“What was I meanin’ by a figure of speech?—why, where was you born?” He snorted, lit up, and accepted another drink and seemed to pass the question by, but I saw his trouble. He couldn’t explain, couldn’t give a clear definition off-hand of the term whose meaning he knew quite well. Can you?
“Well, I was just asking to know,” said the voice.
Then, like a strong man armed, his vast experience of men and matters came to the aid of Captain Tom:
“And know you shall,” said he, “if it’s in my power to put you wise. When you gets travelling about in Languige you bumps across big facts. You wouldn’t think words was any use except to talk them, would you? You wouldn’t think you could belt a chap over the head with a couple of words strung together same as with a slung shot, would you? Well, you can. You was askin’ me what a figure of speech is—well, it’s a thing that can kill a man sure as a shot gun, and Jack Bone, a friend of mine, seen it done.
“Ever heard of Logan? He’d be before your time, but he’s well remembered yet down Rapa way, a tall, soft-spoken chap, never drank, blue-eyed chap as gentle as a woman and your own brother till he’d skinned you and tanned your hide and sold it for sixpence. He had offices in Sydney to start with and three or four schooners in the trade, bêche de mer, turtle shell and copra, with side interests in drinkin’ bars and such, till all of a sudden he went bust and had to skip, leaving his partner to blow his brains out, and a wife he wasn’t married to with six children to fend for. What bust him? Lord only knows; it wasn’t his love of straight dealin’ anyhow. Then he came right down on the beach, with his toes through his boots, till he managed to pick a living somehow at Vavao and chummed in with a trader by name of Cartwright, who’d chucked everything owing to a woman and taken to the Islands and a native wife—one of them soft-shelled chaps that can’t stand Luck, nohow, unless it’s with them. Logan got to be sort of partner with Cartwright, who died six months after, and they said Logan had poisoned him to scoop the business. Some said it was the native wife who did the killing, being in love with Logan, who took her on with the goodwill and fixtures. If she did, she got her gruel, for he sold out to a German after he’d been there less than a year, and skipped again. I reckon that chap must have been born with a skippin’ rope in his fist by the way he went through life. They say wickedness don’t prosper; well, in my experience it prospers well enough up to a point; anyhow Logan after he left Vavao didn’t do bad, by all accounts; he struck here and there, pearling in the Paumotus and what not, and laying by money all the time, got half shares in a schooner and bought the other chap out, took her blackbirding in the Solomons, did a bit of opium smuggling, salved a derelict and brought her right into ’Frisco, turned the coin into real estate at San Lorenz, and sold out for double six months after; then he went partners with a chap called Buck Johnstone in a saloon by the water side close on to Rafferty’s landin’ stage, a regular Shanghai and dope shop with ward politics thrown in, and a place in the wrecking ring, and him going about ’Frisco with a half-dollar Henry Clay in his face and a diamond as big as a decanter stopper for a scarf pin.
“He didn’t drink, as I was saying, and that gave him the bulge on the others. He had a bottle of his own behind the bar with coloured water in it, and when asked to have a drink he’d fill up out of it, leaving the others to poison themselves with whisky.
“Then one night James Appleby blew into the bar.
II
“Appleby was a chap with a fresh red face on him, a Britisher, hailing from Devonshire and just in from the Islands. He’d been supercargo on a schooner trading in the Marshalls or somewhere that’d got piled on a reef by a drunken skipper and sea battered till there wasn’t a stick of her standing and everyone drowned but Appleby and the Kanaka bo’sun. He was keen to tell of his troubles and had a thirst on him, and there he stood lowering the bilge Johnstone passed over to him and trying to interest strangers in his family history and sea doings. Logan was behind the bar with Johnstone, and Logan, listening to the chap clacking with a half-drunk bummer, suddenly pricks his ears. Then he comes round to the front of the bar and listens to his story, and takes him by the arm and walks him out of the place on to the wharf and sits him on a bollard, Appleby clacking away all the time and so full of himself and his story, and so glad to have a chap listening to him, and so mixed up with the whisky that he scarce noticed that he’d left the bar.
“Then, when he’d finished, he seen where he was, and was going back for more drinks, but Logan stopped him.