But Keller did not hear him, he had risen to chase some Kanaka children away from the boat; then, hitching up his trousers, he led the way through the trees to the grass-thatched village where the little houses stood bowered with yellow cassi and blue-blazing convolvulus, and where at the door of the biggest and newest house his chief wife sat preparing kava in a bowl of stone.
They dined off baked pig, taro, palm salad, and palm toddy in a twilight through which rays from the thatch pierced like golden needles, and as they ate they could see through the door space the village with its tree-ferns and thatched houses, the children playing in the sun, and the men lazing in the shade.
“Ain’t no use for work and ain’t no use for fightin’,” said Keller, referring to the men of the village. “Chawin’ bananas and fishin’ is all they’re good for, bone-lazy lot. I’ll larn them!”
Two or three of his wives served the dinner and prepared the palm toddy; then, after the dishes had been removed, Keller, the toddy mounting to his head, beat another wife who had dared to poke a hole in the wall to peep at the strangers, kicked a dog that got in his way, raised Cain all down the street with a four-foot length of bamboo, and fell like a log dead asleep under the shade of a Jack-fruit tree.
“There ain’t no flies on old man Keller,” said Billy Harman to Bud Davis, as they walked next morning in the sun on the beach. “I tell you I like that chap.”
“Meaning Keller?”
“Yep.”
“Jumping Moses!—and what do you like about him?” asked the astonished Davis.
“Well,” said Harman, “takin’ him by and large, he seems to me a trustable chap—goin’ by what he says. It’s straight out and have done with it when he’s talkin’, same as when he’s kickin’ a Kanaka. I likes him because there ain’t nothin’ hidden about him—look at all them wives of his and he ownin’ up to them without a wink. ‘“Plain Sailin’ Jim,” that’s my name,’ says he, ‘straight with them that’s straight and crooked with them that’s crooked.’ You heard him—and that’s his label or I’m a digger Injin. No, there ain’t no flies on Keller.”
“Yes, I heard him,” said Davis, “and taking him by and large I’d label him the king of the yeggmen, hot from yeggtown. No, sir, you don’t take in Bud Davis with artificial flies and that chap may ‘Plain Sailin’ Jim’ himself to the last holoo of the last trumpet, but he won’t put the hood on chaps that have eyes in their heads, nor noses to sniff a rotten character.”