“Well,” says Buck, “as a matter of fact we stop nowhere but a place we call Palm Island. We put in there for water and fruit; it’s not on the charts and there’s no trade to be done there, but it’s pretty enough.”
He describes the place, and then she tackles him on Levua again, and the manners of the natives, and then Mrs. Pat cuts in and talks of the opera and the theatres and such.
Dinner over, we go to the drawing-room, where the women squall at the piano for a bit, and then we go to Pat’s den for cigars.
I remember Buck, who was livened up a bit with the champagne, asking Pat how to become a millionaire.
“Why,” says Pat, cocking his eye at the other, “you just pick a million up and stick to it. It’s not the picking it up that’s the bother, it’s the sticking to it,” he says. Then we went home thinking that Pat had been joking with us. But he hadn’t.
II
Levenstein was the name of the chief German trader at Levua. We had big dealings with him amounting to a share in his business, and we were going out this time with a cargo of trade goods and with some agricultural stuff for a man by name of Marks who had started a plantation on the north of the island. Our hands were pretty full, for we were our own stevedores, not trusting the longshore Johnnies over much, and one day, as we were on deck, the both of us, who should come along the wharf but Pat. Pat looked down in the mouth and as if something was troubling him. He gave us good-day and asked us how we were doing, and then he told us his bother. Sadie wasn’t well, the doctors thought she was going into a consumption.
“There’s nothing but trouble in this world,” said Pat. “First I lost my partner six months ago, then I lost a cargo which wasn’t full insured by a mistake of a damn clerk, and now Sadie is took bad. Well, good-day to you, boys, and better luck than is attending me.”
“Now I wonder why he came along the wharf to tell us that,” says Buck. “Blessed if I can make the old man out. His compasses are wrong, he ain’t sailing true; he’s doing things he’s never done before. Maybe he’s breaking up with old age and that’s what’s the matter with him.”
“He seems to have taken a fancy to us anyhow,” I says, “and if he’s breaking up let’s hope he won’t forget you in his will.”