shoulder to shoulder on the sandbank. When the sickness left us, there were
three thousand yet alive. Also, having made all our cocoanuts into copra,

there was a famine.
"That fella trader," Oti concluded, "he like 'm that much dirt. He like 'm

clam he die KAI-KAI (meat) he stop, stink 'm any amount. He like 'm one fella
dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him. We no fright along that

fella trader. We fright because he white man. We savve plenty too much no good
kill white man. That one fella sick dog trader he plenty brother stop along

him, white men like 'm you fight like hell. We no fright that damn trader.
Some time he made kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want 'm kill m,

kanaka he think devil-devil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah!
Yah! Yah!' and kanaka no kill m."

Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his teeth from
the live and squirming monster, and hook and bait sank in white flames to the

bottom.
"Shark walk about he finish," he said. "I think we catch 'm plenty fella

fish."
His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand, and landed

a big gasping rock cod in the bottom of the canoe.
"Sun he come up, I make 'm that dam fella trader one present big fella fish,"

said Oti.
THE HEATHEN

I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the hurricane
on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under

us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest
of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his

existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her
eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her

six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five
deck passengers-- Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with

a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes bundles.
The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to

Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans,
one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever known), one was a German,

one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half dozen.
It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor

one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well, and all
were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete.

Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and
she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her

hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade
room was packed full with shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work

her. There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth
along the rails.

In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, I'll
swear, two deep. Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of

yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking
cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main

shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the foreboom to swing
clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were

suspended.
It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three

days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing
fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first five hours the trade

died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and
the next day--one of those glaring, glassy, calms, when the very thought of

opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache.
The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that

season in the lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how smallpox could
come on board, when there had been no known cases ashore when we left

Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was, though--smallpox, a man dead, and three
others down on their backs.

There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we
care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but rot

and die--that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the
first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four

native divers sneaked away in the large whale boat. They were never heard of
again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and

there we were.
That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to

eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell
into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a

Frenchman--became very nervous and voluble. He actually got the twitches. He
was a large fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly

became a faithfulrepresentation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.
The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey,

and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept
ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with

us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I
must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the

disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted
himself to one drink daily.

It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was straight
overhead. There was no wind, except for frequentsqualls, which blew fiercely

for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain.
After each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from

the soaked decks.
The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and

millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw it going up from
the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them

exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule to take an additional several
each time they hove the dead over to the sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I
shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as

you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull
through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was what I heard

Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the heathen's
existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers
sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin

companionway. Its normalregister in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite
customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to

see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to sober the most drunken
pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had
watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that

little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the light
sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life lines, and waited for

the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on
the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, if--and

there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane.
We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the

wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to turn and
run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and

then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he
would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl

buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its
ways than a properly qualified captain? was what was in their minds, I knew.

Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never forget
the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels

do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The life
lines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for

them when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and
trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching,

groaning mass.
The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails; and, as

her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of
life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head first,

feet first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing,
and crumpling up. Now and again one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope;