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They were ordered on board by M. Lontane, with two strapping Tahitian gendarmes at his back. If there are any foreigners the average British roustabout hates it is French gendarmes, and the ruffians were of a mind to "beat them up." They raised their fists in attitudes of combat, and suddenly what had been a joyous row became a troublesome incident.
M. Lontane took full credit for the discovery of what he termed "A complot that would rival the Dreyfus case." He struck his chest, and asked me sternly if I knew of M. LeCoq, the great detective, of Emile Gaboriau. Kelly was arrested in the midst of his dancing soirée at Fa'a.
He acted the drunken stoker, the man who would write to "The Times" when M. Lontane placed his pistol at his stomach, and he made us see the fruit and coal flying. We saw how we Anglo-Saxons appeared to the French, and learned how the hoarse growl of the British sailor sounded. The governor was delighted, the inspecteurs also.
One might understand M. Lontane, second in command of the police forces, six men and himself, magnifying the row between the tipsy stokers and his battalions, but to have the governor, who was a first-rate hand at bridge, and even knew the difference between a straight and a flush, putting down in black and white, sealed with the seal of the Republique Française, and signed with his own hand, that "France had been insulted by the actions of the savages of the Noa-Noa," was worthy only of the knight of La Mancha.
He bounced on the stage in a Prince-Albert coat and a Derby hat, rollicking, truculent, plainly exhilarated. Why, it was M. Lontane in disguise, the second in command of the police, the hero of the battle of the limes, the coal, and the potatoes. He gave a side-splitting burlesque of the conflict.
The delightful M. Lontane, in khaki riding breeches, he, as all police, ride bicycles his khaki helmet tipped rakishly over his cigarette, blew a ringlet. "C'est comme ça. We would not press our victory," he said gallantly. "We French are generous. We have hearts."
A petty theft rarely happened. They were never paupers, for their own people cared for them, and unless absolutely mat-ridden, they could find food on the trees about them. The whites and not the French whites either caused the trouble, and but for them M. Lontane might have left off his revolver and club.
Monsieur Lontane, that busy French gendarme, found him tryin' to borrow a revolver or a stiletto, and thought he was going to kill a Frenchman. He put him in the calaboose and brought his effects to me. They consisted of a book of poems and a letter, but not a ha'penny." "What does the bounder look like?" asked Stevens.
His statement was doubted to-day by an English sailor, who called him 'a blarsted Hamerican liar, and the shine took off his own rubber leg, and knocked the sailor down. He could move faster on his one leg than the other on two, and Monsieur Lontane had to summon two assistants to take him to the calaboose. He wouldn't resume his rubber leg.
I asked M. Lontane, the second in command of the police, why Darling had gone. The hero of the battle of the limes, coal, and potatoes, looked at me fiercely. "Is the French republic to permit here in its colony the whites who enjoy its hospitality to shame the nation before the Tahitians by their nakedness?
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