A delicious shudder ran down the spine of the sleeping Mr. Pottle, for from his reading he knew that "the long pig that speaks" means—man!
For Mr. Pottle had one big ambition, one great suppressed desire. It was the dearest wish of his thirty-six years of life to meet a cannibal, a real cannibal, face to face, eye to eye.
Next day he sold his barber's shop. Two months and seventeen days later he was unpacking his trunk in the tiny settlement of Vait-hua, in the Marquesas Islands, in the heart of the South Seas.
The air was balmy, the sea deep purple, the nodding palms and giant ferns of the greenest green were exactly as advertised; but when the first week or two of enchantment had worn off, Mr. Pottle owned to a certain feeling of disappointment.
He tasted popoi and found it rather nasty; the hotel in which he stayed—the only one—was deficient in plumbing, but not in fauna. The natives—he had expected great things of the natives—were remarkably like underdone Pullman porters wrapped in bandana handkerchiefs. They were not exciting, they exhibited no inclination to eat Mr. Pottle or one another, they coveted his pink shirt, and begged for a drink from his bottle of Sweet Lilac Tonic.
He mentioned his disappointment at these evidences of civilization to Tiki Tiu, the astute native who kept the general store.
Mr. Pottle's mode of conversation was his own invention. From the books he had read he improvised a language. It was simple. He gave English words a barbaric sound, usually by suffixing "um" or "ee," shouted them at the top of his voice into the ear of the person with whom he was conversing, and repeated them in various permutations. He addressed Tiki Tiu with brisk and confident familiarity.
"Helloee, Tiki Tiu. Me wantum see can-balls. Can-balls me wantum see. Me see can-balls wantum."
The venerable native, who spoke seventeen island dialects and tongues, and dabbled in English, Spanish, and French, appeared to apprehend his meaning; indeed, one might almost have thought he had heard this question before, for he answered promptly:
"No more can-balls here. All Baptists."