me out
alive. This man not only came out, but he brought with him seven hundred
and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money price of eight years
and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and cases of
tobacco.

Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is
three times its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many
other things--rifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an
excellent collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the
entire collection is another head, perfectly dried and cured, with sandy
hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped in the finest of fibre
lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond his realm,
he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,
contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls
on the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The
head is esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the
possession of it is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.

"YAH! YAH! YAH!"

He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat,
beginning with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and
thereafter repeating it at regular intervals throughout the day till
bedtime, which was usually midnight. He slept but five hours out of the
twenty-four, and for the remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and
decently drunk. During the eight weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll,
I never saw him draw a sober breath. In fact, his sleep was so short
that he never had time to sober up. It was the most beautiful and
orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.

McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins.
His hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured
his whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been
twenty-eight years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the
German Solomons, and so thoroughly had he become identified with that
portion of the world, that he habitually spoke in that bastard lingo
called "bech-de-mer." Thus, in conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP
meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that dinner was served; and BELLY
BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at his stomach. He was
a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside by ardent
spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a man, a
little animated clinker,