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It is true that in Hawaii and Tonga conquerors made themselves kings, but not there or in Samoa, Tahiti, or the Marquesas were kings supreme rulers until the whites established them for their own trade purposes and sold them firearms by which to maintain their power. That day of the whites had passed in Vait-hua. The chief now maintained his authority by the fondness of his people alone.

We were met beneath a giant banian-tree by the chief, who greeted us with simple dignity and led us at once to his house. The most pretentious in the village, it consisted of two rooms, built of redwood boards from California, white-washed, clean, and bare, opening through wide doors upon the broad paepae. This house, the chief insisted, was to be my home while I remained his guest in Vait-hua.

We struck Vait-hua on the island of Tahuata. It was heaven. Rivers and trees and women. Women! Sacré! How I loved them! "I came to Taha-Uka with Mathieu Scallamera. We worked for Captain Hart in the cotton, driving the Chinese and natives. Bill Pincher was a boy, and he worked there, too. In the moonlight on the beach there were dances. The women danced naked on the beaches in the moonlight.

Dried-up Stream! was voyaging toward Vait-hua in a whaleboat, I offered him ten francs and two litres of rum to take me. Remembering Neo's suggestion, I took also two other bottles of rum. While our whaleboat shot across the Bordelaise Channel pursued by a brisk breeze, Ugh! a wisp of a man of fifty, held the helm.

Ugh! was startled and amazed that the birds should come so close, and all raised an uproar of voices and waved arms and oars in the air, to frighten them off. They passed, the sun shone upon us again, and in a sparkling sea we made our way past Iva Iva Iti and Iva Iva Nui, rounding a high green shore into the bay of Vait-hua.

A curse is upon it, and while the cocoanuts flourish and all is fair to the eye, it remains a shunned and haunted spot. Tahuata, that lovely isle of the valley of Vait-hua, rose on our left, with the cape Te hope e te keko, a purple coast miles away, which as the dusk descended grew darker and was lost. The shadowy silhouettes of the mountains of Hiva-oa projected themselves on the horizon.

They pressed their hands to their brows to conjure up a vision of this dead man whom their grandfathers had fought and slain, as I told them the story of his death in the jungle at our feet. It was at Vait-hua that the French first took possession of the Marquesas.

"Alice Snow las' whaleship come Vait-hua six years before," said the Seventh Man Who Wallows. "Before that, one ship, California name, Captain Andrew Hicks. Charlie, he sailmaker, run away from Andrew Hicks. One Vait-hua girl look good to him. She hide him in hills till captain make finish chase him. That him children."

It is so to-day, in Vait-hua where the whites are not. I have had my trousers lifted from my second-story room in a Manila hotel by the eyed and fingered bamboo of the Tagalog ladron, while I washed my face, and stood aghast at the mystery of their disappearance with door locked, until looking from my lofty window I beheld them moving rapidly down an estero in a banca.

The African negro, struggling to harmonize these two ideas, wore a tall silk hat and a pair of slippers as his only garments when he obeyed Livingstone's exhortations to clothe himself in the presence of white women. Vait-hua was all savage; whatever bewilderments the missionaries had brought had faded when dwindling population left the isle to its own people.