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He turned to the steersman: "Tai-Hotauri, what about old Parlay's pearls?" The Kanaka, pleased and self-conscious, took and gave a spoke. "My brother dive for Parlay three, four month, and he make much talk about pearl. Hikihoho very good place for pearl." "And the pearl-buyers have never got him to part with a pearl," the captain broke in.
Moon and wind were heaping the South Pacific on Hikihoho atoll. Captain Warfield returned from one of his periodical trips to the engine room with the word that the engineer lay in a faint. "Can't let that engine stop!" he concluded helplessly. "All right!" Grief said, "Bring him on deck. I'll spell him."
She was educated like a princess, and she accepted herself in much the same way. Also, she thought she was all-white, and never dreamed of a bar sinister. "Now comes the tragedy. The old man had always been cranky and erratic, and he'd played the despot on Hikihoho so long that he'd got the idea in his head that there was nothing wrong with the king or the princess either.
That's how he got in on Hikihoho. Came in trading when trading was the real thing. About a hundred miserable Paumotans lived on the island. He married the queen native fashion. When she died, everything was his. Measles came through, and there weren't more than a dozen survivors. He fed them, and worked them, and was king. Now before the queen died she gave birth to a girl. That's Armande.
"She'll slacken in half an hour then we'll make headway," Captain Warfield said, with an irritation explained by his next words. "He has no right to call it Parlay. It's down on the admiralty charts, and the French charts, too, as Hikihoho. Bougainville discovered it and named it from the natives."
When Armande was eighteen he sent for her. He had slews and slathers of money, as Yankee Bill would say. He'd built the big house on Hikihoho, and a whacking fine bungalow in Papeete. She was to arrive on the mail boat from New Zealand, and he sailed in his schooner to meet her at Papeete.
"Flung a glass of wine in the Governor's face; fought a duel with the port doctor; beat up his native servants; wrecked the hospital; broke two ribs and the collarbone of a man nurse, and escaped; and went down to his schooner, a gun in each hand, daring the chief of police and all the gendarmes to arrest him, and sailed for Hikihoho. And they say he's never left the island since."
"If he really sells, this will be the biggest year's output of pearls in the Paumotus," Grief said. "I say, now, look here!" Mulhall burst forth, harried by the humid heat as much as the rest of them. "What's it all about? Who's the old beachcomber anyway? What are all these pearls? Why so secretious about it?" "Hikihoho belongs to old Parlay," the supercargo answered.
They of the Malahini paid the courtesy visit ashore immediately after anchoring. Other captains and buyers were in the big room examining the pearls that were to be auctioned next day. Paumotan servants, natives of Hikihoho, and relatives of the owner, moved about dispensing whiskey and absinthe.
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