“Look you here, boy, directly you’re feeling fit go up to Parsons’s bar and see if you can get in with some of the shellbacks. They’re the men for us. Tell them you want to negotiate with a skipper who would go to New Guinea, and don’t forget to say that you’ve got a man behind you who’ll pay the necessary expenses for the whole business.”
“Bless you! How good of you!” replied Hillary, as he gripped the old sailorman’s hand, quite forgetting that he was Gabrielle’s father and was thinking of his daughter and not of Hillary’s prospects.
“Don’t thank me, boy; it’s my daughter, ain’t it?”
“Yes; but it’s good of you to give me the chance to hire a schooner to help get your daughter back again,” said Hillary, as he realised the exact position and all that the girl’s future welfare meant to him.
The old man took his hand and said: “You’re a good lad, and I can see that you’re as much interested in my daughter as I am.”
“I am!” exclaimed Hillary fervently. Then at the old man’s request he put his cap on and went off to seek some kindred spirit, someone who would help him to negotiate with a skipper who was likely to let his schooner out on hire. It wanted some negotiating too! Skippers don’t let their ships out on hire every day.
“I’ll make for the grog shanty; that’s the only likely spot where something that no one expects to happen will happen,” was his comment as he walked off.
Hillary seldom visited the grog shanty at Rokeville. Once or twice, as the reader may recall, he had gone to the shanty after dusk just to hear the sunburnt men from the seas sing their rollicking sea-chanteys.
The German consul, Arm Von de Sixt’s edict that native girls were not to go near the grog shanties after dark was still being strictly ignored. Only the night before old Parsons had waved his signal towel and chuckled with delight at the bar door as the brown maids from the mountains performed Tapriata and Siva dances under the moon-lit palms in front of his secluded shanty. As everyone knows, this drew custom; and the sights the sailormen saw—the wild dances and rhythmical swerves of the girls—gripped their imaginations. Indeed the festivals outside Parsons’s grog bar were so well known that as far away as ’Frisco, Callao and London sailors could be heard to remark after leaving some music hall: “Pretty fair show, but nothing like the dancing brown girls outside Parsons’s grog bar in Bougainville!”
As Hillary came within three hundred yards of the grog shanty he could hear the faint halloas and chorus of oaths that mingled with the sounds of drunken revelry in the shanty. Someone was playing an accordion that accompanied some hoarse voice that roared forth: “White wings they never grow weary.” For a moment the young apprentice lingered beneath the palms, then realising that he had the whole afternoon before him, he turned away and went down to the beach. After walking about for some time he managed to get a native to row him out to some of the schooners that were lying at anchor in the bay. He went aboard two of them and asked to see the mate or skipper; but, as luck would have it, they were both ashore.