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And after that came coffee, black coffee, delicious coffee, native coffee grown on the hillsides of Tahaa. Tehei's fishing-tackle fascinated me, and after we arranged to go fishing, Charmian and I decided to remain all night. Again Tehei broached Samoa, and again my petit bateau brought the disappointment and the smile of acquiescence to his face. Bora Bora was my next port.
Close to the beach, amid cocoanut palms and banana trees, erected on stilts, built of bamboo, with a grass- thatched roof, was Tehei's house. And out of the house came Tehei's vahine, a slender mite of a woman, kindly eyed and Mongolian of feature when she was not North American Indian. "Bihaura," Tehei called her, but he did not pronounce it according to English notions of spelling.
Inside the reef, the lagoon, sheltered though it was, was white with fury, and not even Tehei's seamanship could have enabled his slender canoe to live in such a welter. By sunset, the back of the squall had broken though it was still too rough for the canoe.
Tehei's attack developed into black water fever the severest form of malarial fever, which, the doctor-book assures me, is due to some outside infection as well. Having pulled him through his fever, I am now at my wit's end, for he has lost his wits altogether. I am rather recent in practice to take up the cure of insanity. This makes the second lunacy case on this short voyage.
I slid out on the opposite side over the water on a spar lashed across the canoe, and we were full and away on the other tack. "All right," said Tehei. Those three phrases, "Ready about," "Hard a-lee," and "All right," comprised Tehei's English vocabulary and led me to suspect that at some time he had been one of a Kanaka crew under an American captain.
We asked him about kith and kin. Beside him sat a sprightly damsel of sixty, his daughter. "She is all I have," he murmured plaintively, "and she has no children living." The cutter was a small, sloop-rigged affair, but large it seemed alongside Tehei's canoe.
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