Project Gutenberg's The Flemmings And "Flash Harry" Of Savait, by Louis Becke

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Title: The Flemmings And "Flash Harry" Of Savait
From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other
Stories" - 1902

Author: Louis Becke

Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24953]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FLEMMINGS ***

Produced by David Widger

THE FLEMMINGS and "FLASH HARRY" OF SAVAIT

From "The Strange Adventure Of James Shervinton and Other Stories" - 1902

By Louis Becke

T. FISHER UNWIN, 1902

LONDON

THE FLEMMINGS

CHAPTER I

On a certain island in the Paumotu Group, known on the charts as Chain
Island, but called Anaa by the people themselves, lived a white man
named Martin Flemming, one of those restless wanderers who range the
Pacific in search of the fortune they always mean to gain, but which
never comes to them, except in some few instances--so few that they
might be counted on one's fingers.

Two years had come and gone since Flemming had landed on the island
with his wife, family, and two native servants, and settled down as a
resident trader at the large and populous village of Tuuhora, where he
soon gained the respect and confidence--if not the friendship--of the
Anaa people, one of the proudest, most self-reliant, and brave of any
of the Polynesian race, or their offshoots. For though he was a keen
business man, he was just and honest in all his transactions, never
erring, as so many traders do, on the side of mistaken generosity, but
yet evincing a certain amount of liberality when the occasion justified
it--and the natives knew that when he told them that tobacco, or
biscuit, or rice, or gunpowder had risen in price in Tahiti or New
Zealand, and that he would also be compelled to raise his charges, they
knew that his statement was true--that he was a man above trickery,
either in his business or his social relations with them, and would not
descend to a lie for the sake of gain.

Flemming, at this time, was about forty years of age; his wife, who
was an intelligent Hawaiian Islander, was ten years his junior, and the
mother of his t