“I’m going to install an ice-making machine with part of the two thousand dollars the Chink paid me. Going to sea is a hard life and I make enough money for my owners to entitle me to do myself rather well. One does grow a bit weary of boiled Scotch and tepid wines.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Two weeks later the brown crew of the Pelorus set Dan Pritchard and Sooey Wan ashore in the whaleboat.
“I’ll drop in here on my way back—say a year hence,” Captain Hackett promised him as they shook hands at the Jacob’s-ladder. “I’m a little bit curious about you and when I’m curious about anybody I have to find out. I think six months will be long enough to cure you, however. Good-by, Mr. Pritchard, and good luck to you. Kiss the bride for me and—forgive me if I venture to remind you once more—you really do not have to marry her! Tamea hasn’t any very serious thoughts on the validity or the sanctity of marriage. It is, comparatively, a recent institution here.” He shook a horny finger at Dan and answered the latter’s scowl with a mellow laugh. Dan thought he might be just a little bit jingled a few hours earlier than was his wont. Strange man. Dan had an idea he had fallen from high estate.
A Kanaka sailor carried Dan ashore from the boat through the wash of the surf, and followed with Dan’s trunk. Sooey Wan, presumed to be a person of no importance, struggled ashore in water up to his knees, and the moment he found himself high and dry on the shingle he looked about him with interest. What he saw was a half mile of white beach with a fringe of tufted coconut palms leaning seaward, a few canoes hauled up on the beach, a large corrugated iron godown and a small wooden bungalow, painted white with green trimmings and wide, deep verandas, squatted on the low bluff above the beach.
From the veranda of this bungalow a white man detached himself and came down over the bluff to meet them. He introduced himself as the Reverend Cyrus Muggridge, the resident missionary. He was a gloomy, liverish sort of man and Dan had a feeling that to Mr. Muggridge his martyrdom in Riva was a thing of the flesh and scarcely of the spirit. He repaid the reverend gentleman’s compliment in kind and introduced himself. Then, because he observed in the missionary’s eyes an unspoken query, he said:
“Are you, by any chance, Mr. Muggridge, acquainted with Miss Tamea Larrieau, who is, I understand, the last blood of the ancient chiefs of Riva?”
“I am, unhappily, acquainted with the young woman,” Muggridge replied wearily, and added, “She is, like her father, wholly irreclaimable.”
“Perhaps you would be so good as to direct me to her home?” Dan suggested. “That is, if she has arrived in Riva recently, as I have reason to suspect she may have. You seem a bit shy on population, Mr. Muggridge,” he added parenthetically.
“I think my last census showed some four hundred souls, but since then we have had two epidemics of influenza and the birth rate has scarcely kept pace with the mortality rate. Really, I must have another census. Counting them roughly, I should say that the total population of the island is two hundred and fifty, of which, perhaps, thirty families reside in the village.”