s Peabody known
the sting of a living anger. But never before had Junius Peabody been
reduced to a naked Junius Peabody, dot and carry nothing--penniless,
desperate, and now cheated of a last hope. That made the difference.

"Hey!" he protested. "See here, you know--Dammit!"

He struggled up and climbed anyhow into trousers, coat, and shoes, and
set off at a shambling trot, with no clear notion of what he meant to do
but keeping the larrikin in sight.

Sydney dodged in among the trees, found them too scant for cover, paused
to fling a yellow snarl over his shoulder, and swung up the shore. He
turned, questing here and there, shouting as he ran, and presently
raised an answering shout from a hollow whence another figure started up
to join him, a bearded, heavy-set rogue, whose abnormally long arms
dangled like an ape's out of his sleeveless shirt. Junius recognized
Willems, the third of their party the night before, and he knew where
the interest of that sullen big Hollander would lie. He had a coalition
of thievery against him now. The two beachcombers ran on together,
footing briskly past the long boat sheds and the high white veranda of
Bendemeer's place....

Under this iron thatch stood the man Bendemeer himself, cool and lathy
in spotless ducks, planted there, as was his morning custom, to oversee
and command all his little capital. And in truth it was a kingdom's
capital, the center of a trading monopoly of the old type and chief seat
of as strange and absolute a tyrant as the world still offers room for;
rich, powerful, independent, fearing nothing between heaven and hell and
at once the best-loved and the best-hated individual in his sphere of
influence.

Bendemeer, trader, philanthropist, and purveyor of rotgut, was one of
those unclassed growths of the South Seas that almost constitute a new
racial type. Nobody could have placed his nationality or his caste or
his accent. His name was of a piece with the grim self-sufficiency that
gave nothing and asked nothing: an obvious jest, borrowed from the
Persian song of an Irish poet, but the one touch of fancy about him.
Somewhere, somehow, he had taken a cynic twist or a rankling wound that
had turned his white man's blood once for all. They tell stories of such
cases up and down the islands, and mostly the stories are very ugly and
discreditable indeed. But not so concerning Bendemeer; against whom was
no scandal, only curses and bitterness. For his peculiarity