“Anyway, I was goin' to sell out an' leave Penryn. The diving season was over. One night I had the door locked an' was goin' over my accounts to see if I couldn't collect some more dough from the natives. I heard a noise, and By God! there comin' through the window was My Dog. He come up to me, and I said: ‘Stand away, there!’ I ain't afraid of leprosy, but there's no use takin' chances. You never know.
“Well sir, that kid threw himself down on the floor, and he said, ‘McHenry, I knowed you was goin' away and I had to come to see you.’ That's what he said in his Kanaka lingo.
“He was cryin', and he looked pretty bad. He said he couldn't stand the settlement. He said, ‘I don't never see you there. Can't I live here an' be Your Dog again?’
“I said, ‘You got to go to the settlement.’ I wasn't goin' to get into trouble on account of no Kanaka kid.
“Now, that kid had swum about five miles in the night, with sharks all around him—the very place where his father had gone into a shark. That kid thought a lot of me. Well, I made him go back. ‘If you don't go, the doctor will come, an' then you got to go,’ I said. ‘You better get out. I'm goin' away, anyhow,’ I said. I was figuring on my accounts, an' I didn't want to be bothered with no fool kid.
“Well, he hung around awhile, makin' a fuss, till I opened the door an' told him to git. Then he went quiet enough. He went right down the beach into the water an' swum away, back to the settlement. Now look here, that kid liked me. He knowed me well, too—he was around my store pretty near all the time I was in Penryn. He was a fool kid. My Dog, that was the name he give himself. An' while I was in T'yti, here, I get a letter from the trader that took over my store, and he sent me a letter from that kid. It was wrote in Kanaka. He couldn't write much, but a little. Here, I'll show you the letter. You'll see what that kid thought of me.”
In the light from the open cabin window I read the letter, painfully written on cheap, blue-lined paper.
“Greetings to you, McHenry, in Tahiti, from Your Dog. It is hard to live without you. It is long since I have seen you. It is hard. I go to join my father. I give myself to the mako. To you, McHenry, from Your Dog, greetings and farewell.”
Across the bottom of the letter was written in English: “The kid disappeared from the leper settlement. They think he drowned himself.”