Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.
Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in bêche de mer.
Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success. Nobody questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on a pearling license. Nobody wondered when he paid off and scattered his Kanaka crew—possible links with his past—and shipped a new lot from the motley mob on the jetty.
And a motley lot he picked! His cook was Chinese; his head diver a Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp, the name of Buttermilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact—which again nobody noticed—that they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who do.
This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself might have filled a whole illustration; thewed like a colossus, crop black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an institution....
"'Im? Cap'n of the Fancy Free, that flash little lugger out beyond. 'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on shore leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might ha' owed you—that's 'is sort. And—my word!—'e's got a jab to the boko you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im. 'Honest Wetherbee'—that's 'im."
For he lived to the title. If it is honest to abide by every hampering regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices over a bit of inferior shell; to lose two weeks with your outfit in quarantine, voluntarily—that happened when the Opalton brought a hot cholera scare and her passenger list camped on Friday Island—to share your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee played it. Amazingly—as a man might play an arduous game!
Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the harbor master and was calling various pilots, navigators, and odd fish of Torres Strait by their handier names—especially the pilots. These were the rewards of reputation, and they defined Thursday's acceptance of him up to that night in the wet season when his visit ended....
A Saturday again. The northwest monsoon had broken with torrential downpour, and now the island reeked in a steam bath, as if the young moon had focused a sick, intolerable ray upon it. A high wind stormed the sands and brought no relief. The quiver of the surf beat on the senses like heat waves. A few thrashing pawpaws and palm tufts threw shadows like tormented sleepers along the beach. But up in the town Thursday took its usual "tangle," shouted and sang and drowned its fever without assuagement in the periodic crisis of the fortune hunt. A Brisbane steamer lay ready to depart with the morning tide. Meanwhile her shore goers, "seeing a bit o' life," did their possible to keep up the prevailing temperature. Only the long jetty was quiet. Here a man might stand back and away from it all and hear the single note of its turmoil and peer into the mist of its lights like a contemplative Lucifer at the verge of some lesser inferno.