The play that won

by Ralph Henry Barbour

“Oh!”

“An’ it’s pizen if you eat it afore it’s ripe. Don’t never touch a hoki-moki fruit till it’s purple, Billy.”

Billy promised instantly. “Only,” he added, “I might not know it, Captain Ezra, if I was to go to Pirate Key. Is it round? Does it grow on trees?”

“More square than round, you might say. It grows in clusters as big as that water cask there. Hundreds of ’em together. An’ they grow high because if they didn’t the wild horses would eat ’em when they was green an’ die. That’s one o’ the wonders o’ Nature, Billy.”

“Yes, sir. But I didn’t know horses ate fruit.”

“Ain’t you ever see a horse eat a apple? Why, they’re plumb fond o’ apples. Bananas, too. An’ watermelons. Guess the only kind o’ fruit a horse won’t eat is cocoanuts.” The Captain filled his pipe leisurely and in silence. Then: “Another peculiar thing, Billy, is that you might call the affinity o’ the hoki-moki tree an’ them wild horses. They can’t keep away from ’em, the horses can’t. There’s something about the—the tree itself that draws the horses: something in the wood, they say. You don’t never find any bark on a hoki-moki tree low down because the wild horses keeps rubbin’ themselves against it. Seems like they just can’t resist the—the sub-tile influence. It’s extraordinary.”

Billy agreed emphatically that it was. “Are there many wild horses on the key?” he inquired after a moment.

“Thousands. The natives catch ’em an’ train ’em. The King has more’n three hundred horses in his private stable, an’ the Queen she has about a hundred, an’ the Prince he’s got maybe thirty or forty, too.” The Captain applied a lighted match to his pipe and puffed blue smoke clouds into the spring sunlight. “They kill ’em for their hides, too,” he went on presently. “They make fine leather.”

“I shouldn’t think they’d need leather,” said Billy, “being just savages.”

“Savages!” The Captain viewed him reprovingly. “Don’t you ever let ’em hear you say that, son! Benighted, in a manner o’ speakin’, they may be, but they ain’t savages. As for leather, why, now, they make lots o’ uses o’ it: saddles an’ harnesses an’ travelin’ bags——”