It
was dark, and he was sitting alone, as he did mostly, smoking on the
stairs.

"Case," said I, "here's a queer thing. I'm tabooed."

"O, fudge!" says he "'tain't the practice in these islands."

"That may be, or it mayn't," said I. "It's the practice where I was
before. You can bet I know what it's like; and I tell it you for a fact,
I'm tabooed."

"Well," said he, "what have you been doing?"

"That's what I want to find out," said I.

"O, you can't be," said he; "it ain't possible. However, I'll tell you
what I'll do. Just to put your mind at rest, I'll go round and find out
for sure. Just you waltz in and talk to Papa."

"Thank you," I said, "I'd rather stay right out here on the verandah.
Your house is so close."

"I'll call Papa out here, then," says he.

"My dear fellow," I says, "I wish you wouldn't. The fact is, I don't
take to Mr. Randall."

Case laughed, took a lantern from the store, and set out into the
village. He was gone perhaps a quarter of an hour, and he looked mighty
serious when he came back.

"Well," said he, clapping down the lantern on the verandah steps. "I
would never have believed it. I don't know where the impudence of these
Kanakas'll go next; they seem to have lost all idea of respect for
whites. What we want is a man-of-war--a German, if we could--they know
how to manage Kanakas."

"I _am_ tabooed, then?" I cried.

"Something of the sort," said he. "It's the worst thing of the kind I've
heard of yet. But I'll stand by you, Wiltshire, man to man. You come
round here to-morrow about nine, and we'll have it out with the chiefs.
They're afraid of me, or they used to be; but their heads are so big by
now, I don't know what to think. Understand me, Wiltshire; I don't count
this your quarrel," he went on, with a great deal of resolution, "I
count it all of our quarrel, I count it the White Man's Quarrel, and
I'll stand to it through thick and thin, and there's my hand on it."

"Have you found out what's the reason?" I asked.

"Not yet," said Case. "But we'll fix them down to-morrow."

Altogether I was pretty well pleased with his attitude, and almost more
the next day, when we met to go before the chiefs, to see him so stern
and resolved. The chiefs awaited us in one of their big oval houses,
which was marked out to us from a long way off by the crowd about the
eaves, a hundred strong if there was one--men, women, and children. Many
of the men were on their way to work and w