"Did the prayers have anything to do with your pulling through and
saving the copra?" I questioned, curious.

"I don't know. I didn't make any fixed promises. I was bloody well
scared, and I meant what I said about being sorry. But that's all
gone. Let's drink this up and have another. Joseph!"

Helas! the waterspout did not harm my twin half so much as the
rum-spout, which soon had him three sheets in the wind and his rudder
unmanageable. When I went down the rue de Rivoli that night to the
Cercle Militaire, he had drifted into the Cocoanut House, and was
sitting on a fallen tree telling of the storm to a woman in a scarlet
gown with a hibiscus-blossom in her hair. I got him by the arm, and
with an expressed desire to know more of the details of the escape,
steered him to the Annexe, where he had a room.

A good sort was Dixon. He had in the Paumotus a little store, a dark
mother-girl of Raiaroa who waited for him, and a new baby. He had been
only a year in the group. He referred to "my family" with honest pride.

The captains of the Lurline and the O. M. Kellogg were at the
club. The Lurline was twenty-seven years old, and the Kellogg, too,
high up in her teens, if not twenties. Their skippers were Americans,
the Kellogg's master as dark as a negro, burned by thirty years of
tropical sun.

"I used to live in Hawaii in the eighties," he said. "I used to pass
the pipe there in those days. There'd be only one pipe among a dozen
kanakas, and each had a draw or so in turn. They have that custom in
the Marquesas, too, and so had the American Indians."

I walked with the Kellogg's skipper to his vessel, moored close to
the quay in front of the club. He gave an order to the mate, who told
him to go to sheol. The mate had been ashore.

"Come aboard," cried the mate, "and I will knock your block off."

The whole waterfront heard the challenge. Stores were deserted to
witness the imminent fight.

The dark-faced captain ascended the gang-plank, and walked to the
forecastle head, where the mate was directing the making taut a line.

"Now," said the skipper, a foot from the mate, "knock!"

The mate hesitated. That would be a crime; he would go to jail and
the captain would be delighted.

The master taunted him:

"Knock my block off! Touch my block, and I'll whip you so your mother
wouldn't know you, you dirty, drunken, son of a sea-cook!"

The mate looked at him angrily, but uncertainly. He heard the
laughter an