n
to recognise the fact that so long as they warred among themselves the
white man would be averse to remaining among them, and consequently for
the four years previous to my arrival on Tarawa there had been no tribal
battle, though isolated murders were by no means uncommon. But owing to
the white men's influence an amicable arrangement was always arrived at
by the contending parties, i.e., the relatives of the murdered man and
the aggressors.

It was for this reason that Niabon had brought the injured man to my
village by a very circuitous route, so as to avoid meeting any of the
people. Once he and she were inside my house to claim my protection
there would be no further difficulty. She had succeeded in getting her
companion into my boat-shed unobserved, and when the storm burst was
patiently awaiting darkness so that she might bring the man to me.

That was her story, and now I will relate something of the woman herself
and of the white man of whom she had spoken, the German trader Krause.

CHAPTER II

When I first landed on Tarawa, this man, whose name was Krause,
according to the usual custom among us traders, called to see me. He
was a big, broad-shouldered, good-looking fellow, and certainly was very
civil and obliging to me in many ways, although I was an "opposition"
trader; and a new man is never welcome from a business point of view,
no matter how much he may be liked for social reasons, especially in
the God-forsaken Equatorial Pacific, where whilst your fellow-trader
is ready to share his last bottle of grog and his last tin of beef with
you, he is anxious to cut your throat from a business point of view.
Krause, however, did not seem to--and I honestly believe did not
actually--entertain any ill-feeling towards me as a rival trader,
although I was landed on the island with such a stock of new trade goods
that he must at once have recognised the fact that my advent would do
him serious injury, inasmuch as his employers (the big German trading
firm in Hamburg) had not sent him any fresh stock for six months. Like
most Germans of any education whom one meets in the South Seas, or
anywhere else, he was a good native linguist, though, like all his
countrymen, he did not _understand_ natives like Englishmen or Americans
understand wild races. He had no regard nor sympathy for them, and
looked upon even the highly intelligent Polynesian peoples with whom
he had had much dealing as mere "niggers"--to st