and Taloi
takes the oars and pulls out again until they drops. Then a breeze
comes along, and they up stick and sails away and gets clear o' the
group, and brings up, after a lot of sufferin', at Rurutu. And ever
since then there's been a French gunboat a-lookin' for Pallou, and he's
been hidin' at Apatiki for nigh on a twelvemonth, and has come over
here now to see if, when your ship comes back, you can't give him and
his missus a passage away somewhere to the westward, out o' the run of
that there gunboat, the VAUDREUIL."

* * * * *

I promised I would "work it" with the captain, and Pallou put out his
brawny hand--the hand that "drove it home into Frenchy's throat"--and
grasped mine in silence. Then he lifted his jacket and showed me his
money-belt, filled.

"I don't want money," I said. "If you have told me the whole story, I
would help any man in such a fix as you." And then Taloi, fresh from
her bath, came in and sat down on the mat, whilst fat Lucia combed and
dressed her glossy hair and placed therein scarlet hisbiscus flowers;
and to show her returned good temper, she took from her lips the
cigarette she was smoking, and offered it to the grim Pallou.

A month later we all three left Rotoava, and Pallou and Taloi went
ashore at one of the Hervey Group, where I gave him charge of a station
with a small stock of trade, and we sailed away east-ward to Pitcairn
and Easter Islands.

* * * * *

Pallou did a good business, and was well liked; and some seven months
afterwards, when we were at Maga Reva, in the Gambier Group, I got a
letter from him. "Business goes well," he wrote, "but Taloi is ill; I
think she will die. You will find everything square, though, when you
come."

But I was never to see that particular island again, as the firm sent
another vessel in place of ours to get Pallou's produce. When the
captain and the supercargo went ashore, a white trader met them, with a
roll of papers in his hand.

"Pallou's stock-list," he said.

"Why, where is he? gone away?"

"No, he's here still; planted alongside his missus."

"Dead!"

"Yes. A few months after he arrived here, that pretty little wife of
his died. He came to me, and asked if I would come and take stock with
him. I said he seemed in a bit of a hurry to start stocktaking before
the poor thing was buried; but anyhow, I went, and we took stock, and
he counted his cash, and asked me to lock the place up if anything
happened to him. Then we