“He's straight as a mango tree, Bill Pincher is,” McHenry asserted loudly. “He's a terrible liar about stories, but he's the best seaman that comes to T'yti, and square as a biscuit tin. You know how, when that schooner was stole that he was mate on, and the rotten thief run away with her and a woman, Bill he went after 'em, and brought the schooner back from Chile. Bill, he's whatever he says he is, all right—but he can sail a schooner, buy copra and shell cheap, sell goods to the bloody natives, and bring back the money to the owners. That's what I call an honest man.”
Lying Bill received these hearty words with something less than his usual good-humor. There was no friendliness in his eye as he looked at McHenry, whose empty glass remained empty until he himself refilled it. Bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid adventures, McHenry clutched at equality with these men, and it eluded him. Lying Bill, making no reply to his enthusiastic commendation, retired to his bunk with a paper-covered novel, and to cover the rebuff McHenry turned to talk of trade with Gedge, who spoke little.
The traderoom of the Morning Star, opening from the cabin, was to me the door to romance. When I was a boy there was more flavor in traderooms than in war. To have seen one would have been as a glimpse of the Holy Grail to a sworn knight. Those traderooms of my youthful imagination smelt of rum and gun-powder, and beside them were racks of rifles to repel the dusky figures coming over the bulwarks.
The traderoom of the Morning Star was odorous, too. It had no window, and when one opened the door all was obscure at first, while smells of rank Tahiti tobacco, cheap cotton prints, a broken bottle of perfume and scented soaps struggled for supremacy. Gradually the eye discovered shelves and bins and goods heaped from floor to ceiling; pins and anchors, harpoons and pens, crackers and jewelry, cloth, shoes, medicine and tomahawks, socks and writing paper.
Trade business, McHenry's monologue explained, is not what it was. When these petty merchants dared not trust themselves ashore their guns guarded against too eager customers. But now almost every inhabited island has its little store, and the trader has to pursue his buyers, who die so fast that he must move from island to island in search of population.
“Booze is boss,” said McHenry. “I have two thousand pounds in bank in Australia, all made by selling liquor to the natives. It's against French law to sell or trade or give 'em a drop, but we all do it. If you don't have it, you can't get cargo. In the diving season it's the only damn thing that'll pass. The divers'll dig up from five to fifteen dollars a bottle for it, depending on the French being on the job or not. Ain't that so, Gedge?”
“C'est vrai,” Gedge assented. He spoke in French, ostensibly for the benefit of M. L'Hermier des Plantes. That young governor of the Marquesas was not given to saying much, his chief interest in life appearing to be an ample black whisker, to which he devoted incessant tender care. After a few words of broken English he had turned a negligent attention to the pages of a Marquesan dictionary, in preparation for his future labors among the natives. Gedge, however, continued to talk in the language of courts.
It was obvious that McHenry's twenty-five years in French possessions had not taught him the white man's language. He demanded brusquely, “What are you oui-oui-ing for?” and occasionally interjected a few words of bastard French in an attempt to be jovial. To this Gedge paid little attention.
Gedge was chief of the commercial part of the expedition, and his manner proclaimed it. Thin-lipped, cunning-eyed, but strong and self-reliant, he was absorbed in the chances of trade. He had been twenty years in the Marquesas islands. A shrewd man among kanakas, unscrupulous by his own account, he had prospered. Now, after selling his business, he was paying a last visit to his long-time home to settle accounts.
“'Is old woman is a barefoot girl among the cannibals,” Lying Bill said to me later. “'E 'as given a 'ole army of ostriches to fortune, 'e 'as.”