riend can catch and hold. How, then,
explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett
by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.

There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his
fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it
wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the
road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese
half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because
the brandy was very bad.

On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long
lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not
smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that
sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other
part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some
chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song
and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so he persisted.
That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in
alcohol....

Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people
are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much
an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient
little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a
complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red
cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring
suspended from his nose.

Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service
of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco
and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would
be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles,
where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was
the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.

It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the
virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility
can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the
black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence
the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when
Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.

* * * * *

"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, t