not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by
starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him
away. He weighed ninety pounds.

But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled.
Oolong Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One
steered by compass course in its lagoon. It was populated by five
thousand Polynesians, all strapping men and women, many of them standing
six feet in height and weighing a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was
two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land. Twice a year a
little schooner called to collect copra. The one white man on Oolong was
McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler; and he ruled Oolong
and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said come, and they
came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor judgment.
He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered
continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's daughter,
wanted to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said
yes; but McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the
king wanted to buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest,
McAllister said no. The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of
180,000 cocoanuts, and until that was paid he was not to spend a single
cocoanut on anything else.

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they
hated him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the
priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death.
The devil-devils they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since
McAllister did not believe in devil-devils, they were without power over
him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They gathered up scraps of
food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut
from which he had drunk, and even his spittle, and performed all kinds
of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived on. His health was superb.
He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by;
and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and
whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He must have been
so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to
imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as
fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he l