him now that he was sick. Jealousy
did not rankle in their hearts, apparently. That absence often shocked
non-Polynesians. Brothers shared wives, and sisters shared husbands
all over old Polynesia.

This pair of love-lorn maidens had never exchanged a word with Baillon,
for he spoke only English. The whiter girl wore a delicate satin gown,
a red ribbon, and fine pearls in her hair. The cow-boy lay quietly,
while she sat with her bare feet curled under her on the counterpane,
looking actually unutterable passion.

"Shucks!" said he to me, safe in their ignorance of his tongue,
"this is getting serious. They mean business, and I was foolin'. I
got a little girl in the good ol' United States that would skin her
alive if she saw her sittin' like that on my sheets. A man's takin'
chances here that bats his eye at one o' these T'itian fairies. Do
you know, their mother came here with them this morning?"

"They mean to have you in their family," I said. "That mother may
have had a white husband or lover, and aids in the pursuit of you
for auld lang syne."

Wilfrid Baillon was out of the hospital in just ten days. His release,
as cured by the doctor, coincided curiously with his payment in
advance. I saw him off for New Zealand by the steamship leaving the
next day.

"Those people were awful good to me," he said in farewell. "It hurts
me to treat those girls this way, but I'm scairt o' them. They're
too strong in their feelings."

He ran away from a mess of love pottage that many men would have gone
across seas to gain.

Ormsby, an Englishman in his early twenties, good-looking and
courteous, with an air of accustomedness to luxury, but of being
roughened by his environment, was sitting on a bench one morning with
a girl. He called me over to meet her.

"You are an old-timer here now," he began, "and I've got to go away on
the schooner to the Paumotus to-morrow. Drop in at Tahia's shack once
in a while and cheer her up. She lives back of the Catholic mission,
and she's pretty sick."

Tahia was desperately ill, I thought. She was thin, the color of the
yellow wax candles of the high altar, and her straight nose, with
expanded nostrils, and hard, almost savage mouth, features carved as
with the stone chisel of her ancient tribe, conjured up the profile
of Nenehofra, an Egyptian princess whose mummy I had seen. She was
stern, silent, resigned to her fate, as are these races who know the
inexorable will of the gods.