he must have laid down the ancient philosopher to procure the gift for
me, his grim determination already made. I had caught a glimpse of him
Sunday morning listening to the Christian services conducted by the
captain in the social hall, and when I told the brooding captain that,
he was struck by the idea that perhaps some word of his preachment
might have come to Leung Kai Chu's mind in his agony in the waters,
and that at the last moment he might have repented and been saved.

"One aspiration, and he might be washed as white as snow. 'This day
thou shalt be with Me in Paradise,'" said the commander, who was
known as the parson skipper, dour, but ever on the watch for the
first sign of repentance.

On the other hand, Hallman more nearly stated the general feeling:

"By God, he spoiled sport, that black ghost on deck. He was like a
tupapau, a Polynesian demon."

Hallman was in his early forties, with twenty years of South-Seas
trading, a tall, strong, well-featured, but hard-faced, European,
with thin lips over nearly perfect teeth, and cold, small,
pale-blue eyes. He talked little to men, but isolated young women
whenever possible, and bent over them in attempted gay, but earnest,
converse. He was one of those cold sensualists whose passion is as
that of some animals, insistent, prowling, fierce, but impersonal. An
English South-Sea trader aboard gave me an astonishing light upon him:

"Some dozen years ago," he said, "I made a visit of a few weeks to the
Marquesas Islands. Hallman had kept a store there then for more than
ten years, and had a good part of the business of buying and shipping
copra and selling supplies to the natives and a few whites. He lived
in a shack back of his little store, with his native woman and four or
five half-naked children. They told me queer stories about his madness
for women. They said he would go out of his house and into the jungle
near the trails and would lie in wait. If a woman he coveted passed,
he would seize her, and even if her husband or consort was ahead of
her, in the custom of these people, he would grab her feet, and make
her call out that she was delaying a minute, that her companion was
to go along, and she would catch up in a minute. He had some funny
power over those women. Anyhow, that's the story they told me in those
cannibal islands. And yet, you know, there's something different in
him, because he sent two of his sons to school, and afterward to a
universi