he
had worked for the Exploration Company a good few years and had been to
all kinds of places prospecting. Torres Straits, the Gold Coast,
Madagascar, Patagonia. We prospectors have to get around in queer
corners and the life's a dull one. All monotony. But Somerfield had
queer notions. He worked at the job because he could make more money
than at anything else and that gave him a chance to keep his family in
Ohio in comfort. He was mighty fond of his family. Besides, the job gave
him more time with the wife and kids than the average man gets. When he
was at home, he was at home three months on end at times. That's better
than the ordinary man. A man in a city, for example, leaves home early
and gets home late, and then he's too grouchy what with the close air
and one thing and another to find the children anything but an infernal
nuisance. Now a man away from his home for a long spell on end really
enjoys the company when he does get home, and they enjoy his company,
too. Then, too, he does not get to messing into the affairs of the
family. He's not the Lord Almighty and Supreme Court Judge all the time.
Besides that, the wife and children get a kind of independence.

"Now this being so, Somerfield was what he was. He had ideas about
religion. He was full of the notion that things are arranged so that if
you live up to a certain code, you'll get a reward. 'Do right, and
you'll come out right,' was one of his sayings. 'The wages of sin is
death,' was another. Point out to him that virtue got paid in the same
coin, and he'd argue. No use. In a way he was like a man who wouldn't
walk under a ladder or spill salt. You know.

"Naturally, for him things were awkward at the Tlinga village. We stayed
there quite a while, I should say. He lived in his own shack, cooking
for himself and all that. He was full of ideas of duty to his wife and
so on. I fell in with the local customs and took up with a sweetheart,
and handled things so well that there was one of their ceremonials
pretty soon in which I was central figure. Ista, it seems, made a public
announcement. That would be natural enough with a tribe so concerned
about the family birth rate. But it made me sorter mad to hear the
natives everlastingly accusing Somerfield of being an undesirable. But
they never let up trying to educate him and make him a Tlinga citizen.
They were patient and persistent enough. On the other hand, I was looked
on as a model young man, and recei