orning to cook my coffee and eggs, when a whistle split the
sultry air. Far from the bay it came, shrill and demanding; my call
to civilization.

Long expected, the first liner was in the Isles of the Cannibals.
France had begun to make good her promise to expand her trade in
Oceania, and the isolation of the dying Marquesans and empty valleys
was ended. The steamship _Saint Francois_, from Bordeaux by way of
Tahiti, had come to visit this group and pick up cargo for Papeite
and French ports.

Strange was the sight of her in Taha-Uka Bay where never her like
had been, but stranger still, two aboard her, the only two not French,
were known to me. Here thousands of miles from where I had seen them,
unconnected in any way with each other, were a pair of human beings
I had known, one in China, and the other in the United States, both
American citizens, and sent by fate to replace me as objects of
interest to the natives.

They came up from the beach together, one a small black man, the
other tall and golden brown, led by Malicious Gossip to see the
American who lived in these far-away islands. The black lingered to
talk at a distance, but the golden-brown one advanced.

His figure was the bulky one of the trained athlete, stocky and
tremendously powerful, his hide that of an extreme blond burned by
months of a tropic sun upon salt water. His hair was an aureole,
yellow as a sunflower, a bush of it on a bullet-head. And, incredible
almost--as if made of putty by a joker--his nose stuck out like the
first joint of a thumb, the oddest nose ever on a man. His little
eyes were blue and bright. Barefooted, bare-headed, in the
sleeveless shirt and short trousers of a life-guard, with an
embroidered V on the front of the upper garment, he was radiantly
healthy and happy, a civilized being returned to nature's ways.

Though he did not recognize me, I knew him instantly for a trainer
and beach-patrol of Southern California, a diver for planted shells
at Catalina Island, whom I had first seen plunging from the rafters
of a swimming-tank, and I remembered that he had flattened his nose
by striking the bottom, and that a skilful surgeon had saved him its
remnant.

He had with him a bundle in a towel, and setting it down on my
_paepae_, introduced himself nonchalantly as Broken Bronck,
"Late manager of the stable of native fighters of the Count de
M---- of the island of Tahaa, near Tahiti."

"I'm here to stay," he said careless