“Nonsense, man! Come, drink up and shake hands on it all—if you bear no malice we’ll cry quits, eh? No, things have turned out for the best, far as I’m concerned. And so you’ll not bear hard on me, old man? You’ll just forget who I used to be?”
Hobson’s little leering eyes cleared of their suspicion and something very like a sigh of relief shook his fat chest. Their glasses clinked together.
“Here’s how!”
The personal problem, it seemed, was closed finally and forever.
There followed an hour of labor over the table, since it was the junior partner’s first “whirl around the circuit” of the islands; previously he had lived a cunning and contented existence in Auckland, far from savages and resident commissioners.
Cranshaw, however, had looked forward to his coming for some little time.
“You’d better stay ashore for the night,” stated the resident agent, when the reports had been cleared up and balanced properly. “There’s quite a surf running, and it’ll be hard to get a whale boat, since all the natives are feasting. Steamer day’s a great occasion here, you know.”
“I’m not fond of insects,” and as Hobson reached for the siphon his eyes flitted around uneasily. “I’ve heard stories about these islands.”
“You look apoplectic, too,” mused Cranshaw. For an instant that odd, bitterly cruel light shot through his gray eyes. “Nonsense, man! That’s all talk. Of course, there are a few cockroaches and such, but there’s nothing dangerous. Absolutely no scorpions, and the centipeds don’t kill. That’s all talk. See here, I’ve two cots laid up in my sleeping-room—finest mosquito curtains in the island. Better stop, and it’ll save coming ashore in the morning.”
Hobson glanced through the door that his host flung open, and the sight of the wide, clean sleeping-room with its two draped beds evidently decided him.