THE DEVIL’S WHITE MAN
WE were all lying on the floor of Letonu’s big house, Tautala and I side by side, our heads both pillowed on the same bamboo. About us on the mats the whole family lay outstretched in slumber, save little Titi, who was droning on a jews’-harp, and my coxswain, George Leapai, who was playing a game of draughts with the chief. The air was hot and drowsy, and the lowered eaves let through streaks of burning sunshine, outlining a sort of pattern on an old fellow who moaned occasionally in his sleep.
“In the White Country,” said Tautala, “didst thou ever happen to meet a chief named Patsy?—a beautiful young man with sea-blue eyes and golden hair?”
“What was his other name?” I asked.
Tautala could not recall it, the foreign stutter being so unrememberable. Indeed, she doubted almost if she had ever heard it. “We called him Patsy,” she said, “and he used to tell us he was descended from a line of kings.”
“Wasn’t it O’ something?” I inquired.
No, she couldn’t remember. It was long ago, when she was a little child and knew nothing; but she had loved Patsy, and it was a sad day to her when the devil took him.
“Tell me about it,” I said. “I have never heard that tala.”
“Oh, it is a true story,” she said; “for was not my own sister Java married to Patsy, and did I not see it all with my own eyes, from the beginning even to the end? But thou must strengthen thyself to hear it, for it is a tale of sadness.”