midnight?" asked the skipper. "I tell you I was out zere last night and
z' light wass dark and z' devil walking abroad on z' waters. Almost,
almost we went ashore with zese dam currents. But just as we would run
on z' Poi Laut reef you lit up again. Not one little minute too soon did
you show z' light? Why iss zis?"

"I lost my wicks!" said Andrew Harben, quite cool.

"Loze z' wicks?" shouted the skipper. "For why have you lose z' wicks?
Did you find zem again?"

"Come and see," said Andrew Harben.

He took the skipper into the shack where the lights in the cupola were
still burning broad and yellow. They were eight in number, as I said,
and no man ever saw the like of them before nor will again. For every
light there hung a Bugis from the iron framework by the long hair of his
head. One lock of his hair held him up. The rest was twisted into a cue
and looped so that it floated in the oil tub and then passed through a
burner.

By the hand of Andrew Harben that did it, those eight Bugis were the
wicks of Macassar that kept the strait clear!

Meanwhile Andrew Harben went whistling about his work, climbing around
the frame and trimming all so careful and moving the thumbscrews a bit
here and there and ladling oil in a gourd to keep the flow rising well.

"I have made a remarkable discovery," he said. "It is a fact in nature
that human hair can be used for a lamp wick. Of course you have to keep
wetting it, for hair will not draw oil fast enough by capillary action.
But it serves."...

The skipper looked at the Bugis and looked around at the broken pickle
bottles and the scattered specimen cases and the other remnants, and the
skipper understood partly, being a highly intelligent man for a
half-caste.

"Zis," he said, "_zis_ is mos' natural. Only it iss no good for 'istory.
You will never write z' natural 'istory of your great discovery, my
friend, because it is too dam natural for anybody to believe."

And he said true, and that's why I'm telling you the story free gratis
as Andrew Harben told it to me, which you may write yourself if you got
the nerve. Andrew Harben he'll tell you the same if you find him
hammering rust by the Cape Town breakwater. He's all right now, but for
a long time after they took him away from Borneo he was just a little
peculiar one way. It wasn't bugs nor snakes nor natives nor any such
vermin that excited him, though you might think so. No, he was cured of
all that. But whenever he c