Bully made a neat little speech.

"Gentlemen, I thank you for your kindness and courtesy to me. You have
done me a good service. If I went to the States now and told how I had
been seized by a tyrannical American officer, it would make me a rich
man. I could run for President. I could get in, too. I could paint
you all as a crew of piratical ruffians disgracing the uniform of the
greatest country in the world, and the papers would back me up. They
would make me President of a big bank, and the Secretary of the Navy
would keep the _Narrangansett_ at sea for another two years--to save you
from getting lynched by an indignant nation. But I am just going to be
good and generous and remain in obscurity; and to-morrow night I shall
be proud and happy if you will honour me by coming to my house and see
the pirate in his lair."

In the afternoon Bully "dressed ship" and gave his crew liberty. They
went into Matafele, the German quarter of Apia, and made a hideous
disturbance; the _Narrangansett_ sailors joined in, and, only for some
officers being present, the German residents would have had a bad night
of it. Hayes's crew were all gloriously drunk, so were some of the
_Narrangansett_ men, and a lot of flash Samoan _manaia, i.e._, "bucks,"
lent a hand in the proceedings; for even in those days the Germans were
as much hated by the natives as they are at the present time.

II

Before detailing my own experiences of the lamented "Bully," I must
mention some other incidents in his career which will give a fair
illustration of the notoriety he had acquired, and of his keen sense of
humour. Long before these two gentlemen (Bully Hayes and Ben Peese)
had commenced to exploit the Ellice, Gilbert, Kingsmill, Marshall and
Caroline Groups, Bully, then owner of a small, fast-sailing schooner,
had made unto himself a name--particularly as a connoisseur of Island
beauty--among the Marquesas, Society, Hervey and Paumotu Groups, from
Nuka-hiva to Rapa-nui (Easter Island), that ethnographical mystery of
the Southern Seas, whose gentle and amiable people, thirty years ago,
met with so dreadful a fate at the murderous hands of the Peruvian
slavers.

*****

Soon after the slavers had gone from the South Seas a story was current
in Eastern Polynesia that Bully had landed armed boats' crews at Aana,
in the Paumotu Archipelago, and seized a number of girls whom he sold
to Chilian and Peruvian buyers. But, as a matter of fact, Hayes neve