you, I say to them, 'come to me.' Did I ever tell you about the fellow
who had a cancer?"

"Frequently," said Mackintosh.

"I got him right in three months."

"You've never told me about the people you haven't cured."

He finished this part of the work and went on to the rest. It was a
queer medley. There was a woman who could not get on with her husband
and a man who complained that his wife had run away from him.

"Lucky dog," said Walker. "Most men wish their wives would too."

There was a long complicated quarrel about the ownership of a few yards
of land. There was a dispute about the sharing out of a catch of fish.
There was a complaint against a white trader because he had given short
measure. Walker listened attentively to every case, made up his mind
quickly, and gave his decision. Then he would listen to nothing more; if
the complainant went on he was hustled out of the office by a
policeman. Mackintosh listened to it all with sullen irritation. On the
whole, perhaps, it might be admitted that rough justice was done, but it
exasperated the assistant that his chief trusted his instinct rather
than the evidence. He would not listen to reason. He browbeat the
witnesses and when they did not see what he wished them to called them
thieves and liars.

He left to the last a group of men who were sitting in the corner of the
room. He had deliberately ignored them. The party consisted of an old
chief, a tall, dignified man with short, white hair, in a new
_lava-lava_, bearing a huge fly wisp as a badge of office, his son, and
half a dozen of the important men of the village. Walker had had a feud
with them and had beaten them. As was characteristic of him he meant now
to rub in his victory, and because he had them down to profit by their
helplessness. The facts were peculiar. Walker had a passion for building
roads. When he had come to Talua there were but a few tracks here and
there, but in course of time he had cut roads through the country,
joining the villages together, and it was to this that a great part of
the island's prosperity was due. Whereas in the old days it had been
impossible to get the produce of the land, copra chiefly, down to the
coast where it could be put on schooners or motor launches and so taken
to Apia, now transport was easy and simple. His ambition was to make a
road right round the island and a great part of it was already built.

"In two years I shall have done it, and then I can