Was the Bella Union Theater still there in Frisco? Did they still fight in Bottle Meyers, and was his friend Tasset on the police force yet? His memories of San Francisco ante-dated mine. He had been a hoodlum there, and had helped to hang Chinese. He had gone to Tahiti in 1870 and made a hundred thousand francs keeping a bakery. That fortune had lasted him during two years' tour of the world.
“Now I'm bust,” he said bitterly. “Now I got no woman, no children, no friends, and I don't want none. I am by myself and damn everybody!”
I soothed his misanthropy with two fingers of rum, and he mellowed into advice.
“I saw you with that daughter of Liha-Liha,” he said, using the native name of the dead millionaire. “You be careful. One time I baked bread in Taaoa. My oven was near his plantation. I saw that girl come into the woods and take off her dress. She had a mirror to see her back, and I looked, and the sun shone bright. What she saw, I saw—a patch of white. She is a leper, that rich girl.”
His eyes were full of hate.
“You don't like her,” I said. “Why?”
“Why? Why?” he screamed. “Because her father was an accursed villian. He was always kissing the dirty hands of the priests. He used to give his workmen opium to make them work faster, and then he would go to church. He made his money, yes. He was damn hypocrite. And now his daughter, with all that rotten money, is a leper. I tell everybody what I saw. Everybody here knows it but you. Everybody will know it in Tahiti if she goes there.”
The man was like a snake to me. I threw away the glass he had drunk from. And yet—was it idle curiosity, or was it fear of being shut away in the valley outside Papeite by the quarantine officers, that made her ask me that question about the segregation of lepers?
Liha-Liha had spent thirty years making money. He had coined the sweat and blood and lives of a thousand Marquesans into a golden fortune, and he had left behind him that fortune, a marble tomb, and Mlle. N——.