my breath, and I had to laugh.

I got the vessel under way as soon as I came aboard. The Dutchman's
shipment of copra was arranged for--a week, two, three weeks (as the
wind allowed)--and I was to return from the lower islands, where my
present cargo was assigned, and take it on.

As we stood offshore under the waxing moonlight, as I watched the
island, gathering itself in from either extremity, grow small and
smaller on the measureless glass of the sea, the whole episode seemed to
swell up in my mind, explode, and vanish. It was too preposterous.
Thirty-eight hours chosen at random out of ten thousand empty Polynesian
years--that in that wink of eternity five human lives should have gone
to pot simultaneously--a man wasn't to be taken in by that sort of
thing.--

Through twelve days it remained at that. Discharging cargo in the
furnace of Coco Inlet, if my thoughts went back to Taai, it was almost
with the deprecating amusement a man will feel who has been had by a
hoax. If those minstrel husbands were murdered and buried; if that
Broadway imp sweated under the red-hot roof of the godown; if that
incomparable, golden-skinned heiress of cannibal emperors sat staring
seaward from the gilded cage of the Dutchman, awaiting (or no longer
waiting) the whim of the epicure--if indeed any one of them all had ever
so much as set foot upon that microscopic strand lost under the blue
equator--then it was simply because some one had made it up in his head
to while me away an empty hour. I give you my word, when at noon of the
thirteenth day the mountain of Taai stood up once more beyond the bows,
I was weary of the fantasy. I should have been amazed, really, to find a
fellow named Signet housed in the Dutchman's private jail.

As a matter of fact, Signet was not in the jail.

When I went ashore in mid afternoon, wondering a little why no naked
biscuit-beggars or gin swallowers had swum out to bother me that day, I
found the trader of Taai sitting on his veranda, blowing puffs of smoke
from those fine Manila Club perfectos out into the sunshine. Beside him
leaned a shiny, twelve-gauge pump gun which he jostled with an elbow as
he bade me by word and gesture to make myself at home.

I'm quite certain I looked the fool. My eyes must have stuck out. Half a
dozen times I started to speak. With some vacant, fatuous syllable I
tried to break the ice. Strange as it sounds, I was never so embarrassed
in my life.--For the trader of Taa