ered, he proved, as the
afternoon wore on, to be a man from whom Muenchausen might have
gained a story or two.

"They call me Lying Bill," he said to me. "You can't believe wot I
say."

"He's straight as a mango tree, Bill Pincher is," McHenry asserted
loudly. "He's a terrible liar about stories, but he's the best
seaman that comes to T'yti, and square as a biscuit tin. You know how,
when that schooner was stole that he was mate on, and the rotten
thief run away with her and a woman, Bill he went after 'em, and
brought the schooner back from Chile. Bill, he's whatever he says he
is, all right--but he can sail a schooner, buy copra and shell cheap,
sell goods to the bloody natives, and bring back the money to the
owners. That's what I call an honest man."

Lying Bill received these hearty words with something less than his
usual good-humor. There was no friendliness in his eye as he looked
at McHenry, whose empty glass remained empty until he himself
refilled it. Bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped
by a hundred sordid adventures, McHenry clutched at equality with
these men, and it eluded him. Lying Bill, making no reply to his
enthusiastic commendation, retired to his bunk with a paper-covered
novel, and to cover the rebuff McHenry turned to talk of trade with
Gedge, who spoke little.

The traderoom of the _Morning Star_, opening from the cabin, was to
me the door to romance. When I was a boy there was more flavor in
traderooms than in war. To have seen one would have been as a
glimpse of the Holy Grail to a sworn knight. Those traderooms of my
youthful imagination smelt of rum and gun-powder, and beside them
were racks of rifles to repel the dusky figures coming over the
bulwarks.

The traderoom of the _Morning Star_ was odorous, too. It had no
window, and when one opened the door all was obscure at first, while
smells of rank Tahiti tobacco, cheap cotton prints, a broken bottle
of perfume and scented soaps struggled for supremacy. Gradually the
eye discovered shelves and bins and goods heaped from floor to
ceiling; pins and anchors, harpoons and pens, crackers and jewelry,
cloth, shoes, medicine and tomahawks, socks and writing paper.

Trade business, McHenry's monologue explained, is not what it was.
When these petty merchants dared not trust themselves ashore their
guns guarded against too eager customers. But now almost every
inhabited island has its little store, and the trader has to p