e
turned his following away, and shut the door.

"I bet a dollar that fellow wouldn't swap billets with the angel
Gabriel at this partikler moment," said our profane mate thoughtfully.

* * * * *

We started weighing and shipping the copra next day. After finishing
up, the solemn Charley invited the skipper and supercargo to remain
ashore till morning. His great trouble, he told us, was that he had not
yet secured a wife, "a reg'lar wife, y'know." He had, unluckily, "lost
the run" of the last Mrs Charley during his absence at another island
of the group, and negotiations with various local young women had been
broken off owing to his having run out of trade. In the South Seas, as
in the civilised world generally, to get the girl of your heart is
usually a mere matter of trade. There were, he told us with a
melancholy look, "some fine Nukunau girls here on a visit, but the one
I want don't seem to care much about stayin', unless all this new trade
fetches her."

"Who is she?" enquired the skipper.

"Tibakwa's daughter."

"Let's have a look at her," said the skipper, a man of kind impulses,
who felt sorry at the intermittency of the Long One's connubial
relations. The tall, scraggy trader shambled to the door and bawled
out: "Tibakwa, Tibakwa, Tibakwa, O!" three times.

The people, singing in the big MONIEP or town-house, stopped their
monotonous droning, and the name of Tibakwa, was yelled vociferously
through-out the village in true Gilbert Group style. In the Gilberts,
if a native in one corner of a house speaks to another in the opposite,
he bawls loud enough to be heard a mile off.

* * * * *

Tibakwa (The Shark) was a short, squat fellow, with his broad back and
chest scored and seamed with an intricate and inartistic network of
cicatrices made by sharks' teeth swords. His hair, straight, coarse,
and jet-black, was cut away square from just above his eyebrows to the
top of his ears, leaving his fierce countenance in a sort of frame.
Each ear-lobe bore a load--one had two or three sticks of tobacco,
twined in and about the distended circle of flesh, and the other a
clasp-knife and wooden pipe. Stripped to the waist he showed his
muscular outlines to perfection, and he sat down unasked in the bold,
self-confident, half-defiant manner natural to the Line Islander.

* * * * *

"Where's Tirau?" asked the trader.

"Here," said the man of wounds, pointing outside, and he called out in
a voice like the bell