"What?" said the Englishman, "you don't mean Captain Kyte, do you?"
"That's the man. He's a terror. Guldensterns pay him $200 a month regular to recruit for them, and he gets a bonus of $10 each for every nigger as well. We must try and get him a few here to fill up."
"You can," said the Englishman, "but I won't. I'm not going to tout for an infernal Dutch black-birder."
As soon as a breeze set in the three traders sailed off. The schooner was a fine lump of a vessel of about 190 tons register, and her decks were crowded with male and female recruits from the Solomon group. There were about fifty in all—thirty-five or forty men and about a dozen women.
The captain of the schooner and his "recruiter," Captain Kyte, received the traders with great cordiality. In a few minutes the table was covered with bottles of beer, kummel, and other liquor, and Hans was asserting with great vehemence his ability to procure another thirty "boys."
Kyte, a thin man, with deep-set grey eyes, and a skin tanned by twenty years' wanderings in the South Seas, listened quietly to the trader's vapourings, and then said, "All right, Hans! I think, though, we can leave it till to-morrow, and if you can manage to get me twenty 'boys,' I'll give you five dollars a head for them, cash."
The traders remained on board for an hour or two, and in the meanwhile the captain of the schooner sent a boat ashore to fill water casks from the creek near the trader's house. Six natives got in—four of whom were seamen from the schooner and two Solomon Island recruits; these two recruits led to all the subsequent trouble.
Kyte was a wonderfully entertaining man, and although his one arm was against him (he had lost the other one by the bursting of a shell), he contrived to shoot very straight, and could hold his own anywhere.
He was full of cynical humour, and the Englishman, though suffering from latent fever, could not but be amused at the disrespectful manner in which the American spoke of his employers. The German firm which in a small way was the H.E.I.C. of the Pacific; indeed, their actions in many respects, when conducting trading arrangements with the island chiefs, were very similar to those of the Great East India Company—they always had an armed force to back them up.