!" he cried, with a ponderous disdain. "What are they?
What is the strongest brown man? _Puff!_ To a man of purpose and
indomitable will like me! Obstacles? Three husbands? _Puff-puff-puff!_
Like that!--But all that will never be of use to _him_. That Signet! No,
he is a street snipe who will steal a pocketbook and call it a crime. He
is afraid to grasp.--But it is close in here, is it not?"

It was too bald. He stepped across the floor, unlatched and threw open
the blind of the window, letting the candlelight stream forth upon a
mass of bougainvillaea vine without.

"I keep this door locked; you can imagine that," he laughed, returning
and shutting us out of the gun room. He twisted the key; put it in his
pocket. And there, at the back, that window blind stood open.

He stared at Signet, as if the beach comber were just discovered.

"You are hopeless, my dear sir."

"Let us have a drink," he shifted.

For Signet he poured out a tumblerful of raw gin. The fellow took it
like a man in a daze--the daze of a slowly and fiercely solidifying
resolution. It shivered in his hand. A habit of greed sucked his lips.
Into his mouth he took a gulp of the spirits. He held it there. His eyes
searched our faces with a kind of malignant defiance. Of a sudden he
spat the stuff out, right on the floor. He said nothing. It was as if he
said: "By God! if you think I need _that_! _No!_ You don't know me!"

He stalked out of the door. When we followed as far as the veranda we
saw him making off into the striped light to the left.--

"Why did you call it the 'Shame Dance,' Mynheer?" We were seated again.

"Of course, my dear sir, it is not that, but it has a sound so when the
Kanakas speak it. The woman spoke the name. If it is a Polynesian word
I have not heard it before. 'Shemdance.' Like that."

"A good name, though. By jingo! a darn good name. Eh, Mynheer?"

But the trader's head was turned in an attitude of listening. Triumphant
listening--at the keyhole of the striped, moonlit night. I heard it,
too--a faint disturbance of bougainvillaea foliage around two sides of
the house, near the window standing open to the gun room.

Of course the amazing thing was that the man fooled us. In the
Dutchman's heart, I believe, there was nothing but astonishment at his
own success. Signet, on the face of it, was the typical big talker and
little doer; a flaw in character which one tends to think imperishable.
He fitted so precisely into a