He was speaking to me, as if Signet were less than the very pebbles at the step. He got up, striking the floor heavily with his boots, and I followed him into the house, where he took a lighted candle from a stand. Buried in our shadows, silent footed, Signet pursued us as the trader had meant him to do. I persist in saying that I perceived the thing as a whole. From the first I had divined the maneuver of the Dutchman. "Look!" he repeated, flinging open a door and thrusting in the candle to cast its light over ranks and ranges of metal. It was the gun room of the Residence. Here dwelt the law. Shotguns, repeating rifles, old-style revolvers, new, blue automatics. An arsenal! "Big brown muscles!" he cried, with a ponderous disdain. "What are they? What is the strongest brown man? _Puff!_ To a man of purpose and indomitable will like me! Obstacles? Three husbands? _Puff-puff-puff!_ Like that!--But all that will never be of use to _him_. That Signet! No, he is a street snipe who will steal a pocketbook and call it a crime. He is afraid to grasp.--But it is close in here, is it not?" It was too bald. He stepped across the floor, unlatched and threw open the blind of the window, letting the candlelight stream forth upon a mass of bougainvillaea vine without. "I keep this door locked; you can imagine that," he laughed, returning and shutting us out of the gun room. He twisted the key; put it in his pocket. And there, at the back, that window blind stood open. He stared at Signet, as if the beach comber were just discovered. "You are hopeless, my dear sir." "Let us have a drink," he shifted. For Signet he poured out a tumblerful of raw gin. The fellow took it like a man in a daze--the daze of a slowly and fiercely solidifying resolution. It shivered in his hand. A habit of greed sucked his lips. Into his mouth he took a gulp of the spirits. He held it there. His eyes searched our faces with a kind of malignant defiance. Of a sudden he spat the stuff out, right on the floor. He said nothing. It was as if he said: "By God! if you think I need _that_! _No!_ You don't know me!" He stalked out of the door. When we followed as far as the veranda we saw him making off into the striped light to the left.-- "Why did you call it the 'Shame Dance,' Mynheer?" We were seated again. "Of course, my dear sir, it is not that, but it has a sound so when the Kanakas speak it. The woman spoke the name. If it is a Polynesian word I have not heard it before. 'Shemdance.' Like that." "A good name, though. By jingo! a darn good name. Eh, Mynheer?" But the trader's head was turned in an attitude of listening. Triumphant listening--at the keyhole of the striped, moonlit night. I heard it, too--a faint disturbance of bougainvillaea foliage around two sides of the house, near the window standing open to the gun room.