re's
an immense amount of good land going to waste."
"But it will never become a white man's climate, in spite of all that,"
Joan reiterated. "The white man will always be unable to perform the
manual labour."
"That is true."
"It will mean slavery," she dashed on.
"Yes, like all the tropics. The black, the brown, and the yellow will
have to do the work, managed by the white men. The black labour is too
wasteful, however, and in time Chinese or Indian coolies will be
imported. The planters are already considering the matter. I, for one,
am heartily sick of black labour."
"Then the blacks will die off?"
Sheldon shrugged his shoulders, and retorted,--
"Yes, like the North American Indian, who was a far nobler type than the
Melanesian. The world is only so large, you know, and it is filling up--"
"And the unfit must perish?"
"Precisely so. The unfit must perish."
In the morning Joan was roused by a great row and hullabaloo. Her first
act was to reach for her revolver, but when she heard Noa Noah, who was
on guard, laughing outside, she knew there was no danger, and went out to
see the fun. Captain Young had landed Satan at the moment when the
bridge-building gang had started along the beach. Satan was big and
black, short-haired and muscular, and weighed fully seventy pounds. He
did not love the blacks. Tommy Jones had trained him well, tying him up
daily for several hours and telling off one or two black boys at a time
to tease him. So Satan had it in for the whole black race, and the
second after he landed on the beach the bridge-building gang was
stampeding over the compound fence and swarming up the cocoanut palms.
"Good morning," Sheldon called from the veranda. "And what do you think
of the nigger-chaser?"
"I'm thinking we have a task before us to train him in to the
house-boys," she called back.
"And to your Tahitians, too. Look out, Noah! Run for it!"
Satan, having satisfied himself that the tree-perches were unassailable,
was charging straight for the big Tahitian.
But Noah stood his ground, though somewhat irresolutely, and Satan, to
every one's surprise, danced and frisked about him with laughing eyes and
wagging tail.
"Now, that is what I might call a proper dog," was Joan's comment. "He
is at least wiser than you, Mr. Sheldon. He didn't require any teaching
to recognize the difference between a Tahitian and a black boy. What do
you think, Noah? Why don't
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