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Goboto is the mecca of sprees, and when they have spread they go back to their schooners and plantations to recuperate. Some of the less hardy require as much as six months between visits. But for the manager and his assistants there are no such intervals.
Captain Jensen stood up in the sternsheets of his whaleboat and denied the existence of pants on his schooner. Also, he affirmed his intention of coming ashore. They of Goboto nursed him back to health from a bullet-hole through his shoulder, and in addition handsomely begged his pardon, for no pants had they found on his schooner.
At Goboto mail is received, bills are paid, and newspapers, rarely more than five weeks old, are accessible; for the little island, belted with its coral reefs, affords safe anchorage, is the steamer port of call, and serves as the distributing point for the whole wide-scattered group.
Did you catch that big squall an hour after you left us? We had to let go the second anchor." While he was being introduced to Deacon, McMurtrey dispatched a house-boy with the pants, and when Captain Donovan came in it was as a white man should at least in Goboto. Deacon lost the second game, and an outburst heralded the fact. Peter Gee devoted himself to lighting a cigarette and keeping quiet.
And the discussion goes on interminably, principally because of the fact that the disputants do not live long enough to settle it. Goboto is not large. They are the white population. An average of one man out of the three is always to be found down with fever. The job at Goboto is a hard one.
He shut off the electric light, picked up the bundle of books, carefully latched the front door, and went down to the waiting whaleboat. At Goboto the traders come off their schooners and the planters drift in from far, wild coasts, and one and all they assume shoes, white duck trousers, and various other appearances of civilization.
In the second place, David Grief is in these waters, cruising on the Gunga, which is shortly scheduled to leave here for Karo-Karo. I spoke to Grief, on the Gunga, in Sandfly Passage, day before yesterday. He was putting a trader ashore on a new station. He said he was going to call in at Babo, and then come on to Goboto. He has had ample time to get here. I have heard an anchor drop.
Who else than David Grief can it be? Captain Donovan is skipper of the Gunga, and him I know too well to believe that he'd run in to Goboto after dark unless his owner were in charge.
For that matter, though something was wrong with them, they were gentlemen, and had been gentlemen. That was why the great unwritten rule of Goboto was that visitors should put on pants and shoes. Breech-clouts, lava-lavas, and bare legs were not tolerated.
Life at Goboto is heated, unhealthy, and lurid, and for its size it asserts the distinction of more cases of acute alcoholism than any other spot in the world. Guvutu, over in the Solomons, claims that it drinks between drinks. Goboto does not deny this. It merely states, in passing, that in the Goboton chronology no such interval of time is known.
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