He went on deck, and on returning first filled and lit his pipe in his cool, leisurely manner, and resumed his story.
“My father, as I one day told you, was a whaling skipper, and was lost at sea about thirteen years ago—that is all I ever did say about him, I think. He was a hard old man, and there was no love between us, so that is why I have not spoken of him. He used me very roughly, and when my mother died I left him after a stormy scene. That was eighteen or nineteen years ago, and I never saw him again.
“When my poor mother died, he sold his ship and went to the Marquesas Islands, and opened a business there as a trader. He had made a lot of money at sperm whaling; and, I suppose, thought that as I had left him, swearing I never wished to see him again, that he would spend the rest of his days in the South Seas—money grubbing to the last.
“Sometimes I heard of him as being very prosperous. Once, when I was told that he had been badly hurt by a gun accident, I wrote to him and asked if he would care for me to come and stay with him. This I did for the sake of my dead mother. Nearly a year and a half passed before I got an answer—an answer that cut me to the quick:—
“'I want no undutiful son near me. I do well by myself'.
“Several years went by, and then when I was mate of a trading schooner in the Fijis I was handed a letter by the American Consul. It was two years old, and was from my father—a long, long letter, written in such a kindly manner, and with such affectionate expressions that I forgave the old man all the savage and unmerited thrashings he had given me when I sailed with him as a lad.
“In this letter he told me that he wanted to see me again—that made me feel good—and that he had built a schooner which he had named Juliette after my mother, who was a French Canadienne. He described the labour and trouble he had taken over her, the knees and stringers of ngiia wood, and the carvings of sperm whales he had had cut on the windlass butts and stanchions. Then he went on to say that he had been having a lot of trouble with the French naval authorities, who wanted to drive all Englishmen and Americans out of the group, and had made up his mind to leave the Marquesas and settle down again either in Samoa or Tonga, where he hoped I would join him and forget how hardly he had used me in the past.
“The gun accident, he wrote, had rendered him all but blind, and he had engaged a man named Krause, a German, as mate, and to navigate the Juliette to Tonga or Samoa. Krause, he said, was a man he did not like, nor trust; but as he was a good sailor-man and could navigate, he had engaged him, as he could get no one else at Nukahiva.
“With my father were a party of Marquesan natives—a chief and his wife and her infant, and two young men. The schooner's crew were four Dagoes—deserters from some ship. He did not care about taking them, but had no choice.
“Some ten days before the German and the crew came on board, my father secretly took all his money—$8,000 in gold—and, aided by the Marquesan chief, made a secure hiding-place for it by removing the skin in the transoms, and then packing it in oakum and wedging each package in between the timbers. Then he carefully relaid the skin, and repainted the whole. He said, 'If anything happens to me through treachery, no one will ever discover that money, although they will get a couple of thousand of Mexican silver dollars in my chest'.