“What oh!” I responded, as the stranger gave a loud guffaw and roared out:
“Damn me blasted whiskers, where ther ’ell you sprung from?—a wirelin too!” he added, as he stared down at my fiddle.
On hearing all that we chose to tell him, he winked, and told us that he had knocked the skipper of his ship down, and had made a bolt from Papeete to save being placed in irons.
He did keep us alive that night, I must admit. He had a large flask of whisky in his pantaloons and plied himself from it liberally. And the way he sat by us that night and sang awful songs was something extraordinary and thrilling. He seemed to be unable to sleep, and every time I dozed off he caught me a whack on the back and said:
“Wake up, yer young b——!”
At daybreak he informed us that he must make tracks, as he wanted to slip down to the coast and stow away on one of the trading schooners that traded between the Marquesas group and Tahiti. I think that we were about three days’ slow journey from Papeete when he left us. The last I saw of him was when his big boots crashed though the forest scrub, making the parrots rise and scream above the giant breadfruit trees, as his herculean figure faded away into the shadows of the wooded depths. Pokara seemed mighty glad to see him go! I was sorry. I recall that we camped by a large lagoon near the shore that night. It was a glorious starlit sky, and Pokara, who never wearied of telling me his wondrous stories and old legends as we camped by those high sea ways, sat there by the mountains and told me a very fascinating legend. I saw his eyes brighten as the tale he told revived the legendary atmosphere of his youth.
“You see stars—tips of light up there in sky?” said he, as I lit my pipe and prepared to listen.
“Yes,” said I, as I looked up at the heavens and saw, millions of miles beyond his dark, pointing finger, a small constellation of stars, six in all—two very bright ones, and the remainder stars of about the fourth magnitude.
“You liker know, O Papalagi, who those stars are, why they get in sky and stop up there?”
“Indeed I would!” I responded.