Then the old chief looked at me, and said:
“O Papalagi, you did accept the princess’s comb, great gift from her hair, and the whole tribe have accepted you as great chief!”
“Have they?” said I.
Then, as the dawn’s first bird commenced to sing in the banyans and the village still slept on, Pokara and I crept forth from our little pagan hut, and dived noiselessly into the forest!
“What happened? What did you do, O Pokara?” said I, as we camped by a lagoon that day, ten miles from that pagan citadel.
“You no wanter marry princess this day, and go way to ’nother island to the south of the setting sun, and Pokara see you no more?” said Pokara.
“Um! so that’s how the wind blows,” I muttered to myself.
It was after the aforesaid experiences that we decided to return to Papeete, and at once set out on our long return journey. Pokara would swear terrifically, I know, in his own tongue, as he dropped his huge sack of tribal presents and sat on a decayed tree trunk, irritated, as I climbed the trees in search of birds’ nests. Somehow the old schoolboy’s instinct of bird-nesting would come back to me. It would have made any collector’s eyes shine to see the mighty nests that I found, and the richly-hued splashed cockatoos’, parakeets’, and strange tropic birds’ eggs that I discovered. Most of them were too far advanced in fertilization to “blow out”; but, still, I secured a few fine specimens that had hard shells and would not easily break.
One night, just as we had made up our beds of moss and fern grass by a belt of mangroves, and Pokara was telling me his old legendary stories, we were both startled by seeing a strange apparition step out of the forest. It was a fine moonlight night. Pokara leapt to his feet as I bravely leapt behind him! At first I thought it was a heathen god. But I discovered that the peculiar being was real enough, for It wore ragged side-whiskers, large loose pantaloons held up by a belt, and a tremendous wide-brimmed hat that had nothing spiritual-looking about it. It was a derelict sailor.
“What oh, shipmate!”