he old, old days--long before Treaties, and
Imperial Commissioners, and other gilded vanities were dreamt of by us
poor, hard-working traders. He seemed to have dropped from the sky when
one afternoon, as Tom Denison, the supercargo, and some of his friends
sat on Charley the Russian's verandah, drinking lager, he marched up to
them, sat down on the steps, and said, "Good evening."

"Hallo," said Schlueter, the skipper of the _Anna Godeffrey_. "Who _are_
you? Where do you come from?"

'Reo waved a short, stumpy and black clay pipe to and fro, and replied
vaguely--

"Oh, from somewhere."

Some one laughed, surmising correctly enough that he had run away from a
ship; then they remembered that no vessel had even touched at Apia for
a month. (Later on he told Denison that he had jumped overboard from a
Baker's Island guano-man, as she was running down the coast, and swum
ashore, landing at a point twenty miles distant from Apia. The natives
in the various villages had given him food, so when he reached the town
he was not hungry.)

"What do you want, anyway?" asked Schlueter.

"Some tobacco, please. And a dollar or two. I can pay you back."

"When?" said Hamilton the pilot incredulously.

The pipe described a semicircle. "Oh, to-morrow night--before, perhaps."

They gave him some tobacco and matches, and four Bolivian "iron"
half-dollars. He got up and went across to Volkner's combined store and
grog shanty, over the way.

"He's gone to buy a bottle of square-face," said Hamilton.

"He deserves it," said Denison gloomily. "A man of his age who could
jump overboard and swim ashore to this rotten country should be
presented with a case of gin--and a knife to cut his throat with after
he has finished it."

In about ten minutes the old fellow came out of Volkner's store,
carrying two or three stout fishing-lines, several packets of hooks, and
half a dozen ship biscuits. He grinned as he passed the group on the
verandah, and then squatting down on the sward near by began to uncoil
the lines and bend on the hooks.

Denison was interested, went over to him, and watched the swift, skilful
manner in which the thin brown fingers worked.

"Where are you going to fish?" he inquired.

The broad, flat face lit up. "Outside in the dam deep water--sixty,
eighty fa'am."

Denison left him and went aboard the ancient, cockroach-infested craft
of which he was the heartbroken supercargo. Half an hour later 'Reo
paddled past