“Well, Kiliwakee sits up again and does another brood, feeling the sharp edge of the knife. Then, with the knife between his teeth, he makes off on all fours like a land crab, for the house.
“Bone follows.
“Kiliwakee listens at the house door and hears someone snoring inside—Logan, no less; then he crawls through the door, and Bone guessed that looney was after the pearls. If Bone had run he’d have been in time to save Logan, but he didn’t. He just listened. He heard a noise like a yelp. Then, five minutes after, out comes Kiliwakee. He’d done Logan in and cut his stomach open, but he hadn’t found no pearls, not knowing the chief chap had been usin’ a figure of speech.
“Now you know what a figure of speech is, and don’t you forget it, and if you want to know any more about it go and buy a grammar book. Bone—Oh, he never got away with the schooner, nor the boodle neither. A Chile gunboat looked into that lagoon next week and collared the fishin’ rights and produce in the name of Chile, and told Bone to go fight it in the courts if he wanted to put in a claim. Said the place had been charted and claimed by Chile two years before, which was a lie.
“But Bone wasn’t up for fighting. Too much afraid of questions being asked and the doing in of Logan put down to him by the Kanakas.
“So he took a passage in the gunboat to Valdivia. He’d six big pearls stolen from the takings and hid in the lining of his waistcoat, and he sold them for two hundred dollars to a Jew, and that got him back to ’Frisco.
“Thank you, I don’t mind; whisky with a dash, if it’s all the same to you.”
CHAPTER XIV.
UNDER THE FLAME TREES
I
I was sitting in front of Thibaud’s Café one evening when I saw Lewishon, whom I had not met for years.