cabalistic letters and the
leadership of Kelly. He had tracked down the fishermen and found
their headquarters at the dance hall.

At the Cercle Bougainville there was an uproar. Merchants drank
twice their stint of liquor in their indignation. Syndicalism was
invading their shores, and their already limited labor supply would
be corrupted.

I could not picture too seriously the wrath of the honest traders
at the traitorous conduct of Kelly, "a white man," as told by
M. Lontane. I was upbraided because of Kelly being an American with
an Irish name. Lying Bill said it was "A bloody Guy Fawkes plot."

M. Lontane took full credit for the discovery of what he termed
"A complot that would rival the Dreyfus case."

He struck his chest, and asked me sternly if I knew of M. LeCoq,
the great detective, of Emile Gaboriau.

Kelly was arrested in the midst of his dancing soiree at Fa'a. He
was put in the calaboose, and when he frankly said that he had come
to Tahiti to preach the gospel of I. W. W.-ism and that he believed
the fishermen had all the right on their side, he was sentenced as
"a foreigner without visible means of support, a vagrant, miscreant,
vagabond, and dangerous alien," to a month on the roads, and then to
be deported to the United States, whence he had come.

The strike or walk-out was broken. With the cessation of the
direction of Kelly and his heartening song, the fishermen gradually
went back to their routine, and their women folk to the market. The
scales were in operation, but the himene, "Hahrayrooyah! I'm a
boom! Hahrayrooyah! Boomagay!" was sung from one end of Tahiti
to another, and "Ai dobbebelly dobbebelly" was made at the Cercle
Bougainville a password to some very old rum said to have belonged
to the bishop who wrote the Tahitian dictionary.

Chapter XV

A drive to Papenoo--The chief of Papenoo--A dinner and poker on the
beach--Incidents of the game--Breakfast the next morning--The chief
tells his story--The journey back--The leper child and her doll--The
Alliance Francaise--Bemis and his daughter--The band concert and the
fire--The prize-fight--My bowl of velvet.

We had another picnic; this time at Papenoo. Polonsky owned thirty
thousand acres of land in the Great Valley of Papenoo, the largest
of all the valleys of Tahiti. He had bought it from the Catholic
mission, which, following the monastic orders of the church in other
countries for a thousand years, had early adopted a polic