“Go to it!” O’Neil exclaimed admiringly. “You ain’t entirely dead, are you? Don’t be a music box all your life, Bill, that’s my advice to you. Play yourself sometimes. There’s nothing like a little friendly argument to keep the brain well greased up. Now you know, or you ought to know at any rate, that a gun that ain’t worked every day will get all gummed up. That’s the way it is with our brains if they ain’t worked. I was afraid,” he ended, “your head had drawn a sweetbread instead of a brain.”
Mary Hamilton welcomed them to her home. Both sailormen apparently were old friends of this accomplished woman. In spite of her name she was not a “papalangi.” Old Captain Alexander Hamilton, whose record in the islands was good but not entirely spotless, had taken Mele to wife some fifteen years before, and not many years after this happy event, sailed his small trading schooner out of Ukula harbor never to return. Some had said that “Alex” was living happily in the Fiji, but Mele, or Mary, as most every one called her, believed that he and his vessel had met disaster in a big storm at sea. Mary had finally remarried, this time to a chief of her own race. Captain Hamilton had owned considerable property in Ukula, all of which had come to Mary; so despite being a widow, she had been sought by many powerful chiefs. Mary was a linguist. She spoke both English and Herzovinian fluently and was as popular with one faction as with the other.
“How’s it for a couple of cocoanuts?” O’Neil asked.
Mary nodded graciously and called loudly in Kapuan for the fruit.
Several girls came shyly forward and hospitably attended to the comforts of their guests. Mary sat on her mat facing the squatting sailors, and smilingly watched them quench their tropical thirst with the refreshing juice, drunk from the green cocoanut itself, out of a small hole cut dexterously in the soft shell by two strokes from a heavy knife used for the purpose.
“Mary and I can tell you lots of history of these islands that never has been written in books,” O’Neil said proudly after he had smacked his lips and thrown the empty cocoanut shell among others in the corner of the house. “Mary’s present husband was fighting once with Kataafa against the Herzovinians. How’s he going to fight this time?” O’Neil asked suddenly.
Mary put a shapely finger to her lips.
“I figure that he’s got to go against his old chief. Mary Hamilton’s husband never could fight against the Americans.” O’Neil’s voice was persuasively commanding.
Mary shook her head and patted her sailor friend affectionately on the shoulder.
“Fa’a Kapua,” she replied. “Husband maybe fight on one side, wife still stay friend with other side.”