"Whitney," he began, the words coming huskily from the dryness of his throat; "I don't dope a man's chances for finishing inside the distance flag in this little Handicap of Captain Bell's as better than a hundred to one. That's long odds to be on the short end of when a man's life is his stake. I don't give a damn about my life. Anyone will tell you that. I've thrown it into the pool on worse than a hundred-to-one shot a good many times before this. But—well, I'd rather appreciate it if—if you could see fit to make a point of not telling my friends on the beach that—that I had any help in—in volunteering—volunteering to lend Captain Bell a hand in getting this hooker on her way."
Rona, sensing that her responsibilities, so far as Allen was concerned, were at an end, raised the kris from his neck and thrust it into the knot of her sulu. The Australian lifted himself lightly to his feet and looked Bell straight between the eyes. "Lead me to your whisky," he said in a steadied voice.... "By Gawd, I need it!"
Poising an instant on the middle of a forward thwart of the canoe, he sprang to the rail, clambered smartly to the top strand of the barbed wire, and swung lightly down to the deck on the main backstay.
It was at this juncture that I went through the feeble motions of trying to act the part of a man myself. I pointed out to Bell that I had knocked about on yachts a good deal, and, while I couldn't claim to be much of a hand with niggers, was probably as good a navigator as Allen was. I also said something about three men standing a better chance than two of pulling off the job, and even added, half jocularly, that I was about ready to go to Australia anyway, as I had had word that an exhibition of my pictures was due to open in Sydney in a fortnight. I only hope my words didn't sound as hollow to Bell as they did to me—for they were the last ones I was ever to speak to him.
Bell's gentlemanliness—nay, rather, his gentleness—came home to me more in what he refrained from saying in his reply than in what he said. He did not say that he had no absinthe aboard, and that, as a consequence, I would be only more useless and undependable than if he had. He did not say that his hands would be full enough looking after crazy niggers without having a crazy white man to keep an eye on. He even refrained from recalling to my mind a story I had told him of a French official in New Caledonia whose absinthe supply had run out while he was at an isolated post, and who, unable to stand the deprivation to the end of the three-days' run in to Noumea in a trading cutter, had taken a header over the side almost in sight of port—and relief.
All he did say was: "Nonsense, ol' man.... Quite out of the question.... Nothin' doin'." Then, as though to soften the curtness of his refusal: "'Twouldn't be propa, Whitney, to set a man that can slap colour on canvas like you can to herdin' sick niggas. Besides, I'm countin' on you to stick 'roun' Kai an' be a sort o' fatha an' motha' to Rona while I'm gone. Youah the only man on the island I'd ca'ah to trust with that job."
There was nothing more to be said after that, I told myself; nothing more to be done. I gave up limply and relapsed into wondering how long it would take me to paddle Rona ashore and traverse the quarter of a mile of coral clinkers between the place where she would land and the long green bottle cooling in its breeze-swept swing beneath my coco leaf jalousies.