“It was a sight no murder-loving Kanaka could stand and presently out from a valley a bit up beyond the anchorage comes a chap with the biggest belly I’ve ever seen on one man. He had slits in his ears and a tobacco pipe stuck through one of the slits, nothing on him but a gee string and eyes that looked like gimlet holes into hell. I never did see such a chap before or since. It was Sru himself, and he was followed by half a hundred of his tribe, every man armed with an old Snider or a spear, or sometimes both.
“I saw Taute shivering as he looked at Sru, then he bucked up and took heart, seeing that Sru wasn’t armed and was coming for guns, not fighting.
“Then the palaver began, the Kanakas squatting before the gun cases and Slane showing them the Winchesters whilst Taute did the talking. Scudder had been there all right the year before and had measured up Sru and his wants and his paying capacity to a T. He had the gold, brass-yellow Australian sovereigns and British sovereigns got from God knows where, but sovereigns right enough with Victoria’s head on them, for he showed us a fistful, and it was only a question of whether Sru would pay six thousand dollars for our cargo. He wanted to make it four, then he gave in, and we put back in the boat to have the stuff broken out of the hold.
“Knowing the sort of chap Sru was we ought to have made him bring the money on board before a single case was landed, but we were young to the trade and too straight to think another chap crooked, so we didn’t. We let the canoes come alongside and there we hung watching naked Kanakas all shiny with sweat handing overboard the boxes, six guns to a box, to say nothing of the cartridge cases.
“We put off with the last case and then we sat waiting on the beach for our money.
“The Kanakas with the last of the cases turned up into the valley, and when they were gone you couldn’t hear a sound in that place but the noise of the waterfall up among the trees and now and then the sea moving on the beach.
“The water came into that bay as I’ve never seen it come anywhere else. It would be a flat calm, and then, for no reason at all, it would heave up and sigh on the sand and fall quiet again like the bosom of a pious woman in a church.
“There we sat waiting for our money and watching the Greyhound as she swung to her moorings with a Chink fishing over the rail.
“‘What do you think of Sru,’ says Buck at last.
“‘Well, I don’t think he’s a beauty,’ I says, and then talk fizzled out and there we sat waiting for our money and chucking stones in the water.