, her brother having been lost in their double canoe in a hurricane while coming up from a voyage to Samoa. And among the Polynesians the royal women have equal right with the men to rule. In fact, they trace their genealogies always by the female line."

To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt affirmation.

"Ah," said Percival, "I perceive you both know the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expenditure of verbiage on my part, I am assured that you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the Isle of Love."

He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his condensed milk can a man-size drink of druggist's alcohol, and to her again kissed her hand.

"But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near to me but never near enough. When my arm went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not there. I knew, as never before, nor since, the thousand dear and delightful anguishes of love frustrated but ever resilient and beckoned on by the very goddess of love."

"Some vocabulary," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish muttered in aside to Chauncey Delarouse. But Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. He kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held warmly on.

"No fond agonies of rapture deferred that were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover's inferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. Ah! Those swooning tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant surf a langourous murmur as from some vast sea shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover's ardency.

"It was by my wrestling with the champions of Talofa that I first interested her. It was by my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. And it was by a certain swimming deed that I won from her more than coquettish smiles and shy timidities of feigned retreat.

"We were squidding that day, out on the reef--you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies of the coral where squid might be lairing. With the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, perhaps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until he closed his tentacles around fist, stick and arm.--Then you had him, and came to the surface with him, and hit him in the head which is in the centre of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. . . . And to think I used to do that!"

Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the mighty picture of his youth.

"Why, I've pulled out a squid with tentacles eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of water. I could stay down four minutes. I've gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hundred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor. And I could back-dive with a once- over and go in feet-first from eighty feet above the surface--"

"Quit it, delete it, cease it," Chauncey Delarouse admonished testily. "Tell of the Princess. That's what makes old blood leap again. Almost can I see her. Was she wonderful?"

Percival Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation.

"I have said she was a mermaid. She was. I know she swam thirty- six hours before being rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet and bring up pearl shell in each hand. She was wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sublime. I have said she was a sea-goddess. She was. Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have made the wonder of her body immortal!

"And that day, out for squid on the reef, I was almost sick for her. Mad--I know I was mad for her. We would step over the side from the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into the delicious depths of cool and colour, and she would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes tantalize me to further madness. And at last, down, far down, I lost myself and reached for her. She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I saw the laughter on her face as she fled. She fled deeper, and I knew I had her for I was between her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand of the bottom she made a churning with her squid stick. It was the old trick to escape a shark. And she worked it on me, rolling the water so that I could not see her. And when I came up, she was there ahead of me, clinging to the side of the canoe and laughing.

"Almost I would not be denied. But not for nothing was she a princess. She rested her hand on my arm and compelled me to listen. We should play a game, she said, enter into a competition for which should get the more squid, the biggest squid, and the smallest squid. Since the wagers were kisses, you can well imagine I went down on the first next dive with soul aflame.

"I got no squid. Never again in all my life have I dived for squid. Perhaps we were five fathoms down and exploring the face of the reefwall for lurking places of our prey, when it happened. I had found a likely lair and just proved it empty, when I felt or sensed the nearness of something inimical. I turned. There it was, alongside of me, and no mere fish-shark. Fully a dozen feet in length, with the unmistakable phosphorescent cat's eye gleaming like a drowning star, I knew it for what it was, a tiger shark.

"Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral fissure with her squid stick, was the Princess, and the tiger shark was heading directly for her. My totality of thought was precipitated to consciousness in a single all-embracing flash. The man-eater must be deflected from her, and what was I, except a mad lover who would gladly fight and die, or more gladly fight and live, for his beloved? Remember, she was the woman wonderful, and I was aflame for her.

"Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side of the shark, much as one would attract a passing acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And the man-eater turned on me. You know the South Seas, and you know that the tiger shark, like the bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail. The combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on--if by combat may be named such a one-sided struggle.

"The Princess unaware, caught her squid and rose to the surface. The man-eater rushed me. I fended him off with both hands on his nose above his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he backed me against the sharp coral. The scars are there to this day. Whenever I tried to rise, he rushed me, and I could not remain down there indefinitely without air. Whenever he rushed me, I fended him off with my hands on his nose. And I would have escaped unharmed, except for the slip of my right hand. Into his mouth it went to the elbow. His jaws closed, just below the elbow. You know how a shark's teeth are. Once in they cannot be released. They must go through to complete the bite, but they cannot go through heavy bone. So, from just below the elbow he stripped the bone clean to the articulation of the wrist-joint, where his teeth met and my good right hand became his for an appetizer.

"But while he was doing this, I drove the thumb of my left hand, to the hilt into his eye-orifice and popped out his eye. This did not stop him. The meat had maddened him. He pursued the gushing stump of my wrist. Half a dozen times I fended with my intact arm. Then he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, and stripped the meat off the bone from the shoulder down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met and he was free of his second mouthful of me. But, at the same time, with my good arm, I thumbed out his remaining eye."

Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere he resumed.

"From above, those in the canoe had beheld the entire happening and were loud in praise of my deed. To this day they still sing the song of me, and tell the tale of me. And the Princess." His pause was brief but significant. "The Princess married me. . . . Oh, well-a-day and lack-a-day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsyturviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and the polished heel descending a French gunboat, a conquered island kingdom of Oceania, to-day ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial gendarme, and . . . "

He completed the sentence and the tale by burying his face in the down-tilted mouth of the condensed milk can and by gurgling the corrosive drink down his throat in thirsty gulps.

After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delarouse, otherwise Whiskers, took up the tale.

"Far be it from me to boast of no matter what place of birth I have descended from to sit here by this fire with such as . . . as chance along. I may say, however, that I, too, was once a considerable figure of a man. I may add that it was horses, plus parents too indulgent, that exiled me out over the world. I may still wonder to query: 'Are Dover's cliffs still white?'"

"Huh!" Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered. "Next you'll be asking: 'How fares the old Lord Warden?'"

"And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a constitution that was iron," Whiskers hurried on. "Here I am with my three score and ten behind me, and back on that long road have I buried many a youngster that was as rare and devilish as I, but who could not stand the pace. I knew the worst too young. And now I know the worst too old. But there was a time, alas all too short, when I knew, the best.

"I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my heart. She was truly a princess, Polynesian, a thousand miles and more away to the eastward and the south from Delaney's Isle of Love. The natives of all around that part of the South Seas called it the Jolly Island. Their own name, the name of the people who dwelt thereon, translates delicately and justly into 'The Island of Tranquil Laughter.' On the chart you will find the erroneous name given to it by the old navigators to be Manatomana. The seafaring gentry the round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden. And the missionaries for a time called it God's Witness--so great had been their success at converting the inhabitants. As for me, it was, and ever shall be, Paradise.

"It was MY Paradise, for it was there my Princess lived. John Asibeli Tungi was king. He was full-blooded native, descended out of the oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back to Manua which was the primeval sea home of the race. Also was he known as John the Apostate. He lived a long life and apostasized frequently. First converted by the Catholics, he threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned out the native priests, executed a few of the recalcitrant ones, and sent all his subjects to church.

"Next he fell for the traders, who developed in him a champagne thirst, and he shipped off the Catholic priests to New Zealand. The great majority of his subjects always followed his lead, and, having no religion at all, ensued the time of the Great Licentiousness, when by all South Seas missionaries his island, in sermons, was spoken of as Babylon.

"But the traders ruined his digestion with too much champagne, and after several years he fell for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent his people to church, and cleaned up the beach and the trading crowd so spick and span that he would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of doors on Sunday, and, fined one of the chief traders one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his schooner's decks on the Sabbath morn.

"That was the time of the Blue Laws, but perhaps it was too rigorous for King John. Off he packed the Methodists, one fine day, exiled several hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking to Methodism, and, of all things, invented a religion of his own, with himself the figure-head of worship. In this he was aided and abetted by a renegade Fijian. This lasted five years. Maybe he grew tired of being God, or maybe it was because the Fijian decamped with the six thousand pounds in the royal treasury; but at any rate the Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his entire kingdom went Wesleyan. The pioneer Wesleyan missionary he actually made prime minister, and what he did to the trading crowd was a caution. Why, in the end, King John's kingdom was blacklisted and boycotted by the traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the people went bankrupt, and King John couldn't borrow a shilling from his most powerful chief.

"By this time he was getting old, and philosophic, and tolerant, and spiritually atavistic. He fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans, called back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, held a general love-feast, took the lid off, proclaimed religious liberty and high tariff, and as for himself went back to the worship of his ancestors, dug up the idols, reinstated a few octogenarian priests, and observed the tabus. All of which was lovely for the traders, and prosperity reigned. Of course, most of his subjects followed him back into heathen worship. Yet quite a sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans remained true to their beliefs and managed to maintain a few squalid, one-horse churches. But King John didn't mind, any more than did he the high times of the traders along the beach. Everything went, so long as the taxes were paid. Even when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to become a Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet- spirited, club-footed Baptist missionary, King John did not object. All he insisted on was that these wandering religions should be self-supporting and not feed a pennyworth's out of the royal coffers.

"And now the threads of my recital draw together in the paragon of female exquisiteness--my Princess."

Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the ground his half-full condensed milk can with which he had been absently toying, and kissed the fingers of his one hand audibly aloft.

"She was the daughter of Queen Mamare. She was the woman wonderful. Unlike the Diana type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal. She WAS ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and modest as a violet, as fragile-slender as a lily, and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender, were as asphodels on the sward of heaven. She was all flower, and fire, and dew. Hers was the sweetness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of the dove. And she was all of good as well as all of beauty, devout in her belief in her mother's worship, which was the worship introduced by Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. But make no mistake. She was no mere sweet spirit ripe for the bosom of Abraham. All of exquisite deliciousness of woman was she. She was woman, all woman, to the last sensitive quivering atom of her -

"And I? I was a wastrel of the beach. The wildest was not so wild as I, the keenest not so keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd. It was esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. I was the only living man, white, brown, or black, who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark. And on a black night I have done it under reefs in a gale of wind. Well, anyway, I had a bad reputation on a beach where there were no good reputations. I was reckless, dangerous, stopped at nothing in fight or frolic; and the trading captains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies from the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and drink me under the table. I remember one, a calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides. It was a great drinking. He died of it, and we laded him aboard ship, pickled in a cask of trade rum, and sent him back to his own place. A sample, a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on the beach of Manatomana.

"And of all unthinkable things, what did I up and do, one day, but look upon the Princess to find her good and to fall in love with her. It was the real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and after that I got only madder. I reformed. Think of that! Think of what a slip of a woman can do to a busy, roving man!--By the Lord Harry, it's true. I reformed. I went to church. Hear me! I became converted. I cleared my soul before God and kept my hands-- I had two then--off the ribald crew of the beach when it laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to know what was my game.

"I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in passion and sincerity to a religious experience that has made me tolerant of all religion ever since. I discharged my best captain for immorality. So did I my cook, and a better never boiled water in Manatomana. For the same reason I discharged my chief clerk. And for the first time in the history of trading my schooners to the westward carried Bibles in their stock. I built a little anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined street squarely alongside the little house occupied by Ebenezer Naismith. And I made him my pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey pot of sweetnesses and goodnesses. And he was a man, through and through a man. And he died long after like a man, which I would like to tell you about, were the tale of it not so deservedly long.

"It was the Princess, more than the missionary, who was responsible for my expressing my faith in works, and especially in that crowning work, the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother's church.

"'Our poor church,' she said to me, one night after prayer-meeting. I had been converted only a fortnight. 'It is so small its congregation can never grow. And the roof leaks. And King John, my hard-hearted father, will not contribute a penny. Yet he has a big balance in the treasury. And Manatomana is not poor. Much money is made and squandered, I know. I hear the gossip of the wild ways of the beach. Less than a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling at cards, than the cost of the upkeep of our poor church for a year.'

"And I told her it was true, but that it was before I had seen the light. (I'd had an infernal run of bad luck.) I told her I had not tasted liquor since, nor turned a card. I told her that the roof would be repaired at once, by Christian carpenters selected by her from the congregation. But she was filled with the thought of a great revival that Ebenezer Naismith could preach--she was a dear saint--and she spoke of a great church, saying:

"'You are rich. You have many schooners, and traders in far islands, and I have heard of a great contract you have signed to recruit labour for the German plantations of Upolu. They say, next to Sweitzer, you are the richest trader here. I should love to see some use of all this money placed to the glory of God. It would be a noble thing to do, and I should be proud to know the man who would do it.'

"I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would preach the revival, and that I would build a church great enough in which to house it.

"'As big as the Catholic church?' she asked.

"This was the ruined cathedral, built at the time when the entire population was converted, and it was a large order; but I was afire with love, and I told her that the church I would build would be even bigger.

"'But it will take money,' I explained. 'And it takes time to make money.'

"'You have much,' she said. 'Some say you have more money than my father, the King.

"'I have more credit,' I explained. 'But you do not understand money. It takes money to have credit. So, with the money I have, and the credit I have, I will work to make more money and credit, and the church shall be built.'

"Work! I was a surprise to myself. It is an amazement, the amount of time a man finds on his hands after he's given up carousing, and gambling, and all the time-eating diversions of the beach. And I didn't waste a second of all my new-found time. Instead I worked it overtime. I did the work of half a dozen men. I became a driver. My captains made faster runs than ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my supercargoes, who saw to it that my schooners did not loaf and dawdle along the way. And I saw to it that my supercargoes did see to it.

"And good! By the Lord Harry I was so good it hurt. My conscience got so expansive and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to carry it around with me. Why, I even went back over my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid I'd jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years before. And I compounded the interest as well.

"Work! I planted sugar cane--the first commercial planting on Manatomana. I ran in cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the blackbirds putting in cane. And I sent a schooner clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar mill and a German who said he knew the field-end of cane. And he did, and he charged me three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took hold of the mill-end. I installed the mill myself, with the help of several mechanics I brought up from Queensland.

"Of course there was a rival. His name was Motomoe. He was the very highest chief blood next to King John's. He was full native, a strapping, handsome man, with a glowering way of showing his dislikes. He certainly glowered at me when I began hanging around the palace. He went back in my history and circulated the blackest tales about me. The worst of it was that most of them were true. He even made a voyage to Apia to find things out--as if he couldn't find a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana! And he sneered at my failing for religion, and at my going to prayer- meeting, and, most of all, at my sugar-planting. He challenged me to fight, and I kept off of him. He threatened me, and I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have me knocked on the head. You see, he wanted the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted her more.

"She used to play the piano. So did I, once. But I never let her know after I'd heard her play the first time. And she thought her playing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three tum-tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now I'll tell you something funnier. Her playing WAS wonderful to me. The gates of heaven opened to me when she played. I can see myself now, worn out and dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and I loved her for it. It kind of brought her within my human reach. Why, when she played her one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh heaven of bliss. My weariness fell from me. I loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, clean as my love for God. And do you know, into my fond lover's fancy continually intruded the thought that God in most ways must look like her.

"--That's right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, sneer as you like. But I tell you that's love that I've been describing. That's all. It's love. It's the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen to a man. And I know what I'm talking about. It happened to me."

Whiskers, his beady squirrel's eye glittering from out his ruined eyebrow like a live coal in a jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a sedative draught from his condensed milk can and to mix another.

"The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious mat of face hair with the back of his hand. "It matured in sixteen months in that climate, and I was ready, just ready and no more, with the mill for the grinding. Naturally, it did not all mature at once, but I had planted in such succession that I could grind for nine months steadily, while more was being planted and the ratoons were springing up.

"I had my troubles the first several days. If it wasn't one thing the matter with the mill, it was another. On the fourth day, Ferguson, my engineer, had to shut down several hours in order to remedy his own troubles. I was bothered by the feeder. After having the niggers (who had been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out to join the cane-cutting squads. So I was all alone at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, just as I discovered what was the matter with the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up.

"He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin puttees, and all the rest of the fashionable get-up out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like a navvy. And, the rollers now white from the lime, I'd just seen what was wrong. The rollers were not in plumb. One side crushed the cane well, but the other side was too open. I shoved my fingers in on that side. The big, toothed cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers. And yet, suddenly, they did. With the grip of ten thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn in, and pulped to--well, just pulp. And, like a slick of cane, I had started on my way. There was no stopping me. Ten thousand horses could not have pulled me back. There was nothing to stop me. Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, down to the toes of me, I was doomed to feed through.

"It did hurt. It hurt so much it did not hurt me at all. Quite detached, almost may I say, I looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle by knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevitably feeding in. O engineer hoist by thine own petard! O sugar-maker crushed by thine own cane-crusher!

"Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and the sneer was chased from his face by an expression of solicitude. Then the beauty of the situation dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned. No, I didn't expect anything of him. Hadn't he tried to knock me on the head? What could he do anyway? He didn't know anything about engines.

"I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson to shut off the engine, but the roar of the machinery drowned my voice. And there I stood, up to the elbow and feeding right on in. Yes, it did hurt. There were some astonishing twinges when special nerves were shredded and dragged out by the roots. But I remember that I was surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse.

"Motomoe made a movement that attracted my attention. At the same time he growled out loud, as if he hated himself, 'I'm a fool.' What he had done was to pick up a cane-knife--you know the kind, as big as a machete and as heavy. And I was grateful to him in advance for putting me out of my misery. There wasn't any sense in slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and already my arm was pulped half way from elbow to shoulder, and the pulping was going right on. So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.

"'Get your head out of the way, you idiot!' he barked at me.

"And then I understood and obeyed. I was a big man, and he took two hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder and dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.

"Yes, the sugar paid--enormously; and I built for the Princess the church of her saintly dream, and . . . she married me."

He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.

"Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien flag that floats over the bungalow of the British Government House. . . "

Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympathetically drank out of his own small can. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with implacable bitterness. He was a man who preferred to drink by himself. Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played twitches of mockery that caught Fatty's eye. And Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was within reach, challenged.

"Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish? It's your turn."

The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty's until he physically betrayed uncomfortableness.

"I've lived a hard life," Slim grated harshly. "What do I know about love passages?"

"No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them," Fatty wheedled.

"And what of it?" Slim snarled. "It's no reason for a gentleman to boast of amorous triumphs."

"Oh, go on, be a good fellow," Fatty urged. "The night's still young. We've still some drink left. Delarouse and I have contributed our share. It isn't often that three real ones like us get together for a telling. Surely you've got at least one adventure in love you aren't ashamed to tell about--"

Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to debate whether or not he should brain the other. He sighed, and put back the quoit.

"Very well, if you will have it," he surrendered with manifest reluctance. "Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution. And right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the both of you down when you were at your prime. Like you two, my beginnings were far distant and different. That I am marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood there is no discussion . . . unless either of you care to discuss the matter now . . . "

His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit. Neither of his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his menace.

"It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. "But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless. I was running blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili--"

"It was you who cleaned out the entire population of--" Fatty exploded, ere he could check his speech.

The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and flashed back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.

"Proceed," Fatty sighed. "I . . . I have quite forgotten what I was going to say."

"Beastly funny country over that way," the narrator drawled with perfect casualness. "You've read this Sea Wolf stuff--"

"You weren't the Sea Wolf," Whiskers broke in with involuntary positiveness.

"No, sir," was the snarling answer. "The Sea Wolf's dead, isn't he? And I'm still alive, aren't I?"

"Of course, of course," Whiskers conceded. "He suffocated head- first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back."

"As I was saying--and I don't like interruptions," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, "it's a beastly funny country over that way. I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn't at all, for the Solomons are high islands. Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred. The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in Taka-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.

"It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory- nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig. To the westward it was fierce--funny little black kinky- heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling over with wealth--"

"Jack-pots?" Fatty queried. At sight of an irritable movement, he added: "You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you."

"They're all head-hunters. Heads are valuable, especially a white man's head. They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with them. Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes. Whoever brings in a white man's head takes the pot. If there aren't openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous proportions. Beastly funny, isn't it?

"I know. Didn't a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? And didn't I win a pot myself? It was this way. We were lying at Lango-lui at the time. I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. He cut the dead mate's head off and sneaked ashore in the might, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him. He opened the pot with the mate's head, and got it, too. Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot."

"How big was the pot?" Whiskers asked. "I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid."

"To commence with," Slim answered, "there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom. That was two hundred dollars right there. There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself. And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. I split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper. Johnny never complained. He'd never had so much wealth all at one time in his life. Besides, I gave him a couple of the mate's old shirts. And I fancy the mate's head is still there decorating the canoe- house."

"Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian," Whiskers observed.

"But a lucrative burial," Slim retorted. "I had to feed the rest of the mate over-side to the sharks for nothing. Think of feeding an eight-hundred-dollar head along with it. It would have been criminal waste and stark lunacy.

"Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the westward. And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki- Tiki, except that I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour, and for my manner of collecting them had two British ships of war combing the Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar.

"Typhoon season. We caught it. The Merry Mist was my schooner's name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon. I never saw such seas. They pounded that stout craft to pieces, literally so. The sticks were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst had passed, the covering boards began to go. We just managed to repair what was left of one boat and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went down barely enough to get away. And we outfitted that boat in a hurry. The carpenter and I were the last, and we had to jump for it as he went down. There were only four of us--"

"Lost all the niggers?" Whiskers inquired.

"Some of them swam for some time," Slim replied. "But I don't fancy they made the land. We were ten days' in doing it. And we had a spanking breeze most of the way. And what do you think we had in the boat with us? Cases of square-face gin and cases of dynamite. Funny, wasn't it? Well, it got funnier later on. Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a little salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit--enough to keep us alive to Tagalag.

"Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island I've ever beheld. It shows up out of the sea so as you can make its fall twenty miles off. It is a volcano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a segment of the crater wall broken out. This gives sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes a fine sheltered harbour. And that's all. Nothing lives there. The outside and the inside of the crater are too steep. At one place, inside, is a patch of about a thousand coconut palms. And that's all, as I said, saving a few insects. No four-legged thing, even a rat, inhabits the place. And it's funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts, not even a coconut crab. The only meat-food living was schools of mullet in the harbour--fattest, finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on.

"And the four of us landed on the little beach and set up housekeeping among the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite and square-face. Why don't you laugh? It's funny, I tell you. Try it some time.--Holland gin and straight coconut diet. I've never been able to look a confectioner's window in the face since. Now I'm not strong on religion like Chauncey Delarouse there, but I have some primitive ideas; and my concept of hell is an illimitable coconut plantation, stocked with cases of square-face and populated by ship-wrecked mariners. Funny? It must make the devil scream.

"You know, straight coconut is what the agriculturists call an unbalanced ration. It certainly unbalanced our digestions. We got so that whenever hunger took an extra bite at us, we took another drink of gin. After a couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a squarehead sailor, got an idea. It came when he was full of gin, and we, being in the same fix, just watched him shove a cap and short fuse into a stick of dynamite and stroll down toward the boat.

"It dawned on me that he was going to shoot fish if there were any about; but the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined there and hoped he'd have luck.

"About half an hour after he disappeared we heard the explosion. But he didn't come back. We waited till the cool of sunset, and down on the beach found what had become of him. The boat was there all right, grounded by the prevailing breeze, but there was no Olaf. He would never have to eat coconut again. We went back, shakier than ever, and cracked another square-face.

"The next day the cook announced that he would rather take his chance with dynamite than continue trying to exist on coconut, and that, though he didn't know anything about dynamite, he knew a sight too much about coconut. So we bit the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse, and picked him a good fire-stick, while he jolted up with a couple more stiff ones of gin.

"It was the same programme as the day before. After a while we heard the explosion and at twilight went down to the boat, from which we scraped enough of the cook for a funeral.

"The carpenter and I stuck it out two days more, then we drew straws for it and it was his turn. We parted with harsh words; for he wanted to take a square-face along to refresh himself by the way, while I was set against running any chance of wasting the gin. Besides, he had more than he could carry then, and he wobbled and staggered as he walked.

"Same thing, only there was a whole lot of him left for me to bury, because he'd prepared only half a stick. I managed to last it out till next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I got sufficient courage to tackle the dynamite. I used only a third of a stick-- you know, short fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of a safety match. That's where I mended my predecessors' methods. Not using the match-head, they'd too-long fuses. Therefore, when they spotted a school of mullet; and lighted the fuse, they had to hold the dynamite till the fuse burned short before they threw it. If they threw it too soon, it wouldn't go off the instant it hit the water, while the splash of it would frighten the mullet away. Funny stuff dynamite. At any rate, I still maintain mine was the safer method.

"I picked up a school of mullet before I'd been rowing five minutes. Fine big fat ones they were, and I could smell them over the fire. When I stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick in the other, my knees were knocking together. Maybe it was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was the result of all of them, but at any rate I was all of a shake. Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick to the dynamite. Then I did, heard the match-head splutter, and let her go.

"Now I don't know what happened to the others, but I know what I did. I got turned about. Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw the strawberry away and pop the stem into your mouth? That's what I did. I threw the fire-stick into the water after the mullet and held on to the dynamite. And my arm went off with the stick when it went off. . . . "

Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to mix himself a drink, but found it empty. He stood up.

"Heigh ho," he yawned, and started down the path to the river.

In several minutes he was back. He mixed the due quantity of river slush with the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and stared with bitter moodiness into the fire.

"Yes, but . . . " Fatty suggested. "What happened then?"

"Oh," sad Slim. "Then the princess married me, of course."

"But you were the only person left, and there wasn't any princess . . . " Whiskers cried out abruptly, and then let his voice trail away to embarrassed silence.

Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.

Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse looked at each other. Quietly, in solemn silence, each with his one arm aided the one arm of the other in rolling and tying his bundle. And in silence, bundles slung on shoulders, they went away out of the circle of firelight. Not until they reached the top of the railroad embankment did they speak.

"No gentleman would have done it," said Whiskers.

"No gentleman would have done it," Fatty agreed.

Glen Ellen, California,

September 26, 1916.