Chapter IV

Three weeks at Levua got the cargo out and the cargo in, and the morning came when we were due to start. Sadie and Levenstein had been getting thicker and thicker; she was one of those girls that take the bit between the teeth, and it didn’t knock us down with surprise when, coming on board with her trunks, she said she’d been married that morning to Mr. Levenstein by the native parson and that Levenstein was going to follow her on to ’Frisco by the next boat he could catch.

Did you ever hear of such a tomfool arrangement? For she could just as well have waited till he got to ’Frisco, and then she’d have had time to change her mind; that’s what Buck told her as we put out with Levenstein waving to us from the shore.

Buck rubbed it into her proper, he being a relative and all that, but I doubt if he wasn’t as glad as myself to think of the face Pat would pull when he found his daughter had married herself to a small island trader and a German at that. She took his lip without saying a word, and a day or two after she made inquiries as to when we should reach Palm Island.

“Oh, in a day or two,” says Buck.

Now we weren’t due to touch at that place for fourteen days if the wind held good, and when I got him alone a few minutes later I asked him why he had told her that lie.

“And what would you have had me say?” he asked.

“Why, that we wouldn’t be there for a fortnight,” I answered.

“Well,” said he, “that would have been as big a lie, for we aren’t going to touch there at all. I’ve got extra water casks from that cooper chap at Levua and an extra supply of bananas.”

“What’s your reason?” I asks.

“I’ll tell you when this deal is through,” he answers, and knowing it was useless to ask any more, I didn’t.

A few days later. Buck told us that we’d passed the location of the island and that it wasn’t there; must have sunk in the sea, he said, same as these small islands sometimes do.

When he sprung this on us you might have thought by the way Sadie went on she’d lost a relative; said that she wanted to see it more than the New Jerusalem, owing to Buck’s description of it, and asked couldn’t we poke round and make sure it was gone and that we weren’t being deceived owing to some error of the compass.

Buck says: “All right,” and we spent the better part of two days fooling about pretending to look for that damn island and then we lit for ’Frisco.

No sooner had we got there and landed the cargo, Sadie included, than Buck says to me one morning: “Clutch on here,” he says, “whilst I’m away. I’m going to London.”

“London, Ontario?” I asks.

“No, London, England,” he says.

“And what are you going there for?” I questions.

“To see the Tower,” says he.

Off he goes and in two months he returns.