t out that night was that, when I
came aboard I discovered not far from my berth the unobtrusive loom of
that Dutch gunboat, arrived for a "look-in" at last.

The only thing for me to do was to sit tight. If, when the state of the
island's affairs had been discovered, there should be want of
explanation or corroboration, it would be altogether best for me to give
it. I wasn't yet through trading in those waters, you understand.

But Signet was no fool. He, too, must have seen the discreet shade of
the visitor. When the morning dawned, neither he nor the royal dancer
from the Marquesas was to be found. Some time in that night, from the
windward beach, ill-manned and desperate, the royal sailing canoe must
have set forth tumultuously upon its pilgrimage again.

I sat in a place in Honolulu. Soft drinks were served, and somewhere
beyond a tidy screen of palm fronds a band of strings was playing. Even
with soft drinks, the old instinct of wanderers and lone men to herd
together had put four of us down at the same table. Two remain vague--a
fattish, holiday-making banker and a consumptive from Barre, Vermont.
For reasons to appear, I recall the third more in detail.

He let me know somewhere in the give-and-take of talk that he was a
railway telegraph operator, and that, given his first long vacation, an
old impulse, come down from the days of the Hawaiian _hula_ phonograph
records, had brought him to the isle of delight. He was disappointed in
it. One could see in his candid eyes that he felt himself done out of an
illusion, an illusion of continuous dancing by girls in rope skirts on
moonlit beaches. It was an intolerable waste of money. Here, come so far
and so expensively to the romantic goal, he was disturbed to find his
imagination fleeing back to the incredible adventure of a Rock Island
station, an iron-red dot on the bald, high plain of eastern Colorado--to
the blind sun flare of the desert--to the immensity of loneliness--to
the thundering nightly crisis of the "Eleven-ten," sweeping monstrous
and one-eyed out of the cavern of the West, grating, halting,
glittering, gossiping, yawning, drinking with a rush and gurgle from the
red tank--and on again with an abrupt and always startling clangor into
the remote night of the East.

He shifted impatiently in his chair and made a dreary face at the
screening fronds.

"For the love o' Mike! Even the rags they play here are old."

The consumptive was telling the bank