miles between side and side of the ranch. And in the big house
servants beyond remembering or counting. La la, in my mother's house
were many servants."

Mercedes Higgins was voluble as a Greek, and wandered on in
reminiscence.

"But our servants were lazy and dirty. The Chinese are the servants par
excellence. So are the Japanese, when you find a good one, but not so
good as the Chinese. The Japanese maidservants are pretty and merry, but
you never know the moment they'll leave you. The Hindoos are not strong,
but very obedient. They look upon sahibs and memsahibs as gods! I was a
memsahib--which means woman. I once had a Russian cook who always spat
in the soup for luck. It was very funny. But we put up with it. It was
the custom."

"How you must have traveled to have such strange servants!" Saxon
encouraged.

The old woman laughed corroboration.

"And the strangest of all, down in the South Seas, black slaves, little
kinky-haired cannibals with bones through their noses. When they did not
mind, or when they stole, they were tied up to a cocoanut palm behind
the compound and lashed with whips of rhinoceros hide. They were from an
island of cannibals and head-hunters, and they never cried out. It was
their pride. There was little Vibi, only twelve years old--he waited on
me--and when his back was cut in shreds and I wept over him, he would
only laugh and say, 'Short time little bit I take 'm head belong big
fella white marster.' That was Bruce Anstey, the Englishman who whipped
him. But little Vibi never got the head. He ran away and the bushmen cut
off his own head and ate every bit of him."

Saxon chilled, and her face was grave; but Mercedes Higgins rattled on.

"Ah, those were wild, gay, savage days. Would you believe it, my dear,
in three years those Englishmen of the plantation drank up oceans of
champagne and Scotch whisky and dropped thirty thousand pounds on
the adventure. Not dollars--pounds, which means one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars. They were princes while it lasted. It was splendid,
glorious. It was mad, mad. I sold half my beautiful jewels in New
Zealand before I got started again. Bruce Anstey blew out his brains at
the end. Roger went mate on a trader with a black crew, for eight pounds
a month. And Jack Gilbraith--he was the rarest of them all. His people
were wealthy and titled, and he went home to England and sold cat's
meat, sat around their big house till they gave him more money