Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
General
Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
They buried Case upon the field of glory, right in the hole where he
had kept the smoking head. I waited till the thing was done; and Mr.
Tarleton prayed, which I thought tomfoolery, but I’m bound to say he
gave a pretty sick view of the dear departed’s prospects, and seemed to
have his own ideas of hell. I had it out with him afterwards, told him
he had scamped his duty, and what he had ought to have done was to up
like a man and tell the Kanakas plainly Case was damned, and a good
riddance; but I never could get him to see it my way. Then they made me
a litter of poles and carried me down to the station. Mr. Tarleton set
my leg, and made a regular missionary splice of it, so that I limp to
this day. That done, he took down my evidence, and Uma’s, and Maea’s,
wrote it all out fine, and had us sign it; and then he got the chiefs
and marched over to Papa Randall’s to seize Case’s papers.
All they found was a bit of a diary, kept for a good many years, and
all about the price of copra, and chickens being stolen, and that; and
the books of the business and the will I told you of in the beginning,
by both of which the whole thing (stock, lock, and barrel) appeared to
belong to the Samoa woman. It was I that bought her out at a mighty
reasonable figure, for she was in a hurry to get home. As for Randall
and the black, they had to tramp; got into some kind of a station on
the Papa-malulu side; did very bad business, for the truth is neither
of the pair was fit for it, and lived mostly on fish, which was the
means of Randall’s death. It seems there was a nice shoal in one day,
and papa went after them with the dynamite; either the match burned too
fast, or papa was full, or both, but the shell went off (in the usual
way) before he threw it, and where was papa’s hand? Well, there’s
nothing to hurt in that; the islands up north are all full of
one-handed men, like the parties in the “Arabian Nights”; but either
Randall was too old, or he drank too much, and the short and the long
of it was that he died. Pretty soon after, the nigger was turned out of
the island for stealing from white men, and went off to the west, where
he found men of his own colour, in case he liked that, and the men of
his own colour took and ate him at some kind of a corroborree, and I’m
sure I hope he was to their fancy!
So there was I, left alone in my glory at Falesá; and when the schooner
came round I filled her up, and gave her a deck-cargo half as high as
the house. I must say Mr. Tarleton did the right thing by us; but he
took a meanish kind of a revenge.
“Now, Mr. Wiltshire,” said he, “I’ve put you all square with everybody
here. It wasn’t difficult to do, Case being gone; but I have done it,
and given my pledge besides that you will deal fairly with the natives.
I must ask you to keep my word.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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