wont to state--more or less titubant on his pins the while--that the
only honest men in that merry little hell had come by land. It was a
useful and a harmless jest, salted with the essential fact whereby
legends are preserved and made historic. But from a date it lost its
savor....

At the Portugee's one night--Saturday, be sure, for it was always
Saturday on Thursday with the pearlers--a gentleman from Wooloomooloo
who had just adorned the traditional witticism with profane fancy found
himself confronted by a quiet stranger who laid down his coat and a new
law.

"I don't mind so much what you call yourselves _to_ yourselves," he
observed, while the circle shouted and spread about. "Nor your nice new
magistrate, nor your missionaries, nor your artillery guard on the hill.
Maybe you've overlooked the modern spread of respectability and
corrugated roofings. Or maybe you know 'em better than I do. But I've
come to tarry with you for a time, my friends. And, as long as I'm in
your midst, any chap that says I'm not honest--and can't prove it--I'll
knock seven bells out of him."

Which he did, _seriatim_.

* * * * *

Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday
Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the
last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering
grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human
complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is
only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying
very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are
prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.

Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a
color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among
the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their
common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred
words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in _beche de mer_.

Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success.
Nobody questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or
the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on
a pearling license. Nobody wondered when he paid off and scattered his
Kanaka crew--possible links with his past--and shipped a new lot from
the motley mob on the jetty.

And a motley lot he picked!