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Old Maskell, who had seen wind-jammer days and ways and come very close, I suspected, to piracy, always prayed at least once. Pasquier, the successful merchant who imported finery for the ladies of Naapu, rolled out socialistic platitudes he was always flanked, at the end of the feast, by two empty chairs.
He's got something up his sleeve and a Chink's sleeve's big enough to hold a good-sized crime," he finished, with a grim essay of humor. "Are these mere suspicions on your part, or do you know that something's up?" "Most things happen on Naapu before there's been any time for suspicion," he rejoined, squinting at his pipe, which had stopped drawing.
"But none of the people you and I are interested in are concerned with native orgies. We are all what you might call agnostics." "Speak for yourself, sir. I'm a Methodist. 'Tain't that they mix themselves up in the doings. But well, you haven't lived through the merry month of May on Naapu. I tell you, this blessed island ain't big enough to hold all that froth without everybody feeling it.
Lockerbie gave a dinner-party at the end of the week, and Follet got drunk quite early in the evening. I believed it no more the second time than I had believed it the first. Anyhow, she wouldn't have had him. Schneider left us during those days. We hardly noticed his departure. Ching Po still prospers. Except Stires, we are not squeamish on Naapu. By ELLEN GLASGOW
Time is a barren field with no horizon. By KATHARINE FULLERTON GEROULD Perhaps I should include Ching Po but I hate to. I was the man with his hands in his pockets who saw the thing steadily and saw it whole to filch a windy phrase. I liked Stires, who had no social standing, even on Naapu, and disliked Follet, who had all the standing there was.
Let me give you, at once, the few facts I could gather about French Eva. There were rumors a-plenty, but most of them sifted down to a little residual malice. I confined my questionings to the respectable inhabitants of Naapu; they were a very small circle. At last, I got some sort of "line" on French Eva. None within our ken fathered or mothered her.
"What about her?" asked Stires truculently. He advanced two steps towards me. "I'm not looking for trouble " It seemed to me just then that I hated Naapu as I had never hated any place in the world. "She's having hysterics up at Madame Maür's. I fancy that's why we're here. Your yellow friend there seems to have been responsible for the hysterics.
French Eva had been afraid of the Chinaman; yet even Follet had pooh-poohed her fears; and her reputation was or had been well-nigh stainless on Naapu, which is, to say the least, a smudgy place. Still there was only one road for reason to take, and in spite of these obstacles it wearily and doggedly took it.
Old Dubois knew most about her, but old Dubois, a semi-paralyzed colossus, "doped" most of the time, kept his thick lips closed. "An excellent girl" was all that any one could wring from him. As she had begun life on Naapu by being dame de comptoir for him, he had some right to his judgment.
She had eventually preferred independence, and had forsaken him; and if he still had no quarrel with her, that speaks loudly for her many virtues. Whether Dubois had sent for her originally, no one knew. His memory was clouded by opium, and you could get little out of him. Besides, by the time I arrived on Naapu, French Eva belonged to the landscape and to history.