“Oh, give him a chance, Dick,” Paula cried generously. “Ten minutes will worry him.”
“But you don’t know him,” Dicked argued. “And you don’t value my cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He’s drowned kanakas, and you know what that means.”
“Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he’ll slash a killing crawl-stroke at me before I’ve really started. Tell me his history and prizes.”
“I’ll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas. It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them—”
“I thought you said there was one other?” Paula interrupted.
“She was a woman,” Dick answered. “He drowned the last kanaka.”
“And the woman was then a white woman?” Paula insisted.
Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation. Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: “She was a kanaka.”
“A queen, if you please,” Dick took up. “A queen out of the ancient chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa.”
“Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?” Paula asked. “Or did you help her?”