By marrying Kalama, he had married not merely her land, but her own
chief rank, and the fealty owed by the commoners to her by virtue
of her genealogy was also accorded him. In addition, he possessed
of himself all the natural attributes of chiefship: the gigantic
stature, the fearlessness, the pride; and the high hot temper that
could brook no impudence nor insult, that could be neither bullied
nor awed by any utmost magnificence of power that walked on two
legs, and that could compel service of lesser humans, not by any
ignoble purchase by bargaining, but by an unspoken but expected
condescending of largesse. He knew his Hawaiians from the outside
and the in, knew them better than themselves, their Polynesian
circumlocutions, faiths, customs, and mysteries.
And at seventy-one, after a morning in the saddle over the ranges
that began at four o’clock, he lay under the monkey-pods in his
customary and sacred siesta that no retainer dared to break, nor
would dare permit any equal of the great one to break. Only to the
King was such a right accorded, and, as the King had early learned,
to break Hardman Pool’s siesta was to gain awake a very irritable
and grumpy Hardman Pool who would talk straight from the shoulder
and say unpleasant but true things that no king would care to hear.
The sun blazed down. The horses stamped remotely. The fading
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
24
trade-wind wisps sighed and rustled between longer intervals of
quiescence. The perfume grew heavier. The woman brought back the
babe, quiet again, to the rear of the house. The monkey-pods
folded their leaves and swooned to a siesta of their own in the
soft air above the sleeper. The girl, breathless as ever from the
enormous solemnity of her task, still brushed the flies away; and
the score of cowboys still intently and silently watched.
Hardman Pool awoke. The next out-breath, expected of the long
rhythm, did not take place. Neither did the white, long moustache
rise up. Instead, the cheeks, under the whiskers, puffed; the
eyelids lifted, exposing blue eyes, choleric and fully and
immediately conscious; the right hand went out to the half-smoked
pipe beside him, while the left hand reached the matches.
“Get me my gin and milk,” he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little
maid, who had been startled into a tremble by his awaking.
He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence
of his waiting retainers until the tumbler of gin and milk had been
brought and drunk.
“Well?” he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces
wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of dark eyes glowed luminously
with well-wishing pleasure, he wiped the lingering drops of gin and
milk from his hairy lips. “What are you hanging around for? What
do you want? Come over here.”
Twenty giants, most of them young, uprose and with a great clanking
and jangling of spurs and spur-chains strode over to him. They
grouped before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their
shoulders, one behind another’s, their faces a-grin and apologetic,
and at the same time expressing a casual and unconscious
democraticness. In truth, to them Hardman Pool was more than mere
chief. He was elder brother, or father, or patriarch; and to all
of them he was related, in one way or another, according to
Hawaiian custom, through his wife and through the many marriages of
his children and grandchildren. His slightest frown might perturb
them, his anger terrify them, his command compel them to certain
death; yet, on the other hand, not one of them would have dreamed
of addressing him otherwise than intimately by his first name,
which name, “Hardman,” was transmuted by their tongues into Kanaka
Oolea.
At a nod from him, the semicircle seated itself on the manienie
grass, and with further deprecatory smiles waited his pleasure.
“What do you want?” demanded, in Hawaiian, with a brusqueness and
sternness they knew were put on.
They smiled more broadly, and deliciously squirmed their broad
shoulders and great torsos with the appeasingness of so many
wriggling puppies. Hardman Pool singled out one of them.
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
25
“Well, Iliiopoi, what do YOU want?”
“Ten dollars, Kanaka Oolea.”
“Ten dollars!” Pool cried, in apparent shock at mention of so vast
a sum. “Does it mean you are going to take a second wife?
Remember the missionary teaching. One wife at a time, Iliiopoi;
one wife at a time. For he who entertains a plurality of wives
will surely go to hell.”
Giggles and flashings of laughing eyes from all greeted the joke.
“No, Kanaka Oolea,” came the reply. “The devil knows I am hard put
to get kow-kow for one wife and her several relations.”
“Kow-kow?” Pool repeated the Chinese-introduced word for food which
the Hawaiians had come to substitute for their own paina. “Didn’t
you boys get kow-kow here this noon?”
“Yes, Kanaka Oolea,” volunteered an old, withered native who had
just joined the group from the direction of the house. “All of
them had kow-kow in the kitchen, and plenty of it. They ate like
lost horses brought down from the lava.”
“And what do you want, Kumuhana?” Pool diverted to the old one, at
the same time motioning to the little maid to flap flies from the
other side of him.
“Twelve dollars,” said Kumuhana. “I want to buy a Jackass and a
second-hand saddle and bridle. I am growing too old for my legs to
carry me in walking.”
“You wait,” his haole lord commanded. “I will talk with you about
the matter, and about other things of importance, when I am
finished with the rest and they are gone.”
The withered old one nodded and proceeded to light his pipe.
“The kow-kow in the kitchen was good,” Iliiopoi resumed, licking
his lips. “The poi was one-finger, the pig fat, the salmon-belly
unstinking, the fish of great freshness and plenty, though the
opihis” (tiny, rock-clinging shell-fish) “had been salted and
thereby made tough. Never should the opihis be salted. Often have
I told you, Kanaka Oolea, that opihis should never be salted. I am
full of good kow-kow. My belly is heavy with it. Yet is my heart
not light of it because there is no kow-kow in my own house, where
is my wife, who is the aunt of your fourth son’s second wife, and
where is my baby daughter, and my wife’s old mother, and my wife’s
old mother’s feeding child that is a cripple, and my wife’s sister
who lives likewise with us along with her three children, the
father being dead of a wicked dropsy–”
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
26
“Will five dollars save all of you from funerals for a day or
several?” Pool testily cut the tale short.
“Yes, Kanaka Oolea, and as well it will buy my wife a new comb and
some tobacco for myself.”
From a gold-sack drawn from the hip-pocket of his dungarees,
Hardman Pool drew the gold piece and tossed it accurately into the
waiting hand.
To a bachelor who wanted six dollars for new leggings, tobacco, and
spurs, three dollars were given; the same to another who needed a
hat; and to a third, who modestly asked for two dollars, four were
given with a flowery-worded compliment anent his prowess in roping
a recent wild bull from the mountains. They knew, as a rule, that
he cut their requisitions in half, therefore they doubled the size
of their requisitions. And Hardman Pool knew they doubled, and
smiled to himself. It was his way, and, further, it was a very
good way with his multitudinous relatives, and did not reduce his
stature in their esteem.
“And you, Ahuhu?” he demanded of one whose name meant “poison-
wood.”
“And the price of a pair of dungarees,” Ahuhu concluded his list of
needs. “I have ridden much and hard after your cattle, Kanaka
Oolea, and where my dungarees have pressed against the seat of the
saddle there is no seat to my dungarees. It is not well that it be
said that a Kanaka Oolea cowboy, who is also a cousin of Kanaka
Oolea’s wife’s half-sister, should be shamed to be seen out of the
saddle save that he walks backward from all that behold him.”
“The price of a dozen pairs of dungarees be thine, Ahuhu,” Hardman
Pool beamed, tossing to him the necessary sum. “I am proud that my
family shares my pride. Afterward, Ahuhu, out of the dozen
dungarees you will give me one, else shall I be compelled to walk
backward, my own and only dungarees being in like manner well worn
and shameful.”
And in laughter of love at their haole chief’s final sally, all the
sweet-child-minded and physically gorgeous company of them departed
to their waiting horses, save the old withered one, Kumuhana, who
had been bidden to wait.
For a full five minutes they sat in silence. Then Hardman Pool