“Yes, everybody speak me Joe along the Huahine.
Utami my name all the time, just the same.”
“But what are you doing here?” Tudor asked,
releasing the sailor’s hand and leaning eagerly
forward.
“Me sail along Missie Lackalanna her schooner
Miele. We go Tahiti, Raiatea, Tahaa,
Bora-Bora, Manua, Tutuila, Apia, Savaii, and Fiji
Islands—plenty Fiji Islands. Me stop
along Missie Lackalanna in Solomons. Very soon
she catch other schooner.”
“He and I were the two survivors of the wreck
of the Huahine,” Tudor explained to the
others. “Fifty-seven all told on board
when we sailed from Huapa, and Joe and I were the
only two that ever set foot on land again. Hurricane,
you know, in the Paumotus. That was when I was
after pearls.”
“And you never told me, Utami, that you’d
been wrecked in a hurricane,” Joan said reproachfully.
The big Tahitian shifted his weight and flashed his
teeth in a conciliating smile.
“Me no t’ink nothing ’t all,”
he said.
He half-turned, as if to depart, by his manner indicating
that he considered it time to go while yet he desired
to remain.
“All right, Utami,” Tudor said.
“I’ll see you in the morning and have a
yarn.”
“He saved my life, the beggar,” Tudor
explained, as the Tahitian strode away and with heavy
softness of foot went down the steps. “Swim!
I never met a better swimmer.”
And thereat, solicited by Joan, Tudor narrated the
wreck of the Huahine; while Sheldon smoked
and pondered, and decided that whatever the man’s
shortcomings were, he was at least not a liar.
The days passed, and Tudor seemed loath to leave the
hospitality of Berande. Everything was ready
for the start, but he lingered on, spending much time
in Joan’s company and thereby increasing the
dislike Sheldon had taken to him. He went swimming
with her, in point of rashness exceeding her; and
dynamited fish with her, diving among the hungry ground-sharks
and contesting with them for possession of the stunned
prey, until he earned the approval of the whole Tahitian
crew. Arahu challenged him to tear a fish from
a shark’s jaws, leaving half to the shark and
bringing the other half himself to the surface; and
Tudor performed the feat, a flip from the sandpaper
hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches
of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted,
while Sheldon, looking on, realized that here was the
hero of her adventure-dreams coming true. She
did not care for love, but he felt that if ever she
did love it would be that sort of a man—“a
man who exhibited,” was his way of putting it.
