“‘Sydney,’ says the other; ‘I’m not going back to ’Frisco, and seeing Johnstone is drowned, the show is mine; he’s got no relatives. We’ll make for Sydney, and to make you keep your head shut, I’ll give you the old schooner for keeps; she’ll fetch you a good price in Sydney, more than you’d make in ten dozen years long-shoring in ’Frisco. I only want the pearls.’
“‘All right,’ says Bone, ‘I’ll keep my head shut and help you work her,’ having in his mind to tell the whole story soon as he landed, for he’d given up the notion of killing the other chap, not being able to get him alone. But they never put out for Sydney, and here’s the reason why.
“There was a Kanaka on that island by name of Kiliwakee, a chap with a head all frizzled out like a furze bush. He was a looney, though a good enough workman, and he’d got no end of tobacco and fish scale jewellery and such rubbish from Johnstone for his work, and now that supplies had dried up he was pretty much down in the mouth; he’d got to connect pearls and tobacco in his woolly head, and now the lagoon was skinned and there were no more pearls, he saw there was to be no more tobacco, nor jewellery, nor canned salmon.
“Well, that night there was a big Kanaka pow-wow on the beach; the chaps were sitting in a ring and talking and talking, and Bone, catching sight of them, crawled through the bushes to listen.
“He heard the chief chap talking.
“He couldn’t make out at first what he was jabbering about; then at last he got sense of what he was saying.
“‘There’ll be no more good things,’ says he, ‘sticks of tobacco, nor fish in cans, nor knives, nor print calico to make breeches of, nor nothing, for,’ says he, using a figure of speech, ‘the man with the teeth has killed the fat one and swallowed his pearls.’
“Then the meeting closed and the congressmen took their ways home, all but Kiliwakee, the half-lunatic chap, who sits in the moonlight wagging his fuzzy head, which was his way of thinking.
“Then he fetches a knife out of his loin cloth and looks at it, then he lays on his back and begins to strop it on his heel, same as a chap strops a razor.
“Bone said he’d never seen anything funnier than that chap lying in the moonlight stropping away at that knife. It give him a shiver, too, somehow.