“'REO,” THE FISHERMAN
'Reo was a short, squat Malayan, with a face like a skate, barring his eyes, which were long, narrow slits, apparently expressing nothing but supreme indifference to the world in general. But they would light up sometimes with a merry twinkle when the old rogue would narrate some of his past villainies.
He came to Samoa in the old, old days—long before Treaties, and Imperial Commissioners, and other gilded vanities were dreamt of by us poor, hard-working traders. He seemed to have dropped from the sky when one afternoon, as Tom Denison, the supercargo, and some of his friends sat on Charley the Russian's verandah, drinking lager, he marched up to them, sat down on the steps, and said, “Good evening.”
“Hallo,” said Schlüter, the skipper of the Anna Godeffrey. “Who are you? Where do you come from?”
'Reo waved a short, stumpy and black clay pipe to and fro, and replied vaguely—
“Oh, from somewhere.”
Some one laughed, surmising correctly enough that he had run away from a ship; then they remembered that no vessel had even touched at Apia for a month. (Later on he told Denison that he had jumped overboard from a Baker's Island guano-man, as she was running down the coast, and swum ashore, landing at a point twenty miles distant from Apia. The natives in the various villages had given him food, so when he reached the town he was not hungry.)
“What do you want, anyway?” asked Schlüter.
“Some tobacco, please. And a dollar or two. I can pay you back.”
“When?” said Hamilton the pilot incredulously.