On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
by Jack London

Contents:

On the Makaloa Mat
The Bones of Kahekili
When Alice Told her Soul
Shin-Bones
The Water Baby
The Tears of Ah Kim
The Kanaka Surf

ON THE MAKALOA MAT

Unlike the women of most warm races, those of Hawaii age well and
nobly. With no pretence of make-up or cunning concealment of
time's inroads, the woman who sat under the hau tree might have
been permitted as much as fifty years by a judge competent anywhere
over the world save in Hawaii. Yet her children and her
grandchildren, and Roscoe Scandwell who had been her husband for
forty years, knew that she was sixty-four and would be sixty-five
come the next twenty-second day of June. But she did not look it,
despite the fact that she thrust reading glasses on her nose as she
read her magazine and took them off when her gaze desired to wander
in the direction of the half-dozen children playing on the lawn.

It was a noble situation--noble as the ancient hau tree, the size
of a house, where she sat as if in a house, so spaciously and
comfortably house-like was its shade furnished; noble as the lawn
that stretched away landward its plush of green at an appraisement
of two hundred dollars a front foot to a bungalow equally
dignified, noble, and costly. Seaward, glimpsed through a fringe
of hundred-foot coconut palms, was the ocean; beyond the reef a
dark blue that grew indigo blue to the horizon, within the reef all
the silken gamut of jade and emerald and tourmaline.

And this was but one house of the half-dozen houses belonging to
Martha Scandwell. Her town-house, a few miles away in Honolulu, on
Nuuanu Drive between the first and second "showers," was a palace.
Hosts of guests had known the comfort and joy of her mountain house
on Tantalus, and of her volcano house, her mauka house, and her
makai house on the big island of Hawaii. Yet this Waikiki house
stressed no less than the rest in beauty, in dignity, and in
expensiveness of upkeep. Two Japanese yard-boys were trimming
hibiscus, a third was engaged expertly with the long hedge of
night-blooming cereus that was shortly expectant of unfolding in
its mysterious night-bloom. In immaculate ducks, a house Japanese
brought out the tea-things, followed by a Japanese maid, pretty as
a butterfly in the distinctive garb of her race, and fluttery as a
butterfly to attend on her mistress. Another Japanese maid, an
array of Turkish towels on her arm, crossed the lawn well to the
right in the direction of the bath-houses, from which the children,
in swimming suits, were beginning to emerge. Beyond, under the
palms at the edge of the sea, two Chinese nursemaids, in their
pretty native costume of white yee-shon and-straight-lined
trousers, their black braids of hair down their backs, attended
each on a baby in a perambulator.

And all these, servants, and nurses, and grandchildren, were Martha
Scandwell's. So likewise was the colour of the skin of the
grandchildren--the unmistakable Hawaiian colour, tinted beyond
shadow of mistake by exposure to the Hawaiian sun. One-eighth and
one-sixteenth Hawaiian were they, which meant that seven-eighths or
fifteen-sixteenths white blood informed that skin yet failed to
obliterate the modicum of golden tawny brown of Polynesia. But in
this, again, only a trained observer would have known that the
frolicking children were aught but pure-blooded white. Roscoe
Scandwell, grandfather, was pure white; Martha three-quarters
white; the many sons and daughters of them seven-eighths white; the
grandchildren graded up to fifteen-sixteenths white, or, in the
cases when their seven-eighths fathers and mothers had married
seven-eighths, themselves fourteen-sixteenths or seven-eighths
white. On both sides the stock was good, Roscoe straight descended
from the New England Puritans, Martha no less straight descended
from the royal chief-stocks of Hawaii whose genealogies were
chanted in males a thousand years before written speech was
acquired.

In the distance a machine stopped and deposited a woman whose
utmost years might have been guessed as sixty, who walked across
the lawn as lightly as a well-cared-for woman of forty, and whose
actual calendar age was sixty-eight. Martha rose from her seat to
greet her, in the hearty Hawaiian way, arms about, lips on lips,
faces eloquent and bodies no less eloquent with sincereness and
frank excessiveness of emotion. And it was "Sister Bella," and
"Sister Martha," back and forth, intermingled with almost
incoherent inquiries about each other, and about Uncle This and
Brother That and Aunt Some One Else, until, the first tremulousness
of meeting over, eyes moist with tenderness of love, they sat
gazing at each other across their teacups. Apparently, they had
not seen nor embraced for years. In truth, two months marked the
interval of their separation. And one was sixty-four, the other
sixty-eight. But the thorough comprehension resided in the fact
that in each of them one-fourth of them was the sun-warm, love-warm
heart of Hawaii.

The children flooded about Aunt Bella like a rising tide and were
capaciously hugged and kissed ere they departed with their nurses
to the swimming beach.

"I thought I'd run out to the beach for several days--the trades
had stopped blowing," Martha explained.

"You've been here two weeks already," Bella smiled fondly at her
younger sister. "Brother Edward told me. He met me at the steamer
and insisted on running me out first of all to see Louise and
Dorothy and that first grandchild of his. He's as mad as a silly
hatter about it."

"Mercy!" Martha exclaimed. "Two weeks! I had not thought it that
long."

"Where's Annie?--and Margaret?" Bella asked.

Martha shrugged her voluminous shoulders with voluminous and
forgiving affection for her wayward, matronly daughters who left
their children in her care for the afternoon.

"Margaret's at a meeting of the Out-door Circle--they're planning
the planting of trees and hibiscus all along both sides of Kalakaua
Avenue," she said. "And Annie's wearing out eighty dollars' worth
of tyres to collect seventy-five dollars for the British Red Cross-
-this is their tag day, you know."

"Roscoe must be very proud," Bella said, and observed the bright
glow of pride that appeared in her sister's eyes. "I got the news
in San Francisco of Ho-o-la-a's first dividend. Remember when I
put a thousand in it at seventy-five cents for poor Abbie's
children, and said I'd sell when it went to ten dollars?"

"And everybody laughed at you, and at anybody who bought a share,"
Martha nodded. "But Roscoe knew. It's selling to-day at twenty-
four."

"I sold mine from the steamer by wireless--at twenty even," Bella
continued. "And now Abbie's wildly dressmaking. She's going with
May and Tootsie to Paris."

"And Carl?" Martha queried.

"Oh, he'll finish Yale all right--"

"Which he would have done anyway, and you KNOW it," Martha charged,
lapsing charmingly into twentieth-century slang.

Bella affirmed her guilt of intention of paying the way of her
school friend's son through college, and added complacently:

"Just the same it was nicer to have Ho-o-la-a pay for it. In a
way, you see, Roscoe is doing it, because it was his judgment I
trusted to when I made the investment." She gazed slowly about
her, her eyes taking in, not merely the beauty and comfort and
repose of all they rested on, but the immensity of beauty and
comfort and repose represented by them, scattered in similar oases
all over the islands. She sighed pleasantly and observed: "All
our husbands have done well by us with what we brought them."

"And happily . . . " Martha agreed, then suspended her utterance
with suspicious abruptness.

"And happily, all of us, except Sister Bella," Bella forgivingly
completed the thought for her.

"It was too bad, that marriage," Martha murmured, all softness of
sympathy. "You were so young. Uncle Robert should never have made
you."

"I was only nineteen," Bella nodded. "But it was not George
Castner's fault. And look what he, out of she grave, has done for
me. Uncle Robert was wise. He knew George had the far-away vision
of far ahead, the energy, and the steadiness. He saw, even then,
and that's fifty years ago, the value of the Nahala water-rights
which nobody else valued then. They thought he was struggling to
buy the cattle range. He struggled to buy the future of the water-
-and how well he succeeded you know. I'm almost ashamed to think
of my income sometimes. No; whatever else, the unhappiness of our
marriage was not due to George. I could have lived happily with
him, I know, even to this day, had he lived." She shook her head
slowly. "No; it was not his fault. Nor anybody's. Not even mine.
If it was anybody's fault--" The wistful fondness of her smile
took the sting out of what she was about to say. "If it was
anybody's fault it was Uncle John's."

"Uncle John's!" Martha cried with sharp surprise. "If it had to be
one or the other, I should have said Uncle Robert. But Uncle
John!"

Bella smiled with slow positiveness.

"But it was Uncle Robert who made you marry George Castner," her
sister urged.

"That is true," Bella nodded corroboration. "But it was not the
matter of a husband, but of a horse. I wanted to borrow a horse
from Uncle John, and Uncle John said yes. That is how it all
happened."

A silence fell, pregnant and cryptic, and, while the voices of the
children and the soft mandatory protests of the Asiatic maids drew
nearer from the beach, Martha Scandwell felt herself vibrant and
tremulous with sudden resolve of daring. She waved the children
away.

"Run along, dears, run along, Grandma and Aunt Bella want to talk."

And as the shrill, sweet treble of child voices ebbed away across
the lawn, Martha, with scrutiny of the heart, observed the sadness
of the lines graven by secret woe for half a century in her
sister's face. For nearly fifty years had she watched those lines.
She steeled all the melting softness of the Hawaiian of her to
break the half-century of silence.

"Bella," she said. "We never know. You never spoke. But we
wondered, oh, often and often--"

"And never asked," Bella murmured gratefully.

"But I am asking now, at the last. This is our twilight. Listen
to them! Sometimes it almost frightens me to think that they are
grandchildren, MY grandchildren--I, who only the other day, it
would seem, was as heart-free, leg-free, care-free a girl as ever
bestrode a horse, or swam in the big surf, or gathered opihis at
low tide, or laughed at a dozen lovers. And here in our twilight
let us forget everything save that I am your dear sister as you are
mine."

The eyes of both were dewy moist. Bella palpably trembled to
utterance.

"We thought it was George Castner," Martha went on; "and we could
guess the details. He was a cold man. You were warm Hawaiian. He
must have been cruel. Brother Walcott always insisted he must have
beaten you--"

"No! No!" Bella broke in. "George Castner was never a brute, a
beast. Almost have I wished, often, that he had been. He never
laid hand on me. He never raised hand to me. He never raised his
voice to me. Never--oh, can you believe it?--do, please, sister,
believe it--did we have a high word nor a cross word. But that
house of his, of ours, at Nahala, was grey. All the colour of it
was grey and cool, and chill, while I was bright with all colours
of sun, and earth, and blood, and birth. It was very cold, grey
cold, with that cold grey husband of mine at Nahala. You know he
was grey, Martha. Grey like those portraits of Emerson we used to
see at school. His skin was grey. Sun and weather and all hours
in the saddle could never tan it. And he was as grey inside as
out.

"And I was only nineteen when Uncle Robert decided on the marriage.
How was I to know? Uncle Robert talked to me. He pointed out how
the wealth and property of Hawaii was already beginning to pass
into the hands of the haoles" (Whites). "The Hawaiian chiefs let
their possessions slip away from them. The Hawaiian chiefesses,
who married haoles, had their possessions, under the management of
their haole husbands, increase prodigiously. He pointed back to
the original Grandfather Roger Wilton, who had taken Grandmother
Wilton's poor mauka lands and added to them and built up about them
the Kilohana Ranch--"

"Even then it was second only to the Parker Ranch," Martha
interrupted proudly.

"And he told me that had our father, before he died, been as far-
seeing as grandfather, half the then Parker holdings would have
been added to Kilohana, making Kilohana first. And he said that
never, for ever and ever, would beef be cheaper. And he said that
the big future of Hawaii would be in sugar. That was fifty years
ago, and he has been more than proved right. And he said that the
young haole, George Castner, saw far, and would go far, and that
there were many girls of us, and that the Kilohana lands ought by
rights to go to the boys, and that if I married George my future
was assured in the biggest way.

"I was only nineteen. Just back from the Royal Chief School--that
was before our girls went to the States for their education. You
were among the first, Sister Martha, who got their education on the
mainland. And what did I know of love and lovers, much less of
marriage? All women married. It was their business in life.
Mother and grandmother, all the way back they had married. It was
my business in life to marry George Castner. Uncle Robert said so
in his wisdom, and I knew he was very wise. And I went to live
with my husband in the grey house at Nahala.

"You remember it. No trees, only the rolling grass lands, the high
mountains behind, the sea beneath, and the wind!--the Waimea and
Nahala winds, we got them both, and the kona wind as well. Yet
little would I have minded them, any more than we minded them at
Kilohana, or than they minded them at Mana, had not Nahala itself
been so grey, and husband George so grey. We were alone. He was
managing Nahala for the Glenns, who had gone back to Scotland.
Eighteen hundred a year, plus beef, horses, cowboy service, and the
ranch house, was what he received--"

"It was a high salary in those days," Martha said.

"And for George Castner, and the service he gave, it was very
cheap," Bella defended. "I lived with him for three years. There
was never a morning that he was out of his bed later than half-past
four. He was the soul of devotion to his employers. Honest to a
penny in his accounts, he gave them full measure and more of his
time and energy. Perhaps that was what helped make our life so
grey. But listen, Martha. Out of his eighteen hundred, he laid
aside sixteen hundred each year. Think of it! The two of us lived
on two hundred a year. Luckily he did not drink or smoke. Also,
we dressed out of it as well. I made my own dresses. You can
imagine them. Outside of the cowboys who chored the firewood, I
did the work. I cooked, and baked, and scrubbed--"

"You who had never known anything but servants from the time you
were born!" Martha pitied. "Never less than a regiment of them at
Kilohana."

"Oh, but it was the bare, naked, pinching meagreness of it!" Bella
cried out. "How far I was compelled to make a pound of coffee go!
A broom worn down to nothing before a new one was bought! And
beef! Fresh beef and jerky, morning, noon, and night! And
porridge! Never since have I eaten porridge or any breakfast
food."

She arose suddenly and walked a dozen steps away to gaze a moment
with unseeing eyes at the colour-lavish reef while she composed
herself. And she returned to her seat with the splendid, sure,
gracious, high-breasted, noble-headed port of which no out-breeding
can ever rob the Hawaiian woman. Very haole was Bella Castner,
fair-skinned, fine-textured. Yet, as she returned, the high pose
of head, the level-lidded gaze of her long brown eyes under royal
arches of eyebrows, the softly set lines of her small mouth that
fairly sang sweetness of kisses after sixty-eight years--all made
her the very picture of a chiefess of old Hawaii full-bursting
through her ampleness of haole blood. Taller she was than her
sister Martha, if anything more queenly.

"You know we were notorious as poor feeders," Bella laughed lightly
enough. "It was many a mile on either side from Nahala to the next
roof. Belated travellers, or storm-bound ones, would, on occasion,
stop with us overnight. And you know the lavishness of the big
ranches, then and now. How we were the laughing-stock! 'What do
we care!' George would say. 'They live to-day and now. Twenty
years from now will be our turn, Bella. They will be where they
are now, and they will eat out of our hand. We will be compelled
to feed them, they will need to be fed, and we will feed them well;
for we will be rich, Bella, so rich that I am afraid to tell you.
But I know what I know, and you must have faith in me.'

"George was right. Twenty years afterward, though he did not live
to see it, my income was a thousand a month. Goodness! I do not
know what it is to-day. But I was only nineteen, and I would say
to George: 'Now! now! We live now. We may not be alive twenty
years from now. I do want a new broom. And there is a third-rate
coffee that is only two cents a pound more than the awful stuff we
are using. Why couldn't I fry eggs in butter--now? I should
dearly love at least one new tablecloth. Our linen! I'm ashamed
to put a guest between the sheets, though heaven knows they dare
come seldom enough.'

"'Be patient, Bella,' he would reply. 'In a little while, in only
a few years, those that scorn to sit at our table now, or sleep
between our sheets, will be proud of an invitation--those of them
who will not be dead. You remember how Stevens passed out last
year--free-living and easy, everybody's friend but his own. The
Kohala crowd had to bury him, for he left nothing but debts. Watch
the others going the same pace. There's your brother Hal. He
can't keep it up and live five years, and he's breaking his uncles'
hearts. And there's Prince Lilolilo. Dashes by me with half a
hundred mounted, able-bodied, roystering kanakas in his train who
would be better at hard work and looking after their future, for he
will never be king of Hawaii. He will not live to be king of
Hawaii.'

"George was right. Brother Hal died. So did Prince Lilolilo. But
George was not ALL right. He, who neither drank nor smoked, who
never wasted the weight of his arms in an embrace, nor the touch of
his lips a second longer than the most perfunctory of kisses, who
was invariably up before cockcrow and asleep ere the kerosene lamp
had a tenth emptied itself, and who never thought to die, was dead
even more quickly than Brother Hal and Prince Lilolilo.

"'Be patient, Bella,' Uncle Robert would say to me. 'George
Castner is a coming man. I have chosen well for you. Your
hardships now are the hardships on the way to the promised land.
Not always will the Hawaiians rule in Hawaii. Just as they let
their wealth slip out of their hands, so will their rule slip out
of their hands. Political power and the land always go together.
There will be great changes, revolutions no one knows how many nor
of what sort, save that in the end the haole will possess the land
and the rule. And in that day you may well be first lady of
Hawaii, just as surely as George Castner will be ruler of Hawaii.
It is written in the books. It is ever so where the haole
conflicts with the easier races. I, your Uncle Robert, who am
half-Hawaiian and half-haole, know whereof I speak. Be patient,
Bella, be patient.'

"'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say; and I knew his heart was
tender for me. Thank God, he never told me to be patient. He
knew. He was very wise. He was warm human, and, therefore, wiser
than Uncle Robert and George Castner, who sought the thing, not the
spirit, who kept records in ledgers rather than numbers of heart-
beats breast to breast, who added columns of figures rather than
remembered embraces and endearments of look and speech and touch.
'Dear Bella,' Uncle John would say. He knew. You have heard
always how he was the lover of the Princess Naomi. He was a true
lover. He loved but the once. After her death they said he was
eccentric. He was. He was the one lover, once and always.
Remember that taboo inner room of his at Kilohana that we entered
only after his death and found it his shrine to her. 'Dear Bella,'
it was all he ever said to me, but I knew he knew.

"And I was nineteen, and sun-warm Hawaiian in spite of my three-
quarters haole blood, and I knew nothing save my girlhood
splendours at Kilohana and my Honolulu education at the Royal Chief
School, and my grey husband at Nahala with his grey preachments and
practices of sobriety and thrift, and those two childless uncles of
mine, the one with far, cold vision, the other the broken-hearted,
for-ever-dreaming lover of a dead princess.

"Think of that grey house! I, who had known the ease and the
delights and the ever-laughing joys of Kilohana, and of the Parkers
at old Mana, and of Puuwaawaa! You remember. We did live in
feudal spaciousness in those days. Would you, can you, believe it,
Martha--at Nahala the only sewing machine I had was one of those
the early missionaries brought, a tiny, crazy thing that one
cranked around by hand!

"Robert and John had each given Husband George five thousand
dollars at my marriage. But he had asked for it to be kept secret.
Only the four of us knew. And while I sewed my cheap holokus on
that crazy machine, he bought land with the money--the upper Nahala
lands, you know--a bit at a time, each purchase a hard-driven
bargain, his face the very face of poverty. To-day the Nahala
Ditch alone pays me forty thousand a year.

"But was it worth it? I starved. If only once, madly, he had
crushed me in his arms! If only once he could have lingered with
me five minutes from his own business or from his fidelity to his
employers! Sometimes I could have screamed, or showered the
eternal bowl of hot porridge into his face, or smashed the sewing
machine upon the floor and danced a hula on it, just to make him
burst out and lose his temper and be human, be a brute, be a man of
some sort instead of a grey, frozen demi-god."

Bella's tragic expression vanished, and she laughed outright in
sheer genuineness of mirthful recollection.

"And when I was in such moods he would gravely look me over,
gravely feel my pulse, examine my tongue, gravely dose me with
castor oil, and gravely put me to bed early with hot stove-lids,
and assure me that I'd feel better in the morning. Early to bed!
Our wildest sitting up was nine o'clock. Eight o'clock was our
regular bed-time. It saved kerosene. We did not eat dinner at
Nahala--remember the great table at Kilohana where we did have
dinner? But Husband George and I had supper. And then he would
sit close to the lamp on one side the table and read old borrowed
magazines for an hour, while I sat on the other side and darned his
socks and underclothing. He always wore such cheap, shoddy stuff.
And when he went to bed, I went to bed. No wastage of kerosene
with only one to benefit by it. And he went to bed always the same
way, winding up his watch, entering the day's weather in his diary,
and taking off his shoes, right foot first invariably, left foot
second, and placing them just so, side by side, on the floor, at
the foot of the bed, on his side.

"He was the cleanest man I ever knew. He never wore the same
undergarment a second time. I did the washing. He was so clean it
hurt. He shaved twice a day. He used more water on his body than
any kanaka. He did more work than any two haoles. And he saw the
future of the Nahala water."

"And he made you wealthy, but did not make you happy," Martha
observed.

Bella sighed and nodded.

"What is wealth after all, Sister Martha? My new Pierce-Arrow came
down on the steamer with me. My third in two years. But oh, all
the Pierce-Arrows and all the incomes in the world compared with a
lover!--the one lover, the one mate, to be married to, to toil
beside and suffer and joy beside, the one male man lover husband .
. . "

Her voice trailed off, and the sisters sat in soft silence while an
ancient crone, staff in hand, twisted, doubled, and shrunken under
a hundred years of living, hobbled across the lawn to them. Her
eyes, withered to scarcely more than peepholes, were sharp as a
mongoose's, and at Bella's feet she first sank down, in pure
Hawaiian mumbling and chanting a toothless mele of Bella and
Bella's ancestry and adding to it an extemporized welcome back to
Hawaii after her absence across the great sea to California. And
while she chanted her mele, the old crone's shrewd fingers lomied
or massaged Bella's silk-stockinged legs from ankle and calf to
knee and thigh.

Both Bella's and Martha's eyes were luminous-moist, as the old
retainer repeated the lomi and the mele to Martha, and as they
talked with her in the ancient tongue and asked the immemorial
questions about her health and age and great-great-grandchildren--
she who had lomied them as babies in the great house at Kilohana,
as her ancestresses had lomied their ancestresses back through the
unnumbered generations. The brief duty visit over, Martha arose
and accompanied her back to the bungalow, putting money into her
hand, commanding proud and beautiful Japanese housemaids to wait
upon the dilapidated aborigine with poi, which is compounded of the
roots of the water lily, with iamaka, which is raw fish, and with
pounded kukui nut and limu, which latter is seawood tender to the
toothless, digestible and savoury. It was the old feudal tie, the
faithfulness of the commoner to the chief, the responsibility of
the chief to the commoner; and Martha, three-quarters haole with
the Anglo-Saxon blood of New England, was four-quarters Hawaiian in
her remembrance and observance of the well-nigh vanished customs of
old days.

As she came back across the lawn to the hau tree, Bella's eyes
dwelt upon the moving authenticity of her and of the blood of her,
and embraced her and loved her. Shorter than Bella was Martha, a
trifle, but the merest trifle, less queenly of port; but
beautifully and generously proportioned, mellowed rather than
dismantled by years, her Polynesian chiefess figure eloquent and
glorious under the satisfying lines of a half-fitting, grandly
sweeping, black-silk holoku trimmed with black lace more costly
than a Paris gown.

And as both sisters resumed their talk, an observer would have
noted the striking resemblance of their pure, straight profiles, of
their broad cheek-bones, of their wide and lofty foreheads, of
their iron-grey abundance of hair, of their sweet-lipped mouths set
with the carriage of decades of assured and accomplished pride, and
of their lovely slender eye-rows arched over equally lovely long
brown eyes. The hands of both of them, little altered or defaced
by age, were wonderful in their slender, tapering finger-tips,
love-lomied and love-formed while they were babies by old Hawaiian
women like to the one even then eating poi and iamaka and limu in
the house.

"I had a year of it," Bella resumed, "and, do you know, things were
beginning to come right. I was beginning to draw to Husband
George. Women are so made, I was such a woman at any rate. For he
was good. He was just. All the old sterling Puritan virtues were
his. I was coming to draw to him, to like him, almost, might I
say, to love him. And had not Uncle John loaned me that horse, I
know that I would have truly loved him and have lived ever happily
with him--in a quiet sort of way, of course.

"You see, I knew nothing else, nothing different, nothing better in
the way of men. I came gladly to look across the table at him
while he read in the brief interval between supper and bed, gladly
to listen for and to catch the beat of his horse's hoofs coming
home at night from his endless riding over the ranch. And his
scant praise was praise indeed, that made me tingle with happiness-
-yes, Sister Martha, I knew what it was to blush under his precise,
just praise for the things I had done right or correctly.

"And all would have been well for the rest of our lives together,
except that he had to take steamer to Honolulu. It was business.
He was to be gone two weeks or longer, first, for the Glenns in
ranch affairs, and next for himself, to arrange the purchase of
still more of the upper Nahala lands. Do you know! he bought lots
of the wilder and up-and-down lands, worthless for aught save
water, and the very heart of the watershed, for as low as five and
ten cents an acre. And he suggested I needed a change. I wanted
to go with him to Honolulu. But, with an eye to expense, he
decided Kilohana for me. Not only would it cost him nothing for me
to visit at the old home, but he saved the price of the poor food I
should have eaten had I remained alone at Nahala, which meant the
purchase price of more Nahala acreage. And at Kilohana Uncle John
said yes, and loaned me the horse.

"Oh, it was like heaven, getting back, those first several days.
It was difficult to believe at first that there was so much food in
all the world. The enormous wastage of the kitchen appalled me. I
saw waste everywhere, so well trained had I been by Husband George.
Why, out in the servants' quarters the aged relatives and most
distant hangers-on of the servants fed better than George and I
ever fed. You remember our Kilohana way, same as the Parker way, a
bullock killed for every meal, fresh fish by runners from the ponds
of Waipio and Kiholo, the best and rarest at all times of
everything . . .

"And love, our family way of loving! You know what Uncle John was.
And Brother Walcott was there, and Brother Edward, and all the
younger sisters save you and Sally away at school. And Aunt
Elizabeth, and Aunt Janet with her husband and all her children on
a visit. It was arms around, and perpetual endearings, and all
that I had missed for a weary twelvemonth. I was thirsty for it.
I was like a survivor from the open boat falling down on the sand
and lapping the fresh bubbling springs at the roots of the palms.

"And THEY came, riding up from Kawaihae, where they had landed from
the royal yacht, the whole glorious cavalcade of them, two by two,
flower-garlanded, young and happy, gay, on Parker Ranch horses,
thirty of them in the party, a hundred Parker Ranch cowboys and as
many more of their own retainers--a royal progress. It was
Princess Lihue's progress, of course, she flaming and passing as we
all knew with the dreadful tuberculosis; but with her were her
nephews, Prince Lilolilo, hailed everywhere as the next king, and
his brothers, Prince Kahekili and Prince Kamalau. And with the
Princess was Ella Higginsworth, who rightly claimed higher chief
blood lines through the Kauai descent than belonged to the reigning
family, and Dora Niles, and Emily Lowcroft, and . . . oh, why
enumerate them all! Ella Higginsworth and I had been room-mates at
the Royal Chief School. And there was a great resting time for an
hour--no luau, for the luau awaited them at the Parkers'--but beer
and stronger drinks for the men, and lemonade, and oranges, and
refreshing watermelon for the women.

"And it was arms around with Ella Higginsworth and me, and the
Princess, who remembered me, and all the other girls and women, and
Ella spoke to the Princess, and the Princess herself invited me to
the progress, joining them at Mana whence they would depart two
days later. And I was mad, mad with it all--I, from a twelvemonth
of imprisonment at grey Nahala. And I was nineteen yet, just
turning twenty within the week.

"Oh, I had not thought of what was to happen. So occupied was I
with the women that I did not see Lilolilo, except at a distance,
bulking large and tall above the other men. But I had never been
on a progress. I had seen them entertained at Kilohana and Mana,
but I had been too young to be invited along, and after that it had
been school and marriage. I knew what it would be like--two weeks
of paradise, and little enough for another twelve months at Nahala.

"And I asked Uncle John to lend me a horse, which meant three
horses of course--one mounted cowboy and a pack horse to accompany
me. No roads then. No automobiles. And the horse for myself! It
was Hilo. You don't remember him. You were away at school then,
and before you came home, the following year, he'd broken his back
and his rider's neck wild-cattle-roping up Mauna Kea. You heard
about it--that young American naval officer."

"Lieutenant Bowsfield," Martha nodded.

"But Hilo! I was the first woman on his back. He was a three-
year-old, almost a four-year, and just broken. So black and in
such a vigour of coat that the high lights on him clad him in
shimmering silver. He was the biggest riding animal on the ranch,
descended from the King's Sparklingdow with a range mare for dam,
and roped wild only two weeks before. I never have seen so
beautiful a horse. He had the round, deep-chested, big-hearted,
well-coupled body of the ideal mountain pony, and his head and neck
were true thoroughbred, slender, yet full, with lovely alert ears
not too small to be vicious nor too large to be stubborn mulish.
And his legs and feet were lovely too, unblemished, sure and firm,
with long springy pasterns that made him a wonder of ease under the
saddle."

"I remember hearing Prince Lilolilo tell Uncle John that you were
the best woman rider in all Hawaii," Martha interrupted to say.
"That was two years afterward when I was back from school and while
you were still living at Nahala."

"Lilolilo said that!" Bella cried. Almost as with a blush, her
long, brown eyes were illumined, as she bridged the years to her
lover near half a century dead and dust. With the gentleness of
modesty so innate in the women of Hawaii, she covered her
spontaneous exposure of her heart with added panegyric of Hilo.

"Oh, when he ran with me up the long-grass slopes, and down the
long-grass slopes, it was like hurdling in a dream, for he cleared
the grass at every bound, leaping like a deer, a rabbit, or a fox-
terrier--you know how they do. And cut up, and prance, and high
life! He was a mount for a general, for a Napoleon or a Kitchener.
And he had, not a wicked eye, but, oh, such a roguish eye,
intelligent and looking as if it cherished a joke behind and wanted
to laugh or to perpetrate it. And I asked Uncle John for Hilo.
And Uncle John looked at me, and I looked at him; and, though he
did not say it, I knew he was FEELING 'Dear Bella,' and I knew,
somewhere in his seeing of me, was all his vision of the Princess
Naomi. And Uncle John said yes. That is how it happened.

"But he insisted that I should try Hilo out--myself, rather--at
private rehearsal. He was a handful, a glorious handful. But not
vicious, not malicious. He got away from me over and over again,
but I never let him know. I was not afraid, and that helped me
keep always a feel of him that prevented him from thinking that he
was even a jump ahead of me.

"I have often wondered if Uncle John dreamed of what possibly might
happen. I know I had no thought of it myself, that day I rode
across and joined the Princess at Mana. Never was there such
festal time. You know the grand way the old Parkers had of
entertaining. The pig-sticking and wild-cattle-shooting, the
horse-breaking and the branding. The servants' quarters
overflowing. Parker cowboys in from everywhere. And all the girls
from Waimea up, and the girls from Waipio, and Honokaa, and
Paauilo--I can see them yet, sitting in long rows on top the stone
walls of the breaking pen and making leis" (flower garlands) "for
their cowboy lovers. And the nights, the perfumed nights, the
chanting of the meles and the dancing of the hulas, and the big
Mana grounds with lovers everywhere strolling two by two under the
trees.

"And the Prince . . . " Bella paused, and for a long minute her
small fine teeth, still perfect, showed deep in her underlip as she
sought and won control and sent her gaze vacantly out across the
far blue horizon. As she relaxed, her eyes came back to her
sister.

"He was a prince, Martha. You saw him at Kilohana before . . .
after you came home from seminary. He filled the eyes of any
woman, yes, and of any man. Twenty-five he was, in all-glorious
ripeness of man, great and princely in body as he was great and
princely in spirit. No matter how wild the fun, how reckless mad
the sport, he never seemed to forget that he was royal, and that
all his forebears had been high chiefs even to that first one they
sang in the genealogies, who had navigated his double-canoes to
Tahiti and Raiatea and back again. He was gracious, sweet, kindly
comradely, all friendliness--and severe, and stern, and harsh, if
he were crossed too grievously. It is hard to express what I mean.
He was all man, man, man, and he was all prince, with a strain of
the merry boy in him, and the iron in him that would have made him
a good and strong king of Hawaii had he come to the throne.

"I can see him yet, as I saw him that first day and touched his
hand and talked with him . . . few words and bashful, and anything
but a year-long married woman to a grey haole at grey Nahala. Half
a century ago it was, that meeting--you remember how our young men
then dressed in white shoes and trousers, white silk shirts, with
slashed around the middle the gorgeously colourful Spanish sashes--
and for half a century that picture of him has not faded in my
heart. He was the centre of a group on the lawn, and I was being
brought by Ella Higginsworth to be presented. The Princess Lihue
had just called some teasing chaff to her which had made her halt
to respond and left me halted a pace in front of her.

"His glance chanced to light on me, alone there, perturbed,
embarrassed. Oh, how I see him!--his head thrown back a little,
with that high, bright, imperious, and utterly care-free poise that
was so usual of him. Our eyes met. His head bent forward, or
straightened to me, I don't know what happened. Did he command?
Did I obey? I do not know. I know only that I was good to look
upon, crowned with fragrant maile, clad in Princess Naomi's
wonderful holoku loaned me by Uncle John from his taboo room; and I
know that I advanced alone to him across the Mana lawn, and that he
stepped forth from those about him to meet me half-way. We came to
each other across the grass, unattended, as if we were coming to
each other across our lives.

"--Was I very beautiful, Sister Martha, when I was young? I do not
know. I don't know. But in that moment, with all his beauty and
truly royal-manness crossing to me and penetrating to the heart of
me, I felt a sudden sense of beauty in myself--how shall I say? as
if in him and from him perfection were engendered and conjured
within myself.

"No word was spoken. But, oh, I know I raised my face in frank
answer to the thunder and trumpets of the message unspoken, and
that, had it been death for that one look and that one moment I
could not have refrained from the gift of myself that must have
been in my face and eyes, in the very body of me that breathed so
high.

"Was I beautiful, very beautiful, Martha, when I was nineteen, just
turning into twenty?"

And Martha, three-score and four, looked upon Bella, three-score
and eight, and nodded genuine affirmation, and to herself added the
appreciation of the instant in what she beheld--Bella's neck, still
full and shapely, longer than the ordinary Hawaiian woman's neck, a
pillar that carried regally her high-cheeked, high-browed, high
chiefess face and head; Bella's hair, high-piled, intact, sparkling
the silver of the years, ringleted still and contrasting definitely
and sharply with her clean, slim, black brows and deep brown eyes.
And Martha's glance, in modest overwhelming of modesty by what she
saw, dropped down the splendid breast of her and generously true
lines of body to the feet, silken clad, high-heeled-slippered,
small, plump, with an almost Spanish arch and faultlessness of
instep.

"When one is young, the one young time!" Bella laughed. "Lilolilo
was a prince. I came to know his every feature and their every
phase . . . afterward, in our wonder days and nights by the singing
waters, by the slumber-drowsy surfs, and on the mountain ways. I
knew his fine, brave eyes, with their straight, black brows, the
nose of him that was assuredly a Kamehameha nose, and the last,
least, lovable curve of his mouth. There is no mouth more
beautiful than the Hawaiian, Martha.

"And his body. He was a king of athletes, from his wicked, wayward
hair to his ankles of bronzed steel. Just the other day I heard
one of the Wilder grandsons referred to as 'The Prince of Harvard.'
Mercy! What would they, what could they have called my Lilolilo
could they have matched him against this Wilder lad and all his
team at Harvard!"

Bella ceased and breathed deeply, the while she clasped her fine
small hands in her ample silken lap. But her pink fairness blushed
faintly through her skin and warmed her eyes as she relived her
prince-days.

"Well--you have guessed?" Bella said, with defiant shrug of
shoulders and a straight gaze into her sister's eyes. "We rode out
from gay Mana and continued the gay progress--down the lava trails
to Kiholo to the swimming and the fishing and the feasting and the
sleeping in the warm sand under the palms; and up to Puuwaawaa, and
more pig-sticking, and roping and driving, and wild mutton from the
upper pasture-lands; and on through Kona, now mauka"
(mountainward), "now down to the King's palace at Kailua, and to
the swimming at Keauhou, and to Kealakekua Bay, and Napoopoo and
Honaunau. And everywhere the people turning out, in their hands
gifts of flowers, and fruit, and fish, and pig, in their hearts
love and song, their heads bowed in obeisance to the royal ones
while their lips ejaculated exclamations of amazement or chanted
meles of old and unforgotten days.

"What would you, Sister Martha? You know what we Hawaiians are.
You know what we were half a hundred years ago. Lilolilo was
wonderful. I was reckless. Lilolilo of himself could make any
woman reckless. I was twice reckless, for I had cold, grey Nahala
to spur me on. I knew. I had never a doubt. Never a hope.
Divorces in those days were undreamed. The wife of George Castner
could never be queen of Hawaii, even if Uncle Robert's prophesied
revolutions were delayed, and if Lilolilo himself became king. But
I never thought of the throne. What I wanted would have been the
queendom of being Lilolilo's wife and mate. But I made no mistake.
What was impossible was impossible, and I dreamed no false dream.

"It was the very atmosphere of love. And Lilolilo was a lover. I
was for ever crowned with leis by him, and he had his runners bring
me leis all the way from the rose-gardens of Mana--you remember
them; fifty miles across the lava and the ranges, dewy fresh as the
moment they were plucked, in their jewel-cases of banana bark;
yard-long they were, the tiny pink buds like threaded beads of
Neapolitan coral. And at the luaus" (feasts) the for ever never-
ending luaus, I must be seated on Lilolilo's Makaloa mat, the
Prince's mat, his alone and taboo to any lesser mortal save by his
own condescension and desire. And I must dip my fingers into his
own pa wai holoi" (finger-bowl) "where scented flower petals
floated in the warm water. Yes, and careless that all should see
his extended favour, I must dip into his pa paakai for my pinches
of red salt, and limu, and kukui nut and chili pepper; and into his
ipu kai" (fish sauce dish) "of kou wood that the great Kamehameha
himself had eaten from on many a similar progress. And it was the
same for special delicacies that were for Lilolilo and the Princess
alone--for his nelu, and the ake, and the palu, and the alaala.
And his kahilis were waved over me, and his attendants were mine,
and he was mine; and from my flower-crowned hair to my happy feet I
was a woman loved."

Once again Bella's small teeth pressed into her underlip, as she
gazed vacantly seaward and won control of herself and her memories.

"It was on, and on, through all Kona, and all Kau, from Hoopuloa
and Kapua to Honuapo and Punaluu, a life-time of living compressed
into two short weeks. A flower blooms but once. That was my time
of bloom--Lilolilo beside me, myself on my wonderful Hilo, a queen,
not of Hawaii, but of Lilolilo and Love. He said I was a bubble of
colour and beauty on the black back of Leviathan; that I was a
fragile dewdrop on the smoking crest of a lava flow; that I was a
rainbow riding the thunder cloud . . . "

Bella paused for a moment.

"I shall tell you no more of what he said to me," she declared
gravely; "save that the things he said were fire of love and
essence of beauty, and that he composed hulas to me, and sang them
to me, before all, of nights under the stars as we lay on our mats
at the feasting; and I on the Makaloa mat of Lilolilo.

"And it was on to Kilauea--the dream so near its ending; and of
course we tossed into the pit of sea-surging lava our offerings to
the Fire-Goddess of maile leis and of fish and hard poi wrapped
moist in the ti leaves. And we continued down through old Puna,
and feasted and danced and sang at Kohoualea and Kamaili and
Opihikao, and swam in the clear, sweet-water pools of Kalapana.
And in the end came to Hilo by the sea.

"It was the end. We had never spoken. It was the end recognized
and unmentioned. The yacht waited. We were days late. Honolulu
called, and the news was that the King had gone particularly
pupule" (insane), "that there were Catholic and Protestant
missionary plottings, and that trouble with France was brewing. As
they had landed at Kawaihae two weeks before with laughter and
flowers and song, so they departed from Hilo. It was a merry
parting, full of fun and frolic and a thousand last messages and
reminders and jokes. The anchor was broken out to a song of
farewell from Lilolilo's singing boys on the quarterdeck, while we,
in the big canoes and whaleboats, saw the first breeze fill the
vessel's sails and the distance begin to widen.

"Through all the confusion and excitement, Lilolilo, at the rail,
who must say last farewells and quip last jokes to many, looked
squarely down at me. On his head he wore my ilima lei, which I had
made for him and placed there. And into the canoes, to the
favoured ones, they on the yacht began tossing their many leis. I
had no expectancy of hope . . . And yet I hoped, in a small wistful
way that I know did not show in my face, which was as proud and
merry as any there. But Lilolilo did what I knew he would do, what
I had known from the first he would do. Still looking me squarely
and honestly in the eyes, he took my beautiful ilima lei from his
head and tore it across. I saw his lips shape, but not utter
aloud, the single word pau" (finish). "Still looking at me, he
broke both parts of the lei in two again and tossed the deliberate
fragments, not to me, but down overside into the widening water.
Pau. It was finished . . . "

For a long space Bella's vacant gaze rested on the sea horizon.
Martha ventured no mere voice expression of the sympathy that
moistened her own eyes.

"And I rode on that day, up the old bad trail along the Hamakua
coast," Bella resumed, with a voice at first singularly dry and
harsh. "That first day was not so hard. I was numb. I was too
full with the wonder of all I had to forget to know that I had to
forget it. I spent the night at Laupahoehoe. Do you know, I had
expected a sleepless night. Instead, weary from the saddle, still
numb, I slept the night through as if I had been dead.

"But the next day, in driving wind and drenching rain! How it blew
and poured! The trail was really impassable. Again and again our
horses went down. At fist the cowboy Uncle John had loaned me with
the horses protested, then he followed stolidly in the rear,
shaking his head, and, I know, muttering over and over that I was
pupule. The pack horse was abandoned at Kukuihaele. We almost
swam up Mud Lane in a river of mud. At Waimea the cowboy had to
exchange for a fresh mount. But Hilo lasted through. From
daybreak till midnight I was in the saddle, till Uncle John, at
Kilohana, took me off my horse, in his arms, and carried me in, and
routed the women from their beds to undress me and lomi me, while
he plied me with hot toddies and drugged me to sleep and
forgetfulness. I know I must have babbled and raved. Uncle John
must have guessed. But never to another, nor even to me, did he
ever breathe a whisper. Whatever he guessed he locked away in the
taboo room of Naomi.

"I do have fleeting memories of some of that day, all a broken-
hearted mad rage against fate--of my hair down and whipped wet and
stinging about me in the driving rain; of endless tears of weeping
contributed to the general deluge, of passionate outbursts and
resentments against a world all twisted and wrong, of beatings of
my hands upon my saddle pommel, of asperities to my Kilohana
cowboy, of spurs into the ribs of poor magnificent Hilo, with a
prayer on my lips, bursting out from my heart, that the spurs would
so madden him as to make him rear and fall on me and crush my body
for ever out of all beauty for man, or topple me off the trail and
finish me at the foot of the palis" (precipices), "writing pau at
the end of my name as final as the unuttered pau on Lilolilo's lips
when he tore across my ilima lei and dropped it in the sea. . . .

"Husband George was delayed in Honolulu. When he came back to
Nahala I was there waiting for him. And solemnly he embraced me,
perfunctorily kissed my lips, gravely examined my tongue, decried
my looks and state of health, and sent me to bed with hot stove-
lids and a dosage of castor oil. Like entering into the machinery
of a clock and becoming one of the cogs or wheels, inevitably and
remorselessly turning around and around, so I entered back into the
grey life of Nahala. Out of bed was Husband George at half after
four every morning, and out of the house and astride his horse at
five. There was the eternal porridge, and the horrible cheap
coffee, and the fresh beef and jerky. I cooked, and baked, and
scrubbed. I ground around the crazy hand sewing machine and made
my cheap holokus. Night after night, through the endless centuries
of two years more, I sat across the table from him until eight
o'clock, mending his cheap socks and shoddy underwear, while he
read the years' old borrowed magazines he was too thrifty to
subscribe to. And then it was bed-time--kerosene must be
economized--and he wound his watch, entered the weather in his
diary, and took off his shoes, the right shoe first, and placed
them, just so, side by side, at the foot of the bed on his side.

"But there was no more of my drawing to Husband George, as had been
the promise ere the Princess Lihue invited me on the progress and
Uncle John loaned me the horse. You see, Sister Martha, nothing
would have happened had Uncle John refused me the horse. But I had
known love, and I had known Lilolilo; and what chance, after that,
had Husband George to win from me heart of esteem or affection?
And for two years, at Nahala, I was a dead woman who somehow walked
and talked, and baked and scrubbed, and mended socks and saved
kerosene. The doctors said it was the shoddy underwear that did
for him, pursuing as always the high-mountain Nahala waters in the
drenching storms of midwinter.

"When he died, I was not sad. I had been sad too long already.
Nor was I glad. Gladness had died at Hilo when Lilolilo dropped my
ilima lei into the sea and my feet were never happy again.
Lilolilo passed within a month after Husband George. I had never
seen him since the parting at Hilo. La, la, suitors a many have I
had since; but I was like Uncle John. Mating for me was but once.
Uncle John had his Naomi room at Kilohana. I have had my Lilolilo
room for fifty years in my heart. You are the first, Sister
Martha, whom I have permitted to enter that room . . . "

A machine swung the circle of the drive, and from it, across the
lawn, approached the husband of Martha. Erect, slender, grey-
haired, of graceful military bearing, Roscoe Scandwell was a member
of the "Big Five," which, by the interlocking of interests,
determined the destinies of all Hawaii. Himself pure haole, New
England born, he kissed Bella first, arms around, full-hearty, in
the Hawaiian way. His alert eye told him that there had been a
woman talk, and, despite the signs of all generousness of emotion,
that all was well and placid in the twilight wisdom that was
theirs.

"Elsie and the younglings are coming--just got a wireless from
their steamer," he announced, after he had kissed his wife. "And
they'll be spending several days with us before they go on to
Maui."

"I was going to put you in the Rose Room, Sister Bella," Martha
Scandwell planned aloud. "But it will be better for her and the
children and the nurses and everything there, so you shall have
Queen Emma's Room."

"I had it last time, and I prefer it," Bella said.

Roscoe Scandwell, himself well taught of Hawaiian love and love-
ways, erect, slender, dignified, between the two nobly proportioned
women, an arm around each of their sumptuous waists, proceeded with
them toward the house.

WAIKIKI, HAWAII.

June 6, 1916

THE BONES OF KAHEKILI

From over the lofty Koolau Mountains, vagrant wisps of the trade
wind drifted, faintly swaying the great, unwhipped banana leaves,
rustling the palms, and fluttering and setting up a whispering
among the lace-leaved algaroba trees. Only intermittently did the
atmosphere so breathe--for breathing it was, the suspiring of the
languid, Hawaiian afternoon. In the intervals between the soft
breathings, the air grew heavy and balmy with the perfume of
flowers and the exhalations of fat, living soil.

Of humans about the low bungalow-like house, there were many; but
one only of them slept. The rest were on the tense tiptoes of
silence. At the rear of the house a tiny babe piped up a thin
blatting wail that the quickly thrust breast could not appease.
The mother, a slender hapa-haole (half-white), clad in a loose-
flowing holoku of white muslin, hastened away swiftly among the
banana and papaia trees to remove the babe's noise by distance.
Other women, hapa-haole and full native, watched her anxiously as
she fled.

At the front of the house, on the grass, squatted a score of
Hawaiians. Well-muscled, broad-shouldered, they were all strapping
men. Brown-skinned, with luminous brown eyes and black, their
features large and regular, they showed all the signs of being as
good-natured, merry-hearted, and soft-tempered as the climate. To
all of which a seeming contradiction was given by the ferociousness
of their accoutrement. Into the tops of their rough leather
leggings were thrust long knives, the handles projecting. On their
heels were huge-rowelled Spanish spurs. They had the appearance of
banditti, save for the incongruous wreaths of flowers and fragrant
maile that encircled the crowns of their flopping cowboy hats. One
of them, deliciously and roguishly handsome as a faun, with the
eyes of a faun, wore a flaming double-hibiscus bloom coquettishly
tucked over his ear. Above them, casting a shelter of shade from
the sun, grew a wide-spreading canopy of Ponciana regia, itself a
flame of blossoms, out of each of which sprang pom-poms of feathery
stamens. From far off, muffled by distance, came the faint
stamping of their tethered horses. The eyes of all were intently
fixed upon the solitary sleeper who lay on his back on a lauhala
mat a hundred feet away under the monkey-pod trees.

Large as were the Hawaiian cowboys, the sleeper was larger. Also,
as his snow-white hair and beard attested, he was much older. The
thickness of his wrist and the greatness of his fingers made
authentic the mighty frame of him hidden under loose dungaree pants
and cotton shirt, buttonless, open from midriff to Adam's apple,
exposing a chest matted with a thatch of hair as white as that of
his head and face. The depth and breadth of that chest, its
resilience, and its relaxed and plastic muscles, tokened the knotty
strength that still resided in him. Further, no bronze and beat of
sun and wind availed to hide the testimony of his skin that he was
all haole--a white man.

On his back, his great white beard, thrust skyward, untrimmed of
barbers, stiffened and subsided with every breath, while with the
outblow of every exhalation the white moustache erected
perpendicularly like the quills of a porcupine and subsided with
each intake. A young girl of fourteen, clad only in a single
shift, or muumuu, herself a grand-daughter of the sleeper, crouched
beside him and with a feathered fly-flapper brushed away the flies.
In her face were depicted solicitude, and nervousness, and awe, as
if she attended on a god.

And truly, Hardman Pool, the sleeping whiskery one, was to her, and
to many and sundry, a god--a source of life, a source of food, a
fount of wisdom, a giver of law, a smiling beneficence, a blackness
of thunder and punishment--in short, a man-master whose record was
fourteen living and adult sons and daughters, six great-
grandchildren, and more grandchildren than could he in his most
lucid moments enumerate.

Fifty-one years before, he had landed from an open boat at
Laupahoehoe on the windward coast of Hawaii. The boat was the one
surviving one of the whaler Black Prince of New Bedford. Himself
New Bedford born, twenty years of age, by virtue of his driving
strength and ability he had served as second mate on the lost
whaleship. Coming to Honolulu and casting about for himself, he
had first married Kalama Mamaiopili, next acted as pilot of
Honolulu Harbour, after that started a saloon and boarding house,
and, finally, on the death of Kalama's father, engaged in cattle
ranching on the broad pasture lands she had inherited.

For over half a century he had lived with the Hawaiians, and it was
conceded that he knew their language better than did most of them.
By marrying Kalama, he had married not merely her land, but her own
chief rank, and the fealty owed by the commoners to her by virtue
of her genealogy was also accorded him. In addition, he possessed
of himself all the natural attributes of chiefship: the gigantic
stature, the fearlessness, the pride; and the high hot temper that
could brook no impudence nor insult, that could be neither bullied
nor awed by any utmost magnificence of power that walked on two
legs, and that could compel service of lesser humans, not by any
ignoble purchase by bargaining, but by an unspoken but expected
condescending of largesse. He knew his Hawaiians from the outside
and the in, knew them better than themselves, their Polynesian
circumlocutions, faiths, customs, and mysteries.

And at seventy-one, after a morning in the saddle over the ranges
that began at four o'clock, he lay under the monkey-pods in his
customary and sacred siesta that no retainer dared to break, nor
would dare permit any equal of the great one to break. Only to the
King was such a right accorded, and, as the King had early learned,
to break Hardman Pool's siesta was to gain awake a very irritable
and grumpy Hardman Pool who would talk straight from the shoulder
and say unpleasant but true things that no king would care to hear.

The sun blazed down. The horses stamped remotely. The fading
trade-wind wisps sighed and rustled between longer intervals of
quiescence. The perfume grew heavier. The woman brought back the
babe, quiet again, to the rear of the house. The monkey-pods
folded their leaves and swooned to a siesta of their own in the
soft air above the sleeper. The girl, breathless as ever from the
enormous solemnity of her task, still brushed the flies away; and
the score of cowboys still intently and silently watched.

Hardman Pool awoke. The next out-breath, expected of the long
rhythm, did not take place. Neither did the white, long moustache
rise up. Instead, the cheeks, under the whiskers, puffed; the
eyelids lifted, exposing blue eyes, choleric and fully and
immediately conscious; the right hand went out to the half-smoked
pipe beside him, while the left hand reached the matches.

"Get me my gin and milk," he ordered, in Hawaiian, of the little
maid, who had been startled into a tremble by his awaking.

He lighted the pipe, but gave no sign of awareness of the presence
of his waiting retainers until the tumbler of gin and milk had been
brought and drunk.

"Well?" he demanded abruptly, and in the pause, while twenty faces
wreathed in smiles and twenty pairs of dark eyes glowed luminously
with well-wishing pleasure, he wiped the lingering drops of gin and
milk from his hairy lips. "What are you hanging around for? What
do you want? Come over here."

Twenty giants, most of them young, uprose and with a great clanking
and jangling of spurs and spur-chains strode over to him. They
grouped before him in a semicircle, trying bashfully to wedge their
shoulders, one behind another's, their faces a-grin and apologetic,
and at the same time expressing a casual and unconscious
democraticness. In truth, to them Hardman Pool was more than mere
chief. He was elder brother, or father, or patriarch; and to all
of them he was related, in one way or another, according to
Hawaiian custom, through his wife and through the many marriages of
his children and grandchildren. His slightest frown might perturb
them, his anger terrify them, his command compel them to certain
death; yet, on the other hand, not one of them would have dreamed
of addressing him otherwise than intimately by his first name,
which name, "Hardman," was transmuted by their tongues into Kanaka
Oolea.

At a nod from him, the semicircle seated itself on the manienie
grass, and with further deprecatory smiles waited his pleasure.

"What do you want?" demanded, in Hawaiian, with a brusqueness and
sternness they knew were put on.

They smiled more broadly, and deliciously squirmed their broad
shoulders and great torsos with the appeasingness of so many
wriggling puppies. Hardman Pool singled out one of them.

"Well, Iliiopoi, what do YOU want?"

"Ten dollars, Kanaka Oolea."

"Ten dollars!" Pool cried, in apparent shock at mention of so vast
a sum. "Does it mean you are going to take a second wife?
Remember the missionary teaching. One wife at a time, Iliiopoi;
one wife at a time. For he who entertains a plurality of wives
will surely go to hell."

Giggles and flashings of laughing eyes from all greeted the joke.

"No, Kanaka Oolea," came the reply. "The devil knows I am hard put
to get kow-kow for one wife and her several relations."

"Kow-kow?" Pool repeated the Chinese-introduced word for food which
the Hawaiians had come to substitute for their own paina. "Didn't
you boys get kow-kow here this noon?"

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea," volunteered an old, withered native who had
just joined the group from the direction of the house. "All of
them had kow-kow in the kitchen, and plenty of it. They ate like
lost horses brought down from the lava."

"And what do you want, Kumuhana?" Pool diverted to the old one, at
the same time motioning to the little maid to flap flies from the
other side of him.

"Twelve dollars," said Kumuhana. "I want to buy a Jackass and a
second-hand saddle and bridle. I am growing too old for my legs to
carry me in walking."

"You wait," his haole lord commanded. "I will talk with you about
the matter, and about other things of importance, when I am
finished with the rest and they are gone."

The withered old one nodded and proceeded to light his pipe.

"The kow-kow in the kitchen was good," Iliiopoi resumed, licking
his lips. "The poi was one-finger, the pig fat, the salmon-belly
unstinking, the fish of great freshness and plenty, though the
opihis" (tiny, rock-clinging shell-fish) "had been salted and
thereby made tough. Never should the opihis be salted. Often have
I told you, Kanaka Oolea, that opihis should never be salted. I am
full of good kow-kow. My belly is heavy with it. Yet is my heart
not light of it because there is no kow-kow in my own house, where
is my wife, who is the aunt of your fourth son's second wife, and
where is my baby daughter, and my wife's old mother, and my wife's
old mother's feeding child that is a cripple, and my wife's sister
who lives likewise with us along with her three children, the
father being dead of a wicked dropsy--"

"Will five dollars save all of you from funerals for a day or
several?" Pool testily cut the tale short.

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea, and as well it will buy my wife a new comb and
some tobacco for myself."

From a gold-sack drawn from the hip-pocket of his dungarees,
Hardman Pool drew the gold piece and tossed it accurately into the
waiting hand.

To a bachelor who wanted six dollars for new leggings, tobacco, and
spurs, three dollars were given; the same to another who needed a
hat; and to a third, who modestly asked for two dollars, four were
given with a flowery-worded compliment anent his prowess in roping
a recent wild bull from the mountains. They knew, as a rule, that
he cut their requisitions in half, therefore they doubled the size
of their requisitions. And Hardman Pool knew they doubled, and
smiled to himself. It was his way, and, further, it was a very
good way with his multitudinous relatives, and did not reduce his
stature in their esteem.

"And you, Ahuhu?" he demanded of one whose name meant "poison-
wood."

"And the price of a pair of dungarees," Ahuhu concluded his list of
needs. "I have ridden much and hard after your cattle, Kanaka
Oolea, and where my dungarees have pressed against the seat of the
saddle there is no seat to my dungarees. It is not well that it be
said that a Kanaka Oolea cowboy, who is also a cousin of Kanaka
Oolea's wife's half-sister, should be shamed to be seen out of the
saddle save that he walks backward from all that behold him."

"The price of a dozen pairs of dungarees be thine, Ahuhu," Hardman
Pool beamed, tossing to him the necessary sum. "I am proud that my
family shares my pride. Afterward, Ahuhu, out of the dozen
dungarees you will give me one, else shall I be compelled to walk
backward, my own and only dungarees being in like manner well worn
and shameful."

And in laughter of love at their haole chief's final sally, all the
sweet-child-minded and physically gorgeous company of them departed
to their waiting horses, save the old withered one, Kumuhana, who
had been bidden to wait.

For a full five minutes they sat in silence. Then Hardman Pool
ordered the little maid to fetch a tumbler of gin and milk, which,
when she brought it, he nodded her to hand to Kumuhana. The glass
did not leave his lips until it was empty, whereon he gave a great
audible out-breath of "A-a-ah," and smacked his lips.

"Much awa have I drunk in my time," he said reflectively. "Yet is
the awa but a common man's drink, while the haole liquor is a drink
for chiefs. The awa has not the liquor's hot willingness, its spur
in the ribs of feeling, its biting alive of oneself that is very
pleasant since it is pleasant to be alive."

Hardman Pool smiled, nodded agreement, and old Kumuhana continued.

"There is a warmingness to it. It warms the belly and the soul.
It warms the heart. Even the soul and the heart grow cold when one
is old."

"You ARE old," Pool conceded. "Almost as old as I."

Kumuhana shook his head and murmured. "Were I no older than you I
would be as young as you."

"I am seventy-one," said Pool.

"I do not know ages that way," was the reply. "What happened when
you were born?"

"Let me see," Pool calculated. "This is 1880. Subtract seventy-
one, and it leaves nine. I was born in 1809, which is the year
Keliimakai died, which is the year the Scotchman, Archibald
Campbell, lived in Honolulu."

"Then am I truly older than you, Kanaka Oolea. I remember the
Scotchman well, for I was playing among the grass houses of
Honolulu at the time, and already riding a surf-board in the
wahine" (woman) "surf at Waikiki. I can take you now to the spot
where was the Scotchman's grass house. The Seaman's Mission stands
now on the very ground. Yet do I know when I was born. Often my
grandmother and my mother told me of it. I was born when Madame
Pele" (the Fire Goddess or Volcano Goddess) "became angry with the
people of Paiea because they sacrificed no fish to her from their
fish-pool, and she sent down a flow of lava from Huulalai and
filled up their pond. For ever was the fish-pond of Paiea filled
up. That was when I was born."

"That was in 1801, when James Boyd was building ships for
Kamehameha at Hilo," Pool cast back through the calendar; "which
makes you seventy-nine, or eight years older than I. You are very
old."

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea," muttered Kumuhana, pathetically attempting to
swell his shrunken chest with pride.

"And you are very wise."

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea."

"And you know many of the secret things that are known only to old
men."

"Yes, Kanaka Oolea."

"And then you know--" Hardman Pool broke off, the more effectively
to impress and hypnotize the other ancient with the set stare of
his pale-washed blue eyes. "They say the bones of Kahekili were
taken from their hiding-place and lie to-day in the Royal
Mausoleum. I have heard it whispered that you alone of all living
men truly know."

"I know," was the proud answer. "I alone know."

"Well, do they lie there? Yes or no?"

"Kahekili was an alii" (high chief). "It is from this straight
line that your wife Kalama came. She is an alii." The old
retainer paused and pursed his lean lips in meditation. "I belong
to her, as all my people before me belonged to her people before
her. She only can command the great secrets of me. She is wise,
too wise ever to command me to speak this secret. To you, O Kanaka
Oolea, I do not answer yes, I do not answer no. This is a secret
of the aliis that even the aliis do not know."

"Very good, Kumuhana," Hardman Pool commanded. "Yet do you forget
that I am an alii, and that what my good Kalama does not dare ask,
I command to ask. I can send for her, now, and tell her to command
your answer. But such would be a foolishness unless you prove
yourself doubly foolish. Tell me the secret, and she will never
know. A woman's lips must pour out whatever flows in through her
ears, being so made. I am a man, and man is differently made. As
you well know, my lips suck tight on secrets as a squid sucks to
the salty rock. If you will not tell me alone, then will you tell
Kalama and me together, and her lips will talk, her lips will talk,
so that the latest malahini will shortly know what, otherwise, you
and I alone will know."

Long time Kumuhana sat on in silence, debating the argument and
finding no way to evade the fact-logic of it.

"Great is your haole wisdom," he conceded at last.

"Yes? or no?" Hardman Pool drove home the point of his steel.

Kumuhana looked about him first, then slowly let his eyes come to
rest on the fly-flapping maid.

"Go," Pool commanded her. "And come not back without you hear a
clapping of my hands."

Hardman Pool spoke no further, even after the flapper had
disappeared into the house; yet his face adamantly looked: "Yes or
no?"

Again Kumuhana looked carefully about him, and up into the monkey-
pod boughs as if to apprehend a lurking listener. His lips were
very dry. With his tongue he moistened them repeatedly. Twice he
essayed to speak, but was inarticulately husky. And finally, with
bowed head, he whispered, so low and solemnly that Hardman Pool
bent his own head to hear: "No."

Pool clapped his hands, and the little maid ran out of the house to
him in tremulous, fluttery haste.

"Bring a milk and gin for old Kumuhana, here," Pool commanded; and,
to Kumuhana: "Now tell me the whole story."

"Wait," was the answer. "Wait till the little wahine has come and
gone."

And when the maid was gone, and the gin and milk had travelled the
way predestined of gin and milk when mixed together, Hardman Pool
waited without further urge for the story. Kumuhana pressed his
hand to his chest and coughed hollowly at intervals, bidding for
encouragement; but in the end, of himself, spoke out.

"It was a terrible thing in the old days when a great alii died.
Kahekili was a great alii. He might have been king had he lived.
Who can tell? I was a young man, not yet married. You know,
Kanaka Oolea, when Kahekili died, and you can tell me how old I
was. He died when Governor Boki ran the Blonde Hotel here in
Honolulu. You have heard?"

"I was still on windward Hawaii," Pool answered. "But I have
heard. Boki made a distillery, and leased Manoa lands to grow
sugar for it, and Kaahumanu, who was regent, cancelled the lease,
rooted out the cane, and planted potatoes. And Boki was angry, and
prepared to make war, and gathered his fighting men, with a dozen
whaleship deserters and five brass six-pounders, out at Waikiki--"

"That was the very time Kahekili died," Kumuhana broke in eagerly.
"You are very wise. You know many things of the old days better
than we old kanakas."

"It was 1829," Pool continued complacently. "You were twenty-eight
years old, and I was twenty, just coming ashore in the open boat
after the burning of the Black Prince."

"I was twenty-eight," Kumuhana resumed. "It sounds right. I
remember well Boki's brass guns at Waikiki. Kahekili died, too, at
the time, at Waikiki. The people to this day believe his bones
were taken to the Hale o Keawe" (mausoleum) "at Honaunau, in Kona--
"

"And long afterward were brought to the Royal Mausoleum here in
Honolulu," Pool supplemented.

"Also, Kanaka Oolea, there are some who believe to this day that
Queen Alice has them stored with the rest of her ancestral bones in
the big jars in her taboo room. All are wrong. I know. The
sacred bones of Kahekili are gone and for ever gone. They rest
nowhere. They have ceased to be. And many kona winds have
whitened the surf at Waikiki since the last man looked upon the
last of Kahekili. I alone remain alive of those men. I am the
last man, and I was not glad to be at the finish.

"For see! I was a young man, and my heart was white-hot lava for
Malia, who was in Kahekili's household. So was Anapuni's heart
white-hot for her, though the colour of his heart was black, as you
shall see. We were at a drinking that night--Anapuni and I--the
night that Kahekili died. Anapuni and I were only commoners, as
were all of us kanakas and wahines who were at the drinking with
the common sailors and whaleship men from before the mast. We were
drinking on the mats by the beach at Waikiki, close to the old
heiau" (temple) "that is not far from what is now the Wilders'
beach place. I learned then and for ever what quantities of drink
haole sailormen can stand. As for us kanakas, our heads were hot
and light and rattly as dry gourds with the whisky and the rum.

"It was past midnight, I remember well, when I saw Malia, whom
never had I seen at a drinking, come across the wet-hard sand of
the beach. My brain burned like red cinders of hell as I looked
upon Anapuni look upon her, he being nearest to her by being across
from me in the drinking circle. Oh, I know it was whisky and rum
and youth that made the heat of me; but there, in that moment, the
mad mind of me resolved, if she spoke to him and yielded to dance
with him first, that I would put both my hands around his throat
and throw him down and under the wahine surf there beside us, and
drown and choke out his life and the obstacle of him that stood
between me and her. For know, that she had never decided between
us, and it was because of him that she was not already and long
since mine.

"She was a grand young woman with a body generous as that of a
chiefess and more wonderful, as she came upon us, across the wet
sand, in the shimmer of the moonlight. Even the haole sailormen
made pause of silence, and with open mouths stared upon her. Her
walk! I have heard you talk, O Kanaka Oolea, of the woman Helen
who caused the war of Troy. I say of Malia that more men would
have stormed the walls of hell for her than went against that old-
time city of which it is your custom to talk over much and long
when you have drunk too little milk and too much gin.

"Her walk! In the moonlight there, the soft glow-fire of the
jelly-fishes in the surf like the kerosene-lamp footlights I have
seen in the new haole theatre! It was not the walk of a girl, but
a woman. She did not flutter forward like rippling wavelets on a
reef-sheltered, placid beach. There was that in her manner of walk
that was big and queenlike, like the motion of the forces of
nature, like the rhythmic flow of lava down the slopes of Kau to
the sea, like the movement of the huge orderly trade-wind seas,
like the rise and fall of the four great tides of the year that may
be like music in the eternal ear of God, being too slow of
occurrence in time to make a tune for ordinary quick-pulsing,
brief-living, swift-dying man.

"Anapuni was nearest. But she looked at me. Have you ever heard a
call, Kanaka Oolea, that is without sound yet is louder than the
conches of God? So called she to me across that circle of the
drinking. I half arose, for I was not yet full drunken; but
Anapuni's arm caught her and drew her, and I sank back on my elbow
and watched and raged. He was for making her sit beside him, and I
waited. Did she sit, and, next, dance with him, I knew that ere
morning Anapuni would be a dead man, choked and drowned by me in
the shallow surf.

"Strange, is it not, Kanaka Oolea, all this heat called 'love'?
Yet it is not strange. It must be so in the time of one's youth,
else would mankind not go on."

"That is why the desire of woman must be greater than the desire of
life," Pool concurred. "Else would there be neither men nor
women."

"Yes," said Kumuhana. "But it is many a year now since the last of
such heat has gone out of me. I remember it as one remembers an
old sunrise--a thing that was. And so one grows old, and cold, and
drinks gin, not for madness, but for warmth. And the milk is very
nourishing.

"But Malia did not sit beside him. I remember her eyes were wild,
her hair down and flying, as she bent over him and whispered in his
ear. And her hair covered him about and hid him as she whispered,
and the sight of it pounded my heart against my ribs and dizzied my
head till scarcely could I half-see. And I willed myself with all
the will of me that if, in short minutes, she did not come over to
me, I would go across the circle and get her.

"It was one of the things never to be. You remember Chief
Konukalani? Himself he strode up to the circle. His face was
black with anger. He gripped Malia, not by the arm, but by the
hair, and dragged her away behind him and was gone. Of that, even
now, can I understand not the half. I, who was for slaying Anapuni
because of her, raised neither hand nor voice of protest when
Konukalani dragged her away by the hair--nor did Anapuni. Of
course, we were common men, and he was a chief. That I know. But
why should two common men, mad with desire of woman, with desire of
woman stronger in them than desire of life, let any one chief, even
the highest in the land, drag the woman away by the hair? Desiring
her more than life, why should the two men fear to slay then and
immediately the one chief? Here is something stronger than life,
stronger than woman, but what is it? and why?"

"I will answer you," said Hardman Pool. "It is so because most men
are fools, and therefore must be taken care of by the few men who
are wise. Such is the secret of chiefship. In all the world are
chiefs over men. In all the world that has been have there ever
been chiefs, who must say to the many fool men: 'Do this; do not
do that. Work, and work as we tell you or your bellies will remain
empty and you will perish. Obey the laws we set you or you will be
beasts and without place in the world. You would not have been,
save for the chiefs before you who ordered and regulated for your
fathers. No seed of you will come after you, except that we order
and regulate for you now. You must be peace-abiding, and decent,
and blow your noses. You must be early to bed of nights, and up
early in the morning to work if you would heave beds to sleep in
and not roost in trees like the silly fowls. This is the season
for the yam-planting and you must plant now. We say now, to-day,
and not picnicking and hulaing to-day and yam-planting to-morrow or
some other day of the many careless days. You must not kill one
another, and you must leave your neighbours' wives alone. All this
is life for you, because you think but one day at a time, while we,
your chiefs, think for you all days and for days ahead.'"

"Like a cloud on the mountain-top that comes down and wraps about
you and that you dimly see is a cloud, so is your wisdom to me,
Kanaka Oolea," Kumuhana murmured. "Yet is it sad that I should be
born a common man and live all my days a common man."

"That is because you were of yourself common," Hardman Pool assured
him. "When a man is born common, and is by nature uncommon, he
rises up and overthrows the chiefs and makes himself chief over the
chiefs. Why do you not run my ranch, with its many thousands of
cattle, and shift the pastures by the rain-fall, and pick the
bulls, and arrange the bargaining and the selling of the meat to
the sailing ships and war vessels and the people who live in the
Honolulu houses, and fight with lawyers, and help make laws, and
even tell the King what is wise for him to do and what is
dangerous? Why does not any man do this that I do? Any man of all
the men who work for me, feed out of my hand, and let me do their
thinking for them--me, who work harder than any of them, who eats
no more than any of them, and who can sleep on no more than one
lauhala mat at a time like any of them?"

"I am out of the cloud, Kanaka Oolea," said Kumuhana, with a
visible brightening of countenance. "More clearly do I see. All
my long years have the aliis I was born under thought for me.
Ever, when I was hungry, I came to them for food, as I come to your
kitchen now. Many people eat in your kitchen, and the days of
feasts when you slay fat steers for all of us are understandable.
It is why I come to you this day, an old man whose labour of
strength is not worth a shilling a week, and ask of you twelve
dollars to buy a jackass and a second-hand saddle and bridle. It
is why twice ten fool men of us, under these monkey-pods half an
hour ago, asked of you a dollar or two, or four or five, or ten or
twelve. We are the careless ones of the careless days who will not
plant the yam in season if our alii does not compel us, who will
not think one day for ourselves, and who, when we age to
worthlessness, know that our alii will think kow-kow into our
bellies and a grass thatch over our heads.

Hardman Pool bowed his appreciation, and urged:

"But the bones of Kahekili. The Chief Konukalani had just dragged
away Malia by the hair of the head, and you and Anapuni sat on
without protest in the circle of drinking. What was it Malia
whispered in Anapuni's ear, bending over him, her hair hiding the
face of him?"

"That Kahekili was dead. That was what she whispered to Anapuni.
That Kahekili was dead, just dead, and that the chiefs, ordering
all within the house to remain within, were debating the disposal
of the bones and meat of him before word of his death should get
abroad. That the high priest Eoppo was deciding them, and that she
had overheard no less than Anapuni and me chosen as the sacrifices
to go the way of Kahekili and his bones and to care for him
afterward and for ever in the shadowy other world."

"The moepuu, the human sacrifice," Pool commented. "Yet it was
nine years since the coming of the missionaries."

"And it was the year before their coming that the idols were cast
down and the taboos broken," Kumuhana added. "But the chiefs still
practised the old ways, the custom of hunakele, and hid the bones
of the aliis where no men should find them and make fish-hooks of
their jaws or arrow heads of their long bones for the slaying of
little mice in sport. Behold, O Kanaka Oolea!"

The old man thrust out his tongue; and, to Pool's amazement, he saw
the surface of that sensitive organ, from root to tip, tattooed in
intricate designs.

"That was done after the missionaries came, several years
afterward, when Keopuolani died. Also, did I knock out four of my
front teeth, and half-circles did I burn over my body with blazing
bark. And whoever ventured out-of-doors that night was slain by
the chiefs. Nor could a light be shown in a house or a whisper of
noise be made. Even dogs and hogs that made a noise were slain,
nor all that night were the ships' bells of the haoles in the
harbour allowed to strike. It was a terrible thing in those days
when an alii died.

"But the night that Kahekili died. We sat on in the drinking
circle after Konukalani dragged Malia away by the hair. Some of
the haole sailors grumbled; but they were few in the land in those
days and the kanakas many. And never was Malia seen of men again.
Konukalani alone knew the manner of her slaying, and he never told.
And in after years what common men like Anapuni and me should dare
to question him?

"Now she had told Anapuni before she was dragged away. But
Anapuni's heart was black. Me he did not tell. Worthy he was of
the killing I had intended for him. There was a giant harpooner in
the circle, whose singing was like the bellowing of bulls; and,
gazing on him in amazement while he roared some song of the sea,
when next I looked across the circle to Anapuni, Anapuni was gone.
He had fled to the high mountains where he could hide with the
bird-catchers a week of moons. This I learned afterward.

"I? I sat on, ashamed of my desire of woman that had not been so
strong as my slave-obedience to a chief. And I drowned my shame in
large drinks of rum and whisky, till the world went round and
round, inside my head and out, and the Southern Cross danced a hula
in the sky, and the Koolau Mountains bowed their lofty summits to
Waikiki and the surf of Waikiki kissed them on their brows. And
the giant harpooner was still roaring, his the last sounds in my
ear, as I fell back on the lauhala mat, and was to all things for
the time as one dead.

"When I awoke was at the faint first beginning of dawn. I was
being kicked by a hard naked heel in the ribs. What of the
enormousness of the drink I had consumed, the feelings aroused in
me by the heel were not pleasant. The kanakas and wahines of the
drinking were gone. I alone remained among the sleeping sailormen,
the giant harpooner snoring like a whale, his head upon my feet.

"More heel-kicks, and I sat up and was sick. But the one who
kicked was impatient, and demanded to know where was Anapuni. And
I did not know, and was kicked, this time from both sides by two
impatient men, because I did not know. Nor did I know that
Kahekili was dead. Yet did I guess something serious was afoot,
for the two men who kicked me were chiefs, and no common men
crouched behind them to do their bidding. One was Aimoku, of
Kaneche; the other Humuhumu, of Manoa.

"They commanded me to go with them, and they were not kind in their
commanding; and as I uprose, the head of the giant harpooner was
rolled off my feet, past the edge of the mat, into the sand. He
grunted like a pig, his lips opened, and all of his tongue rolled
out of his mouth into the sand. Nor did he draw it back. For the
first time I knew how long was a man's tongue. The sight of the
sand on it made me sick for the second time. It is a terrible
thing, the next day after a night of drinking. I was afire, dry
afire, all the inside of me like a burnt cinder, like aa lava, like
the harpooner's tongue dry and gritty with sand. I bent for a
half-drunk drinking coconut, but Aimoku kicked it out of my shaking
fingers, and Humuhumu smote me with the heel of his hand on my
neck.

"They walked before me, side by side, their faces solemn and black,
and I walked at their heels. My mouth stank of the drink, and my
head was sick with the stale fumes of it, and I would have cut off
my right hand for a drink of water, one drink, a mouthful even.
And, had I had it, I know it would have sizzled in my belly like
water spilled on heated stones for the roasting. It is terrible,
the next day after the drinking. All the life-time of many men who
died young has passed by me since the last I was able to do such
mad drinking of youth when youth knows not capacity and is
undeterred.

"But as we went on, I began to know that some alii was dead. No
kanakas lay asleep in the sand, nor stole home from their love-
making; and no canoes were abroad after the early fish most
catchable then inside the reef at the change of the tide. When we
came, past the hoiau" (temple), "to where the Great Kamehameha used
to haul out his brigs and schooners, I saw, under the canoe-sheds,
that the mat-thatches of Kahekili's great double canoe had been
taken off, and that even then, at low tide, many men were launching
it down across the sand into the water. But all these men were
chiefs. And, though my eyes swam, and the inside of my head went
around and around, and the inside of my body was a cinder athirst,
I guessed that the alii who was dead was Kahekili. For he was old,
and most likely of the aliis to be dead."

"It was his death, as I have heard it, more than the intercession
of Kekuanaoa, that spoiled Governor Boki's rebellion," Hardman Pool
observed.

"It was Kahekili's death that spoiled it," Kumuhana confirmed.
"All commoners, when the word slipped out that night of his death,
fled into the shelter of the grass houses, nor lighted fire nor
pipes, nor breathed loudly, being therein and thereby taboo from
use for sacrifice. And all Governor Boki's commoners of fighting
men, as well as the haole deserters from ships, so fled, so that
the brass guns lay unserved and his handful of chiefs of themselves
could do nothing.

"Aimoku and Humuhumu made me sit on the sand to the side from the
launching of the great double-canoe. And when it was afloat all
the chiefs were athirst, not being used to such toil; and I was
told to climb the palms beside the canoe-sheds and throw down
drink-coconuts. They drank and were refreshed, but me they refused
to let drink.

"Then they bore Kahekili from his house to the canoe in a haole
coffin, oiled and varnished and new. It had been made by a ship's
carpenter, who thought he was making a boat that must not leak. It
was very tight, and over where the face of Kahekili lay was nothing
but thin glass. The chiefs had not screwed on the outside plank to
cover the glass. Maybe they did not know the manner of haole
coffins; but at any rate I was to be glad they did not know, as you
shall see.

"'There is but one moepuu,' said the priest Eoppo, looking at me
where I sat on the coffin in the bottom of the canoe. Already the
chiefs were paddling out through the reef.

"'The other has run into hiding,' Aimoku answered. 'This one was
all we could get.'

"And then I knew. I knew everything. I was to be sacrificed.
Anapuni had been planned for the other sacrifice. That was what
Malia had whispered to Anapuni at the drinking. And she had been
dragged away before she could tell me. And in his blackness of
heart he had not told me.

"'There should be two,' said Eoppo. 'It is the law.'

"Aimoku stopped paddling and looked back shoreward as if to return
and get a second sacrifice. But several of the chiefs contended
no, saying that all commoners were fled to the mountains or were
lying taboo in their houses, and that it might take days before
they could catch one. In the end Eoppo gave in, though he grumbled
from time to time that the law required two moepuus.

"We paddled on, past Diamond Head and abreast of Koko Head, till we
were in the midway of the Molokai Channel. There was quite a sea
running, though the trade wind was blowing light. The chiefs
rested from their paddles, save for the steersmen who kept the
canoes bow-on to the wind and swell. And, ere they proceeded
further in the matter, they opened more coconuts and drank.

"'I do not mind so much being the moepuu,' I said to Humuhumu; 'but
I should like to have a drink before I am slain.' I got no drink.
But I spoke true. I was too sick of the much whisky and rum to be
afraid to die. At least my mouth would stink no more, nor my head
ache, nor the inside of me be as dry-hot sand. Almost worst of
all, I suffered at thought of the harpooner's tongue, as last I had
seen it lying on the sand and covered with sand. O Kanaka Oolea,
what animals young men are with the drink! Not until they have
grown old, like you and me, do they control their wantonness of
thirst and drink sparingly, like you and me."

"Because we have to," Hardman Pool rejoined. "Old stomachs are
worn thin and tender, and we drink sparingly because we dare not
drink more. We are wise, but the wisdom is bitter."

"The priest Eoppo sang a long mele about Kahekili's mother and his
mother's mother, and all their mothers all the way back to the
beginning of time," Kumuhana resumed. "And it seemed I must die of
my sand-hot dryness ere he was done. And he called upon all the
gods of the under world, the middle world and the over world, to
care for and cherish the dead alii about to be consigned to them,
and to carry out the curses--they were terrible curses--he laid
upon all living men and men to live after who might tamper with the
bones of Kahekili to use them in sport of vermin-slaying.

"Do you know, Kanaka Oolea, the priest talked a language largely
different, and I know it was the priest language, the old language.
Maui he did not name Maui, but Maui-Tiki-Tiki and Maui-Po-Tiki.
And Hina, the goddess-mother of Maui, he named Ina. And Maui's
god-father he named sometimes Akalana and sometimes Kanaloa.
Strange how one about to die and very thirsty should remember such
things! And I remember the priest named Hawaii as Vaii, and Lanai
as Ngangai."

"Those were the Maori names," Hardman Pool explained, "and the
Samoan and Tongan names, that the priests brought with them in
their first voyages from the south in the long ago when they found
Hawaii and settled to dwell upon it."

"Great is your wisdom, O Kanaka Oolea," the old man accorded
solemnly. "Ku, our Supporter of the Heavens, the priest named Tu,
and also Ru; and La, our God of the Sun, he named Ra--"

"And Ra was a sun-god in Egypt in the long ago," Pool interrupted
with a sparkle of interest. "Truly, you Polynesians have travelled
far in time and space since first you began. A far cry it is from
Old Egypt, when Atlantis was still afloat, to Young Hawaii in the
North Pacific. But proceed, Kumuhana. Do you remember anything
also of what the priest Eoppo sang?"

"At the very end," came the confirming nod, "though I was near dead
myself, and nearer to die under the priest's knife, he sang what I
have remembered every word of. Listen! It was thus."

And in quavering falsetto, with the customary broken-notes, the old
man sang.

"A Maori death-chant unmistakable," Pool exclaimed, "sung by an
Hawaiian with a tattooed tongue! Repeat it once again, and I shall
say it to you in English."

And when it had been repeated, he spoke it slowly in English:

"But death is nothing new.
Death is and has been ever since old Maui died.
Then Pata-tai laughed loud
And woke the goblin-god,
Who severed him in two, and shut him in,
So dusk of eve came on."

"And at the last," Kumuhana resumed, "I was not slain. Eoppo, the
killing knife in hand and ready to lift for the blow, did not lift.
And I? How did I feel and think? Often, Kanaka Oolea, have I
since laughed at the memory of it. I felt very thirsty. I did not
want to die. I wanted a drink of water. I knew I was going to
die, and I kept remembering the thousand waterfalls falling to
waste down the pans" (precipices) "of the windward Koolau
Mountains. I did not think of Anapuni. I was too thirsty. I did
not think of Malia. I was too thirsty. But continually, inside my
head, I saw the tongue of the harpooner, covered dry with sand, as
I had last seen it, lying in the sand. My tongue was like that,
too. And in the bottom of the canoe rolled about many drinking
nuts. Yet I did not attempt to drink, for these were chiefs and I
was a common man.

"'No,' said Eoppo, commanding the chiefs to throw overboard the
coffin. 'There are not two moepuus, therefore there shall be
none.'

"'Slay the one,' the chiefs cried.

"But Eoppo shook his head, and said: 'We cannot send Kahekili on
his way with only the tops of the taro.'

"'Half a fish is better than none,' Aimoku said the old saying.

"'Not at the burying of an alii,' was the priest's quick reply.
'It is the law. We cannot be niggard with Kahekili and cut his
allotment of sacrifice in half.'

"So, for the moment, while the coffin went overside, I was not
slain. And it was strange that I was glad immediately that I was
to live. And I began to remember Malia, and to begin to plot a
vengeance on Anapuni. And with the blood of life thus freshening
in me, my thirst multiplied on itself tenfold and my tongue and
mouth and throat seemed as sanded as the tongue of the harpooner.