Tulifau but to put a good face on his
favourite’s disgrace, and his
mountainous fat lay back on the
mats and shook in a gale of
Gargantuan laughter.
When Sepeli dropped both pig and
Chancellor, a talking man from the
windward coast picked up the
carcass. Cornelius was on his feet
and running, when the pig caught
him on the legs and tripped him. The people and the army, with shouts and
laughter, joined in the sport. Twist and dodge as he would, everywhere the
ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer was met or overtaken by the flying pig.
He scuttled like a frightened rabbit in and out among the avocados and the
palms. No hand was laid upon him, and his tormentors made way before
him, but ever they pursued, and ever the pig flew as fast as hands could
pick it up.
As the chase died away down the Broom Road, Grief led the traders to the
royal treasury, and the day was well over ere the last Fitu-Ivan bank note
had been redeemed with coin.
VIII
Through the mellow cool of twilight a man paddled out from a clump of
jungle to the Cantani. It was a leaky and abandoned dugout, and he
paddled slowly, desisting from time to time in order to bale. The Kanaka
sailors giggled gleefully as he came alongside and painfully drew himself
over the rail. He was bedraggled and filthy, and seemed half- dazed.
“Could I speak a word with you, Mr. Grief?” he asked sadly and humbly.
A SON OF THE SUN
125
“Sit to leeward and farther away,” Grief answered. “A little farther away.
That’s better.”
Cornelius sat down on the rail and held his head in both his hands.
“‘Tis right,” he said. “I’m as fragrant as a recent battlefield. My head aches
to burstin’. My neck is fair broken. The teeth are loose in my jaws. There’s
nests of hornets buzzin’ in my ears. My medulla oblongata is dislocated.
I’ve been through earthquake and pestilence, and the heavens have rained
pigs.” He paused with a sigh that ended in a groan. “‘Tis a vision of
terrible death. One that the poets never dreamed. To be eaten by rats, or
boiled in oil, or pulled apart by wild horses—that would be unpleasant.
But to be beaten to death with a dead pig!” He shuddered at the awfulness
of it. “Sure it transcends the human imagination.”
Captain Boig sniffed audibly, moved his canvas chair farther to windward,
and sat down again.
“I hear you’re runnin’ over to Yap, Mr. Grief,” Cornelius went on. “An’
two things I’m wantin’ to beg of you: a passage an’ the nip of the old
smoky I refused the night you landed.”
Grief clapped his hands for the black steward and ordered soap and
towels.
“Go for’ard, Cornelius, and take a scrub first,” he said. “The boy will bring
you a pair of dungarees and a shirt. And by the way, before you go, how
was it we found more coin in the treasury than paper you had issued?”
“‘Twas the stake of my own I’d brought with me for the adventure.”
“We’ve decided to charge the demurrage and other expenses and loss to
Tui Tulifau,” Grief said. “So the balance we found will be turned over to
you. But ten shillings must be deducted.”
“For what?”
“Do you think dead pigs grow on trees? The sum of ten shillings for that
pig is entered in the accounts.”
Cornelius bowed his assent with a shudder.
“Sure it’s grateful I am it wasn’t a fifteen-shilling pig or a twenty- shilling
one.”
A SON OF THE SUN
126
The Pearls of Parlay
(First published in The Saturday Evening Post, v. 184, October 14, 1911: 9-
11, 64-66)
I
The Kanaka helmsman put the wheel down, and the Malahini slipped into
the eye of the wind and righted to an even keel. Her headsails emptied,
there was a rat-tat of reef-points and quick shifting of boom- tackles, and
she was heeled over and filled away on the other tack. Though it was early
morning and the wind brisk, the five white men who lounged on the poopdeck
were scantily clad. David Grief, and his guest, Gregory Mulhall, an
Englishman, were still in pajamas, their naked feet thrust into Chinese
slippers. The captain and mate were in thin undershirts and unstarched
duck pants, while the supercargo still held in his hands the undershirt he
was reluctant to put on. The sweat stood out on his forehead, and he
seemed to thrust his bare chest thirstily into the wind that did not cool.
“Pretty muggy, for a breeze like this,” he complained.
“And what’s it doing around in the west? That’s what I want to know,” was
Grief’s contribution to the general plaint.
“It won’t last, and it ain’t been there long,” said Hermann, the Holland
mate. “She is been chop around all night—five minutes here, ten minutes
there, one hour somewhere other quarter.”
“Something makin’, something makin’,” Captain Warfield croaked,
spreading his bushy beard with the fingers of both hands and shoving the
thatch of his chin into the breeze in a vain search for coolness. “Weather’s
been crazy for a fortnight. Haven’t had the proper trades in three weeks.
Everything’s mixed up. Barometer was pumping at sunset last night, and
it’s pumping now, though the weather sharps say it don’t mean anything.
All the same, I’ve got a prejudice against seeing it pump. Gets on my
nerves, sort of, you know. She was pumping that way the time we lost the
Lancaster. I was only an apprentice, but I can remember that well enough.
Brand new, four-masted steel ship; first voyage; broke the old man’s heart.
He’d been forty years in the company. Just faded way and died the next
year.”
A SON OF THE SUN
127
Despite the wind and the early hour, the heat was suffocating. The wind
whispered coolness, but did not deliver coolness. It might have blown off
the Sahara, save for the extreme humidity with which it was laden. There
was no fog nor mist, nor hint of fog or mist, yet the dimness of distance
produced the impression. There were no defined clouds, yet so thickly
were the heavens covered by a messy cloud-pall that the sun failed to
shine through.
“Ready about!” Captain Warfield ordered with slow sharpness.
The brown, breech-clouted Kanaka sailors moved languidly but quickly to
head-sheets and boom-tackles.
“Hard a-lee!”
The helmsman ran the spokes over with no hint of gentling, and the
Malahini darted prettily into the wind and about.
“Jove! she’s a witch!” was Mulhall’s appreciation. “I didn’t know you
South Sea traders sailed yachts.”
“She was a Gloucester fisherman originally,” Grief explained, “and the
Gloucester boats are all yachts when it comes to build, rig, and sailing.”
“But you’re heading right in—why don’t you make it?” came the
Englishman’s criticism.
“Try it, Captain Warfield,” Grief suggested. “Show him what a lagoon
entrance is on a strong ebb.”
“Close-and-by!” the captain ordered.
“Close-and-by,” the Kanaka repeated, easing half a spoke.
The Malahini laid squarely into the narrow passage which was the lagoon
entrance of a large, long, and narrow oval of an atoll. The atoll was shaped
as if three atolls, in the course of building, had collided and coalesced and
failed to rear the partition walls. Cocoanut palms grew in spots on the
circle of sand, and there were many gaps where the sand was too low to
the sea for cocoanuts, and through which could be seen the protected
lagoon where the water lay flat like the ruffled surface of a mirror. Many
square miles of water were in the irregular lagoon, all of which surged out
on the ebb through the one narrow channel. So narrow was the channel, so
large the outflow of water, that the passage was more- like the rapids of a
river than the mere tidal entrance to an atoll. The water boiled and whirled
and swirled and drove outward in a white foam of stiff, serrated waves.
A SON OF THE SUN
128
Each heave and blow on her bows of the upstanding waves of the current
swung the Malahini off the straight lead and wedged her as with wedges
of steel toward the side of the passage. Part way in she was, when her
closeness to the coral edge compelled her to go about. On the opposite
tack, broadside to the current, she swept seaward with the current’s speed.
“Now’s the time for that new and expensive engine of yours,” Grief jeered
good-naturedly.
That the engine was a sore point with Captain Warfield was patent. He had
begged and badgered for it, until in the end Grief had given his consent.
“It will pay for itself yet,” the captain retorted. “You wait and see. It beats
insurance and you know the underwriters won’t stand for insurance in the
Paumotus.”
Grief pointed to a small cutter beating up astern of them on the same