AMATUA’S SAILOR
AMATUA was running down a beautifully shaded road as fast as his little legs would carry him, and close in chase, like a hawk after a sparrow, was a grizzled man-of-war’s-man with a switch. The road was long and straight; on both sides it was bordered by prickly hedges bright with limes, and as impenetrable as a tangle of barbed wire. At every step the white man gained on the boy, until the latter could hear the hoarse, angry breath of his pursuer. Amatua stopped short, and before he could even so much as turn he found himself in a grip of iron. Whish, whish, whish! dashed the switch on his bare back and legs, keen and stinging like the bite of fire-ants. It took all the little fellow’s manliness to keep him from bellowing aloud. The tears sprang to his eyes,—even the son of a chief is human like the rest of us,—but he would not cry.
“What’s all this?” rang out a voice, as a white man reined in his horse beside them—a tall man in spectacles, who spoke with an air of authority.
The sailor touched his hat. “Why, sir, you’d scarcely believe it,” he said, “the fuss I’ve had with this young savage! First he tried to lose me in the woods. I didn’t think nothing of that; but when he got me into a river for a swim, and then made off with my clothes, and hid ’em under a tree—I might have been looking for ’em yet, me that must be aboard my ship at twelve o’clock. Why, it might have cost me my stripe! I tell you, I never dreamed of such a thing, for me and Am have been friends ever since the first day I came ashore. He’s no better than a treacherous little what-d’ye-call-’em!”
“The chief says thou hidst his clothes,” said the stranger, in the native language. “He says thou triedst to lose him in the woods.”
“Ask him if I haven’t always been a good friend to him,” said the sailor. “Ask him who gave him the knife with the lanyard, and who made him the little spear to jug fish on the reef. Just you ask him that, sir.”
“Your Highness,” said Amatua, in his own tongue, “Bill doesn’t understand. I love Bill, and I don’t want him to drown. I want to save Bill’s high-chief life.”
“And so thou hidst Bill’s clothes,” said the stranger. “That was a fine way to help him!”
“Be not angry,” said Amatua. “Great is the wisdom of white chiefs in innumerable things, but there are some little, common, worthless things that they don’t understand at all.”