human being
at all, but an angel straight from heaven, and to think the angel hated
him was almost more than he could bear.

He turned crankier than ever, working off steam on Rau and Ah Lum, with
twenty-five cents for every swear, and nothing at night but hymns. But I
guess Rau and the China boy would have gone on their knees and kowtowed
to a sting ray if Coe had told them to, for they didn't have no more
wills of their own than a child unborn, and everything he said, went. If
he had turned pirate, they would have followed him just as meek, and
would have scuttled ships and made passengers walk planks with the same
devotion and zeal to please him!

But all this was by the way, so far as it availed the captain with Mrs.
Tweedie, who passed him on the road as cold as ever, and received the
swear-money disdainful, and never said "thank you" for it, though there
was eighteen dollars in the bag and the biggest share Coe's. Afiola
himself had been getting out of favor for two months. He couldn't
manage to be deacon of the church one day, and the next pirating along
the coast mad drunk on orange beer; besides, the Tweedies were getting
to talk native now, and got more the hang of what was going on around
them. So they give Afiola a sort of drumhead court-martial, and bounced
him unanimous, and all the pent-up deviltry of the man came out of him
at one lick, like touching off a dynamite cartridge. Tweedie preached
against him from the pulpit; the other chiefs, slow as they had been to
move before, now waked up a bit, and there was a general feeling in the
respectable part of the native community that he was pushing things too
far. You see, he had named one of his pigs after the king, and there was
more scandal over that than for all the crimes he had been guilty of;
and there was a razor-backed yaller one for Tweedie, and an old sow for
the queen, and porkers for the princes, and he passed insulting remarks
on them till the Kanakas went wild--those that weren't of Afiola's own
family, I mean; and Afiola would laugh and laugh till his great pocked
face grew a dirty crimson, laying on a mat with a Winchester beside him,
and sniggering as they'd bring him orange beer in a calabash.

I guess he thought he'd wind up by pulling off the biggest thing yet,
for he had a kind of pride of wickedness in him, and gloried in being
the bad man of Puna Punou. He wanted to top it all now, and do something
that tremendous that it would shake