He unbuckled his belt, and with a contemptuous gesture threw the whole lot outside the door.
“Thank you, Mr. Krause,” I said, “I feel more at ease now, so will you kindly tell me the object of your visit?”
“I've come to get that swine Tematau. I pay him. He is my man. I shall tolerate no interference. I shall take him back to Taritai” (the name of the village where he lived) “if I have to fight my way out of this village of yours and kill fifty of your niggers.”
“Steady yourself, Mr. Krause, and don't say 'your niggers' so emphatically. In the first place I have but two native servants, not fifty, but either of those two would very much resent your calling him a 'nigger.' You know as well as I do that to call a native of this island, or of any other island of the group, a nigger, is so grossly insulting that his knife would be out in an instant.”
“Ah, you and I have different ideas on the subject,” he said sneeringly; “but that does not matter to me at the moment. My paid servant has absconded from my service, and I have come to get him. That is plain enough, isn't it?”
“Quite. But I am an Englishman, Mr. Krause, and not to be easily bluffed because a man comes stamping into my house with a brace of pistols in his belt.”
“I did not come here to argue. I came here for that nigger—my property.”
“Your property! Is the man a slave? Now, look here, Mr. Krause; you have used the man so brutally that he is unable to stand on his feet. He and the girl——”
“I don't want the girl, and I daresay you do,” he said, with a sneering laugh that made me long to haul off and hit the fellow between the eyes; “she's a nuisance, and if I ever again see her prowling about my house and practising her infernal fooleries on my wife, I'll put a bullet through her. But the man I will have.”
“Stop!” I cried warningly, as he took a step toward the sick man, “stop, before you run yourself into mischief. Listen to me. I have but to raise my hand and call, and you will find yourself trussed up fore and aft to a pole like a pig, and carried back to your village.”