t also fail to be too long on
imagination. He must not understand too well the instincts, customs
and mental processes of the blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it
is not in such fashion that the white race has tramped its royal road
around the world.

Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely
strung, and he possessed too much imagination. The world was too much
with him. He projected himself too quiveringly into his environment.
Therefore, the last place in the world for him to come was the
Solomons. He did not come, expecting to stay. A five-weeks' stop-over
between steamers, he decided, would satisfy the call of the primitive
he felt thrumming the strings of his being. At least, so he told the
lady tourists on the Makembo, though in different terms; and they
worshipped him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they would
know only the safety of the steamer's deck as she threaded her way
through the Solomons.

There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He
was a little shriveled wisp of a man, with a withered skin the color of
mahogany. His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his
other name, Captain Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and
to scare naughty pickaninnies to righteousness, from New Hanover to the
New Hebrides. He had farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and
hardship, the crack of Sniders and the lash of the overseers, had
wrested five millions of money in the form of beche-de-mer, sandalwood,
pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and copra, grasslands, trading
stations, and plantations. Captain Malu's little finger, which was
broken, had more inevitableness in it than Bertie Arkwright's whole
carcass. But then, the lady tourists had nothing by which to judge
save appearances, and Bertie certainly was a fine-looking man.

Bertie talked with Captain Malu in the smoking-room, confiding to him
his intention of seeing life red and bleeding in the Solomons. Captain
Malu agreed that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not
until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that
young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-calibre
pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a
loaded magazine up the hollow butt.

"It is so simple," he said. He shot the outer barrel back along the
inner one. "That loads it, and cocks it, you see. And the