“There isn't very much more,” said the young man. He laughed shortly.
“As far as I know I'm the sole survivor from that tramp. She never got
to New Zealand; and that's how I got here to Samoa. She went down in
a hurricane. I was washed ashore on one of this group of islands about
forty or fifty miles from here. I don't know much about the details; I
was past knowing anything when the bit of wreckage on which I had lashed
myself days before came to port. There weren't any--I was going to say
white people on the island, but I'm wrong about that. The Samoans are
about the whitest people on God's green earth. I found that out. There
were only natives on that island. I lived with them for about two
months, and I got to be pretty friendly with them, especially the old
fellow who originally picked me up half drowned and unconscious on the
beach, and who took me into the bosom of his family. Then the missionary
boat came along, and I came back with it to Apia here.”
The young man laughed again suddenly, a jarring note in his mirth.
“I don't suppose you've heard that original remark about the world
being such a small place after all! I figured that back here in Apia a
shipwrecked and destitute white man would get the glad hand and at least
a chance to earn his stake. Maybe he would ordinarily; but I didn't. I
hadn't said anything to the missionary about that Honolulu escapade, and
I was keeping it dark when I got here and started to tell the shipwreck
end of my story over again. Queer, isn't it? Lined up in about the first
audience I had was the gentleman with the pasty face that I had toppled
over with the screen in the old Chink's faro dump. He was one of the big
guns here, and had been away on a pleasure trip, and Honolulu had been
on his itinerary. That settled it. The missionary chap spoke up a bit
for me, I'll give him credit for that, though I had a hunch he was going
to use that play as an opening wedge in an effort to reform me later on.
But I had my fingers crossed. The whites here turned their backs on me,
and I turned my back on the missionary. That's about all there was to
it. That was about two weeks ago, and for those two weeks I've lived in
another of Mr. Dante's delightful circles.”
He sat suddenly upright, a clenched fist flung outward.
“Not a cent! Not a damned sou-marquee! Nothing but this torn shirt, and
what's left of these cotton pants! Hell!”
He lay back on the sand quite as suddenly again, and fell to laughing
softly.
“Tck!” It was the quill toothpick.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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