“That’s the Kapuan custom all right,” O’Neil hastened to say, “but that ain’t the kind of friends we’re looking for. We want you and the old man too on our side; for, Mary, we’re going to be on the right side. We ain’t looking for land. We ain’t swiping native property and refusing to give it back. But hold on,” he added interrupting himself, “I promised to give Bill here a lesson in Kapuan history. You correct me, Mary,” he said, “if I wander from the truth. In spinning yarns these days if you just tell things that happened and don’t invent some, your audience’ll go to sleep before your eyes. “The king that just passed over to the ‘happy fishing grounds,’” O’Neil began, “was a long time ago, when first made king, no friend of the Herzovinians, so they kidnapped him and sent him into exile. A native chief named Samasese was put in the ‘chair’ by our friends in the Kapuan firm, and this same chief Kataafa then declared war on Samasese. Kataafa licked the king’s army through the town from one end to the other. I saw the fight;--went along with ’em, and had to make a hundred yards in ten seconds flat, getting to cover when the Herzovinian war-ship opened fire on Kataafa’s warriors. If she hadn’t come to Samasese’s help, Kataafa would have run him clean over the point of Kulinuu into the sea. “Those certainly were warm times. Eh, Mary?” O’Neil exclaimed enthusiastically. “We had a skipper named O’Malley in command of the old corvette ‘Wyoming.’ Stevenson, the great writer, was living then in that big bungalow you can see on the hill back of the town, and he got lots of good material for his books out of the way O’Malley handled the situation. “O’Malley didn’t care who was king, only he didn’t cotton to the high-handed way the Herzovinians were running things and asking nobody’s consent,” the sailor continued, his Irish blue eyes sparkling with joy at the remembrance. “Samasese was ‘treed’ at Kulinuu and Kataafa with several thousand warriors was surrounding him. There was an American beachcomber named Blacklock who owned a house just outside of the Samasese lines. One night a party of natives from Kulinuu broke into his house to get some grub to eat. They scared Blacklock nearly into a fit. The same night he got on board the ‘Wyoming’ and told a horrible story of brutality to O’Malley. The American commander landed his sailors the next day and encamped at the outraged house. The ‘Wyoming’ anchored in a position to shell the Samasese forts at Kulinuu. O’Malley, then, all day long wagged his Irish tongue as if it was mounted on a swivel and run by a six cylinder gasoline motor. All Ukula said that at sunrise the next day, unless Samasese dug out of Kulinuu O’Malley sure was going to use the king’s camp for his annual target practice. “The next morning there wasn’t anything alive at Kulinuu except dogs and pigs. Samasese skinned out during the night, and was landed by a Herzovinian war-ship’s boats down the coast there about six miles.”