Chapter I

The longest answer to a short question I ever heard given was delivered by Captain Tom Bowlby, master mariner, in the back parlour of Jack Rounds’ saloon away back in 1903.

Bowlby still lingers as a memory in Island bars; a large mahogany-coloured man, Bristol born and owned by the Pacific; he had seen sandalwood wane and copra wax, had known Bully Hayes and the ruffian Pease and Colonel Steinberger; and as to the ocean of his fancy, there was scarcely a sounding from the Kermadecs to French Frigate Island he could not have given you.

An illiterate man, maybe, as far as book reading goes, but a full man by reason of experience and knowledge of Life—which is Literature in the raw.

“And so, usin’ a figure of speech, she’d stuck the blister on the wrong chap,” said the Captain finishing a statement.

“I beg your pardon, Cap’,” came a voice through the blue haze of tobacco smoke, “but what was you meanin’ by a figure of speech?”

The Cap’, re-loading his pipe, allowed his eyes to travel from the window and its view of the blue bay and the Chinese shrimp boats to the island headdresses and paddles on the wall and from thence to the speaker.

“What was I meanin’ by a figure of speech?—why, where was you born?” He snorted, lit up, and accepted another drink and seemed to pass the question by, but I saw his trouble. He couldn’t explain, couldn’t give a clear definition off-hand of the term whose meaning he knew quite well. Can you?

“Well, I was just asking to know,” said the voice.

Then, like a strong man armed, his vast experience of men and matters came to the aid of Captain Tom:

“And know you shall,” said he, “if it’s in my power to put you wise. When you gets travelling about in Languige you bumps across big facts. You wouldn’t think words was any use except to talk them, would you? You wouldn’t think you could belt a chap over the head with a couple of words strung together same as with a slung shot, would you? Well, you can. You was askin’ me what a figure of speech is—well, it’s a thing that can kill a man sure as a shot gun, and Jack Bone, a friend of mine, seen it done.

“Ever heard of Logan? He’d be before your time, but he’s well remembered yet down Rapa way, a tall, soft-spoken chap, never drank, blue-eyed chap as gentle as a woman and your own brother till he’d skinned you and tanned your hide and sold it for sixpence. He had offices in Sydney to start with and three or four schooners in the trade, _bêche de mer_, turtle shell and copra, with side interests in drinkin’ bars and such, till all of a sudden he went bust and had to skip, leaving his partner to blow his brains out, and a wife he wasn’t married to with six children to fend for. What bust him? Lord only knows; it wasn’t his love of straight dealin’ anyhow. Then he came right down on the beach, with his toes through his boots, till he managed to pick a living somehow at Vavao and chummed in with a trader by name of Cartwright, who’d chucked everything owing to a woman and taken to the Islands and a native wife—one of them soft-shelled chaps that can’t stand Luck, nohow, unless it’s with them. Logan got to be sort of partner with Cartwright, who died six months after, and they said Logan had poisoned him to scoop the business. Some said it was the native wife who did the killing, being in love with Logan, who took her on with the goodwill and fixtures. If she did, she got her gruel, for he sold out to a German after he’d been there less than a year, and skipped again. I reckon that chap must have been born with a skippin’ rope in his fist by the way he went through life. They say wickedness don’t prosper; well, in my experience it prospers well enough up to a point; anyhow Logan after he left Vavao didn’t do bad, by all accounts; he struck here and there, pearling in the Paumotus and what not, and laying by money all the time, got half shares in a schooner and bought the other chap out, took her blackbirding in the Solomons, did a bit of opium smuggling, salved a derelict and brought her right into ’Frisco, turned the coin into real estate at San Lorenz, and sold out for double six months after; then he went partners with a chap called Buck Johnstone in a saloon by the water side close on to Rafferty’s landin’ stage, a regular Shanghai and dope shop with ward politics thrown in, and a place in the wrecking ring, and him going about ’Frisco with a half-dollar Henry Clay in his face and a diamond as big as a decanter stopper for a scarf pin.

“He didn’t drink, as I was saying, and that gave him the bulge on the others. He had a bottle of his own behind the bar with coloured water in it, and when asked to have a drink he’d fill up out of it, leaving the others to poison themselves with whisky.

“Then one night James Appleby blew into the bar.