her, in the custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and make
her call out that she was delaying a minute, that her companion was
to go along, and she would catch up in a minute. He had some funny
power over those women. Anyhow, that's the story they told me in those
cannibal islands. And yet, you know, there's something different in
him, because he sent two of his sons to school, and afterward to a
university in Europe. To make it queerer yet, one of them is here
on this ship, in the second class, and wouldn't dare to speak to
his father without being asked. Of course he's a half-Marquesan--the
son--and looks it. I know them all, and only yesterday I heard Hallman
call his son on the main-deck, away from where any one could see him,
and threaten him with 'putting him back in the jungle, where he came
from,' if he appeared again near the first-class space. I tell you,
I'd hate to be in his hands if I was in his way."

Fictionists who take the South Seas for their scenery too often
paint their characters in one tone--black, brown, or yellow, or even
white. Their bad men are super-villains, and yet there are no men
all bad. I know there are no supermen at all, bad or good, but only
that some men do super acts now and then; none has the grand gesture
at all times. Napoleon had a disgraceful affliction at Waterloo,
which rid him of strength, mental and physical; the thief on the
cross became wistful for an unknown delight.

Hallman had said to me in the smoking-room that he never drank alcohol
or smoked tobacco, because "it took the edge off the game." Now,
a poet might say that, or even a moralist, but he was neither.

That night I walked through the waist of the ship and on to the
promenade-deck of the third-class passengers, where a huddle of