ppressing
the villainies and slaughter that then attended the labour trade, there
was one instance in which one of the schooners and her captain did some
good by avenging as cruel a murder as was ever perpetrated in equatorial
Oceania.

One Jack Keyes was a trader on the island of Apiang, one of the Gilbert
Group, recently annexed by Great Britain. He was very old, very quiet
in his manner, and about the last kind of man one would expect to see
earning his living as a trader among the excitable, intractable native
race which inhabit the Line Islands. His fellow-trader, Bob Randolph,
a man of tremendous nerve and resolution, only maintained his prestige
among the Apiang natives by the wonderful control he had learnt to
exercise over a naturally fiery temper and by taking care, when knocking
down any especially insulting native "buck," never to draw blood, and
always to laugh. And the people of Apiang thought much of Te Matan Bob,
as much as the inhabitants of the whole group--from Arorai in the south
to Makin in the north--do to this day of quiet, spectacled Bob Corrie,
of wild Maiana, who can twist them round his little finger without an
angry word. Perhaps poor Keyes, being a notoriously inoffensive man,
might have died a natural death in due time, but for one fatal mistake
he made; and that was in bringing a young wife to the island.

A white woman was a rarity in the Line Islands. Certainly the Boston
mission ship, _Morning Star_, in trying to establish the "Gospel
according to Bosting--no ile or dollars, no missn'ry," as Jim Garstang,
of Drummond's Island, used to observe, had once brought a lady
soul-saver of somewhat matured charms to the island, but her advent into
the Apiang _moniap_ or town hall, carrying an abnormally large white
umbrella and wearing a white solar topee with a green turban, and blue
goggles, had had the effect of scaring the assembled councillors away
across to the weather-side of the narrow island, whence none returned
until the terrifying apparition had gone back to the ship. But this
white woman who poor old Keyes married and brought with him was
different, and the Apiang native, like all the rest of the world, is
susceptible to female charms; and _her_ appearance at the doorway of the
old trader's house was ever hailed with an excited and admiring chorus
of "_Te boom te matan! Te boom te matan!_" (The white man's wife.) But
none were rude or offensive to her, although the young men especi