“Where’s she bound for?” he asked of a sailor who was holystoning the schooner’s deck.
“Barnd fer ’Frisco,” said the man, as he stared at Hillary, and then asked him if he wanted a job.
“Not on a boat that’s going to ’Frisco,” said Hillary, as he looked over the side and beckoned the native to come alongside with the canoe.
Then he went over to the tramp steamer that lay near the promontory, and after a good deal of trouble managed to see the skipper, who, when he found that Hillary wanted a job, roared out: “If yer don’t git off this b—— ship in two seconds I’ll pitch yer off!”
And so Hillary bowed his thanks and gracefully withdrew into his native canoe. He had made up his mind to go back and visit the grog shanty. “Perhaps I’ll see some skipper there, or at least someone who knows the way to get in with a captain who might sail for a price to New Guinea,” was his reflection.
When he arrived once more on the beach off Rokeville he could hear the sounds of revelry in Parsons’s grog bar going strong. It was getting near sunset, the busy drinking time. For the Solomon Island climate is terribly hot and muggy at times.
“I shall be glad to go into the bar and see men that laugh; it’s better than mooching about in company with my own reflections,” thought Hillary, as he walked up the grove of palm-trees that led to the beach hotel. As he approached the entry to the rough wooden saloon he was startled by hearing a mighty voice—a voice that sounded like the voice of some Olympian god. It was the voice of some man who was singing, someone gifted with a vibrant, melodious utterance. It was strangely mellow, for distance softened the gigantic hoarse-throated rumbling till it sounded peculiarly attractive, as though a woman sang in a man’s heart.
As Hillary listened he felt confused. Where had he heard that voice before? Then he strode beneath the two bread-fruit trees that stood just in front of the shanty and, with strange eagerness, entered the little doorway, anxious to see the one who sang so loud and inspired the shellbacks to yell so vociferously.
As the young apprentice came into the presence of that motley throng of drinking seamen he stared with astonishment at the big figure of the man who had just finished singing. Hillary had seen him before; there he stood, the Homeric personality who had so rudely intruded when he had been listening to Gabrielle’s song by the lagoon. It was the huge sailorman who had disturbed him by inquiring for the nearest Solomon Island gin palace.
Hillary almost forgot his troubles as he stared on the scene before him. The big man was waiting for the chorus to cease before he proudly took up the solo with his vibrant voice. Heaven knows why the apprentice dubbed him “Ulysses” in his mind, for by his own account he was anything but an example of the Homeric hero—that is, if his own accounts of his faithlessness to his absent spouse, whoever she might be, were true. There he stood, one muscular arm outstretched, his helmet hat tilted off his fine brow, revealing his bronze curls, his eyes sentimentally lifted to the low roof of the shanty. He looked like some forlorn, derelict knight as, with one hand at his van-dyke beard, he began to roar forth the fourth verse: