Makes my flesh creep. He’s a regular Finn.”
“What’s that?” Mulhall inquired.
“Bosses the weather—that’s what the natives believe, at any rate. Ask Tai-
Hotauri there. Hey, Tai-Hotauri ! what you think old Parlay do along
weather?”
“Just the same one big weather devil,” came the Kanaka’s answer. “I
know. He want big blow, he make big blow. He want no wind, no wind
come.”
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“A regular old Warlock,” said Mulhall.
“No good luck them pearl,” Tai-Hotauri blurted out, rolling his head
ominously. “He say he sell. Plenty schooner come. Then he make big
hurricane, everybody finish, you see. All native men say so.”
“It’s hurricane season now,” Captain Warfield laughed morosely. “They’re
not far wrong. It’s making for something right now, and I’d feel better if
the Malahini was a thousand miles away from here.”
“He is a bit mad,” Grief concluded. “I’ve tried to get his point of view.
It’s—well, it’s mixed. For eighteen years he’d centred everything on
Armande. Half the time he believes she’s still alive, not yet come back
from France. That’s one of the reasons he held on to the pearls. And all the
time he hates white men. He never forgets they killed her, though a great
deal of the time he forgets she’s dead. Hello! Where’s your wind?”
The sails bellied emptily overhead, and Captain Warfield grunted his
disgust. Intolerable as the heat had been, in the absence of wind it was
almost overpowering. The sweat oozed out on all their faces, and now one,
and again another, drew deep breaths, involuntarily questing for more air.
“Here she comes again—an eight point haul! Boom-tackles across! jump!”
The Kanakas sprang to the captain’s orders, and for five minutes the
schooner laid directly into the passage and even gained on the current.
Again the breeze fell flat, then puffed from the old quarter, compelling a
shift back of sheets and tackles.
“Here comes the Nuhiva,” Grief said. “She’s got her engine on. Look at her
skim.”
“All ready?” the captain asked the engineer, a Portuguese half-caste,
whose head and shoulders protruded from the small hatch just for’ard of
the cabin, and who wiped the sweat from his face with a bunch of greasy
waste.
“Sure,” he replied.
“Then let her go.”
The engineer disappeared into his den, and a moment later the exhaust
muffler coughed and spluttered overside. But the schooner could not hold
her lead. The little cutter made three feet to her two and was quickly
alongside and forging ahead. Only natives were on her deck, and the man
steering waved his hand in derisive greeting and farewell.
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“That’s Narii Herring,” Grief told Mulhall. “The big fellow at the wheel—
the nerviest and most conscienceless scoundrel in the Paumotus.”
Five minutes later a cry of joy from their own Kanakas centred all eyes on
the Nuhiva. Her engine had broken down and they were overtaking her.
The Malahini’s sailors sprang into the rigging and jeered as they went by;
the little cutter heeled over by the wind with a bone in her teeth, going
backward on the tide.
“Some engine that of ours,” Grief approved, as the lagoon opened before
them and the course was changed across it to the anchorage.
Captain Warfield was visibly cheered, though he merely grunted, “It’ll pay
for itself, never fear.”
The Malahini ran well into the centre of the little fleet ere she found
swinging room to anchor.
“There’s Isaacs on the Dolly,” Grief observed, with a hand wave of
greeting. “And Peter Gee’s on the Roberta. Couldn’t keep him away from a
pearl sale like this. And there’s Francini on the Cactus. They’re all here, all
the buyers. Old Parlay will surely get a price.”
“They haven’t repaired the engine yet,” Captain Warfield grumbled
gleefully.
He was looking across the lagoon to where the Nuhiva’s sails showed
through the sparse cocoanuts.
II
The house of Parlay was a big two-story frame affair, built of California
lumber, with a galvanized iron roof. So disproportionate was it to the
slender ring of the atoll that it showed out upon the sand-strip and above it
like some monstrous excrescence. They of the Malahini paid the courtesy
visit ashore immediately after anchoring. Other captains and buyers were
in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day.
Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives of the owner,
moved about dispensing whiskey and absinthe. And through the curious
company moved Parlay himself, cackling and sneering, the withered
wreck of what had once been a tall and powerful man. His eyes were deep
sunken and feverish, his cheeks fallen in and cavernous. The hair of his
head seemed to have come out in patches, and his mustache and imperial
had shed in the same lopsided way.
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“Jove!” Mulhall muttered under his breath. “A long-legged Napoleon the
Third, but burnt out, baked, and fire-crackled. And mangy! No wonder he
crooks his head to one side. He’s got to keep the balance.”
“Goin’ to have a blow,” was the old man’s greeting to Grief. “You must
think a lot of pearls to come a day like this.”
“They’re worth going to inferno for,” Grief laughed genially back, running
his eyes over the surface of the table covered by the display.
“Other men have already made that journey for them,” old Parlay cackled.
“See this one!” He pointed to a large, perfect pearl the size of a small
walnut that lay apart on a piece of chamois. “They offered me sixty
thousand francs for it in Tahiti. They’ll bid as much and more for it to-
morrow, if they aren’t blown away. Well, that pearl, it was found by my
cousin, my cousin by marriage. He was a native, you see. Also, he was a
thief. He hid it. It was mine. His cousin, who was also my cousin—we’re
all related here—killed him for it and fled away in a cutter to Noo-Nau. I
pursued, but the chief of Noo-Nau had killed him for it before I got there.
Oh, yes, there are many dead men represented on the table there. Have a
drink, Captain. Your face is not familiar. You are new in the islands?”
“It’s Captain Robinson of the Roberta,” Grief said, introducing them.
In the meantime Mulhall had shaken hands with Peter Gee.
“I never fancied there were so many pearls in the world,” Mulhall said.
“Nor have I ever seen so many together at one time,” Peter Gee admitted.
“What ought they to be worth?”
“Fifty or sixty thousand pounds—and that’s to us buyers. In Paris—” He
shrugged his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows at the incommunicableness
of the sun.
Mulhall wiped the sweat from his eyes. All were sweating profusely and
breathing hard. There was no ice in the drink that was served, and whiskey
and absinthe went down lukewarm.
“Yes, yes,” Parlay was cackling. “Many dead men lie on the table there. I
know those pearls, all of them. You see those three! Perfectly matched,
aren’t they? A diver from Easter Island got them for me inside a week.
Next week a shark got him; took his arm off and blood poison did the
business. And that big baroque there—nothing much—if I’m offered
twenty francs for it to-morrow I’ll be in luck; it came out of twenty-two
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135
fathoms of water. The man was from Raratonga. He broke all diving
records. He got it out of twenty-two fathoms. I saw him. And he burst his
lungs at the same time, or got the ‘bends,’ for he died in two hours. He died
screaming. They could hear him for miles. He was the most powerful
native I ever saw. Half a dozen of my divers have died of the bends. And
more men will die, more men will die.”
“Oh, hush your croaking, Parlay,” chided one of the captains. “It ain’t
going to blow.”
“If I was a strong man, I couldn’t get up hook and get out fast enough,” the
old man retorted in the falsetto of age. “Not if I was a strong man with the
taste for wine yet in my mouth. But not you. You’ll all stay. I wouldn’t
advise you if I thought you’d go. You can’t drive buzzards away from the
carrion. Have another drink, my brave sailormen. Well, well, what men
will dare for a few little oyster drops! There they are, the beauties!
Auction to-morrow, at ten sharp. Old Parlays selling out, and the buzzards
are gathering—old Parlay who was a stronger man in his day than any of
them and who will see most of them dead yet.”
“If he isn’t a vile old beast!” the supercargo of the Malahini whispered to
Peter Gee.
“What if she does blow?” said the captain of the Dolly. “Hikihoho’s never
been swept.”
“The more reason she will be, then,” Captain Warfield answered back. “I