1 files changed, 3558 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/2416.txt b/2416.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..1c89b4b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/2416.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3558 @@
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The House of Pride, by Jack London
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The House of Pride
+
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 11, 2007  [eBook #2416]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF PRIDE***
+
+
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1919 Mills & Boon edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
+
+
+Contents:
+
+The House of Pride
+Koolau the Leper
+Good-bye, Jack
+Aloha Oe
+Chun Ah Chun
+The Sheriff of Kona
+Jack London
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF PRIDE
+
+
+Percival Ford wondered why he had come.  He did not dance.  He did not
+care much for army people.  Yet he knew them all--gliding and revolving
+there on the broad _lanai_ of the Seaside, the officers in their fresh-
+starched uniforms of white, the civilians in white and black, and the
+women bare of shoulders and arms.  After two years in Honolulu the
+Twentieth was departing to its new station in Alaska, and Percival Ford,
+as one of the big men of the Islands, could not help knowing the officers
+and their women.
+
+But between knowing and liking was a vast gulf.  The army women
+frightened him just a little.  They were in ways quite different from the
+women he liked best--the elderly women, the spinsters and the
+bespectacled maidens, and the very serious women of all ages whom he met
+on church and library and kindergarten committees, who came meekly to him
+for contributions and advice.  He ruled those women by virtue of his
+superior mentality, his great wealth, and the high place he occupied in
+the commercial baronage of Hawaii.  And he was not afraid of them in the
+least.  Sex, with them, was not obtrusive.  Yes, that was it.  There was
+in them something else, or more, than the assertive grossness of life.  He
+was fastidious; he acknowledged that to himself; and these army women,
+with their bare shoulders and naked arms, their straight-looking eyes,
+their vitality and challenging femaleness, jarred upon his sensibilities.
+
+Nor did he get on better with the army men, who took life lightly,
+drinking and smoking and swearing their way through life and asserting
+the essential grossness of flesh no less shamelessly than their women.  He
+was always uncomfortable in the company of the army men.  They seemed
+uncomfortable, too.  And he felt, always, that they were laughing at him
+up their sleeves, or pitying him, or tolerating him.  Then, too, they
+seemed, by mere contiguity, to emphasize a lack in him, to call attention
+to that in them which he did not possess and which he thanked God he did
+not possess.  Faugh!  They were like their women!
+
+In fact, Percival Ford was no more a woman's man than he was a man's man.
+A glance at him told the reason.  He had a good constitution, never was
+on intimate terms with sickness, nor even mild disorders; but he lacked
+vitality.  His was a negative organism.  No blood with a ferment in it
+could have nourished and shaped that long and narrow face, those thin
+lips, lean cheeks, and the small, sharp eyes.  The thatch of hair, dust-
+coloured, straight and sparse, advertised the niggard soil, as did the
+nose, thin, delicately modelled, and just hinting the suggestion of a
+beak.  His meagre blood had denied him much of life, and permitted him to
+be an extremist in one thing only, which thing was righteousness.  Over
+right conduct he pondered and agonized, and that he should do right was
+as necessary to his nature as loving and being loved were necessary to
+commoner clay.
+
+He was sitting under the algaroba trees between the _lanai_ and the
+beach.  His eyes wandered over the dancers and he turned his head away
+and gazed seaward across the mellow-sounding surf to the Southern Cross
+burning low on the horizon.  He was irritated by the bare shoulders and
+arms of the women.  If he had a daughter he would never permit it, never.
+But his hypothesis was the sheerest abstraction.  The thought process had
+been accompanied by no inner vision of that daughter.  He did not see a
+daughter with arms and shoulders.  Instead, he smiled at the remote
+contingency of marriage.  He was thirty-five, and, having had no personal
+experience of love, he looked upon it, not as mythical, but as bestial.
+Anybody could marry.  The Japanese and Chinese coolies, toiling on the
+sugar plantations and in the rice-fields, married.  They invariably
+married at the first opportunity.  It was because they were so low in the
+scale of life.  There was nothing else for them to do.  They were like
+the army men and women.  But for him there were other and higher things.
+He was different from them--from all of them.  He was proud of how he
+happened to be.  He had come of no petty love-match.  He had come of
+lofty conception of duty and of devotion to a cause.  His father had not
+married for love.  Love was a madness that had never perturbed Isaac
+Ford.  When he answered the call to go to the heathen with the message of
+life, he had had no thought and no desire for marriage.  In this they
+were alike, his father and he.  But the Board of Missions was economical.
+With New England thrift it weighed and measured and decided that married
+missionaries were less expensive per capita and more efficacious.  So the
+Board commanded Isaac Ford to marry.  Furthermore, it furnished him with
+a wife, another zealous soul with no thought of marriage, intent only on
+doing the Lord's work among the heathen.  They saw each other for the
+first time in Boston.  The Board brought them together, arranged
+everything, and by the end of the week they were married and started on
+the long voyage around the Horn.
+
+Percival Ford was proud that he had come of such a union.  He had been
+born high, and he thought of himself as a spiritual aristocrat.  And he
+was proud of his father.  It was a passion with him.  The erect, austere
+figure of Isaac Ford had burned itself upon his pride.  On his desk was a
+miniature of that soldier of the Lord.  In his bedroom hung the portrait
+of Isaac Ford, painted at the time when he had served under the Monarchy
+as prime minister.  Not that Isaac Ford had coveted place and worldly
+wealth, but that, as prime minister, and, later, as banker, he had been
+of greater service to the missionary cause.  The German crowd, and the
+English crowd, and all the rest of the trading crowd, had sneered at
+Isaac Ford as a commercial soul-saver; but he, his son, knew different.
+When the natives, emerging abruptly from their feudal system, with no
+conception of the nature and significance of property in land, were
+letting their broad acres slip through their fingers, it was Isaac Ford
+who had stepped in between the trading crowd and its prey and taken
+possession of fat, vast holdings.  Small wonder the trading crowd did not
+like his memory.  But he had never looked upon his enormous wealth as his
+own.  He had considered himself God's steward.  Out of the revenues he
+had built schools, and hospitals, and churches.  Nor was it his fault
+that sugar, after the slump, had paid forty per cent; that the bank he
+founded had prospered into a railroad; and that, among other things,
+fifty thousand acres of Oahu pasture land, which he had bought for a
+dollar an acre, grew eight tons of sugar to the acre every eighteen
+months.  No, in all truth, Isaac Ford was an heroic figure, fit, so
+Percival Ford thought privately, to stand beside the statue of Kamehameha
+I. in front of the Judiciary Building.  Isaac Ford was gone, but he, his
+son, carried on the good work at least as inflexibly if not as
+masterfully.
+
+He turned his eyes back to the _lanai_.  What was the difference, he
+asked himself, between the shameless, grass-girdled _hula_ dances and the
+decollete dances of the women of his own race?  Was there an essential
+difference? or was it a matter of degree?
+
+As he pondered the problem a hand rested on his shoulder.
+
+"Hello, Ford, what are you doing here?  Isn't this a bit festive?"
+
+"I try to be lenient, Dr. Kennedy, even as I look on," Percival Ford
+answered gravely.  "Won't you sit down?"
+
+Dr. Kennedy sat down, clapping his palms sharply.  A white-clad Japanese
+servant answered swiftly.
+
+Scotch and soda was Kennedy's order; then, turning to the other, he
+said:--
+
+"Of course, I don't ask you."
+
+"But I will take something," Ford said firmly.  The doctor's eyes showed
+surprise, and the servant waited.  "Boy, a lemonade, please."
+
+The doctor laughed at it heartily, as a joke on himself, and glanced at
+the musicians under the _hau_ tree.
+
+"Why, it's the Aloha Orchestra," he said.  "I thought they were with the
+Hawaiian Hotel on Tuesday nights.  Some rumpus, I guess."
+
+His eyes paused for a moment, and dwelt upon the one who was playing a
+guitar and singing a Hawaiian song to the accompaniment of all the
+instruments.
+
+His face became grave as he looked at the singer, and it was still grave
+as he turned it to his companion.
+
+"Look here, Ford, isn't it time you let up on Joe Garland?  I understand
+you are in opposition to the Promotion Committee's sending him to the
+States on this surf-board proposition, and I've been wanting to speak to
+you about it.  I should have thought you'd be glad to get him out of the
+country.  It would be a good way to end your persecution of him."
+
+"Persecution?"  Percival Ford's eyebrows lifted interrogatively.
+
+"Call it by any name you please," Kennedy went on.  "You've hounded that
+poor devil for years.  It's not his fault.  Even you will admit that."
+
+"Not his fault?"  Percival Ford's thin lips drew tightly together for the
+moment.  "Joe Garland is dissolute and idle.  He has always been a
+wastrel, a profligate."
+
+"But that's no reason you should keep on after him the way you do.  I've
+watched you from the beginning.  The first thing you did when you
+returned from college and found him working on the plantation as outside
+_luna_ was to fire him--you with your millions, and he with his sixty
+dollars a month."
+
+"Not the first thing," Percival Ford said judicially, in a tone he was
+accustomed to use in committee meetings.  "I gave him his warning.  The
+superintendent said he was a capable _luna_.  I had no objection to him
+on that ground.  It was what he did outside working hours.  He undid my
+work faster than I could build it up.  Of what use were the Sunday
+schools, the night schools, and the sewing classes, when in the evenings
+there was Joe Garland with his infernal and eternal tum-tumming of guitar
+and _ukulele_, his strong drink, and his _hula_ dancing?  After I warned
+him, I came upon him--I shall never forget it--came upon him, down at the
+cabins.  It was evening.  I could hear the _hula_ songs before I saw the
+scene.  And when I did see it, there were the girls, shameless in the
+moonlight and dancing--the girls upon whom I had worked to teach clean
+living and right conduct.  And there were three girls there, I remember,
+just graduated from the mission school.  Of course I discharged Joe
+Garland.  I know it was the same at Hilo.  People said I went out of my
+way when I persuaded Mason and Fitch to discharge him.  But it was the
+missionaries who requested me to do so.  He was undoing their work by his
+reprehensible example."
+
+"Afterwards, when he got on the railroad, your railroad, he was
+discharged without cause," Kennedy challenged.
+
+"Not so," was the quick answer.  "I had him into my private office and
+talked with him for half an hour."
+
+"You discharged him for inefficiency?"
+
+"For immoral living, if you please."
+
+Dr. Kennedy laughed with a grating sound.  "Who the devil gave it to you
+to be judge and jury?  Does landlordism give you control of the immortal
+souls of those that toil for you?  I have been your physician.  Am I to
+expect tomorrow your ukase that I give up Scotch and soda or your
+patronage?  Bah!  Ford, you take life too seriously.  Besides, when Joe
+got into that smuggling scrape (he wasn't in your employ, either), and he
+sent word to you, asked you to pay his fine, you left him to do his six
+months' hard labour on the reef.  Don't forget, you left Joe Garland in
+the lurch that time.  You threw him down, hard; and yet I remember the
+first day you came to school--we boarded, you were only a day scholar--you
+had to be initiated.  Three times under in the swimming tank--you
+remember, it was the regular dose every new boy got.  And you held back.
+You denied that you _could_ swim.  You were frightened, hysterical--"
+
+"Yes, I know," Percival Ford said slowly.  "I was frightened.  And it was
+a lie, for I could swim . . . And I was frightened."
+
+"And you remember who fought for you? who lied for you harder than you
+could lie, and swore he knew you couldn't swim?  Who jumped into the tank
+and pulled you out after the first under and was nearly drowned for it by
+the other boys, who had discovered by that time that you _could_ swim?"
+
+"Of course I know," the other rejoined coldly.  "But a generous act as a
+boy does not excuse a lifetime of wrong living."
+
+"He has never done wrong to you?--personally and directly, I mean?"
+
+"No," was Percival Ford's answer.  "That is what makes my position
+impregnable.  I have no personal spite against him.  He is bad, that is
+all.  His life is bad--"
+
+"Which is another way of saying that he does not agree with you in the
+way life should be lived," the doctor interrupted.
+
+"Have it that way.  It is immaterial.  He is an idler--"
+
+"With reason," was the interruption, "considering the jobs out of which
+you have knocked him."
+
+"He is immoral--"
+
+"Oh, hold on now, Ford.  Don't go harping on that.  You are pure New
+England stock.  Joe Garland is half Kanaka.  Your blood is thin.  His is
+warm.  Life is one thing to you, another thing to him.  He laughs and
+sings and dances through life, genial, unselfish, childlike, everybody's
+friend.  You go through life like a perambulating prayer-wheel, a friend
+of nobody but the righteous, and the righteous are those who agree with
+you as to what is right.  And after all, who shall say?  You live like an
+anchorite.  Joe Garland lives like a good fellow.  Who has extracted the
+most from life?  We are paid to live, you know.  When the wages are too
+meagre we throw up the job, which is the cause, believe me, of all
+rational suicide.  Joe Garland would starve to death on the wages you get
+from life.  You see, he is made differently.  So would you starve on his
+wages, which are singing, and love--"
+
+"Lust, if you will pardon me," was the interruption.
+
+Dr. Kennedy smiled.
+
+"Love, to you, is a word of four letters and a definition which you have
+extracted from the dictionary.  But love, real love, dewy and palpitant
+and tender, you do not know.  If God made you and me, and men and women,
+believe me He made love, too.  But to come back.  It's about time you
+quit hounding Joe Garland.  It is not worthy of you, and it is cowardly.
+The thing for you to do is to reach out and lend him a hand."
+
+"Why I, any more than you?" the other demanded.  "Why don't you reach him
+a hand?"
+
+"I have.  I'm reaching him a hand now.  I'm trying to get you not to down
+the Promotion Committee's proposition of sending him away.  I got him the
+job at Hilo with Mason and Fitch.  I've got him half a dozen jobs, out of
+every one of which you drove him.  But never mind that.  Don't forget one
+thing--and a little frankness won't hurt you--it is not fair play to
+saddle another fault on Joe Garland; and you know that you, least of all,
+are the man to do it.  Why, man, it's not good taste.  It's positively
+indecent."
+
+"Now I don't follow you," Percival Ford answered.  "You're up in the air
+with some obscure scientific theory of heredity and personal
+irresponsibility.  But how any theory can hold Joe Garland irresponsible
+for his wrongdoings and at the same time hold me personally responsible
+for them--more responsible than any one else, including Joe Garland--is
+beyond me."
+
+"It's a matter of delicacy, I suppose, or of taste, that prevents you
+from following me," Dr. Kennedy snapped out.  "It's all very well, for
+the sake of society, tacitly to ignore some things, but you do more than
+tacitly ignore."
+
+"What is it, pray, that I tacitly ignore!"
+
+Dr. Kennedy was angry.  A deeper red than that of constitutional Scotch
+and soda suffused his face, as he answered:
+
+"Your father's son."
+
+"Now just what do you mean?"
+
+"Damn it, man, you can't ask me to be plainer spoken than that.  But if
+you will, all right--Isaac Ford's son--Joe Garland--your brother."
+
+Percival Ford sat quietly, an annoyed and shocked expression on his face.
+Kennedy looked at him curiously, then, as the slow minutes dragged by,
+became embarrassed and frightened.
+
+"My God!" he cried finally, "you don't mean to tell me that you didn't
+know!"
+
+As in answer, Percival Ford's cheeks turned slowly grey.
+
+"It's a ghastly joke," he said; "a ghastly joke."
+
+The doctor had got himself in hand.
+
+"Everybody knows it," he said.  "I thought you knew it.  And since you
+don't know it, it's time you did, and I'm glad of the chance of setting
+you straight.  Joe Garland and you are brothers--half-brothers."
+
+"It's a lie," Ford cried.  "You don't mean it.  Joe Garland's mother was
+Eliza Kunilio."  (Dr. Kennedy nodded.)  "I remember her well, with her
+duck pond and _taro_ patch.  His father was Joseph Garland, the beach-
+comber."  (Dr. Kennedy shook his head.)  "He died only two or three years
+ago.  He used to get drunk.  There's where Joe got his dissoluteness.
+There's the heredity for you."
+
+"And nobody told you," Kennedy said wonderingly, after a pause.
+
+"Dr. Kennedy, you have said something terrible, which I cannot allow to
+pass.  You must either prove or, or . . . "
+
+"Prove it yourself.  Turn around and look at him.  You've got him in
+profile.  Look at his nose.  That's Isaac Ford's.  Yours is a thin
+edition of it.  That's right.  Look.  The lines are fuller, but they are
+all there."
+
+Percival Ford looked at the Kanaka half-breed who played under the _hau_
+tree, and it seemed, as by some illumination, that he was gazing on a
+wraith of himself.  Feature after feature flashed up an unmistakable
+resemblance.  Or, rather, it was he who was the wraith of that other full-
+muscled and generously moulded man.  And his features, and that other
+man's features, were all reminiscent of Isaac Ford.  And nobody had told
+him.  Every line of Isaac Ford's face he knew.  Miniatures, portraits,
+and photographs of his father were passing in review through his mind,
+and here and there, over and again, in the face before him, he caught
+resemblances and vague hints of likeness.  It was devil's work that could
+reproduce the austere features of Isaac Ford in the loose and sensuous
+features before him.  Once, the man turned, and for one flashing instant
+it seemed to Percival Ford that he saw his father, dead and gone, peering
+at him out of the face of Joe Garland.
+
+"It's nothing at all," he could faintly hear Dr. Kennedy saying, "They
+were all mixed up in the old days.  You know that.  You've seen it all
+your life.  Sailors married queens and begat princesses and all the rest
+of it.  It was the usual thing in the Islands."
+
+"But not with my father," Percival Ford interrupted.
+
+"There you are."  Kennedy shrugged his shoulders.  "Cosmic sap and smoke
+of life.  Old Isaac Ford was straitlaced and all the rest, and I know
+there's no explaining it, least of all to himself.  He understood it no
+more than you do.  Smoke of life, that's all.  And don't forget one
+thing, Ford.  There was a dab of unruly blood in old Isaac Ford, and Joe
+Garland inherited it--all of it, smoke of life and cosmic sap; while you
+inherited all of old Isaac's ascetic blood.  And just because your blood
+is cold, well-ordered, and well-disciplined, is no reason that you should
+frown upon Joe Garland.  When Joe Garland undoes the work you do,
+remember that it is only old Isaac Ford on both sides, undoing with one
+hand what he does with the other.  You are Isaac Ford's right hand, let
+us say; Joe Garland is his left hand."
+
+Percival Ford made no answer, and in the silence Dr. Kennedy finished his
+forgotten Scotch and soda.  From across the grounds an automobile hooted
+imperatively.
+
+"There's the machine," Dr. Kennedy said, rising.  "I've got to run.  I'm
+sorry I've shaken you up, and at the same time I'm glad.  And know one
+thing, Isaac Ford's dab of unruly blood was remarkably small, and Joe
+Garland got it all.  And one other thing.  If your father's left hand
+offend you, don't smite it off.  Besides, Joe is all right.  Frankly, if
+I could choose between you and him to live with me on a desert isle, I'd
+choose Joe."
+
+Little bare-legged children ran about him, playing, on the grass; but
+Percival Ford did not see them.  He was gazing steadily at the singer
+under the _hau_ tree.  He even changed his position once, to get closer.
+The clerk of the Seaside went by, limping with age and dragging his
+reluctant feet.  He had lived forty years on the Islands.  Percival Ford
+beckoned to him, and the clerk came respectfully, and wondering that he
+should be noticed by Percival Ford.
+
+"John," Ford said, "I want you to give me some information.  Won't you
+sit down?"
+
+The clerk sat down awkwardly, stunned by the unexpected honour.  He
+blinked at the other and mumbled, "Yes, sir, thank you."
+
+"John, who is Joe Garland?"
+
+The clerk stared at him, blinked, cleared his throat, and said nothing.
+
+"Go on," Percival Ford commanded.
+
+"Who is he?"
+
+"You're joking me, sir," the other managed to articulate.
+
+"I spoke to you seriously."
+
+The clerk recoiled from him.
+
+"You don't mean to say you don't know?" he questioned, his question in
+itself the answer.
+
+"I want to know."
+
+"Why, he's--" John broke off and looked about him helplessly.  "Hadn't
+you better ask somebody else?  Everybody thought you knew.  We always
+thought . . . "
+
+"Yes, go ahead."
+
+"We always thought that that was why you had it in for him."
+
+Photographs and miniatures of Isaac Ford were trooping through his son's
+brain, and ghosts of Isaac Ford seemed in the air about hint "I wish you
+good night, sir," he could hear the clerk saying, and he saw him
+beginning to limp away.
+
+"John," he called abruptly.
+
+John came back and stood near him, blinking and nervously moistening his
+lips.
+
+"You haven't told me yet, you know."
+
+"Oh, about Joe Garland?"
+
+"Yes, about Joe Garland.  Who is he?"
+
+"He's your brother, sir, if I say it who shouldn't."
+
+"Thank you, John.  Good night."
+
+"And you didn't know?" the old man queried, content to linger, now that
+the crucial point was past.
+
+"Thank you, John.  Good night," was the response.
+
+"Yes, sir, thank you, sir.  I think it's going to rain.  Good night,
+sir."
+
+Out of the clear sky, filled only with stars and moonlight, fell a rain
+so fine and attenuated as to resemble a vapour spray.  Nobody minded it;
+the children played on, running bare-legged over the grass and leaping
+into the sand; and in a few minutes it was gone.  In the south-east,
+Diamond Head, a black blot, sharply defined, silhouetted its crater-form
+against the stars.  At sleepy intervals the surf flung its foam across
+the sands to the grass, and far out could be seen the black specks of
+swimmers under the moon.  The voices of the singers, singing a waltz,
+died away; and in the silence, from somewhere under the trees, arose the
+laugh of a woman that was a love-cry.  It startled Percival Ford, and it
+reminded him of Dr. Kennedy's phrase.  Down by the outrigger canoes,
+where they lay hauled out on the sand, he saw men and women, Kanakas,
+reclining languorously, like lotus-eaters, the women in white _holokus_;
+and against one such _holoku_ he saw the dark head of the steersman of
+the canoe resting upon the woman's shoulder.  Farther down, where the
+strip of sand widened at the entrance to the lagoon, he saw a man and
+woman walking side by side.  As they drew near the light _lanai_, he saw
+the woman's hand go down to her waist and disengage a girdling arm.  And
+as they passed him, Percival Ford nodded to a captain he knew, and to a
+major's daughter.  Smoke of life, that was it, an ample phrase.  And
+again, from under the dark algaroba tree arose the laugh of a woman that
+was a love-cry; and past his chair, on the way to bed, a bare-legged
+youngster was led by a chiding Japanese nurse-maid.  The voices of the
+singers broke softly and meltingly into an Hawaiian love-song, and
+officers and women, with encircling arms, were gliding and whirling on
+the _lanai_; and once again the woman laughed under the algaroba trees.
+
+And Percival Ford knew only disapproval of it all.  He was irritated by
+the love-laugh of the woman, by the steersman with pillowed head on the
+white _holoku_, by the couples that walked on the beach, by the officers
+and women that danced, and by the voices of the singers singing of love,
+and his brother singing there with them under the _hau_ tree.  The woman
+that laughed especially irritated him.  A curious train of thought was
+aroused.  He was Isaac Ford's son, and what had happened with Isaac Ford
+might happen with him.  He felt in his cheeks the faint heat of a blush
+at the thought, and experienced a poignant sense of shame.  He was
+appalled by what was in his blood.  It was like learning suddenly that
+his father had been a leper and that his own blood might bear the taint
+of that dread disease.  Isaac Ford, the austere soldier of the Lord--the
+old hypocrite!  What difference between him and any beach-comber?  The
+house of pride that Percival Ford had builded was tumbling about his
+ears.
+
+The hours passed, the army people laughed and danced, the native
+orchestra played on, and Percival Ford wrestled with the abrupt and
+overwhelming problem that had been thrust upon him.  He prayed quietly,
+his elbow on the table, his head bowed upon his hand, with all the
+appearance of any tired onlooker.  Between the dances the army men and
+women and the civilians fluttered up to him and buzzed conventionally,
+and when they went back to the _lanai_ he took up his wrestling where he
+had left it off.
+
+He began to patch together his shattered ideal of Isaac Ford, and for
+cement he used a cunning and subtle logic.  It was of the sort that is
+compounded in the brain laboratories of egotists, and it worked.  It was
+incontrovertible that his father had been made of finer clay than those
+about him; but still, old Isaac had been only in the process of becoming,
+while he, Percival Ford, had become.  As proof of it, he rehabilitated
+his father and at the same time exalted himself.  His lean little ego
+waxed to colossal proportions.  He was great enough to forgive.  He
+glowed at the thought of it.  Isaac Ford had been great, but he was
+greater, for he could forgive Isaac Ford and even restore him to the holy
+place in his memory, though the place was not quite so holy as it had
+been.  Also, he applauded Isaac Ford for having ignored the outcome of
+his one step aside.  Very well, he, too, would ignore it.
+
+The dance was breaking up.  The orchestra had finished "Aloha Oe" and was
+preparing to go home.  Percival Ford clapped his hands for the Japanese
+servant.
+
+"You tell that man I want to see him," he said, pointing out Joe Garland.
+"Tell him to come here, now."
+
+Joe Garland approached and halted respectfully several paces away,
+nervously fingering the guitar which he still carried.  The other did not
+ask him to sit down.
+
+"You are my brother," he said.
+
+"Why, everybody knows that," was the reply, in tones of wonderment.
+
+"Yes, so I understand," Percival Ford said dryly.  "But I did not know it
+till this evening."
+
+The half-brother waited uncomfortably in the silence that followed,
+during which Percival Ford coolly considered his next utterance.
+
+"You remember that first time I came to school and the boys ducked me?"
+he asked.  "Why did you take my part?"
+
+The half-brother smiled bashfully.
+
+"Because you knew?"
+
+"Yes, that was why."
+
+"But I didn't know," Percival Ford said in the same dry fashion.
+
+"Yes," the other said.
+
+Another silence fell.  Servants were beginning to put out the lights on
+the _lanai_.
+
+"You know . . . now," the half-brother said simply.
+
+Percival Ford frowned.  Then he looked the other over with a considering
+eye.
+
+"How much will you take to leave the Islands and never come back?" he
+demanded.
+
+"And never come back?" Joe Garland faltered.  "It is the only land I
+know.  Other lands are cold.  I do not know other lands.  I have many
+friends here.  In other lands there would not be one voice to say,
+'_Aloha_, Joe, my boy.'"
+
+"I said never to come back," Percival Ford reiterated.  "The _Alameda_
+sails tomorrow for San Francisco."
+
+Joe Garland was bewildered.
+
+"But why?" he asked.  "You know now that we are brothers."
+
+"That is why," was the retort.  "As you said yourself, everybody knows.  I
+will make it worth your while."
+
+All awkwardness and embarrassment disappeared from Joe Garland.  Birth
+and station were bridged and reversed.
+
+"You want me to go?" he demanded.
+
+"I want you to go and never come back," Percival Ford answered.
+
+And in that moment, flashing and fleeting, it was given him to see his
+brother tower above him like a mountain, and to feel himself dwindle and
+dwarf to microscopic insignificance.  But it is not well for one to see
+himself truly, nor can one so see himself for long and live; and only for
+that flashing moment did Percival Ford see himself and his brother in
+true perspective.  The next moment he was mastered by his meagre and
+insatiable ego.
+
+"As I said, I will make it worth your while.  You will not suffer.  I
+will pay you well."
+
+"All right," Joe Garland said.  "I'll go."
+
+He started to turn away.
+
+"Joe," the other called.  "You see my lawyer tomorrow morning.  Five
+hundred down and two hundred a month as long as you stay away."
+
+"You are very kind," Joe Garland answered softly.  "You are too kind.  And
+anyway, I guess I don't want your money.  I go tomorrow on the
+_Alameda_."
+
+He walked away, but did not say good-bye.
+
+Percival Ford clapped his hands.
+
+"Boy," he said to the Japanese, "a lemonade."
+
+And over the lemonade he smiled long and contentedly to himself.
+
+
+
+
+KOOLAU THE LEPER
+
+
+"Because we are sick they take away our liberty.  We have obeyed the law.
+We have done no wrong.  And yet they would put us in prison.  Molokai is
+a prison.  That you know.  Niuli, there, his sister was sent to Molokai
+seven years ago.  He has not seen her since.  Nor will he ever see her.
+She must stay there until she dies.  This is not her will.  It is not
+Niuli's will.  It is the will of the white men who rule the land.  And
+who are these white men?
+
+"We know.  We have it from our fathers and our fathers' fathers.  They
+came like lambs, speaking softly.  Well might they speak softly, for we
+were many and strong, and all the islands were ours.  As I say, they
+spoke softly.  They were of two kinds.  The one kind asked our
+permission, our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God.  The
+other kind asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with
+us.  That was the beginning.  Today all the islands are theirs, all the
+land, all the cattle--everything is theirs.  They that preached the word
+of God and they that preached the word of Rum have fore-gathered and
+become great chiefs.  They live like kings in houses of many rooms, with
+multitudes of servants to care for them.  They who had nothing have
+everything, and if you, or I, or any Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and
+say, 'Well, why don't you work?  There are the plantations.'"
+
+Koolau paused.  He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted fingers
+lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his black hair.  The
+moonlight bathed the scene in silver.  It was a night of peace, though
+those who sat about him and listened had all the seeming of
+battle-wrecks.  Their faces were leonine.  Here a space yawned in a face
+where should have been a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where a hand
+had rotted off.  They were men and women beyond the pale, the thirty of
+them, for upon them had been placed the mark of the beast.
+
+They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous night, and their
+lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of Koolau's
+speech.  They were creatures who once had been men and women.  But they
+were men and women no longer.  They were monsters--in face and form
+grotesque caricatures of everything human.  They were hideously maimed
+and distorted, and had the seeming of creatures that had been racked in
+millenniums of hell.  Their hands, when they possessed them, were like
+harpy claws.  Their faces were the misfits and slips, crushed and bruised
+by some mad god at play in the machinery of life.  Here and there were
+features which the mad god had smeared half away, and one woman wept
+scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once had been.
+Some were in pain and groaned from their chests.  Others coughed, making
+sounds like the tearing of tissue.  Two were idiots, more like huge apes
+marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel.  They mowed and
+gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping, golden blossoms.
+One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan upon his shoulder, caught
+up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet and with it decorated the
+monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his every movement.
+
+And over these things Koolau was king.  And this was his kingdom,--a
+flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
+floated the blattings of wild goats.  On three sides the grim walls rose,
+festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and pierced by cave-
+entrances--the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects.  On the fourth side the
+earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and, far below, could be seen
+the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at whose bases foamed and rumbled
+the Pacific surge.  In fine weather a boat could land on the rocky beach
+that marked the entrance of Kalalau Valley, but the weather must be very
+fine.  And a cool-headed mountaineer might climb from the beach to the
+head of Kalalau Valley, to this pocket among the peaks where Koolau
+ruled; but such a mountaineer must be very cool of head, and he must know
+the wild-goat trails as well.  The marvel was that the mass of human
+wreckage that constituted Koolau's people should have been able to drag
+its helpless misery over the giddy goat-trails to this inaccessible spot.
+
+"Brothers," Koolau began.
+
+But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of
+madness, and Koolau waited while the shrill cachination was tossed back
+and forth among the rocky walls and echoed distantly through the
+pulseless night.
+
+"Brothers, is it not strange?  Ours was the land, and behold, the land is
+not ours.  What did these preachers of the word of God and the word of
+Rum give us for the land?  Have you received one dollar, as much as one
+dollar, any one of you, for the land?  Yet it is theirs, and in return
+they tell us we can go to work on the land, their land, and that what we
+produce by our toil shall be theirs.  Yet in the old days we did not have
+to work.  Also, when we are sick, they take away our freedom."
+
+"Who brought the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and wiry
+man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to see
+the cloven hoofs under him.  They were cloven, it was true, but the
+cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions.  Yet this was
+Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who knew every
+goat-trail and who had led Koolau and his wretched followers into the
+recesses of Kalalau.
+
+"Ay, well questioned," Koolau answered.  "Because we would not work the
+miles of sugar-cane where once our horses pastured, they brought the
+Chinese slaves from overseas.  And with them came the Chinese
+sickness--that which we suffer from and because of which they would
+imprison us on Molokai.  We were born on Kauai.  We have been to the
+other islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to Hawaii, to
+Honolulu.  Yet always did we come back to Kauai.  Why did we come back?
+There must be a reason.  Because we love Kauai.  We were born here.  Here
+we have lived.  And here shall we die--unless--unless--there be weak
+hearts amongst us.  Such we do not want.  They are fit for Molokai.  And
+if there be such, let them not remain.  Tomorrow the soldiers land on the
+shore.  Let the weak hearts go down to them.  They will be sent swiftly
+to Molokai.  As for us, we shall stay and fight.  But know that we will
+not die.  We have rifles.  You know the narrow trails where men must
+creep, one by one.  I, alone, Koolau, who was once a cowboy on Niihau,
+can hold the trail against a thousand men.  Here is Kapalei, who was once
+a judge over men and a man with honour, but who is now a hunted rat, like
+you and me.  Hear him.  He is wise."
+
+Kapalei arose.  Once he had been a judge.  He had gone to college at
+Punahou.  He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high
+representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of traders
+and missionaries.  Such had been Kapalei.  But now, as Koolau had said,
+he was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law, sunk so deep in the mire
+of human horror that he was above the law as well as beneath it.  His
+face was featureless, save for gaping orifices and for the lidless eyes
+that burned under hairless brows.
+
+"Let us not make trouble," he began.  "We ask to be left alone.  But if
+they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and the penalty.
+My fingers are gone, as you see."  He held up his stumps of hands that
+all might see.  "Yet have I the joint of one thumb left, and it can pull
+a trigger as firmly as did its lost neighbour in the old days.  We love
+Kauai.  Let us live here, or die here, but do not let us go to the prison
+of Molokai.  The sickness is not ours.  We have not sinned.  The men who
+preached the word of God and the word of Rum brought the sickness with
+the coolie slaves who work the stolen land.  I have been a judge.  I know
+the law and the justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal a man's
+land, to make that man sick with the Chinese sickness, and then to put
+that man in prison for life."
+
+"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau.  "Let us
+drink and dance and be happy as we can."
+
+From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed round.
+The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of the root of
+the _ti_-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through them and mounted
+to their brains, they forgot that they had once been men and women, for
+they were men and women once more.  The woman who wept scalding tears
+from open eye-pits was indeed a woman apulse with life as she plucked the
+strings of an _ukulele_ and lifted her voice in a barbaric love-call such
+as might have come from the dark forest-depths of the primeval world.  The
+air tingled with her cry, softly imperious and seductive.  Upon a mat,
+timing his rhythm to the woman's song Kiloliana danced.  It was
+unmistakable.  Love danced in all his movements, and, next, dancing with
+him on the mat, was a woman whose heavy hips and generous breast gave the
+lie to her disease-corroded face.  It was a dance of the living dead, for
+in their disintegrating bodies life still loved and longed.  Ever the
+woman whose sightless eyes ran scalding tears chanted her love-cry, ever
+the dancers of love danced in the warm night, and ever the calabashes
+went around till in all their brains were maggots crawling of memory and
+desire.  And with the woman on the mat danced a slender maid whose face
+was beautiful and unmarred, but whose twisted arms that rose and fell
+marked the disease's ravage.  And the two idiots, gibbering and mouthing
+strange noises, danced apart, grotesque, fantastic, travestying love as
+they themselves had been travestied by life.
+
+But the woman's love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered, and
+the dancers ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea, where a
+rocket flared like a wan phantom through the moonlit air.
+
+"It is the soldiers," said Koolau.  "Tomorrow there will be fighting.  It
+is well to sleep and be prepared."
+
+The lepers obeyed, crawling away to their lairs in the cliff, until only
+Koolau remained, sitting motionless in the moonlight, his rifle across
+his knees, as he gazed far down to the boats landing on the beach.
+
+The far head of Kalalau Valley had been well chosen as a refuge.  Except
+Kiloliana, who knew back-trails up the precipitous walls, no man could
+win to the gorge save by advancing across a knife-edged ridge.  This
+passage was a hundred yards in length.  At best, it was a scant twelve
+inches wide.  On either side yawned the abyss.  A slip, and to right or
+left the man would fall to his death.  But once across he would find
+himself in an earthly paradise.  A sea of vegetation laved the landscape,
+pouring its green billows from wall to wall, dripping from the cliff-lips
+in great vine-masses, and flinging a spray of ferns and air-plants in to
+the multitudinous crevices.  During the many months of Koolau's rule, he
+and his followers had fought with this vegetable sea.  The choking
+jungle, with its riot of blossoms, had been driven back from the bananas,
+oranges, and mangoes that grew wild.  In little clearings grew the wild
+arrowroot; on stone terraces, filled with soil scrapings, were the _taro_
+patches and the melons; and in every open space where the sunshine
+penetrated were _papaia_ trees burdened with their golden fruit.
+
+Koolau had been driven to this refuge from the lower valley by the beach.
+And if he were driven from it in turn, he knew of gorges among the
+jumbled peaks of the inner fastnesses where he could lead his subjects
+and live.  And now he lay with his rifle beside him, peering down through
+a tangled screen of foliage at the soldiers on the beach.  He noted that
+they had large guns with them, from which the sunshine flashed as from
+mirrors.  The knife-edged passage lay directly before him.  Crawling
+upward along the trail that led to it he could see tiny specks of men.  He
+knew they were not the soldiers, but the police.  When they failed, then
+the soldiers would enter the game.
+
+He affectionately rubbed a twisted hand along his rifle barrel and made
+sure that the sights were clean.  He had learned to shoot as a
+wild-cattle hunter on Niihau, and on that island his skill as a marksman
+was unforgotten.  As the toiling specks of men grew nearer and larger, he
+estimated the range, judged the deflection of the wind that swept at
+right angles across the line of fire, and calculated the chances of
+overshooting marks that were so far below his level.  But he did not
+shoot.  Not until they reached the beginning of the passage did he make
+his presence known.  He did not disclose himself, but spoke from the
+thicket.
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded.
+
+"We want Koolau, the leper," answered the man who led the native police,
+himself a blue-eyed American.
+
+"You must go back," Koolau said.
+
+He knew the man, a deputy sheriff, for it was by him that he had been
+harried out of Niihau, across Kauai, to Kalalau Valley, and out of the
+valley to the gorge.
+
+"Who are you?" the sheriff asked.
+
+"I am Koolau, the leper," was the reply.
+
+"Then come out.  We want you.  Dead or alive, there is a thousand dollars
+on your head.  You cannot escape."
+
+Koolau laughed aloud in the thicket.
+
+"Come out!" the sheriff commanded, and was answered by silence.
+
+He conferred with the police, and Koolau saw that they were preparing to
+rush him.
+
+"Koolau," the sheriff called.  "Koolau, I am coming across to get you."
+
+"Then look first and well about you at the sun and sea and sky, for it
+will be the last time you behold them."
+
+"That's all right, Koolau," the sheriff said soothingly.  "I know you're
+a dead shot.  But you won't shoot me.  I have never done you any wrong."
+
+Koolau grunted in the thicket.
+
+"I say, you know, I've never done you any wrong, have I?" the sheriff
+persisted.
+
+"You do me wrong when you try to put me in prison," was the reply.  "And
+you do me wrong when you try for the thousand dollars on my head.  If you
+will live, stay where you are."
+
+"I've got to come across and get you.  I'm sorry.  But it is my duty."
+
+"You will die before you get across."
+
+The sheriff was no coward.  Yet was he undecided.  He gazed into the gulf
+on either side and ran his eyes along the knife-edge he must travel.  Then
+he made up his mind.
+
+"Koolau," he called.
+
+But the thicket remained silent.
+
+"Koolau, don't shoot.  I am coming."
+
+The sheriff turned, gave some orders to the police, then started on his
+perilous way.  He advanced slowly.  It was like walking a tight rope.  He
+had nothing to lean upon but the air.  The lava rock crumbled under his
+feet, and on either side the dislodged fragments pitched downward through
+the depths.  The sun blazed upon him, and his face was wet with sweat.
+Still he advanced, until the halfway point was reached.
+
+"Stop!" Koolau commanded from the thicket.  "One more step and I shoot."
+
+The sheriff halted, swaying for balance as he stood poised above the
+void.  His face was pale, but his eyes were determined.  He licked his
+dry lips before he spoke.
+
+"Koolau, you won't shoot me.  I know you won't."
+
+He started once more.  The bullet whirled him half about.  On his face
+was an expression of querulous surprise as he reeled to the fall.  He
+tried to save himself by throwing his body across the knife-edge; but at
+that moment he knew death.  The next moment the knife-edge was vacant.
+Then came the rush, five policemen, in single file, with superb
+steadiness, running along the knife-edge.  At the same instant the rest
+of the posse opened fire on the thicket.  It was madness.  Five times
+Koolau pulled the trigger, so rapidly that his shots constituted a
+rattle.  Changing his position and crouching low under the bullets that
+were biting and singing through the bushes, he peered out.  Four of the
+police had followed the sheriff.  The fifth lay across the knife-edge
+still alive.  On the farther side, no longer firing, were the surviving
+police.  On the naked rock there was no hope for them.  Before they could
+clamber down Koolau could have picked off the last man.  But he did not
+fire, and, after a conference, one of them took off a white undershirt
+and waved it as a flag.  Followed by another, he advanced along the knife-
+edge to their wounded comrade.  Koolau gave no sign, but watched them
+slowly withdraw and become specks as they descended into the lower
+valley.
+
+Two hours later, from another thicket, Koolau watched a body of police
+trying to make the ascent from the opposite side of the valley.  He saw
+the wild goats flee before them as they climbed higher and higher, until
+he doubted his judgment and sent for Kiloliana, who crawled in beside
+him.
+
+"No, there is no way," said Kiloliana.
+
+"The goats?" Koolau questioned.
+
+"They come over from the next valley, but they cannot pass to this.  There
+is no way.  Those men are not wiser than goats.  They may fall to their
+deaths.  Let us watch."
+
+"They are brave men," said Koolau.  "Let us watch."
+
+Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the yellow blossoms
+of the _hau_ dropping upon them from overhead, watching the motes of men
+toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of them, slipping,
+rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell sheer half a thousand
+feet.
+
+Kiloliana chuckled.
+
+"We will be bothered no more," he said.
+
+"They have war guns," Koolau made answer.  "The soldiers have not yet
+spoken."
+
+In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock dens
+asleep.  Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and ready, dozed
+in the entrance to his own den.  The maid with the twisted arms lay below
+in the thicket and kept watch on the knife-edge passage.  Suddenly Koolau
+was startled wide awake by the sound of an explosion on the beach.  The
+next instant the atmosphere was incredibly rent asunder.  The terrible
+sound frightened him.  It was as if all the gods had caught the envelope
+of the sky in their hands and were ripping it apart as a woman rips apart
+a sheet of cotton cloth.  But it was such an immense ripping, growing
+swiftly nearer.  Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if expecting to see
+the thing.  Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell burst in a
+fountain of black smoke.  The rock was shattered, the fragments falling
+to the foot of the cliff.
+
+Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow.  He was terribly shaken.
+He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this was more dreadful than
+anything he had imagined.
+
+"One," said Kapahei, suddenly bethinking himself to keep count.
+
+A second and a third shell flew screaming over the top of the wall,
+bursting beyond view.  Kapahei methodically kept the count.  The lepers
+crowded into the open space before the caves.  At first they were
+frightened, but as the shells continued their flight overhead the leper
+folk became reassured and began to admire the spectacle.
+
+The two idiots shrieked with delight, prancing wild antics as each air-
+tormenting shell went by.  Koolau began to recover his confidence.  No
+damage was being done.  Evidently they could not aim such large missiles
+at such long range with the precision of a rifle.
+
+But a change came over the situation.  The shells began to fall short.
+One burst below in the thicket by the knife-edge.  Koolau remembered the
+maid who lay there on watch, and ran down to see.  The smoke was still
+rising from the bushes when he crawled in.  He was astounded.  The
+branches were splintered and broken.  Where the girl had lain was a hole
+in the ground.  The girl herself was in shattered fragments.  The shell
+had burst right on her.
+
+First peering out to make sure no soldiers were attempting the passage,
+Koolau started back on the run for the caves.  All the time the shells
+were moaning, whining, screaming by, and the valley was rumbling and
+reverberating with the explosions.  As he came in sight of the caves, he
+saw the two idiots cavorting about, clutching each other's hands with
+their stumps of fingers.  Even as he ran, Koolau saw a spout of black
+smoke rise from the ground, near to the idiots.  They were flung apart
+bodily by the explosion.  One lay motionless, but the other was dragging
+himself by his hands toward the cave.  His legs trailed out helplessly
+behind him, while the blood was pouring from his body.  He seemed bathed
+in blood, and as he crawled he cried like a little dog.  The rest of the
+lepers, with the exception of Kapahei, had fled into the caves.
+
+"Seventeen," said Kapahei.  "Eighteen," he added.
+
+This last shell had fairly entered into one of the caves.  The explosion
+caused the caves to empty.  But from the particular cave no one emerged.
+Koolau crept in through the pungent, acrid smoke.  Four bodies,
+frightfully mangled, lay about.  One of them was the sightless woman
+whose tears till now had never ceased.
+
+Outside, Koolau found his people in a panic and already beginning to
+climb the goat-trail that led out of the gorge and on among the jumbled
+heights and chasms.  The wounded idiot, whining feebly and dragging
+himself along on the ground by his hands, was trying to follow.  But at
+the first pitch of the wall his helplessness overcame him and he fell
+back.
+
+"It would be better to kill him," said Koolau to Kapahei, who still sat
+in the same place.
+
+"Twenty-two," Kapahei answered.  "Yes, it would be a wise thing to kill
+him.  Twenty-three--twenty-four."
+
+The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle levelled at him.  Koolau
+hesitated, then lowered the gun.
+
+"It is a hard thing to do," he said.
+
+"You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Kapahei.  "Let me show
+you."
+
+He arose, and with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached the
+wounded thing.  As he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst full upon
+him, relieving him of the necessity of the act and at the same time
+putting an end to his count.
+
+Koolau was alone in the gorge.  He watched the last of his people drag
+their crippled bodies over the brow of the height and disappear.  Then he
+turned and went down to the thicket where the maid had keen killed.  The
+shell-fire still continued, but he remained; for far below he could see
+the soldiers climbing up.  A shell burst twenty feet away.  Flattening
+himself into the earth, he heard the rush of the fragments above his
+body.  A shower of hau blossoms rained upon him.  He lifted his head to
+peer down the trail, and sighed.  He was very much afraid.  Bullets from
+rifles would not have worried him, but this shell-fire was abominable.
+Each time a shell shrieked by he shivered and crouched; but each time he
+lifted his head again to watch the trail.
+
+At last the shells ceased.  This, he reasoned, was because the soldiers
+were drawing near.  They crept along the trail in single file, and he
+tried to count them until he lost track.  At any rate, there were a
+hundred or so of them--all come after Koolau the leper.  He felt a
+fleeting prod of pride.  With war guns and rifles, police and soldiers,
+they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled wreck of a man at
+that.  They offered a thousand dollars for him, dead or alive.  In all
+his life he had never possessed that much money.  The thought was a
+bitter one.  Kapahei had been right.  He, Koolau, had done no wrong.
+Because the _haoles_ wanted labour with which to work the stolen land,
+they had brought in the Chinese coolies, and with them had come the
+sickness.  And now, because he had caught the sickness, he was worth a
+thousand dollars--but not to himself.  It was his worthless carcass,
+rotten with disease or dead from a bursting shell, that was worth all
+that money.
+
+When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted to
+warn them.  But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid, and he
+kept silent.  When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he opened fire.
+Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare.  He emptied his magazine,
+reloaded, and emptied it again.  He kept on shooting.  All his wrongs
+were blazing in his brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance.  All down
+the goat-trail the soldiers were firing, and though they lay flat and
+sought to shelter themselves in the shallow inequalities of the surface,
+they were exposed marks to him.  Bullets whistled and thudded about him,
+and an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air.  One bullet
+ploughed a crease through his scalp, and a second burned across his
+shoulder-blade without breaking the skin.
+
+It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing.  The soldiers began
+to retreat, helping along their wounded.  As Koolau picked them off he
+became aware of the smell of burnt meat.  He glanced about him at first,
+and then discovered that it was his own hands.  The heat of the rifle was
+doing it.  The leprosy had destroyed most of the nerves in his hands.
+Though his flesh burned and he smelled it, there was no sensation.
+
+He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns.  Without
+doubt they would open upon him again, and this time upon the very thicket
+from which he had inflicted the danger.  Scarcely had he changed his
+position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the wall where he had noted
+that no shells fell, than the bombardment recommenced.  He counted the
+shells.  Sixty more were thrown into the gorge before the war-guns
+ceased.  The tiny area was pitted with their explosions, until it seemed
+impossible that any creature could have survived.  So the soldiers
+thought, for, under the burning afternoon sun, they climbed the
+goat-trail again.  And again the knife-edged passage was disputed, and
+again they fell back to the beach.
+
+For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers
+contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat.  Then Pahau,
+a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the gorge and
+shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that they might eat,
+had been killed by a fall, and that the women were frightened and knew
+not what to do.  Koolau called the boy down and left him with a spare gun
+with which to guard the passage.  Koolau found his people disheartened.
+The majority of them were too helpless to forage food for themselves
+under such forbidding circumstances, and all were starving.  He selected
+two women and a man who were not too far gone with the disease, and sent
+them back to the gorge to bring up food and mats.  The rest he cheered
+and consoled until even the weakest took a hand in building rough
+shelters for themselves.
+
+But those he had dispatched for food did not return, and he started back
+for the gorge.  As he came out on the brow of the wall, half a dozen
+rifles cracked.  A bullet tore through the fleshy part of his shoulder,
+and his cheek was cut by a sliver of rock where a second bullet smashed
+against the cliff.  In the moment that this happened, and he leaped back,
+he saw that the gorge was alive with soldiers.  His own people had
+betrayed him.  The shell-fire had been too terrible, and they had
+preferred the prison of Molokai.
+
+Koolau dropped back and unslung one of his heavy cartridge-belts.  Lying
+among the rocks, he allowed the head and shoulders of the first soldier
+to rise clearly into view before pulling trigger.  Twice this happened,
+and then, after some delay, in place of a head and shoulders a white flag
+was thrust above the edge of the wall.
+
+"What do you want?" he demanded.
+
+"I want you, if you are Koolau the leper," came the answer.
+
+Koolau forgot where he was, forgot everything, as he lay and marvelled at
+the strange persistence of these _haoles_ who would have their will
+though the sky fell in.  Aye, they would have their will over all men and
+all things, even though they died in getting it.  He could not but admire
+them, too, what of that will in them that was stronger than life and that
+bent all things to their bidding.  He was convinced of the hopelessness
+of his struggle.  There was no gainsaying that terrible will of the
+_haoles_.  Though he killed a thousand, yet would they rise like the
+sands of the sea and come upon him, ever more and more.  They never knew
+when they were beaten.  That was their fault and their virtue.  It was
+where his own kind lacked.  He could see, now, how the handful of the
+preachers of God and the preachers of Rum had conquered the land.  It was
+because--
+
+"Well, what have you got to say?  Will you come with me?"
+
+It was he voice of the invisible man under the white flag.  There he was,
+like any haole, driving straight toward the end determined.
+
+"Let us talk," said Koolau.
+
+The man's head and shoulders arose, then his whole body.  He was a smooth-
+faced, blue-eyed youngster of twenty-five, slender and natty in his
+captain's uniform.  He advanced until halted, then seated himself a dozen
+feet away.
+
+"You are a brave man," said Koolau wonderingly.  "I could kill you like a
+fly."
+
+"No, you couldn't," was the answer.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because you are a man, Koolau, though a bad one.  I know your story.  You
+kill fairly."
+
+Koolau grunted, but was secretly pleased.
+
+"What have you done with my people?" he demanded.  "The boy, the two
+women, and the man?"
+
+"They gave themselves up, as I have now come for you to do."
+
+Koolau laughed incredulously.
+
+"I am a free man," he announced.  "I have done no wrong.  All I ask is to
+be left alone.  I have lived free, and I shall die free.  I will never
+give myself up."
+
+"Then your people are wiser than you," answered the young captain.
+"Look--they are coming now."
+
+Koolau turned and watched the remnant of his band approach.  Groaning and
+sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its wretchedness past.  It was
+given to Koolau to taste a deeper bitterness, for they hurled
+imprecations and insults at him as they went by; and the panting hag who
+brought up the rear halted, and with skinny, harpy-claws extended,
+shaking her snarling death's head from side to side, she laid a curse
+upon him.  One by one they dropped over the lip-edge and surrendered to
+the hiding soldiers.
+
+"You can go now," said Koolau to the captain.  "I will never give myself
+up.  That is my last word.  Good-bye."
+
+The captain slipped over the cliff to his soldiers.  The next moment, and
+without a flag of truce, he hoisted his hat on his scabbard, and Koolau's
+bullet tore through it.  That afternoon they shelled him out from the
+beach, and as he retreated into the high inaccessible pockets beyond, the
+soldiers followed him.
+
+For six weeks they hunted him from pocket to pocket, over the volcanic
+peaks and along the goat-trails.  When he hid in the lantana jungle, they
+formed lines of beaters, and through lantana jungle and guava scrub they
+drove him like a rabbit.  But ever he turned and doubled and eluded.
+There was no cornering him.  When pressed too closely, his sure rifle
+held them back and they carried their wounded down the goat-trails to the
+beach.  There were times when they did the shooting as his brown body
+showed for a moment through the underbrush.  Once, five of them caught
+him on an exposed goat-trail between pockets.  They emptied their rifles
+at him as he limped and climbed along his dizzy way.  Afterwards they
+found bloodstains and knew that he was wounded.  At the end of six weeks
+they gave up.  The soldiers and police returned to Honolulu, and Kalalau
+Valley was left to him for his own, though head-hunters ventured after
+him from time to time and to their own undoing.
+
+Two years later, and for the last time, Koolau crawled into a thicket and
+lay down among the _ti_-leaves and wild ginger blossoms.  Free he had
+lived, and free he was dying.  A slight drizzle of rain began to fall,
+and he drew a ragged blanket about the distorted wreck of his limbs.  His
+body was covered with an oilskin coat.  Across his chest he laid his
+Mauser rifle, lingering affectionately for a moment to wipe the dampness
+from the barrel.  The hand with which he wiped had no fingers left upon
+it with which to pull the trigger.
+
+He closed his eyes, for, from the weakness in his body and the fuzzy
+turmoil in his brain, he knew that his end was near.  Like a wild animal
+he had crept into hiding to die.  Half-conscious, aimless and wandering,
+he lived back in his life to his early manhood on Niihau.  As life faded
+and the drip of the rain grew dim in his ears it seemed to him that he
+was once more in the thick of the horse-breaking, with raw colts rearing
+and bucking under him, his stirrups tied together beneath, or charging
+madly about the breaking corral and driving the helping cowboys over the
+rails.  The next instant, and with seeming naturalness, he found himself
+pursuing the wild bulls of the upland pastures, roping them and leading
+them down to the valleys.  Again the sweat and dust of the branding pen
+stung his eyes and bit his nostrils.
+
+All his lusty, whole-bodied youth was his, until the sharp pangs of
+impending dissolution brought him back.  He lifted his monstrous hands
+and gazed at them in wonder.  But how?  Why?  Why should the wholeness of
+that wild youth of his change to this?  Then he remembered, and once
+again, and for a moment, he was Koolau, the leper.  His eyelids fluttered
+wearily down and the drip of the rain ceased in his ears.  A prolonged
+trembling set up in his body.  This, too, ceased.  He half-lifted his
+head, but it fell back.  Then his eyes opened, and did not close.  His
+last thought was of his Mauser, and he pressed it against his chest with
+his folded, fingerless hands.
+
+
+
+
+GOOD-BYE, JACK
+
+
+Hawaii is a queer place.  Everything socially is what I may call topsy-
+turvy.  Not but what things are correct.  They are almost too much so.
+But still things are sort of upside down.  The most ultra-exclusive set
+there is the "Missionary Crowd."  It comes with rather a shock to learn
+that in Hawaii the obscure martyrdom-seeking missionary sits at the head
+of the table of the moneyed aristocracy.  But it is true.  The humble New
+Englanders who came out in the third decade of the nineteenth century,
+came for the lofty purpose of teaching the kanakas the true religion, the
+worship of the one only genuine and undeniable God.  So well did they
+succeed in this, and also in civilizing the kanaka, that by the second or
+third generation he was practically extinct.  This being the fruit of the
+seed of the Gospel, the fruit of the seed of the missionaries (the sons
+and the grandsons) was the possession of the islands themselves,--of the
+land, the ports, the town sites, and the sugar plantations:  The
+missionary who came to give the bread of life remained to gobble up the
+whole heathen feast.
+
+But that is not the Hawaiian queerness I started out to tell.  Only one
+cannot speak of things Hawaiian without mentioning the missionaries.
+There is Jack Kersdale, the man I wanted to tell about; he came of
+missionary stock.  That is, on his grandmother's side.  His grandfather
+was old Benjamin Kersdale, a Yankee trader, who got his start for a
+million in the old days by selling cheap whiskey and square-face gin.
+There's another queer thing.  The old missionaries and old traders were
+mortal enemies.  You see, their interests conflicted.  But their children
+made it up by intermarrying and dividing the island between them.
+
+Life in Hawaii is a song.  That's the way Stoddard put it in his "Hawaii
+Noi":--
+
+   "Thy life is music--Fate the notes prolong!
+   Each isle a stanza, and the whole a song."
+
+And he was right.  Flesh is golden there.  The native women are sun-ripe
+Junos, the native men bronzed Apollos.  They sing, and dance, and all are
+flower-bejewelled and flower-crowned.  And, outside the rigid "Missionary
+Crowd," the white men yield to the climate and the sun, and no matter how
+busy they may be, are prone to dance and sing and wear flowers behind
+their ears and in their hair.  Jack Kersdale was one of these fellows.  He
+was one of the busiest men I ever met.  He was a several-times
+millionaire.  He was a sugar-king, a coffee planter, a rubber pioneer, a
+cattle rancher, and a promoter of three out of every four new enterprises
+launched in the islands.  He was a society man, a club man, a yachtsman,
+a bachelor, and withal as handsome a man as was ever doted upon by mammas
+with marriageable daughters.  Incidentally, he had finished his education
+at Yale, and his head was crammed fuller with vital statistics and
+scholarly information concerning Hawaii Nei than any other islander I
+ever encountered.  He turned off an immense amount of work, and he sang
+and danced and put flowers in his hair as immensely as any of the idlers.
+He had grit, and had fought two duels--both, political--when he was no
+more than a raw youth essaying his first adventures in politics.  In
+fact, he played a most creditable and courageous part in the last
+revolution, when the native dynasty was overthrown; and he could not have
+been over sixteen at the time.  I am pointing out that he was no coward,
+in order that you may appreciate what happens later on.  I've seen him in
+the breaking yard at the Haleakala Ranch, conquering a four-year-old
+brute that for two years had defied the pick of Von Tempsky's cow-boys.
+And I must tell of one other thing.  It was down in Kona,--or up, rather,
+for the Kona people scorn to live at less than a thousand feet elevation.
+We were all on the _lanai_ of Doctor Goodhue's bungalow.  I was talking
+with Dottie Fairchild when it happened.  A big centipede--it was seven
+inches, for we measured it afterwards--fell from the rafters overhead
+squarely into her coiffure.  I confess, the hideousness of it paralysed
+me.  I couldn't move.  My mind refused to work.  There, within two feet
+of me, the ugly venomous devil was writhing in her hair.  It threatened
+at any moment to fall down upon her exposed shoulders--we had just come
+out from dinner.
+
+"What is it?" she asked, starting to raise her hand to her head.
+
+"Don't!" I cried.  "Don't!"
+
+"But what is it?" she insisted, growing frightened by the fright she read
+in my eyes and on my stammering lips.
+
+My exclamation attracted Kersdale's attention.  He glanced our way
+carelessly, but in that glance took in everything.  He came over to us,
+but without haste.
+
+"Please don't move, Dottie," he said quietly.
+
+He never hesitated, nor did he hurry and make a bungle of it.
+
+"Allow me," he said.
+
+And with one hand he caught her scarf and drew it tightly around her
+shoulders so that the centipede could not fall inside her bodice.  With
+the other hand--the right--he reached into her hair, caught the repulsive
+abomination as near as he was able by the nape of the neck, and held it
+tightly between thumb and forefinger as he withdrew it from her hair.  It
+was as horrible and heroic a sight as man could wish to see.  It made my
+flesh crawl.  The centipede, seven inches of squirming legs, writhed and
+twisted and dashed itself about his hand, the body twining around the
+fingers and the legs digging into the skin and scratching as the beast
+endeavoured to free itself.  It bit him twice--I saw it--though he
+assured the ladies that he was not harmed as he dropped it upon the walk
+and stamped it into the gravel.  But I saw him in the surgery five
+minutes afterwards, with Doctor Goodhue scarifying the wounds and
+injecting permanganate of potash.  The next morning Kersdale's arm was as
+big as a barrel, and it was three weeks before the swelling went down.
+
+All of which has nothing to do with my story, but which I could not avoid
+giving in order to show that Jack Kersdale was anything but a coward.  It
+was the cleanest exhibition of grit I have ever seen.  He never turned a
+hair.  The smile never left his lips.  And he dived with thumb and
+forefinger into Dottie Fairchild's hair as gaily as if it had been a box
+of salted almonds.  Yet that was the man I was destined to see stricken
+with a fear a thousand times more hideous even than the fear that was
+mine when I saw that writhing abomination in Dottie Fairchild's hair,
+dangling over her eyes and the trap of her bodice.
+
+I was interested in leprosy, and upon that, as upon every other island
+subject, Kersdale had encyclopedic knowledge.  In fact, leprosy was one
+of his hobbies.  He was an ardent defender of the settlement at Molokai,
+where all the island lepers were segregated.  There was much talk and
+feeling among the natives, fanned by the demagogues, concerning the
+cruelties of Molokai, where men and women, not alone banished from
+friends and family, were compelled to live in perpetual imprisonment
+until they died.  There were no reprieves, no commutations of sentences.
+"Abandon hope" was written over the portal of Molokai.
+
+"I tell you they are happy there," Kersdale insisted.  "And they are
+infinitely better off than their friends and relatives outside who have
+nothing the matter with them.  The horrors of Molokai are all poppycock.
+I can take you through any hospital or any slum in any of the great
+cities of the world and show you a thousand times worse horrors.  The
+living death!  The creatures that once were men!  Bosh!  You ought to see
+those living deaths racing horses on the Fourth of July.  Some of them
+own boats.  One has a gasoline launch.  They have nothing to do but have
+a good time.  Food, shelter, clothes, medical attendance, everything, is
+theirs.  They are the wards of the Territory.  They have a much finer
+climate than Honolulu, and the scenery is magnificent.  I shouldn't mind
+going down there myself for the rest of my days.  It is a lovely spot."
+
+So Kersdale on the joyous leper.  He was not afraid of leprosy.  He said
+so himself, and that there wasn't one chance in a million for him or any
+other white man to catch it, though he confessed afterward that one of
+his school chums, Alfred Starter, had contracted it, gone to Molokai, and
+there died.
+
+"You know, in the old days," Kersdale explained, "there was no certain
+test for leprosy.  Anything unusual or abnormal was sufficient to send a
+fellow to Molokai.  The result was that dozens were sent there who were
+no more lepers than you or I.  But they don't make that mistake now.  The
+Board of Health tests are infallible.  The funny thing is that when the
+test was discovered they immediately went down to Molokai and applied it,
+and they found a number who were not lepers.  These were immediately
+deported.  Happy to get away?  They wailed harder at leaving the
+settlement than when they left Honolulu to go to it.  Some refused to
+leave, and really had to be forced out.  One of them even married a leper
+woman in the last stages and then wrote pathetic letters to the Board of
+Health, protesting against his expulsion on the ground that no one was so
+well able as he to take care of his poor old wife."
+
+"What is this infallible test?" I demanded.
+
+"The bacteriological test.  There is no getting away from it.  Doctor
+Hervey--he's our expert, you know--was the first man to apply it here.  He
+is a wizard.  He knows more about leprosy than any living man, and if a
+cure is ever discovered, he'll be that discoverer.  As for the test, it
+is very simple.  They have succeeded in isolating the _bacillus leprae_
+and studying it.  They know it now when they see it.  All they do is to
+snip a bit of skin from the suspect and subject it to the bacteriological
+test.  A man without any visible symptoms may be chock full of the
+leprosy bacilli."
+
+"Then you or I, for all we know," I suggested, "may be full of it now."
+
+Kersdale shrugged his shoulders and laughed.
+
+"Who can say?  It takes seven years for it to incubate.  If you have any
+doubts go and see Doctor Hervey.  He'll just snip out a piece of your
+skin and let you know in a jiffy."
+
+Later on he introduced me to Dr. Hervey, who loaded me down with Board of
+Health reports and pamphlets on the subject, and took me out to Kalihi,
+the Honolulu receiving station, where suspects were examined and
+confirmed lepers were held for deportation to Molokai.  These
+deportations occurred about once a month, when, the last good-byes said,
+the lepers were marched on board the little steamer, the _Noeau_, and
+carried down to the settlement.
+
+One afternoon, writing letters at the club, Jack Kersdale dropped in on
+me.
+
+"Just the man I want to see," was his greeting.  "I'll show you the
+saddest aspect of the whole situation--the lepers wailing as they depart
+for Molokai.  The _Noeau_ will be taking them on board in a few minutes.
+But let me warn you not to let your feelings be harrowed.  Real as their
+grief is, they'd wail a whole sight harder a year hence if the Board of
+Health tried to take them away from Molokai.  We've just time for a
+whiskey and soda.  I've a carriage outside.  It won't take us five
+minutes to get down to the wharf."
+
+To the wharf we drove.  Some forty sad wretches, amid their mats,
+blankets, and luggage of various sorts, were squatting on the stringer
+piece.  The Noeau had just arrived and was making fast to a lighter that
+lay between her and the wharf.  A Mr. McVeigh, the superintendent of the
+settlement, was overseeing the embarkation, and to him I was introduced,
+also to Dr. Georges, one of the Board of Health physicians whom I had
+already met at Kalihi.  The lepers were a woebegone lot.  The faces of
+the majority were hideous--too horrible for me to describe.  But here and
+there I noticed fairly good-looking persons, with no apparent signs of
+the fell disease upon them.  One, I noticed, a little white girl, not
+more than twelve, with blue eyes and golden hair.  One cheek, however,
+showed the leprous bloat.  On my remarking on the sadness of her alien
+situation among the brown-skinned afflicted ones, Doctor Georges
+replied:--
+
+"Oh, I don't know.  It's a happy day in her life.  She comes from Kauai.
+Her father is a brute.  And now that she has developed the disease she is
+going to join her mother at the settlement.  Her mother was sent down
+three years ago--a very bad case."
+
+"You can't always tell from appearances," Mr. McVeigh explained.  "That
+man there, that big chap, who looks the pink of condition, with nothing
+the matter with him, I happen to know has a perforating ulcer in his foot
+and another in his shoulder-blade.  Then there are others--there, see
+that girl's hand, the one who is smoking the cigarette.  See her twisted
+fingers.  That's the anaesthetic form.  It attacks the nerves.  You could
+cut her fingers off with a dull knife, or rub them off on a
+nutmeg-grater, and she would not experience the slightest sensation."
+
+"Yes, but that fine-looking woman, there," I persisted; "surely, surely,
+there can't be anything the matter with her.  She is too glorious and
+gorgeous altogether."
+
+"A sad case," Mr. McVeigh answered over his shoulder, already turning
+away to walk down the wharf with Kersdale.
+
+She was a beautiful woman, and she was pure Polynesian.  From my meagre
+knowledge of the race and its types I could not but conclude that she had
+descended from old chief stock.  She could not have been more than twenty-
+three or four.  Her lines and proportions were magnificent, and she was
+just beginning to show the amplitude of the women of her race.
+
+"It was a blow to all of us," Dr. Georges volunteered.  "She gave herself
+up voluntarily, too.  No one suspected.  But somehow she had contracted
+the disease.  It broke us all up, I assure you.  We've kept it out of the
+papers, though.  Nobody but us and her family knows what has become of
+her.  In fact, if you were to ask any man in Honolulu, he'd tell you it
+was his impression that she was somewhere in Europe.  It was at her
+request that we've been so quiet about it.  Poor girl, she has a lot of
+pride."
+
+"But who is she?" I asked.  "Certainly, from the way you talk about her,
+she must be somebody."
+
+"Did you ever hear of Lucy Mokunui?" he asked.
+
+"Lucy Mokunui?" I repeated, haunted by some familiar association.  I
+shook my head.  "It seems to me I've heard the name, but I've forgotten
+it."
+
+"Never heard of Lucy Mokunui!  The Hawaiian nightingale!  I beg your
+pardon.  Of course you are a _malahini_, {1} and could not be expected to
+know.  Well, Lucy Mokunui was the best beloved of Honolulu--of all
+Hawaii, for that matter."
+
+"You say was," I interrupted.
+
+"And I mean it.  She is finished."  He shrugged his shoulders pityingly.
+"A dozen _haoles_--I beg your pardon, white men--have lost their hearts
+to her at one time or another.  And I'm not counting in the ruck.  The
+dozen I refer to were _haoles_ of position and prominence."
+
+"She could have married the son of the Chief Justice if she'd wanted to.
+You think she's beautiful, eh?  But you should hear her sing.  Finest
+native woman singer in Hawaii Nei.  Her throat is pure silver and melted
+sunshine.  We adored her.  She toured America first with the Royal
+Hawaiian Band.  After that she made two more trips on her own--concert
+work."
+
+"Oh!" I cried.  "I remember now.  I heard her two years ago at the Boston
+Symphony.  So that is she.  I recognize her now."
+
+I was oppressed by a heavy sadness.  Life was a futile thing at best.  A
+short two years and this magnificent creature, at the summit of her
+magnificent success, was one of the leper squad awaiting deportation to
+Molokai.  Henley's lines came into my mind:--
+
+   "The poor old tramp explains his poor old ulcers;
+   Life is, I think, a blunder and a shame."
+
+I recoiled from my own future.  If this awful fate fell to Lucy Mokunui,
+what might my lot not be?--or anybody's lot?  I was thoroughly aware that
+in life we are in the midst of death--but to be in the midst of living
+death, to die and not be dead, to be one of that draft of creatures that
+once were men, aye, and women, like Lucy Mokunui, the epitome of all
+Polynesian charms, an artist as well, and well beloved of men--.  I am
+afraid I must have betrayed my perturbation, for Doctor Georges hastened
+to assure me that they were very happy down in the settlement.
+
+It was all too inconceivably monstrous.  I could not bear to look at her.
+A short distance away, behind a stretched rope guarded by a policeman,
+were the lepers' relatives and friends.  They were not allowed to come
+near.  There were no last embraces, no kisses of farewell.  They called
+back and forth to one another--last messages, last words of love, last
+reiterated instructions.  And those behind the rope looked with terrible
+intensity.  It was the last time they would behold the faces of their
+loved ones, for they were the living dead, being carted away in the
+funeral ship to the graveyard of Molokai.
+
+Doctor Georges gave the command, and the unhappy wretches dragged
+themselves to their feet and under their burdens of luggage began to
+stagger across the lighter and aboard the steamer.  It was the funeral
+procession.  At once the wailing started from those behind the rope.  It
+was blood-curdling; it was heart-rending.  I never heard such woe, and I
+hope never to again.  Kersdale and McVeigh were still at the other end of
+the wharf, talking earnestly--politics, of course, for both were head-
+over-heels in that particular game.  When Lucy Mokunui passed me, I stole
+a look at her.  She _was_ beautiful.  She was beautiful by our standards,
+as well--one of those rare blossoms that occur but once in generations.
+And she, of all women, was doomed to Molokai.  She straight on board, and
+aft on the open deck where the lepers huddled by the rail, wailing now,
+to their dear ones on shore.
+
+The lines were cast off, and the _Noeau_ began to move away from the
+wharf.  The wailing increased.  Such grief and despair!  I was just
+resolving that never again would I be a witness to the sailing of the
+_Noeau_, when McVeigh and Kersdale returned.  The latter's eyes were
+sparkling, and his lips could not quite hide the smile of delight that
+was his.  Evidently the politics they had talked had been satisfactory.
+The rope had been flung aside, and the lamenting relatives now crowded
+the stringer piece on either side of us.
+
+"That's her mother," Doctor Georges whispered, indicating an old woman
+next to me, who was rocking back and forth and gazing at the steamer rail
+out of tear-blinded eyes.  I noticed that Lucy Mokunui was also wailing.
+She stopped abruptly and gazed at Kersdale.  Then she stretched forth her
+arms in that adorable, sensuous way that Olga Nethersole has of embracing
+an audience.  And with arms outspread, she cried:
+
+"Good-bye, Jack!  Good-bye!"
+
+He heard the cry, and looked.  Never was a man overtaken by more crushing
+fear.  He reeled on the stringer piece, his face went white to the roots
+of his hair, and he seemed to shrink and wither away inside his clothes.
+He threw up his hands and groaned, "My God!  My God!"  Then he controlled
+himself by a great effort.
+
+"Good-bye, Lucy!  Good-bye!" he called.
+
+And he stood there on the wharf, waving his hands to her till the _Noeau_
+was clear away and the faces lining her after-rail were vague and
+indistinct.
+
+"I thought you knew," said McVeigh, who had been regarding him curiously.
+"You, of all men, should have known.  I thought that was why you were
+here."
+
+"I know now," Kersdale answered with immense gravity.  "Where's the
+carriage?"
+
+He walked rapidly--half-ran--to it.  I had to half-run myself to keep up
+with him.
+
+"Drive to Doctor Hervey's," he told the driver.  "Drive as fast as you
+can."
+
+He sank down in a seat, panting and gasping.  The pallor of his face had
+increased.  His lips were compressed and the sweat was standing out on
+his forehead and upper lip.  He seemed in some horrible agony.
+
+"For God's sake, Martin, make those horses go!" he broke out suddenly.
+"Lay the whip into them!--do you hear?--lay the whip into them!"
+
+"They'll break, sir," the driver remonstrated.
+
+"Let them break," Kersdale answered.  "I'll pay your fine and square you
+with the police.  Put it to them.  That's right.  Faster!  Faster!"
+
+"And I never knew, I never knew," he muttered, sinking back in the seat
+and with trembling hands wiping the sweat away.
+
+The carriage was bouncing, swaying and lurching around corners at such a
+wild pace as to make conversation impossible.  Besides, there was nothing
+to say.  But I could hear him muttering over and over, "And I never knew.
+I never knew."
+
+
+
+
+ALOHA OE
+
+
+Never are there such departures as from the dock at Honolulu.  The great
+transport lay with steam up, ready to pull out.  A thousand persons were
+on her decks; five thousand stood on the wharf.  Up and down the long
+gangway passed native princes and princesses, sugar kings and the high
+officials of the Territory.  Beyond, in long lines, kept in order by the
+native police, were the carriages and motor-cars of the Honolulu
+aristocracy.  On the wharf the Royal Hawaiian Band played "Aloha Oe," and
+when it finished, a stringed orchestra of native musicians on board the
+transport took up the same sobbing strains, the native woman singer's
+voice rising birdlike above the instruments and the hubbub of departure.
+It was a silver reed, sounding its clear, unmistakable note in the great
+diapason of farewell.
+
+Forward, on the lower deck, the rail was lined six deep with khaki-clad
+young boys, whose bronzed faces told of three years' campaigning under
+the sun.  But the farewell was not for them.  Nor was it for the white-
+clad captain on the lofty bridge, remote as the stars, gazing down upon
+the tumult beneath him.  Nor was the farewell for the young officers
+farther aft, returning from the Philippines, nor for the white-faced,
+climate-ravaged women by their sides.  Just aft the gangway, on the
+promenade deck, stood a score of United States Senators with their wives
+and daughters--the Senatorial junketing party that for a month had been
+dined and wined, surfeited with statistics and dragged up volcanic hill
+and down lava dale to behold the glories and resources of Hawaii.  It was
+for the junketing party that the transport had called in at Honolulu, and
+it was to the junketing party that Honolulu was saying good-bye.
+
+The Senators were garlanded and bedecked with flowers.  Senator Jeremy
+Sambrooke's stout neck and portly bosom were burdened with a dozen
+wreaths.  Out of this mass of bloom and blossom projected his head and
+the greater portion of his freshly sunburned and perspiring face.  He
+thought the flowers an abomination, and as he looked out over the
+multitude on the wharf it was with a statistical eye that saw none of the
+beauty, but that peered into the labour power, the factories, the
+railroads, and the plantations that lay back of the multitude and which
+the multitude expressed.  He saw resources and thought development, and
+he was too busy with dreams of material achievement and empire to notice
+his daughter at his side, talking with a young fellow in a natty summer
+suit and straw hat, whose eager eyes seemed only for her and never left
+her face.  Had Senator Jeremy had eyes for his daughter, he would have
+seen that, in place of the young girl of fifteen he had brought to Hawaii
+a short month before, he was now taking away with him a woman.
+
+Hawaii has a ripening climate, and Dorothy Sambrooke had been exposed to
+it under exceptionally ripening circumstances.  Slender, pale, with blue
+eyes a trifle tired from poring over the pages of books and trying to
+muddle into an understanding of life--such she had been the month before.
+But now the eyes were warm instead of tired, the cheeks were touched with
+the sun, and the body gave the first hint and promise of swelling lines.
+During that month she had left books alone, for she had found greater joy
+in reading from the book of life.  She had ridden horses, climbed
+volcanoes, and learned surf swimming.  The tropics had entered into her
+blood, and she was aglow with the warmth and colour and sunshine.  And
+for a month she had been in the company of a man--Stephen Knight,
+athlete, surf-board rider, a bronzed god of the sea who bitted the
+crashing breakers, leaped upon their backs, and rode them in to shore.
+
+Dorothy Sambrooke was unaware of the change.  Her consciousness was still
+that of a young girl, and she was surprised and troubled by Steve's
+conduct in this hour of saying good-bye.  She had looked upon him as her
+playfellow, and for the month he had been her playfellow; but now he was
+not parting like a playfellow.  He talked excitedly and disconnectedly,
+or was silent, by fits and starts.  Sometimes he did not hear what she
+was saying, or if he did, failed to respond in his wonted manner.  She
+was perturbed by the way he looked at her.  She had not known before that
+he had such blazing eyes.  There was something in his eyes that was
+terrifying.  She could not face it, and her own eyes continually drooped
+before it.  Yet there was something alluring about it, as well, and she
+continually returned to catch a glimpse of that blazing, imperious,
+yearning something that she had never seen in human eyes before.  And she
+was herself strangely bewildered and excited.
+
+The transport's huge whistle blew a deafening blast, and the
+flower-crowned multitude surged closer to the side of the dock.  Dorothy
+Sambrooke's fingers were pressed to her ears; and as she made a _moue_ of
+distaste at the outrage of sound, she noticed again the imperious,
+yearning blaze in Steve's eyes.  He was not looking at her, but at her
+ears, delicately pink and transparent in the slanting rays of the
+afternoon sun.  Curious and fascinated, she gazed at that strange
+something in his eyes until he saw that he had been caught.  She saw his
+cheeks flush darkly and heard him utter inarticulately.  He was
+embarrassed, and she was aware of embarrassment herself.  Stewards were
+going about nervously begging shore-going persons to be gone.  Steve put
+out his hand.  When she felt the grip of the fingers that had gripped
+hers a thousand times on surf-boards and lava slopes, she heard the words
+of the song with a new understanding as they sobbed in the Hawaiian
+woman's silver throat:
+
+   "Ka halia ko aloha kai hiki mai,
+   Ke hone ae nei i ku'u manawa,
+   O oe no kan aloha
+   A loko e hana nei."
+
+Steve had taught her air and words and meaning--so she had thought, till
+this instant; and in this instant of the last finger clasp and warm
+contact of palms she divined for the first time the real meaning of the
+song.  She scarcely saw him go, nor could she note him on the crowded
+gangway, for she was deep in a memory maze, living over the four weeks
+just past, rereading events in the light of revelation.
+
+When the Senatorial party had landed, Steve had been one of the committee
+of entertainment.  It was he who had given them their first exhibition of
+surf riding, out at Waikiki Beach, paddling his narrow board seaward
+until he became a disappearing speck, and then, suddenly reappearing,
+rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning
+white--rising swiftly higher and higher, shoulders and chest and loins
+and limbs, until he stood poised on the smoking crest of a mighty, mile-
+long billow, his feet buried in the flying foam, hurling beach-ward with
+the speed of an express train and stepping calmly ashore at their
+astounded feet.  That had been her first glimpse of Steve.  He had been
+the youngest man on the committee, a youth, himself, of twenty.  He had
+not entertained by speechmaking, nor had he shone decoratively at
+receptions.  It was in the breakers at Waikiki, in the wild cattle drive
+on Manna Kea, and in the breaking yard of the Haleakala Ranch that he had
+performed his share of the entertaining.
+
+She had not cared for the interminable statistics and eternal
+speechmaking of the other members of the committee.  Neither had Steve.
+And it was with Steve that she had stolen away from the open-air feast at
+Hamakua, and from Abe Louisson, the coffee planter, who had talked
+coffee, coffee, nothing but coffee, for two mortal hours.  It was then,
+as they rode among the tree ferns, that Steve had taught her the words of
+"Aloha Oe," the song that had been sung to the visiting Senators at every
+village, ranch, and plantation departure.
+
+Steve and she had been much together from the first.  He had been her
+playfellow.  She had taken possession of him while her father had been
+occupied in taking possession of the statistics of the island territory.
+She was too gentle to tyrannize over her playfellow, yet she had ruled
+him abjectly, except when in canoe, or on horse or surf-board, at which
+times he had taken charge and she had rendered obedience.  And now, with
+this last singing of the song, as the lines were cast off and the big
+transport began backing slowly out from the dock, she knew that Steve was
+something more to her than playfellow.
+
+Five thousand voices were singing "Aloha Oe,"--"_My love be with you till
+we meet again_,"--and in that first moment of known love she realized
+that she and Steve were being torn apart.  When would they ever meet
+again?  He had taught her those words himself.  She remembered listening
+as he sang them over and over under the _hau_ tree at Waikiki.  Had it
+been prophecy?  And she had admired his singing, had told him that he
+sang with such expression.  She laughed aloud, hysterically, at the
+recollection.  With such expression!--when he had been pouring his heart
+out in his voice.  She knew now, and it was too late.  Why had he not
+spoken?  Then she realized that girls of her age did not marry.  But
+girls of her age did marry--in Hawaii--was her instant thought.  Hawaii
+had ripened her--Hawaii, where flesh is golden and where all women are
+ripe and sun-kissed.
+
+Vainly she scanned the packed multitude on the dock.  What had become of
+him?  She felt she could pay any price for one more glimpse of him, and
+she almost hoped that some mortal sickness would strike the lonely
+captain on the bridge and delay departure.  For the first time in her
+life she looked at her father with a calculating eye, and as she did she
+noted with newborn fear the lines of will and determination.  It would be
+terrible to oppose him.  And what chance would she have in such a
+struggle?  But why had Steve not spoken?  Now it was too late.  Why had
+he not spoken under the _hau_ tree at Waikiki?
+
+And then, with a great sinking of the heart, it came to her that she knew
+why.  What was it she had heard one day?  Oh, yes, it was at Mrs.
+Stanton's tea, that afternoon when the ladies of the "Missionary Crowd"
+had entertained the ladies of the Senatorial party.  It was Mrs.
+Hodgkins, the tall blonde woman, who had asked the question.  The scene
+came back to her vividly--the broad _lanai_, the tropic flowers, the
+noiseless Asiatic attendants, the hum of the voices of the many women and
+the question Mrs. Hodgkins had asked in the group next to her.  Mrs.
+Hodgkins had been away on the mainland for years, and was evidently
+inquiring after old island friends of her maiden days.  "What has become
+of Susie Maydwell?" was the question she had asked.  "Oh, we never see
+her any more; she married Willie Kupele," another island woman answered.
+And Senator Behrend's wife laughed and wanted to know why matrimony had
+affected Susie Maydwell's friendships.
+
+"_Hapa-haole_," was the answer; "he was a half-caste, you know, and we of
+the Islands have to think about our children."
+
+Dorothy turned to her father, resolved to put it to the test.
+
+"Papa, if Steve ever comes to the United States, mayn't he come and see
+us some time?"
+
+"Who?  Steve?"
+
+"Yes, Stephen Knight--you know him.  You said good-bye to him not five
+minutes ago.  Mayn't he, if he happens to be in the United States some
+time, come and see us?"
+
+"Certainly not," Jeremy Sambrooke answered shortly.  "Stephen Knight is a
+_hapa-haole_ and you know what that means."
+
+"Oh," Dorothy said faintly, while she felt a numb despair creep into her
+heart.
+
+Steve was not a _hapa-haole_--she knew that; but she did not know that a
+quarter-strain of tropic sunshine streamed in his veins, and she knew
+that that was sufficient to put him outside the marriage pale.  It was a
+strange world.  There was the Honourable A. S. Cleghorn, who had married
+a dusky princess of the Kamehameha blood, yet men considered it an honour
+to know him, and the most exclusive women of the ultra-exclusive
+"Missionary Crowd" were to be seen at his afternoon teas.  And there was
+Steve.  No one had disapproved of his teaching her to ride a surf-board,
+nor of his leading her by the hand through the perilous places of the
+crater of Kilauea.  He could have dinner with her and her father, dance
+with her, and be a member of the entertainment committee; but because
+there was tropic sunshine in his veins he could not marry her.
+
+And he didn't show it.  One had to be told to know.  And he was so good-
+looking.  The picture of him limned itself on her inner vision, and
+before she was aware she was pleasuring in the memory of the grace of his
+magnificent body, of his splendid shoulders, of the power in him that
+tossed her lightly on a horse, bore her safely through the thundering
+breakers, or towed her at the end of an alpenstock up the stern lava
+crest of the House of the Sun.  There was something subtler and
+mysterious that she remembered, and that she was even then just beginning
+to understand--the aura of the male creature that is man, all man,
+masculine man.  She came to herself with a shock of shame at the thoughts
+she had been thinking.  Her cheeks were dyed with the hot blood which
+quickly receded and left them pale at the thought that she would never
+see him again.  The stem of the transport was already out in the stream,
+and the promenade deck was passing abreast of the end of the dock.
+
+"There's Steve now," her father said.  "Wave good-bye to him, Dorothy."
+
+Steve was looking up at her with eager eyes, and he saw in her face what
+he had not seen before.  By the rush of gladness into his own face she
+knew that he knew.  The air was throbbing with the song--
+
+   My love to you.
+   My love be with you till we meet again.
+
+There was no need for speech to tell their story.  About her, passengers
+were flinging their garlands to their friends on the dock.  Steve held up
+his hands and his eyes pleaded.  She slipped her own garland over her
+head, but it had become entangled in the string of Oriental pearls that
+Mervin, an elderly sugar king, had placed around her neck when he drove
+her and her father down to the steamer.
+
+She fought with the pearls that clung to the flowers.  The transport was
+moving steadily on.  Steve was already beneath her.  This was the moment.
+The next moment and he would be past.  She sobbed, and Jeremy Sambrooke
+glanced at her inquiringly.
+
+"Dorothy!" he cried sharply.
+
+She deliberately snapped the string, and, amid a shower of pearls, the
+flowers fell to the waiting lover.  She gazed at him until the tears
+blinded her and she buried her face on the shoulder of Jeremy Sambrooke,
+who forgot his beloved statistics in wonderment at girl babies that
+insisted on growing up.  The crowd sang on, the song growing fainter in
+the distance, but still melting with the sensuous love-languor of Hawaii,
+the words biting into her heart like acid because of their untruth.
+
+   Aloha oe, Aloha oe, e ke onaona no ho ika lipo,
+   A fond embrace, ahoi ae au, until we meet again.
+
+
+
+
+CHUN AH CHUN
+
+
+There was nothing striking in the appearance of Chun Ah Chun.  He was
+rather undersized, as Chinese go, and the Chinese narrow shoulders and
+spareness of flesh were his.  The average tourist, casually glimpsing him
+on the streets of Honolulu, would have concluded that he was a
+good-natured little Chinese, probably the proprietor of a prosperous
+laundry or tailorshop.  In so far as good nature and prosperity went, the
+judgment would be correct, though beneath the mark; for Ah Chun was as
+good-natured as he was prosperous, and of the latter no man knew a tithe
+the tale.  It was well known that he was enormously wealthy, but in his
+case "enormous" was merely the symbol for the unknown.
+
+Ah Chun had shrewd little eyes, black and beady and so very little that
+they were like gimlet-holes.  But they were wide apart, and they
+sheltered under a forehead that was patently the forehead of a thinker.
+For Ah Chun had his problems, and had had them all his life.  Not that he
+ever worried over them.  He was essentially a philosopher, and whether as
+coolie, or multi-millionaire and master of many men, his poise of soul
+was the same.  He lived always in the high equanimity of spiritual
+repose, undeterred by good fortune, unruffled by ill fortune.  All things
+went well with him, whether they were blows from the overseer in the cane
+field or a slump in the price of sugar when he owned those cane fields
+himself.  Thus, from the steadfast rock of his sure content he mastered
+problems such as are given to few men to consider, much less to a Chinese
+peasant.
+
+He was precisely that--a Chinese peasant, born to labour in the fields
+all his days like a beast, but fated to escape from the fields like the
+prince in a fairy tale.  Ah Chun did not remember his father, a small
+farmer in a district not far from Canton; nor did he remember much of his
+mother, who had died when he was six.  But he did remember his respected
+uncle, Ah Kow, for him had he served as a slave from his sixth year to
+his twenty-fourth.  It was then that he escaped by contracting himself as
+a coolie to labour for three years on the sugar plantations of Hawaii for
+fifty cents a day.
+
+Ah Chun was observant.  He perceived little details that not one man in a
+thousand ever noticed.  Three years he worked in the field, at the end of
+which time he knew more about cane-growing than the overseers or even the
+superintendent, while the superintendent would have been astounded at the
+knowledge the weazened little coolie possessed of the reduction processes
+in the mill.  But Ah Chun did not study only sugar processes.  He studied
+to find out how men came to be owners of sugar mills and plantations.  One
+judgment he achieved early, namely, that men did not become rich from the
+labour of their own hands.  He knew, for he had laboured for a score of
+years himself.  The men who grew rich did so from the labour of the hands
+of others.  That man was richest who had the greatest number of his
+fellow creatures toiling for him.
+
+So, when his term of contract was up, Ah Chun invested his savings in a
+small importing store, going into partnership with one, Ah Yung.  The
+firm ultimately became the great one of "Ah Chun and Ah Yung," which
+handled anything from India silks and ginseng to guano islands and
+blackbird brigs.  In the meantime, Ah Chun hired out as cook.  He was a
+good cook, and in three years he was the highest-paid chef in Honolulu.
+His career was assured, and he was a fool to abandon it, as Dantin, his
+employer, told him; but Ah Chun knew his own mind best, and for knowing
+it was called a triple-fool and given a present of fifty dollars over and
+above the wages due him.
+
+The firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung was prospering.  There was no need for Ah
+Chun longer to be a cook.  There were boom times in Hawaii.  Sugar was
+being extensively planted, and labour was needed.  Ah Chun saw the
+chance, and went into the labour-importing business.  He brought
+thousands of Cantonese coolies into Hawaii, and his wealth began to grow.
+He made investments.  His beady black eyes saw bargains where other men
+saw bankruptcy.  He bought a fish-pond for a song, which later paid five
+hundred per cent and was the opening wedge by which he monopolized the
+fish market of Honolulu.  He did not talk for publication, nor figure in
+politics, nor play at revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly
+and farther ahead than did the men who engineered them.  In his mind's
+eye he saw Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it
+straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of uplifted
+coral rock.  So he bought land.  He bought land from merchants who needed
+ready cash, from impecunious natives, from riotous traders' sons, from
+widows and orphans and the lepers deported to Molokai; and, somehow, as
+the years went by, the pieces of land he had bought proved to be needed
+for warehouses, or coffee buildings, or hotels.  He leased, and rented,
+sold and bought, and resold again.
+
+But there were other things as well.  He put his confidence and his money
+into Parkinson, the renegade captain whom nobody would trust.  And
+Parkinson sailed away on mysterious voyages in the little _Vega_.
+Parkinson was taken care of until he died, and years afterward Honolulu
+was astonished when the news leaked out that the Drake and Acorn guano
+islands had been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for three-quarters
+of a million.  Then there were the fat, lush days of King Kalakaua, when
+Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for the opium licence.  If he
+paid a third of a million for the drug monopoly, the investment was
+nevertheless a good one, for the dividends bought him the Kalalau
+Plantation, which, in turn, paid him thirty per cent for seventeen years
+and was ultimately sold by him for a million and a half.
+
+It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his own
+country as Chinese Consul--a position that was not altogether
+unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his
+citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella
+Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more of
+Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian.  In fact, the
+random breeds in her were so attenuated that they were valued at eighths
+and sixteenths.  In the latter proportions was the blood of her great-
+grandmother, Paahao--the Princess Paahao, for she came of the royal line.
+Stella Allendale's great-grandfather had been a Captain Blunt, an English
+adventurer who took service under Kamehameha I and was made a tabu chief
+himself.  Her grandfather had been a New Bedford whaling captain, while
+through her own father had been introduced a remote blend of Italian and
+Portuguese which had been grafted upon his own English stock.  Legally a
+Hawaiian, Ah Chun's spouse was more of any one of three other
+nationalities.
+
+And into this conglomerate of the races, Ah Chun introduced the Mongolian
+mixture.  Thus, his children by Mrs. Ah Chun were one thirty-second
+Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one sixteenth Portuguese, one-half
+Chinese, and eleven thirty-seconds English and American.  It might well
+be that Ah Chun would have refrained from matrimony could he have
+foreseen the wonderful family that was to spring from this union.  It was
+wonderful in many ways.  First, there was its size.  There were fifteen
+sons and daughters, mostly daughters.  The sons had come first, three of
+them, and then had followed, in unswerving sequence, a round dozen of
+girls.  The blend of the race was excellent.  Not alone fruitful did it
+prove, for the progeny, without exception, was healthy and without
+blemish.  But the most amazing thing about the family was its beauty.  All
+the girls were beautiful--delicately, ethereally beautiful.  Mamma Ah
+Chun's rotund lines seemed to modify papa Ah Chun's lean angles, so that
+the daughters were willowy without being lathy, round-muscled without
+being chubby.  In every feature of every face were haunting reminiscences
+of Asia, all manipulated over and disguised by Old England, New England,
+and South of Europe.  No observer, without information, would have
+guessed, the heavy Chinese strain in their veins; nor could any observer,
+after being informed, fail to note immediately the Chinese traces.
+
+As beauties, the Ah Chun girls were something new.  Nothing like them had
+been seen before.  They resembled nothing so much as they resembled one
+another, and yet each girl was sharply individual.  There was no
+mistaking one for another.  On the other hand, Maud, who was blue-eyed
+and yellow-haired, would remind one instantly of Henrietta, an olive
+brunette with large, languishing dark eyes and hair that was blue-black.
+The hint of resemblance that ran through them all, reconciling every
+differentiation, was Ah Chun's contribution.  He had furnished the
+groundwork upon which had been traced the blended patterns of the races.
+He had furnished the slim-boned Chinese frame, upon which had been
+builded the delicacies and subtleties of Saxon, Latin, and Polynesian
+flesh.
+
+Mrs. Ah Chun had ideas of her own to which Ah Chun gave credence, though
+never permitting them expression when they conflicted with his own
+philosophic calm.  She had been used all her life to living in European
+fashion.  Very well.  Ah Chun gave her a European mansion.  Later, as his
+sons and daughters grew able to advise, he built a bungalow, a spacious,
+rambling affair, as unpretentious as it was magnificent.  Also, as time
+went by, there arose a mountain house on Tantalus, to which the family
+could flee when the "sick wind" blew from the south.  And at Waikiki he
+built a beach residence on an extensive site so well chosen that later
+on, when the United States government condemned it for fortification
+purposes, an immense sum accompanied the condemnation.  In all his houses
+were billiard and smoking rooms and guest rooms galore, for Ah Chun's
+wonderful progeny was given to lavish entertainment.  The furnishing was
+extravagantly simple.  Kings' ransoms were expended without
+display--thanks to the educated tastes of the progeny.
+
+Ah Chun had been liberal in the matter of education.  "Never mind
+expense," he had argued in the old days with Parkinson when that slack
+mariner could see no reason for making the _Vega_ seaworthy; "you sail
+the schooner, I pay the bills."  And so with his sons and daughters.  It
+had been for them to get the education and never mind the expense.
+Harold, the eldest-born, had gone to Harvard and Oxford; Albert and
+Charles had gone through Yale in the same classes.  And the daughters,
+from the eldest down, had undergone their preparation at Mills Seminary
+in California and passed on to Vassar, Wellesley, or Bryn Mawr.  Several,
+having so desired, had had the finishing touches put on in Europe.  And
+from all the world Ah Chun's sons and daughters returned to him to
+suggest and advise in the garnishment of the chaste magnificence of his
+residences.  Ah Chun himself preferred the voluptuous glitter of Oriental
+display; but he was a philosopher, and he clearly saw that his children's
+tastes were correct according to Western standards.
+
+Of course, his children were not known as the Ah Chun children.  As he
+had evolved from a coolie labourer to a multi-millionaire, so had his
+name evolved.  Mamma Ah Chun had spelled it A'Chun, but her wiser
+offspring had elided the apostrophe and spelled it Achun.  Ah Chun did
+not object.  The spelling of his name interfered no whit with his comfort
+nor his philosophic calm.  Besides, he was not proud.  But when his
+children arose to the height of a starched shirt, a stiff collar, and a
+frock coat, they did interfere with his comfort and calm.  Ah Chun would
+have none of it.  He preferred the loose-flowing robes of China, and
+neither could they cajole nor bully him into making the change.  They
+tried both courses, and in the latter one failed especially disastrously.
+They had not been to America for nothing.  They had learned the virtues
+of the boycott as employed by organized labour, and he, their father,
+Chun Ah Chun, they boycotted in his own house, Mamma Achun aiding and
+abetting.  But Ah Chun himself, while unversed in Western culture, was
+thoroughly conversant with Western labour conditions.  An extensive
+employer of labour himself, he knew how to cope with its tactics.
+Promptly he imposed a lockout on his rebellious progeny and erring
+spouse.  He discharged his scores of servants, locked up his stables,
+closed his houses, and went to live in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, in which
+enterprise he happened to be the heaviest stockholder.  The family
+fluttered distractedly on visits about with friends, while Ah Chun calmly
+managed his many affairs, smoked his long pipe with the tiny silver bowl,
+and pondered the problem of his wonderful progeny.
+
+This problem did not disturb his calm.  He knew in his philosopher's soul
+that when it was ripe he would solve it.  In the meantime he enforced the
+lesson that complacent as he might be, he was nevertheless the absolute
+dictator of the Achun destinies.  The family held out for a week, then
+returned, along with Ah Chun and the many servants, to occupy the
+bungalow once more.  And thereafter no question was raised when Ah Chun
+elected to enter his brilliant drawing-room in blue silk robe, wadded
+slippers, and black silk skull-cap with red button peak, or when he chose
+to draw at his slender-stemmed silver-bowled pipe among the cigarette-and
+cigar-smoking officers and civilians on the broad verandas or in the
+smoking room.
+
+Ah Chun occupied a unique position in Honolulu.  Though he did not appear
+in society, he was eligible anywhere.  Except among the Chinese merchants
+of the city, he never went out; but he received, and he always was the
+centre of his household and the head of his table.  Himself peasant, born
+Chinese, he presided over an atmosphere of culture and refinement second
+to none in all the islands.  Nor were there any in all the islands too
+proud to cross his threshold and enjoy his hospitality.  First of all,
+the Achun bungalow was of irreproachable tone.  Next, Ah Chun was a
+power.  And finally, Ah Chun was a moral paragon and an honest business
+man.  Despite the fact that business morality was higher than on the
+mainland, Ah Chun outshone the business men of Honolulu in the scrupulous
+rigidity of his honesty.  It was a saying that his word was as good as
+his bond.  His signature was never needed to bind him.  He never broke
+his word.  Twenty years after Hotchkiss, of Hotchkiss, Morterson Company,
+died, they found among mislaid papers a memorandum of a loan of thirty
+thousand dollars to Ah Chun.  It had been incurred when Ah Chun was Privy
+Councillor to Kamehameha II.  In the bustle and confusion of those
+heyday, money-making times, the affair had slipped Ah Chun's mind.  There
+was no note, no legal claim against him, but he settled in full with the
+Hotchkiss' Estate, voluntarily paying a compound interest that dwarfed
+the principal.  Likewise, when he verbally guaranteed the disastrous
+Kakiku Ditch Scheme, at a time when the least sanguine did not dream a
+guarantee necessary--"Signed his cheque for two hundred thousand without
+a quiver, gentlemen, without a quiver," was the report of the secretary
+of the defunct enterprise, who had been sent on the forlorn hope of
+finding out Ah Chun's intentions.  And on top of the many similar actions
+that were true of his word, there was scarcely a man of repute in the
+islands that at one time or another had not experienced the helping
+financial hand of Ah Chun.
+
+So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow up into a
+perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with him, for it was beyond
+any of them to imagine what he was going to do with it.  But Ah Chun saw
+the problem more clearly than they.  No one knew as he knew the extent to
+which he was an alien in his family.  His own family did not guess it.  He
+saw that there was no place for him amongst this marvellous seed of his
+loins, and he looked forward to his declining years and knew that he
+would grow more and more alien.  He did not understand his children.
+Their conversation was of things that did not interest him and about
+which he knew nothing.  The culture of the West had passed him by.  He
+was Asiatic to the last fibre, which meant that he was heathen.  Their
+Christianity was to him so much nonsense.  But all this he would have
+ignored as extraneous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the
+young people themselves.  When Maud, for instance, told him that the
+housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand--that he
+understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand with
+which to buy the schooner yacht _Muriel_ and become a member of the
+Hawaiian Yacht Club.  But it was their remoter, complicated desires and
+mental processes that obfuscated him.  He was not slow in learning that
+the mind of each son and daughter was a secret labyrinth which he could
+never hope to tread.  Always he came upon the wall that divides East from
+West.  Their souls were inaccessible to him, and by the same token he
+knew that his soul was inaccessible to them.
+
+Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself harking back more
+and more to his own kind.  The reeking smells of the Chinese quarter were
+spicy to him.  He sniffed them with satisfaction as he passed along the
+street, for in his mind they carried him back to the narrow tortuous
+alleys of Canton swarming with life and movement.  He regretted that he
+had cut off his queue to please Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days,
+and he seriously considered the advisability of shaving his crown and
+growing a new one.  The dishes his highly paid chef concocted for him
+failed to tickle his reminiscent palate in the way that the weird messes
+did in the stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese quarter.  He enjoyed
+vastly more a half-hour's smoke and chat with two or three Chinese chums,
+than to preside at the lavish and elegant dinners for which his bungalow
+was famed, where the pick of the Americans and Europeans sat at the long
+table, men and women on equality, the women with jewels that blazed in
+the subdued light against white necks and arms, the men in evening dress,
+and all chattering and laughing over topics and witticisms that, while
+they were not exactly Greek to him, did not interest him nor entertain.
+
+But it was not merely his alienness and his growing desire to return to
+his Chinese flesh-pots that constituted the problem.  There was also his
+wealth.  He had looked forward to a placid old age.  He had worked hard.
+His reward should have been peace and repose.  But he knew that with his
+immense fortune peace and repose could not possibly be his.  Already
+there were signs and omens.  He had seen similar troubles before.  There
+was his old employer, Dantin, whose children had wrested from him, by due
+process of law, the management of his property, having the Court appoint
+guardians to administer it for him.  Ah Chun knew, and knew thoroughly
+well, that had Dantin been a poor man, it would have been found that he
+could quite rationally manage his own affairs.  And old Dantin had had
+only three children and half a million, while he, Chun Ah Chun, had
+fifteen children and no one but himself knew how many millions.
+
+"Our daughters are beautiful women," he said to his wife, one evening.
+"There are many young men.  The house is always full of young men.  My
+cigar bills are very heavy.  Why are there no marriages?"
+
+Mamma Achun shrugged her shoulders and waited.
+
+"Women are women and men are men--it is strange there are no marriages.
+Perhaps the young men do not like our daughters."
+
+"Ah, they like them well enough," Mamma Chun answered; "but you see, they
+cannot forget that you are your daughters' father."
+
+"Yet you forgot who my father was," Ah Chun said gravely.  "All you asked
+was for me to cut off my queue."
+
+"The young men are more particular than I was, I fancy."
+
+"What is the greatest thing in the world?" Ah Chun demanded with abrupt
+irrelevance.
+
+Mamma Achun pondered for a moment, then replied:  "God."
+
+He nodded.  "There are gods and gods.  Some are paper, some are wood,
+some are bronze.  I use a small one in the office for a paper-weight.  In
+the Bishop Museum are many gods of coral rock and lava stone."
+
+"But there is only one God," she announced decisively, stiffening her
+ample frame argumentatively.
+
+Ah Chun noted the danger signal and sheered off.
+
+"What is greater than God, then?" he asked.  "I will tell you.  It is
+money.  In my time I have had dealings with Jews and Christians,
+Mohammedans and Buddhists, and with little black men from the Solomons
+and New Guinea who carried their god about them, wrapped in oiled paper.
+They possessed various gods, these men, but they all worshipped money.
+There is that Captain Higginson.  He seems to like Henrietta."
+
+"He will never marry her," retorted Mamma Achun.  "He will be an admiral
+before he dies--"
+
+"A rear-admiral," Ah Chun interpolated.
+
+"Yes, I know.  That is the way they retire."
+
+"His family in the United States is a high one.  They would not like it
+if he married . . . if he did not marry an American girl."
+
+Ah Chun knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thoughtfully refilling the
+silver bowl with a tiny pleget of tobacco.  He lighted it and smoked it
+out before he spoke.
+
+"Henrietta is the oldest girl.  The day she marries I will give her three
+hundred thousand dollars.  That will fetch that Captain Higginson and his
+high family along with him.  Let the word go out to him.  I leave it to
+you."
+
+And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-wreaths he saw
+take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey--Toy Shuey, the maid of all
+work in his uncle's house in the Cantonese village, whose work was never
+done and who received for a whole year's work one dollar.  And he saw his
+youthful self arise in the curling smoke, his youthful self who had
+toiled eighteen years in his uncle's field for little more.  And now he,
+Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his daughter with three hundred thousand
+years of such toil.  And she was but one daughter of a dozen.  He was not
+elated at the thought.  It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical
+world, and he chuckled aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which
+he knew lay deep in the hidden crypts of her being where he had never
+penetrated.
+
+But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson forgot
+his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife three hundred
+thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who was one
+thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-sixteenth
+Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and one-half
+Chinese.
+
+Ah Chun's munificence had its effect.  His daughters became suddenly
+eligible and desirable.  Clara was the next, but when the Secretary of
+the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah Chun informed him that he
+must wait his turn, that Maud was the oldest and that she must be married
+first.  It was shrewd policy.  The whole family was made vitally
+interested in marrying off Maud, which it did in three months, to Ned
+Humphreys, the United States immigration commissioner.  Both he and Maud
+complained, for the dowry was only two hundred thousand.  Ah Chun
+explained that his initial generosity had been to break the ice, and that
+after that his daughters could not expect otherwise than to go more
+cheaply.
+
+Clara followed Maud, and thereafter, for a space of two years; there was
+a continuous round of weddings in the bungalow.  In the meantime Ah Chun
+had not been idle.  Investment after investment was called in.  He sold
+out his interests in a score of enterprises, and step by step, so as not
+to cause a slump in the market, he disposed of his large holdings in real
+estate.  Toward the last he did precipitate a slump and sold at
+sacrifice.  What caused this haste were the squalls he saw already rising
+above the horizon.  By the time Lucille was married, echoes of bickerings
+and jealousies were already rumbling in his ears.  The air was thick with
+schemes and counter-schemes to gain his favour and to prejudice him
+against one or another or all but one of his sons-in-law.  All of which
+was not conducive to the peace and repose he had planned for his old age.
+
+He hastened his efforts.  For a long time he had been in correspondence
+with the chief banks in Shanghai and Macao.  Every steamer for several
+years had carried away drafts drawn in favour of one, Chun Ah Chun, for
+deposit in those Far Eastern banks.  The drafts now became heavier.  His
+two youngest daughters were not yet married.  He did not wait, but
+dowered them with a hundred thousand each, which sums lay in the Bank of
+Hawaii, drawing interest and awaiting their wedding day.  Albert took
+over the business of the firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung, Harold, the eldest,
+having elected to take a quarter of a million and go to England to live.
+Charles, the youngest, took a hundred thousand, a legal guardian, and a
+course in a Keeley institute.  To Mamma Achun was given the bungalow, the
+mountain House on Tantalus, and a new seaside residence in place of the
+one Ah Chun sold to the government.  Also, to Mamma Achun was given half
+a million in money well invested.
+
+Ah Chun was now ready to crack the nut of the problem.  One fine morning
+when the family was at breakfast--he had seen to it that all his sons-in-
+law and their wives were present--he announced that he was returning to
+his ancestral soil.  In a neat little homily he explained that he had
+made ample provision for his family, and he laid down various maxims that
+he was sure, he said, would enable them to dwell together in peace and
+harmony.  Also, he gave business advice to his sons-in-law, preached the
+virtues of temperate living and safe investments, and gave them the
+benefit of his encyclopedic knowledge of industrial and business
+conditions in Hawaii.  Then he called for his carriage, and, in the
+company of the weeping Mamma Achun, was driven down to the Pacific Mail
+steamer, leaving behind him a panic in the bungalow.  Captain Higginson
+clamoured wildly for an injunction.  The daughters shed copious tears.
+One of their husbands, an ex-Federal judge, questioned Ah Chun's sanity,
+and hastened to the proper authorities to inquire into it.  He returned
+with the information that Ah Chun had appeared before the commission the
+day before, demanded an examination, and passed with flying colours.
+There was nothing to be done, so they went down and said good-bye to the
+little old man, who waved farewell from the promenade deck as the big
+steamer poked her nose seaward through the coral reef.
+
+But the little old man was not bound for Canton.  He knew his own country
+too well, and the squeeze of the Mandarins, to venture into it with the
+tidy bulk of wealth that remained to him.  He went to Macao.  Now Ah Chun
+had long exercised the power of a king and he was as imperious as a king.
+When he landed at Macao and went into the office of the biggest European
+hotel to register, the clerk closed the book on him.  Chinese were not
+permitted.  Ah Chun called for the manager and was treated with
+contumely.  He drove away, but in two hours he was back again.  He called
+the clerk and manager in, gave them a month's salary, and discharged
+them.  He had made himself the owner of the hotel; and in the finest
+suite he settled down during the many months the gorgeous palace in the
+suburbs was building for him.  In the meantime, with the inevitable
+ability that was his, he increased the earnings of his big hotel from
+three per cent to thirty.
+
+The troubles Ah Chun had flown began early.  There were sons-in-law that
+made bad investments, others that played ducks and drakes with the Achun
+dowries.  Ah Chun being out of it, they looked at Mamma Ah Chun and her
+half million, and, looking, engendered not the best of feeling toward one
+another.  Lawyers waxed fat in the striving to ascertain the construction
+of trust deeds.  Suits, cross-suits, and counter-suits cluttered the
+Hawaiian courts.  Nor did the police courts escape.  There were angry
+encounters in which harsh words and harsher blows were struck.  There
+were such things as flower pots being thrown to add emphasis to winged
+words.  And suits for libel arose that dragged their way through the
+courts and kept Honolulu agog with excitement over the revelations of the
+witnesses.
+
+In his palace, surrounded by all dear delights of the Orient, Ah Chun
+smokes his placid pipe and listens to the turmoil overseas.  By each mail
+steamer, in faultless English, typewritten on an American machine, a
+letter goes from Macao to Honolulu, in which, by admirable texts and
+precepts, Ah Chun advises his family to live in unity and harmony.  As
+for himself, he is out of it all, and well content.  He has won to peace
+and repose.  At times he chuckles and rubs his hands, and his slant
+little black eyes twinkle merrily at the thought of the funny world.  For
+out of all his living and philosophizing, that remains to him--the
+conviction that it is a very funny world.
+
+
+
+
+THE SHERIFF OF KONA
+
+
+"You cannot escape liking the climate," Cudworth said, in reply to my
+panegyric on the Kona coast.  "I was a young fellow, just out of college,
+when I came here eighteen years ago.  I never went back, except, of
+course, to visit.  And I warn you, if you have some spot dear to you on
+earth, not to linger here too long, else you will find this dearer."
+
+We had finished dinner, which had been served on the big _lanai_, the one
+with a northerly _exposure_, though exposure is indeed a misnomer in so
+delectable a climate.
+
+The candles had been put out, and a slim, white-clad Japanese slipped
+like a ghost through the silvery moonlight, presented us with cigars, and
+faded away into the darkness of the bungalow.  I looked through a screen
+of banana and lehua trees, and down across the guava scrub to the quiet
+sea a thousand feet beneath.  For a week, ever since I had landed from
+the tiny coasting-steamer, I had been stopping with Cudworth, and during
+that time no wind had ruffled that unvexed sea.  True, there had been
+breezes, but they were the gentlest zephyrs that ever blew through summer
+isles.  They were not winds; they were sighs--long, balmy sighs of a
+world at rest.
+
+"A lotus land," I said.
+
+"Where each day is like every day, and every day is a paradise of days,"
+he answered.  "Nothing ever happens.  It is not too hot.  It is not too
+cold.  It is always just right.  Have you noticed how the land and the
+sea breathe turn and turn about?"
+
+Indeed, I had noticed that delicious rhythmic, breathing.  Each morning I
+had watched the sea-breeze begin at the shore and slowly extend seaward
+as it blew the mildest, softest whiff of ozone to the land.  It played
+over the sea, just faintly darkening its surface, with here and there and
+everywhere long lanes of calm, shifting, changing, drifting, according to
+the capricious kisses of the breeze.  And each evening I had watched the
+sea breath die away to heavenly calm, and heard the land breath softly
+make its way through the coffee trees and monkey-pods.
+
+"It is a land of perpetual calm," I said.  "Does it ever blow here?--ever
+really blow?  You know what I mean."
+
+Cudworth shook his head and pointed eastward.
+
+"How can it blow, with a barrier like that to stop it?"
+
+Far above towered the huge bulks of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, seeming to
+blot out half the starry sky.  Two miles and a half above our heads they
+reared their own heads, white with snow that the tropic sun had failed to
+melt.
+
+"Thirty miles away, right now, I'll wager, it is blowing forty miles an
+hour."
+
+I smiled incredulously.
+
+Cudworth stepped to the _lanai_ telephone.  He called up, in succession,
+Waimea, Kohala, and Hamakua.  Snatches of his conversation told me that
+the wind was blowing:  "Rip-snorting and back-jumping, eh? . . . How
+long? . . . Only a week? . . . Hello, Abe, is that you? . . . Yes, yes .
+. . You _will_ plant coffee on the Hamakua coast . . . Hang your wind-
+breaks!  You should see _my_ trees."
+
+"Blowing a gale," he said to me, turning from hanging up the receiver.  "I
+always have to joke Abe on his coffee.  He has five hundred acres, and
+he's done marvels in wind-breaking, but how he keeps the roots in the
+ground is beyond me.  Blow?  It always blows on the Hamakua side.  Kohala
+reports a schooner under double reefs beating up the channel between
+Hawaii and Maui, and making heavy weather of it."
+
+"It is hard to realize," I said lamely.  "Doesn't a little whiff of it
+ever eddy around somehow, and get down here?"
+
+"Not a whiff.  Our land-breeze is absolutely of no kin, for it begins
+this side of Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.  You see, the land radiates its
+heat quicker than the sea, and so, at night, the land breathes over the
+sea.  In the day the land becomes warmer than the sea, and the sea
+breathes over the land . . . Listen!  Here comes the land-breath now, the
+mountain wind."
+
+I could hear it coming, rustling softly through the coffee trees,
+stirring the monkey-pods, and sighing through the sugar-cane.  On the
+_lanai_ the hush still reigned.  Then it came, the first feel of the
+mountain wind, faintly balmy, fragrant and spicy, and cool, deliciously
+cool, a silken coolness, a wine-like coolness--cool as only the mountain
+wind of Kona can be cool.
+
+"Do you wonder that I lost my heart to Kona eighteen years ago?" he
+demanded.  "I could never leave it now.  I think I should die.  It would
+be terrible.  There was another man who loved it, even as I.  I think he
+loved it more, for he was born here on the Kona coast.  He was a great
+man, my best friend, my more than brother.  But he left it, and he did
+not die."
+
+"Love?" I queried.  "A woman?"
+
+Cudworth shook his head.
+
+"Nor will he ever come back, though his heart will be here until he
+dies."
+
+He paused and gazed down upon the beachlights of Kailua.  I smoked
+silently and waited.
+
+"He was already in love . . . with his wife.  Also, he had three
+children, and he loved them.  They are in Honolulu now.  The boy is going
+to college."
+
+"Some rash act?" I questioned, after a time, impatiently.
+
+He shook his head.  "Neither guilty of anything criminal, nor charged
+with anything criminal.  He was the Sheriff of Kona."
+
+"You choose to be paradoxical," I said.
+
+"I suppose it does sound that way," he admitted, "and that is the perfect
+hell of it."
+
+He looked at me searchingly for a moment, and then abruptly took up the
+tale.
+
+"He was a leper.  No, he was not born with it--no one is born with it; it
+came upon him.  This man--what does it matter?  Lyte Gregory was his
+name.  Every _kamaina_ knows the story.  He was straight American stock,
+but he was built like the chieftains of old Hawaii.  He stood six feet
+three.  His stripped weight was two hundred and twenty pounds, not an
+ounce of which was not clean muscle or bone.  He was the strongest man I
+have ever seen.  He was an athlete and a giant.  He was a god.  He was my
+friend.  And his heart and his soul were as big and as fine as his body.
+
+"I wonder what you would do if you saw your friend, your brother, on the
+slippery lip of a precipice, slipping, slipping, and you were able to do
+nothing.  That was just it.  I could do nothing.  I saw it coming, and I
+could do nothing.  My God, man, what could I do?  There it was, malignant
+and incontestable, the mark of the thing on his brow.  No one else saw
+it.  It was because I loved him so, I do believe, that I alone saw it.  I
+could not credit the testimony of my senses.  It was too incredibly
+horrible.  Yet there it was, on his brow, on his ears.  I had seen it,
+the slight puff of the earlobes--oh, so imperceptibly slight.  I watched
+it for months.  Then, next, hoping against hope, the darkening of the
+skin above both eyebrows--oh, so faint, just like the dimmest touch of
+sunburn.  I should have thought it sunburn but that there was a shine to
+it, such an invisible shine, like a little highlight seen for a moment
+and gone the next.  I tried to believe it was sunburn, only I could not.
+I knew better.  No one noticed it but me.  No one ever noticed it except
+Stephen Kaluna, and I did not know that till afterward.  But I saw it
+coming, the whole damnable, unnamable awfulness of it; but I refused to
+think about the future.  I was afraid.  I could not.  And of nights I
+cried over it.
+
+"He was my friend.  We fished sharks on Niihau together.  We hunted wild
+cattle on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa.  We broke horses and branded steers on
+the Carter Ranch.  We hunted goats through Haleakala.  He taught me
+diving and surfing until I was nearly as clever as he, and he was
+cleverer than the average Kanaka.  I have seen him dive in fifteen
+fathoms, and he could stay down two minutes.  He was an amphibian and a
+mountaineer.  He could climb wherever a goat dared climb.  He was afraid
+of nothing.  He was on the wrecked _Luga_, and he swam thirty miles in
+thirty-six hours in a heavy sea.  He could fight his way out through
+breaking combers that would batter you and me to a jelly.  He was a
+great, glorious man-god.  We went through the Revolution together.  We
+were both romantic loyalists.  He was shot twice and sentenced to death.
+But he was too great a man for the republicans to kill.  He laughed at
+them.  Later, they gave him honour and made him Sheriff of Kona.  He was
+a simple man, a boy that never grew up.  His was no intricate brain
+pattern.  He had no twists nor quirks in his mental processes.  He went
+straight to the point, and his points were always simple.
+
+"And he was sanguine.  Never have I known so confident a man, nor a man
+so satisfied and happy.  He did not ask anything from life.  There was
+nothing left to be desired.  For him life had no arrears.  He had been
+paid in full, cash down, and in advance.  What more could he possibly
+desire than that magnificent body, that iron constitution, that immunity
+from all ordinary ills, and that lowly wholesomeness of soul?  Physically
+he was perfect.  He had never been sick in his life.  He did not know
+what a headache was.  When I was so afflicted he used to look at me in
+wonder, and make me laugh with his clumsy attempts at sympathy.  He did
+not understand such a thing as a headache.  He could not understand.
+Sanguine?  No wonder.  How could he be otherwise with that tremendous
+vitality and incredible health?
+
+"Just to show you what faith he had in his glorious star, and, also, what
+sanction he had for that faith.  He was a youngster at the time--I had
+just met him--when he went into a poker game at Wailuku.  There was a big
+German in it, Schultz his name was, and he played a brutal, domineering
+game.  He had had a run of luck as well, and he was quite insufferable,
+when Lyte Gregory dropped in and took a hand.  The very first hand it was
+Schultz's blind.  Lyte came in, as well as the others, and Schultz raised
+them out--all except Lyte.  He did not like the German's tone, and he
+raised him back.  Schultz raised in turn, and in turn Lyte raised
+Schultz.  So they went, back and forth.  The stakes were big.  And do you
+know what Lyte held?  A pair of kings and three little clubs.  It wasn't
+poker.  Lyte wasn't playing poker.  He was playing his optimism.  He
+didn't know what Schultz held, but he raised and raised until he made
+Schultz squeal, and Schultz held three aces all the time.  Think of it!  A
+man with a pair of kings compelling three aces to see before the draw!
+
+"Well, Schultz called for two cards.  Another German was dealing,
+Schultz's friend at that.  Lyte knew then that he was up against three of
+a kind.  Now what did he do?  What would you have done?  Drawn three
+cards and held up the kings, of course.  Not Lyte.  He was playing
+optimism.  He threw the kings away, held up the three little clubs, and
+drew two cards.  He never looked at them.  He looked across at Schultz to
+bet, and Schultz did bet, big.  Since he himself held three aces he knew
+he had Lyte, because he played Lyte for threes, and, necessarily, they
+would have to be smaller threes.  Poor Schultz!  He was perfectly correct
+under the premises.  His mistake was that he thought Lyte was playing
+poker.  They bet back and forth for five minutes, until Schultz's
+certainty began to ooze out.  And all the time Lyte had never looked at
+his two cards, and Schultz knew it.  I could see Schultz think, and
+revive, and splurge with his bets again.  But the strain was too much for
+him."
+
+"'Hold on, Gregory,' he said at last.  'I've got you beaten from the
+start.  I don't want any of your money.  I've got--'"
+
+"'Never mind what you've got,' Lyte interrupted.  'You don't know what
+I've got.  I guess I'll take a look.'"
+
+"He looked, and raised the German a hundred dollars.  Then they went at
+it again, back and forth and back and forth, until Schultz weakened and
+called, and laid down his three aces.  Lyte faced his five cards.  They
+were all black.  He had drawn two more clubs.  Do you know, he just about
+broke Schultz's nerve as a poker player.  He never played in the same
+form again.  He lacked confidence after that, and was a bit wobbly."
+
+"'But how could you do it?' I asked Lyte afterwards.  'You knew he had
+you beaten when he drew two cards.  Besides, you never looked at your own
+draw.'"
+
+"'I didn't have to look,' was Lyte's answer.  'I knew they were two clubs
+all the time.  They just had to be two clubs.  Do you think I was going
+to let that big Dutchman beat me?  It was impossible that he should beat
+me.  It is not my way to be beaten.  I just have to win.  Why, I'd have
+been the most surprised man in this world if they hadn't been all
+clubs.'"
+
+"That was Lyte's way, and maybe it will help you to appreciate his
+colossal optimism.  As he put it he just had to succeed, to fare well, to
+prosper.  And in that same incident, as in ten thousand others, he found
+his sanction.  The thing was that he did succeed, did prosper.  That was
+why he was afraid of nothing.  Nothing could ever happen to him.  He knew
+it, because nothing had ever happened to him.  That time the _Luga_ was
+lost and he swam thirty miles, he was in the water two whole nights and a
+day.  And during all that terrible stretch of time he never lost hope
+once, never once doubted the outcome.  He just knew he was going to make
+the land.  He told me so himself, and I know it was the truth.
+
+"Well, that is the kind of a man Lyte Gregory was.  He was of a different
+race from ordinary, ailing mortals.  He was a lordly being, untouched by
+common ills and misfortunes.  Whatever he wanted he got.  He won his
+wife--one of the Caruthers, a little beauty--from a dozen rivals.  And
+she settled down and made him the finest wife in the world.  He wanted a
+boy.  He got it.  He wanted a girl and another boy.  He got them.  And
+they were just right, without spot or blemish, with chests like little
+barrels, and with all the inheritance of his own health and strength.
+
+"And then it happened.  The mark of the beast was laid upon him.  I
+watched it for a year.  It broke my heart.  But he did not know it, nor
+did anybody else guess it except that cursed _hapa-haole_, Stephen
+Kaluna.  He knew it, but I did not know that he did.  And--yes--Doc
+Strowbridge knew it.  He was the federal physician, and he had developed
+the leper eye.  You see, part of his business was to examine suspects and
+order them to the receiving station at Honolulu.  And Stephen Kaluna had
+developed the leper eye.  The disease ran strong in his family, and four
+or five of his relatives were already on Molokai.
+
+"The trouble arose over Stephen Kaluna's sister.  When she became
+suspect, and before Doc Strowbridge could get hold of her, her brother
+spirited her away to some hiding-place.  Lyte was Sheriff of Kona, and it
+was his business to find her.
+
+"We were all over at Hilo that night, in Ned Austin's.  Stephen Kaluna
+was there when we came in, by himself, in his cups, and quarrelsome.  Lyte
+was laughing over some joke--that huge, happy laugh of a giant boy.
+Kaluna spat contemptuously on the floor.  Lyte noticed, so did everybody;
+but he ignored the fellow.  Kaluna was looking for trouble.  He took it
+as a personal grudge that Lyte was trying to apprehend his sister.  In
+half a dozen ways he advertised his displeasure at Lyte's presence, but
+Lyte ignored him.  I imagined Lyte was a bit sorry for him, for the
+hardest duty of his office was the apprehension of lepers.  It is not a
+nice thing to go in to a man's house and tear away a father, mother, or
+child, who has done no wrong, and to send such a one to perpetual
+banishment on Molokai.  Of course, it is necessary as a protection to
+society, and Lyte, I do believe, would have been the first to apprehend
+his own father did he become suspect.
+
+"Finally, Kaluna blurted out:  'Look here, Gregory, you think you're
+going to find Kalaniweo, but you're not.'
+
+"Kalaniweo was his sister.  Lyte glanced at him when his name was called,
+but he made no answer.  Kaluna was furious.  He was working himself up
+all the time.
+
+"'I'll tell you one thing,' he shouted.  'You'll be on Molokai yourself
+before ever you get Kalaniweo there.  I'll tell you what you are.  You've
+no right to be in the company of honest men.  You've made a terrible fuss
+talking about your duty, haven't you?  You've sent many lepers to
+Molokai, and knowing all the time you belonged there yourself.'
+
+"I'd seen Lyte angry more than once, but never quite so angry as at that
+moment.  Leprosy with us, you know, is not a thing to jest about.  He
+made one leap across the floor, dragging Kaluna out of his chair with a
+clutch on his neck.  He shook him back and forth savagely, till you could
+hear the half-caste's teeth rattling.
+
+"'What do you mean?' Lyte was demanding.  'Spit it out, man, or I'll
+choke it out of you!'
+
+"You know, in the West there is a certain phrase that a man must smile
+while uttering.  So with us of the islands, only our phrase is related to
+leprosy.  No matter what Kaluna was, he was no coward.  As soon as Lyte
+eased the grip on his throat he answered:--
+
+"'I'll tell you what I mean.  You are a leper yourself.'
+
+"Lyte suddenly flung the half-caste sideways into a chair, letting him
+down easily enough.  Then Lyte broke out into honest, hearty laughter.
+But he laughed alone, and when he discovered it he looked around at our
+faces.  I had reached his side and was trying to get him to come away,
+but he took no notice of me.  He was gazing, fascinated, at Kaluna, who
+was brushing at his own throat in a flurried, nervous way, as if to brush
+off the contamination of the fingers that had clutched him.  The action
+was unreasoned, genuine.
+
+"Lyte looked around at us, slowly passing from face to face.
+
+"'My God, fellows!  My God!' he said.
+
+"He did not speak it.  It was more a hoarse whisper of fright and horror.
+It was fear that fluttered in his throat, and I don't think that ever in
+his life before he had known fear.
+
+"Then his colossal optimism asserted itself, and he laughed again.
+
+"'A good joke--whoever put it up,' he said.  'The drinks are on me.  I
+had a scare for a moment.  But, fellows, don't do it again, to anybody.
+It's too serious.  I tell you I died a thousand deaths in that moment.  I
+thought of my wife and the kids, and . . . '
+
+"His voice broke, and the half-caste, still throat-brushing, drew his
+eyes.  He was puzzled and worried.
+
+"'John,' he said, turning toward me.
+
+"His jovial, rotund voice rang in my ears.  But I could not answer.  I
+was swallowing hard at that moment, and besides, I knew my face didn't
+look just right.
+
+"'John,' he called again, taking a step nearer.
+
+"He called timidly, and of all nightmares of horrors the most frightful
+was to hear timidity in Lyte Gregory's voice.
+
+"'John, John, what does it mean?' he went on, still more timidly. 'It's a
+joke, isn't it?  John, here's my hand.  If I were a leper would I offer
+you my hand?  Am I a leper, John?'
+
+"He held out his hand, and what in high heaven or hell did I care?  He
+was my friend.  I took his hand, though it cut me to the heart to see the
+way his face brightened.
+
+"'It was only a joke, Lyte,' I said.  'We fixed it up on you.  But you're
+right.  It's too serious.  We won't do it again.'
+
+"He did not laugh this time.  He smiled, as a man awakened from a bad
+dream and still oppressed by the substance of the dream.
+
+"'All right, then,' he said.  'Don't do it again, and I'll stand for the
+drinks.  But I may as well confess that you fellows had me going south
+for a moment.  Look at the way I've been sweating.'
+
+"He sighed and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he started to step
+toward the bar.
+
+"'It is no joke,' Kaluna said abruptly.  I looked murder at him, and I
+felt murder, too.  But I dared not speak or strike.  That would have
+precipitated the catastrophe which I somehow had a mad hope of still
+averting.
+
+"'It is no joke,' Kaluna repeated.  'You are a leper, Lyte Gregory, and
+you've no right putting your hands on honest men's flesh--on the clean
+flesh of honest men.'
+
+"Then Gregory flared up.
+
+"'The joke has gone far enough!  Quit it!  Quit it, I say, Kaluna, or
+I'll give you a beating!'
+
+"'You undergo a bacteriological examination,' Kaluna answered, 'and then
+you can beat me--to death, if you want to.  Why, man, look at yourself
+there in the glass.  You can see it.  Anybody can see it.  You're
+developing the lion face.  See where the skin is darkened there over your
+eyes.
+
+"Lyte peered and peered, and I saw his hands trembling.
+
+"'I can see nothing,' he said finally, then turned on the _hapa-haole_.
+'You have a black heart, Kaluna.  And I am not ashamed to say that you
+have given me a scare that no man has a right to give another.  I take
+you at your word.  I am going to settle this thing now.  I am going
+straight to Doc Strowbridge.  And when I come back, watch out.'
+
+"He never looked at us, but started for the door.
+
+"'You wait here, John,' he said, waving me back from accompanying him.
+
+"We stood around like a group of ghosts.
+
+"'It is the truth,' Kaluna said.  'You could see it for yourselves.'
+
+"They looked at me, and I nodded.  Harry Burnley lifted his glass to his
+lips, but lowered it untasted.  He spilled half of it over the bar.  His
+lips were trembling like a child that is about to cry.  Ned Austin made a
+clatter in the ice-chest.  He wasn't looking for anything.  I don't think
+he knew what he was doing.  Nobody spoke.  Harry Burnley's lips were
+trembling harder than ever.  Suddenly, with a most horrible, malignant
+expression he drove his fist into Kaluna's face.  He followed it up.  We
+made no attempt to separate them.  We didn't care if he killed the half-
+caste.  It was a terrible beating.  We weren't interested.  I don't even
+remember when Burnley ceased and let the poor devil crawl away.  We were
+all too dazed.
+
+"Doc Strowbridge told me about it afterward.  He was working late over a
+report when Lyte came into his office.  Lyte had already recovered his
+optimism, and came swinging in, a trifle angry with Kaluna to be sure,
+but very certain of himself.  'What could I do?' Doc asked me.  'I knew
+he had it.  I had seen it coming on for months.  I couldn't answer him.  I
+couldn't say yes.  I don't mind telling you I broke down and cried.  He
+pleaded for the bacteriological test.  'Snip out a piece, Doc,' he said,
+over and over.  'Snip out a piece of skin and make the test.'"
+
+"The way Doc Strowbridge cried must have convinced Lyte.  The _Claudine_
+was leaving next morning for Honolulu.  We caught him when he was going
+aboard.  You see, he was headed for Honolulu to give himself up to the
+Board of Health.  We could do nothing with him.  He had sent too many to
+Molokai to hang back himself.  We argued for Japan.  But he wouldn't hear
+of it.  'I've got to take my medicine, fellows,' was all he would say,
+and he said it over and over.  He was obsessed with the idea.
+
+"He wound up all his affairs from the Receiving Station at Honolulu, and
+went down to Molokai.  He didn't get on well there.  The resident
+physician wrote us that he was a shadow of his old self.  You see he was
+grieving about his wife and the kids.  He knew we were taking care of
+them, but it hurt him just the same.  After six months or so I went down
+to Molokai.  I sat on one side a plate-glass window, and he on the other.
+We looked at each other through the glass and talked through what might
+be called a speaking tube.  But it was hopeless.  He had made up his mind
+to remain.  Four mortal hours I argued.  I was exhausted at the end.  My
+steamer was whistling for me, too.
+
+"But we couldn't stand for it.  Three months later we chartered the
+schooner _Halcyon_.  She was an opium smuggler, and she sailed like a
+witch.  Her master was a squarehead who would do anything for money, and
+we made a charter to China worth his while.  He sailed from San
+Francisco, and a few days later we took out Landhouse's sloop for a
+cruise.  She was only a five-ton yacht, but we slammed her fifty miles to
+windward into the north-east trade.  Seasick?  I never suffered so in my
+life.  Out of sight of land we picked up the _Halcyon_, and Burnley and I
+went aboard.
+
+"We ran down to Molokai, arriving about eleven at night.  The schooner
+hove to and we landed through the surf in a whale-boat at Kalawao--the
+place, you know, where Father Damien died.  That squarehead was game.
+With a couple of revolvers strapped on him he came right along.  The
+three of us crossed the peninsula to Kalaupapa, something like two miles.
+Just imagine hunting in the dead of night for a man in a settlement of
+over a thousand lepers.  You see, if the alarm was given, it was all off
+with us.  It was strange ground, and pitch dark.  The leper's dogs came
+out and bayed at us, and we stumbled around till we got lost.
+
+"The squarehead solved it.  He led the way into the first detached house.
+We shut the door after us and struck a light.  There were six lepers.  We
+routed them up, and I talked in native.  What I wanted was a _kokua_.  A
+_kokua_ is, literally, a helper, a native who is clean that lives in the
+settlement and is paid by the Board of Health to nurse the lepers, dress
+their sores, and such things.  We stayed in the house to keep track of
+the inmates, while the squarehead led one of them off to find a _kokua_.
+He got him, and he brought him along at the point of his revolver.  But
+the _kokua_ was all right.  While the squarehead guarded the house,
+Burnley and I were guided by the _kokua_ to Lyte's house.  He was all
+alone.
+
+"'I thought you fellows would come,' Lyte said.  'Don't touch me, John.
+How's Ned, and Charley, and all the crowd?  Never mind, tell me
+afterward.  I am ready to go now.  I've had nine months of it.  Where's
+the boat?'
+
+"We started back for the other house to pick up the squarehead.  But the
+alarm had got out.  Lights were showing in the houses, and doors were
+slamming.  We had agreed that there was to be no shooting unless
+absolutely necessary, and when we were halted we went at it with our
+fists and the butts of our revolvers.  I found myself tangled up with a
+big man.  I couldn't keep him off me, though twice I smashed him fairly
+in the face with my fist.  He grappled with me, and we went down, rolling
+and scrambling and struggling for grips.  He was getting away with me,
+when some one came running up with a lantern.  Then I saw his face.  How
+shall I describe the horror of it.  It was not a face--only wasted or
+wasting features--a living ravage, noseless, lipless, with one ear
+swollen and distorted, hanging down to the shoulder.  I was frantic.  In
+a clinch he hugged me close to him until that ear flapped in my face.
+Then I guess I went insane.  It was too terrible.  I began striking him
+with my revolver.  How it happened I don't know, but just as I was
+getting clear he fastened upon me with his teeth.  The whole side of my
+hand was in that lipless mouth.  Then I struck him with the revolver butt
+squarely between the eyes, and his teeth relaxed."
+
+Cudworth held his hand to me in the moonlight, and I could see the scars.
+It looked as if it had been mangled by a dog.
+
+"Weren't you afraid?" I asked.
+
+"I was.  Seven years I waited.  You know, it takes that long for the
+disease to incubate.  Here in Kona I waited, and it did not come.  But
+there was never a day of those seven years, and never a night, that I did
+not look out on . . . on all this . . . "  His voice broke as he swept
+his eyes from the moon-bathed sea beneath to the snowy summits above.  "I
+could not bear to think of losing it, of never again beholding Kona.
+Seven years!  I stayed clean.  But that is why I am single.  I was
+engaged.  I could not dare to marry while I was in doubt.  She did not
+understand.  She went away to the States and married.  I have never seen
+her since.
+
+"Just at the moment I got clear of the leper policeman there was a rush
+and clatter of hoofs like a cavalry charge.  It was the squarehead.  He
+had been afraid of a rumpus and he had improved his time by making those
+blessed lepers he was guarding saddle up four horses.  We were ready for
+him.  Lyte had accounted for three _kokuas_, and between us we untangled
+Burnley from a couple more.  The whole settlement was in an uproar by
+that time, and as we dashed away somebody opened upon us with a
+Winchester.  It must have been Jack McVeigh, the superintendent of
+Molokai.
+
+"That was a ride!  Leper horses, leper saddles, leper bridles,
+pitch-black darkness, whistling bullets, and a road none of the best.  And
+the squarehead's horse was a mule, and he didn't know how to ride,
+either.  But we made the whaleboat, and as we shoved off through the surf
+we could hear the horses coming down the hill from Kalaupapa.
+
+"You're going to Shanghai.  You look Lyte Gregory up.  He is employed in
+a German firm there.  Take him out to dinner.  Open up wine.  Give him
+everything of the best, but don't let him pay for anything.  Send the
+bill to me.  His wife and the kids are in Honolulu, and he needs the
+money for them.  I know.  He sends most of his salary, and lives like an
+anchorite.  And tell him about Kona.  There's where his heart is.  Tell
+him all you can about Kona."
+
+
+
+
+JACK LONDON BY HIMSELF
+
+
+I was born in San Francisco in 1876.  At fifteen I was a man among men,
+and if I had a spare nickel I spent it on beer instead of candy, because
+I thought it was more manly to buy beer.  Now, when my years are nearly
+doubled, I am out on a hunt for the boyhood which I never had, and I am
+less serious than at any other time of my life.  Guess I'll find that
+boyhood!  Almost the first things I realized were responsibilities.  I
+have no recollection of being taught to read or write--I could do both at
+the age of five--but I know that my first school was in Alameda before I
+went out on a ranch with my folks and as a ranch boy worked hard from my
+eighth year.
+
+The second school were I tried to pick up a little learning was an
+irregular hit or miss affair at San Mateo.  Each class sat in a separate
+desk, but there were days when we did not sit at all, for the master used
+to get drunk very often, and then one of the elder boys would thrash him.
+To even things up, the master would then thrash the younger lads, so you
+can think what sort of school it was.  There was no one belonging to me,
+or associated with me in any way, who had literary tastes or ideas, the
+nearest I can make to it is that my great-grandfather was a circuit
+writer, a Welshman, known as "Priest" Jones in the backwoods, where his
+enthusiasm led him to scatter the Gospel.
+
+One of my earliest and strongest impressions was of the ignorance of
+other people.  I had read and absorbed Washington Irving's "Alhambra"
+before I was nine, but could never understand how it was that the other
+ranchers knew nothing about it.  Later I concluded that this ignorance
+was peculiar to the country, and felt that those who lived in cities
+would not be so dense.  One day a man from the city came to the ranch.  He
+wore shiny shoes and a cloth coat, and I felt that here was a good chance
+for me to exchange thoughts with an enlightened mind.  From the bricks of
+an old fallen chimney I had built an Alhambra of my own; towers,
+terraces, and all were complete, and chalk inscriptions marked the
+different sections.  Here I led the city man and questioned him about
+"The Alhambra," but he was as ignorant as the man on the ranch, and then
+I consoled myself with the thought that there were only two clever people
+in the world--Washington Irving and myself.
+
+My other reading-matter at that time consisted mainly of dime novels,
+borrowed from the hired men, and newspapers in which the servants gloated
+over the adventures of poor but virtuous shop-girls.
+
+Through reading such stuff my mind was necessarily ridiculously
+conventional, but being very lonely I read everything that came my way,
+and was greatly impressed by Ouida's story "Signa," which I devoured
+regularly for a couple of years.  I never knew the finish until I grew
+up, for the closing chapters were missing from my copy, so I kept on
+dreaming with the hero, and, like him, unable to see Nemesis, at the end.
+My work on the ranch at one time was to watch the bees, and as I sat
+under a tree from sunrise till late in the afternoon, waiting for the
+swarming, I had plenty of time to read and dream.  Livermore Valley was
+very flat, and even the hills around were then to me devoid of interest,
+and the only incident to break in on my visions was when I gave the alarm
+of swarming, and the ranch folks rushed out with pots, pans, and buckets
+of water.  I think the opening line of "Signa" was "It was only a little
+lad," yet he had dreams of becoming a great musician, and having all
+Europe at his feet.  Well, I was only a little lad, too, but why could
+not I become what "Signa" dreamed of being?
+
+Life on a Californian ranch was then to me the dullest possible
+existence, and every day I thought of going out beyond the sky-line to
+see the world.  Even then there were whispers, promptings; my mind
+inclined to things beautiful, although my environment was unbeautiful.
+The hills and valleys around were eyesores and aching pits, and I never
+loved them till I left them.
+
+* * * * *
+
+Before I was eleven I left the ranch and came to Oakland, where I spent
+so much of my time in the Free Public Library, eagerly reading everything
+that came to hand, that I developed the first stages of St. Vitus' dance
+from lack of exercise.  Disillusions quickly followed, as I learned more
+of the world.  At this time I made my living as a newsboy, selling papers
+in the streets; and from then on until I was sixteen I had a thousand and
+one different occupations--work and school, school and work--and so it
+ran.
+
+Then the adventure-lust was strong within me, and I left home.  I didn't
+run, I just left--went out in the bay, and joined the oyster pirates.  The
+days of the oyster pirates are now past, and if I had got my dues for
+piracy, I would have been given five hundred years in prison.  Later, I
+shipped as a sailor on a schooner, and also took a turn at salmon
+fishing.  Oddly enough, my next occupation was on a fish-patrol, where I
+was entrusted with the arrest of any violators of the fishing laws.
+Numbers of lawless Chinese, Greeks, and Italians were at that time
+engaged in illegal fishing, and many a patrolman paid his life for his
+interference.  My only weapon on duty was a steel table-fork, but I felt
+fearless and a man when I climbed over the side of a boat to arrest some
+marauder.
+
+Subsequently I shipped before the mast and sailed for the Japanese coast
+on a seal-hunting expedition, later going to Behring Sea.  After sealing
+for seven months I came back to California and took odd jobs at coal
+shovelling and longshoring and also in a jute factory, where I worked
+from six in the morning until seven at night.  I had planned to join the
+same lot for another sealing trip the following year, but somehow I
+missed them.  They sailed away on the _Mary Thomas_, which was lost with
+all hands.
+
+In my fitful school-days I had written the usual compositions, which had
+been praised in the usual way, and while working in the jute mills I
+still made an occasional try.  The factory occupied thirteen hours of my
+day, and being young and husky, I wanted a little time for myself, so
+there was little left for composition.  The San Francisco _Call_ offered
+a prize for a descriptive article.  My mother urged me to try for it, and
+I did, taking for my subject "Typhoon off the Coast of Japan."  Very
+tired and sleepy, knowing I had to be up at half-past five, I began the
+article at midnight and worked straight on until I had written two
+thousand words, the limit of the article, but with my idea only half
+worked out.  The next night, under the same conditions, I continued,
+adding another two thousand words before I finished, and then the third
+night I spent in cutting out the excess, so as to bring the article
+within the conditions of the contest.  The first prize came to me, and
+the second and third went to students of the Stanford and Berkeley
+Universities.
+
+My success in the San Francisco _Call_ competition seriously turned my
+thoughts to writing, but my blood was still too hot for a settled
+routine, so I practically deferred literature, beyond writing a little
+gush for the _Call_, which that journal promptly rejected.
+
+I tramped all through the United States, from California to Boston, and
+up and down, returning to the Pacific coast by way of Canada, where I got
+into jail and served a term for vagrancy, and the whole tramping
+experience made me become a Socialist.  Previously I had been impressed
+by the dignity of labour, and, without having read Carlyle or Kipling, I
+had formulated a gospel of work which put theirs in the shade.  Work was
+everything.  It was sanctification and salvation.  The pride I took in a
+hard day's work well done would be inconceivable to you.  I was as
+faithful a wage-slave as ever a capitalist exploited.  In short, my
+joyous individualism was dominated by the orthodox bourgeois ethics.  I
+had fought my way from the open west, where men bucked big and the job
+hunted the man, to the congested labour centres of the eastern states,
+where men were small potatoes and hunted the job for all they were worth,
+and I found myself looking upon life from a new and totally different
+angle.  I saw the workers in the shambles at the bottom of the Social
+Pit.  I swore I would never again do a hard day's work with my body
+except where absolutely compelled to, and I have been busy ever since
+running away from hard bodily labour.
+
+In my nineteenth year I returned to Oakland and started at the High
+School, which ran the usual school magazine.  This publication was a
+weekly--no, I guess a monthly--one, and I wrote stories for it, very
+little imaginary, just recitals of my sea and tramping experiences.  I
+remained there a year, doing janitor work as a means of livelihood, and
+leaving eventually because the strain was more than I could bear.  At
+this time my socialistic utterances had attracted considerable attention,
+and I was known as the "Boy Socialist," a distinction that brought about
+my arrest for street-talking.  After leaving the High School, in three
+months cramming by myself, I took the three years' work for that time and
+entered the University of California.  I hated to give up the hope of a
+University education and worked in a laundry and with my pen to help me
+keep on.  This was the only time I worked because I loved it, but the
+task was too much, and when half-way through my Freshman year I had to
+quit.
+
+I worked away ironing shirts and other things in the laundry, and wrote
+in all my spare time.  I tried to keep on at both, but often fell asleep
+with the pen in my hand.  Then I left the laundry and wrote all the time,
+and lived and dreamed again.  After three months' trial I gave up
+writing, having decided that I was a failure, and left for the Klondike
+to prospect for gold.  At the end of the year, owing to the outbreak of
+scurvy, I was compelled to come out, and on the homeward journey of 1,900
+miles in an open boat made the only notes of the trip.  It was in the
+Klondike I found myself.  There nobody talks.  Everybody thinks.  You get
+your true perspective.  I got mine.
+
+While I was in the Klondike my father died, and the burden of the family
+fell on my shoulders.  Times were bad in California, and I could get no
+work.  While trying for it I wrote "Down the River," which was rejected.
+During the wait for this rejection I wrote a twenty-thousand word serial
+for a news company, which was also rejected.  Pending each rejection I
+still kept on writing fresh stuff.  I did not know what an editor looked
+like.  I did not know a soul who had ever published anything.  Finally a
+story was accepted by a Californian magazine, for which I received five
+dollars.  Soon afterwards "The Black Cat" offered me forty dollars for a
+story.
+
+Then things took a turn, and I shall probably not have to shovel coal for
+a living for some time to come, although I have done it, and could do it
+again.
+
+My first book was published in 1900.  I could have made a good deal at
+newspaper work; but I had sufficient sense to refuse to be a slave to
+that man-killing machine, for such I held a newspaper to be to a young
+man in his forming period.  Not until I was well on my feet as a magazine-
+writer did I do much work for newspapers.  I am a believer in regular
+work, and never wait for an inspiration.  Temperamentally I am not only
+careless and irregular, but melancholy; still I have fought both down.
+The discipline I had as a sailor had full effect on me.  Perhaps my old
+sea days are also responsible for the regularity and limitations of my
+sleep.  Five and a half hours is the precise average I allow myself, and
+no circumstance has yet arisen in my life that could keep me awake when
+the time comes to "turn in."
+
+I am very fond of sport, and delight in boxing, fencing, swimming,
+riding, yachting, and even kite-flying.  Although primarily of the city,
+I like to be near it rather than in it.  The country, though, is the
+best, the only natural life.  In my grown-up years the writers who have
+influenced me most are Karl Marx in a particular, and Spencer in a
+general, way.  In the days of my barren boyhood, if I had had a chance, I
+would have gone in for music; now, in what are more genuinely the days of
+my youth, if I had a million or two I would devote myself to writing
+poetry and pamphlets.  I think the best work I have done is in the
+"League of the Old Men," and parts of "The Kempton-Wace Letters."  Other
+people don't like the former.  They prefer brighter and more cheerful
+things.  Perhaps I shall feel like that, too, when the days of my youth
+are behind me.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{1}  Malahini--new-comer.
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF PRIDE***
+
+
+******* This file should be named 2416.txt or 2416.zip *******
+
+
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/1/2416
+
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+http://www.gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/pglaf.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at http://www.gutenberg.org/about/contact
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
+To donate, please visit:
+http://www.gutenberg.org/fundraising/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart is the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     http://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
+