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One Jack Keyes was a trader on the island of Apiang, one of the Gilbert Group, recently annexed by Great Britain. He was very old, very quiet in his manner, and about the last kind of man one would expect to see earning his living as a trader among the excitable, intractable native race which inhabit the Line Islands.
Their revolt against authority had not been without some redeeming features, and an unbiased critic would have found it hard to blame them. After twenty-seven days and nights at the pumps of a four-masted sieve, the Lords had struck in a body, and forced the captain to abandon the ship and set out in three boats for Apiang.
But this white woman who poor old Keyes married and brought with him was different, and the Apiang native, like all the rest of the world, is susceptible to female charms; and her appearance at the doorway of the old trader's house was ever hailed with an excited and admiring chorus of "Te boom te matân! Te boom te matân!" One of these young men was unnecessarily intrusive.
Even the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his projected invasion of Apiang presenting the missionary's wife, on his departure, with a gold-inlaid Winchester that was the apple of his eye. "I shall make Karaitch smart for this!" she said vindictively.
Why the army was so ruthlessly condemned to wear boots, is a question that was often asked and never properly answered. Nobody else wore boots not even the king; but the military caste is proverbially dressy, and it is enough to say that the armed forces of Apiang set immense store by their boots.
Certainly the Boston mission ship, Morning Star, in trying to establish the "Gospel according to Bosting no ile or dollars, no missn'ry," as Jim Garstang, of Drummond's Island, used to observe, had once brought a lady soul-saver of somewhat matured charms to the island, but her advent into the Apiang moniap or town hall, carrying an abnormally large white umbrella and wearing a white solar topee with a green turban, and blue goggles, had had the effect of scaring the assembled councillors away across to the weather-side of the narrow island, whence none returned until the terrifying apparition had gone back to the ship.
A long, uneasy six months passed, and then the little "four-and-halfter" Renard, Commander sailed into Apiang lagoon, and the naval officer told Randolph he had come to get the man and try him for the murder. The commander first warped his vessel in as near as possible to the crowded village, and moored her with due regard to the effectiveness of his one big gun.
His fellow-trader, Bob Randolph, a man of tremendous nerve and resolution, only maintained his prestige among the Apiang natives by the wonderful control he had learnt to exercise over a naturally fiery temper and by taking care, when knocking down any especially insulting native "buck," never to draw blood, and always to laugh.
"And it is with great pleasure I propose the name of hour first president, Miss Daisy Kirke, of Apiang." Then, my stars, wasn't there a cheer! Daisy hung her head, nestled closer to Mr. Bob, and felt all the joy of good works promptly bearing fruit. "I don't see no reason," went on Mr.
The Rev. Walter Kirke looked out moodily from beneath the eaves of his basket-work house, and his heart sank as he gazed across the sweltering strip of water, twenty miles wide, that divided the island of Apiang from its neighbor, Tarawa. "The king has broken all his promises," wrote Titcombe, in a hand illegible from distress and agitation.
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