South of the Line/We of Malita
We of Malita
HURRICANES and bananas are incompatible. In other words, we of Malita were ruined. Enraged nature had seen fit to stretch out her inexorable hand and wipe the fruits of our labour from the face of the island as cleanly as a drawing from a slate. We were talking about it on my veranda.
"The question is," began the.inevitable Tomlin, tilting back his packing case, the cane chairs having gone to his betters, "what are we going to do about it? Personally, I'm down and out."
"I suppose it hit us all equally," I suggested.
There followed a series of doleful nods.
"Pulp," grunted Webb.
"Except the weeds," chirped Tomlin, "I've got the finest unscathed crop of creeping vine south of the line, and"
"As a banana country," said Rands, ignoring the nuisance, " and as far as I'm concerned, gentlemen" He raised his right hand with grave deliberation.
"Which being interpreted?" I suggested.
"Never again," explained the American.
"As bad as that, eh?"
"Sure. My motto is: 'Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten cut it out, whatever it is, before it eats you.'"
"But I want to tell you this," he added, pausing for effect; "Pineapples take no account of blows. I came through Hawaii on my way here, and they're growing pineapples there on land that costs them a thousand dollars an acre; pineapples no better than ours in the bush of Malita. It costs them a dollar and a half a day for labour, and they're making money. Here we should pay nothing for the land, a shilling a day for labour—and a thousand for the canning plant," he ended a trifle hurriedly. His flashing eye challenged the company. "As an idea?" he demanded.
"Excellent," admitted someone. "But"
"Thank you, gentlemen," said Rands, and subsided.
"But the thousand?" came the still small voice.
The American's face was buried in a tumbler of what he persisted in calling a highball. "I've given you the idea," he said on its withdrawal; "the rest is up to you."
Malita practically lived on my veranda during these drear days of despondency, and one afternoon the same as a hundred others, brazen and breathless Tomlin was reading the Levuka Herald when he made a noise in his throat and said: "Well, I'm"
As usual, no one took the faintest notice. Tomlin continued to read with extraordinary concentration for upward of five minutes, then wandered across to the veranda railing and stood there, alternately whistling and staring out at the glare.
Suddenly he turned. "I have an idea," he announced, "and it's a good one, although it's mine."
"Common theft?" suggested Rands.
Tomlin shook his head. "No," he said, "you can't call it that."
"Appropriation?" murmured Nares.
"Out with it," rasped Webb.
"Then I gather you want my little idea," said the imperturbable Tomlin. "Have any of you ever heard of Colin Sterling?"
"Sounds Scotch," suggested an intelligent someone.
"It is," admitted Tomlin. "It is also the name of the wealthiest shipping man in Liverpool. He wallows, literally wallows, in slathers and slathers of money. A thousand to him is as an unripe banana to you and me."
"And you know him?" I suggested. I thought I was beginning to see daylight.
"I know of him," corrected Tomlin, "which is quite enough for our purposes. He doesn't know how to spend his money, so he lets his youngest son do it for him. He's the only one of the family who has the knack. The others are like the father and the extraordinary thing is that the old man's prouder of the spendthrift than of all the others put together. A son of Colin Sterling who doesn't think twice about keeping a taxi waiting! He's looked on as unique in the annals of the family."
"This is all very instructive," Nares interpolated. "But is one permitted to ask how the eccentric son of a wealthy Scotsman in Liverpool affects us of Malita?"
Tomlin waited for his glass to be filled before answering. "Certainly," he said; "the answer is in the newspaper yonder. This same eccentric son is on an educational world tour—thinks he paints—and he lands in Levuka the day after to-morrow."
We leaned back in our chairs. The tension was relaxed. This seemed to trouble Tomlin. "Mind you," he warned, "I don't mean what you mean. Nothing would induce me to cadge. Besides, I don't know the man."
"Sure," murmured Nares, his cigar pointing at a reflective angle. "Haven't been introduced. I know the dope."
"No; and don't intend to be," supplemented Tomlin, with unusual warmth. "Look here, Rands; I know all sorts of schemes are flitting through your nimble brain, but there's only one way this thing's going to be done, and that's my way. It's going to be a straightforward affair without any subtleties or complications of any kind. It's based on simple logic."
"I like to hear a man talk like that," said Rands. "Fire ahead."
Tomlin's simple logic took three minutes to propound and as many hours to discuss. Certainly it was simple, but opinions differed as to its being logic. It was christened variously and according to taste, but Tomlin held his ground with unlooked-for determination. Night descended on Malita like a hot, moist blanket, and our voices, raised in altercation, mingled under the tropic stars and drowned the boom of the surf on the barrier reef.
One by one we fell into line, driven by the overpowering weight of necessity. Webb was the last to succumb. "All right," he grunted. "Something's got to be done, and I suppose this is something."
"And that's all the thanks I get," wailed Tomlin.
It was.
The launch left Malita the next morning, manned by its owner, Tomlin, and Rands, and, after waving it farewell from the landing, Webb and I returned to the bungalow in pensive silence. We both knew that we were a couple of old fools, who had been carried away in a weak moment by a full glass and the contagious enthusiasm of youth. We both knew that at that moment we would have cheerfully given what little we possessed to be able to hail the launch and cry off. Also, we both knew that it was too late. "How will they do it?" I ventured to suggest at lunch. "Force?"
Webb shrugged his massive shoulders and gave his attention to curried bush pig. There were occasions when Webb was not the best of company.
Toward evening two days later, the launch came back to Malita down the golden pathway of the setting sun. Webb lowered the glasses. "They've done it, anyway," he announced, and we strolled mechanically down to the landing.
Exactly what we expected to see it is difficult to say. Personally, I was conscious of alternate waves of bewilderment and belief as the launch gave its last despairing kick and sheered alongside. At the helm sat a remarkably pink young man in immaculate white flannels and an art tie, chatting pleasantly with Tomlin. Nares was in his usual state of filth and agitation over his precious engine. Rands was making fast. Tomlin looked up and waved his hand to us. "Cheer-o!" he called. We've brought a
The remark was accompanied by a prodigious and entirely uncalled-for wink as the pink young man picked a discriminating way through the litter of decayed banana skins up the rickety landing steps.
"Mr. Sterling—Webb, father," Tomlin bawled after him, presumably by way of introduction.
"Awfully good of you," drawled the pink young man, shaking us warmly by the hand. "Topping place you have here."
Webb grunted, and I said something idiotic; then we all went up to the bungalow.
At the first opportunity—while Sterling was under the shower, to be exact—I tackled Rands.
"Don't know a thing," he jerked at me—"don't know a thing except that Tomlin brought him out of the club with a valise, and here he is."
"And he doesn't know?" I inquired.
"Hasn't a notion."
At that moment Sterling emerged from the shower pinker than ever. "Topping bath," he observed, and floated into the bedroom.
A little later Tomlin was the centre of a hurried conclave behind the crotons. "Easy as falling off a log," he chortled. "Not a soul in the club, house boy asleep as usual, jumped at the chance of seeing plantation life on a real South Sea island, and here we are." He panted and gazed round the semi-circle of faces. An apprehensive glint came into his eyes. "Look here," he demanded plaintively, "you're not going back on the thing?"
We protested valiantly.
At dinner our guest informed us that Malita was "topping; simply topping." "It's been the dream of my life to see the South Seas," he confessed. "Of course I kicked about the Mediterranean a bit in the gov'nor's yacht, but there's nothing at all like this—so unsullied, so dreamlike. It's hard to imagine here that somewhere people are slaving their lives away; scrambling after money."
"Sure," agreed Rands thoughtfully.
"I mean, now, what can you possibly want here?" Sterling proceeded. "You have three excellent meals a day, a comfortable house, and—this." He waved a hand in the direction of the blue-black darkness outside which happily veiled the decayed stumps of my banana plants and a pile of empty corned-beef tins. "It's paintable," he added, as though this were the acme of praise.
Rands seemed to be struggling with a strong emotion. "Well, I don't know," he confessed. "Scenery may be good to paint, but it's poor stuff to live on. What we want is pineapples—pineapples with a capital P."
The slogan had been dragged from him. From it he slid into explanation, and before the meal was over Sterling was in possession of the main facts of our pitiful case. "Topping!" was his verdict, pronounced over the third glass of my whisky. "Absolutely topping idea. Pineapples! And only a thousand for a plant! Why, the thing's a gift. Here's to pineapples!"
We drank enthusiastically.
Rands, with his tongue as near hanging out as I have ever seen a man's, then proceeded to point out the fatal obstacle to the realization of our dreams. With a catch in his voice, he confessed that the sordid but necessary thousand was not ours to command.
Sterling was sympathetic. "It's splendid," he announced with conviction. "I think it's perfectly splendid how you fellows out here on the edge of the world face difficulties that would appall a meaner soul. Face them and overcome them," he added hopefully.
"This one isn't overcome," growled Webb, and I know his enormous foot was swinging under the table; "or ever likely to be."
"Oh, you can't tell me that," bantered Sterling, "I know what you fellows are—splendid, topping," he said meditatively, refilling his glass.
Then we went out on the veranda.
Late that night we of Malita assembled in the packing shed and stared at one another blankly.
"Well, that's that," said Tomlin.
"I believe the insufferable little tike's pulling our legs," offered Webb.
"Nix on that," snapped Rands. "I know when I'm being bull-dozed. It's just natural, unadulterated hide. You couldn't prick decent feelings into him with a handspike."
"And he's got such lots and lots of money," chanted Tomlin from his improvised stage on an empty banana crate.
Personally, I began to feel uncomfortable, and I know that Webb looked it. Suddenly he burst into speech: "I have a suggestion to make—that we drop it. It's crazy. We're a lot of damned fools."
There was silence for a moment. Then Rands spoke. "Thank you," he said. "It was someone else's idea; someone else carried it out, and you agreed to see it through. Are you going to let us down?"
"No," said Webb. "I won't let anybody down. As it happens we can ship the young cub back, and he'll never know what he's missed. Put it to the vote.... But mind you," he added, "if this thing goes through, there can be no more half measures about it. It isn't a joke. It's serious business. I've let myself in for it, and, if it has to be done, I'll take on the biggest part of the job."
It was the longest utterance we of Malita had ever heard Webb make. It sobered even Tomlin for the moment.
"Those in favour"
Two hands went up, Rands' and Tomlin's. Nares's fluttered up after them. I'm convinced he was only actuated by the thought that if he didn't vote that way his everlasting launch would have spluttered to Levuka and back for nothing. Webb contemplated the trio from under his shaggy eyebrows for a moment, then grunted and went out.
"In my opinion" began Nares. We fell upon him in a simultaneous pæan of encouragement. "In my opinion," he struggled on, "the affair can still be—er—handled on a pacific basis. Possibly"
"Why, sure," agreed Rands. "It only wants nous, tact, and you're the man, Nares. You're it." Nares stared about him with the expression of a startled rabbit. "It's up to you to tell him why he's here," pursued the inexorable Rands. "It's your turn next."
Nares shot one fleeting glance of entreaty in my direction. It was a horrid sight. Such must have been the look in the eyes of the early martyrs under the upraised sword of the gladiator. And I turned away my head. That's the sort of person I am.
After breakfast, Sterling, pinker and more ecstatic than ever, wandered off up the beach with the dogs, a water-colour block, and a paint box. He was not going to let his visit interfere with our work, he informed us. He could find plenty to amuse him.
Our "work" consisted in sitting on the veranda, staring listlessly at the unlovely remains of my banana patch.
"Only a thousand," mused Tomlin, "and he's got such lots and lots of money." The last part of this utterance he had succeeded in rendering particularly obnoxious by setting it to ragtime.
Sterling did not return till afternoon tea. In one hand he carried a rush basket full of an indescribable mess, in the other a native fish spear. His shoes were slung over his shoulder, his faultless flannels rolled to the knee, and his solar topee set jauntily on the back of his head.
"Oh, lor'!" groaned Webb, "it's going to be 'topping'."
It was. Everything was. What were those nimble little fellows that dashed about with a sort of mast sticking up, and vanished into holes? Soldier crabs? How topping! And those big fellows up in a tree, with eyes, or something, on the end of a stalk a foot long? Tree lobsters? Splendid. And this, and this He littered the veranda with every species of South Sea Crustacea—and there are a few—until the place was like an insanitary skating rink.
Nares's hour of doom drew near. One by one we evaporated from the veranda and collected in the mosquito-proof office adjoining the living room to witness it. Nares had demanded a clear stage for his operations.
We heard the two men enter the living room, and Nares, in a remarkably natural voice, suggest whisky and sparklet. "... Of course, as you see," he was saying in his mincing accents, "we are practically ruined. The hurricane swept everything before it. Luckily the launch escaped, or I don't know what we should have done."
"Quite," sympathized Sterling. "And is that jolly little launch your only means of leaving the island?"
"Yes," sighed Nares. "We had in mind, before the hurricane, of course, a fifty-ton auxiliary schooner to carry all our produce, but now"—he giggled weakly—"we have no produce."
"Quite," repeated Sterling to the accompaniment of complaining cane as he sank into my only safe chair.
There was a pause, broken after what seemed a century by another giggle, even more weak.
"Do you know," said Nares, in tones intended to be conversational, "we have racked our brains to think of some method to raise money, only a little."
"Really?" remarked Sterling. "That should be easy enough."
"Ah, but you don't know our difficulties," said Nares. "We are already mortgaged to the hilt. Only a thousand would set us up with a canning plant, and the rest would be plain sailing."
"In that case," said Sterling (I could feel Rands's fevered breath down the back of my neck. Tomlin was on tiptoe, with mouth agape. Webb was standing with his grizzled head on one side like an inquisitive hen. He is slightly deaf in one ear)—"in that case, I should stretch a point to get that thousand."
"We have—intend to," Nares corrected himself. "Fair means or foul, you know."
"Quite," agreed Sterling.
"In fact"—again Nares had recourse to the giggle, which I could feel was rapidly driving Webb berserk—"in fact," he ended weakly and a trifle hurriedly, "we conceived the idea—rather daring, of course—of abducting some wealthy man and holding him up to ransom."
There was another brief but agonized pause before Sterling slapped his knee and burst into a roar of laughter. "Daring? Not a bit. What's to stop you? Topping. I should like to see the fun."
Nares stared at him as though fascinated, then trailed off into imitation laughter himself. The two of them sat there making the most absurd noise.
"You see" Nares had begun again, when something uncommonly like an earthquake rent us of Malita asunder, and stumbled through the mosquito door. It was Webb, a terrible sight.
"Stop your cackling!" he roared at Nares. "And you," turning on Sterling, "understand this now, if you never did before—you're not a guest here; you're a hostage. We abducted you. We'd have abducted you by force if we'd had to. We shall keep you by force if we have to—until you hand over a thousand cash. We're not asking for the money; we're demanding it. It's robbery. We're desperate."
Webb came to an abrupt full stop. The well of his rhetoric had run dry. Sterling turned slowly to Nares. He was slightly less pink than usual, that was all. "Who is this gentleman?" he inquired. "I don't seem to know him."
"I'm not a gentleman," boomed Webb. "I'm a robber. We're all robbers. Are you going to part up or not?"
Sterling looked up at him serenely; then, from sheer force of habit, slipped a gold cigarette case from his pocket and tapping one of its contents on the lid. "Topping," he murmured irrelevantly.
"And that's another thing," flashed Webb. "Say that again and you'll be kicked."
Sterling regarded him in mild surprise. "Say what?" he inquired.
"Topping."
"Ah, splendid," drawled Sterling, after due reflection.
Webb towered over him like an impending hurricane. "Are you going to pay?" he demanded.
"No," said Sterling deliberately.
"Very well, then." Webb shuffled his enormous feet on the matting of the floor. "You'll stay here until you do."
"Nothing would please me more," returned Sterling, and helped himself from the tantalus.
For a moment Webb seemed at a loss. Was our tower of strength faltering? "That can soon be put right," he threatened. "Think it over."
"Certainly," Sterling agreed. He had now entirely resumed his normal shade of pink. "And now, may we return to a less transpontine mode of intercourse? Mr. Nares here was telling me of some top—splendid scheme of raising money for pineapples...."
"He daren't say it," triumphed Tomlin in the packing shed a few hours later. "We've got him. Although I must say he takes it rather well, we've got him."
"Think so?" grunted Webb. "Seems to me the difficulty will be to get rid of him without" His voice rumbled away into ruminative silence.
We hardly dared to look one another in the eye. The appalling possibility conjured up by Webb's unfinished sentence left us speechless. He looked round at me with a grim smile playing under his moustache.
"I thought you hadn't properly digested this thing before you set out on it. We've got to get that money now."
What is one to do with a hostage who has no desire for freedom? On the contrary, Sterling appeared to be having the time of his life. He told us frankly that he had fallen violently in love with Malita, and if it was a pose it was too cleverly done for us to detect. Each day he wandered at large—the dry batteries had been removed from the launch—and returned with some noisome thing that was a curio to him and a pest to us. His thirst for island lore was insatiable. His water-colour sketches were either completely above our heads or else the ghastliest daubs that ever soiled paper; personally, I can never tell which. And for us the hard fact remained that time, precious time, was slipping away without any appreciable results.
"I was wondering how long you'd sit down under this," Webb told us, after some murmurings of discontent at the fourth packing-shed convention, "and you were all so full of ideas at first. Perhaps you're for climbing out now?"
We protested violently.
"Very well, then," said Webb, "what about it?"
Rands took him by the buttonhole. I think Rands must have been an insurance agent in Denver. "See here, Webb, old man," he crooned. "You're the doctor; there's no getting away from that, and"
"I knew I should have to be," grumbled Webb.
And the net result was Sterling's confinement in the smallest and hottest room in the bungalow. There he sat in silk pyjamas, under a corrugated iron roof, and sizzled, the deathlong day. He grew less pink and a good deal thinner, but, as he pointed out, it gave him a top—splendid chance of working out the plans of his model village scheme.
"They'll be instituting inquiries," suggested Nares in his best startled-rabbit manner, after the third day of the melting process. "We have, as it were, launched an avalanche"
Webb gave him a look that blasted him on the spot.
"There's nothing else for it," said Rands with slow deliberation. "I guess the old hands at this game knew their business all right."
"But—what—how?"
Instinctively we gathered closer in an awed circle, which Webb broke up by grunting with unprecedented vigour, and stalking from the shed. I'm certain it was only his contempt for our weak-kneed attitude that kept us up to the mark.
That evening Webb was observed passing a length of stout cord over a beam of the veranda roof.
"What's the game?" asked Rands.
Webb did not answer. He completed the task and then turned to me. "Now," he said, "just tie that as tight as you can around my thumbs—there, that'll do. Now, you two, pull on the other end."
We obeyed mechanically. The toes of Webb's enormous feet just trailed the ground.
"Now swing me—slowly one, two, three, four. Now let me down."
He stood there while we untied his thumbs, then went over to the tantalus.
"That, morning and afternoon, increasing one each time," he growled. "Saw it done once."
Rands and I melted gracefully into the landscape.
"Whew!" he exclaimed, when we were clear of the bungalow. "Our Mr. Webb is a sticker."
"Didn't you know that?" said I.
We walked in pensive silence for a space.
"Wonder if he heard?" suggested Rands. "That house is like a band-box."
"I don't see that it makes any difference if he did," said I.
Rands shrugged his shoulders and gave his attention to the view. "Pineapples," he breathed. "Can't you see 'em on that hill? And a cunning little plant on those flats, and an overhead cable...."
Yes, it was worth it.
The next morning—a perfectly peaceful sunrise was ruined by the silly, ineffectual noises of Nares. I first heard him running—actually running at five o'clock in the morning—up the powdered coral pathway to the bungalow, then the hurried patter of his feet on the veranda steps, and finally his panting breath.
"She's gone," he squealed. "The launch has gone."
There were the rumblings of an earthquake in the room opposite mine, and Webb's pyjamaed figure appeared in the doorway.
"Where did you put those dry batteries?" he demanded.
"They were in my room," panted Nares; "under the bed. I—they"
Webb broke open the door of Sterling's oven with a gnarled toe. It was no longer Sterling's. It was empty.
"That's broken it," said Webb, and climbed into bed again, leaving Nares still gesticulating in the middle of the room.
"B-but the launch," he wailed; "she'll never pass Vuna Point with him driving her. She'll"
"She'll go quite far enough for his purposes," boomed Webb. "Go to bed, you ass."
"He'll go to Suva," said Rands of the nimble mind. He had been sleeping on the veranda. Rands affects a hammock and a nightshirt for some extraordinary reason. "He'll go to Suva, and bring along the sheriff—I mean the police, and"
"Go to bed," repeated Webb.
"And we can't get away," ended Tomlin brightly.
Sterling's escape completely broke up Webb. He, even he, who I knew could not have hurt a fly in ordinary circumstances, had nerved himself up to the necessary pitch for torture, and now the relapse had set in. Each day and all day we scoured the horizon for the craft bearing our fate, but none appeared. We could almost hear the pink young man chortling at our suspense: "Topping!" he would be able to call it without restraint. We of Malita grew peevish under the strain, and blamed one another like fishwives. Webb alone sat silent, staring out to sea and swinging his foot.
"Five years," Tomlin would chirp; "about five years, I should think, with a possible remission for good conduct."
"Say," Rands would jerk out, "I don't know if I can bash you, Tomlin, but I'll sure try if you don't quit that."
And Nares would look from one to the other with the same silly startled expression on his rabbit face, and we all knew he was thinking of his launch.
Oh, it was a ghastly week. Truly, Sterling's vengeance.
Then, out of the blue, our fate approached us, climbing down from the horizon in a solitary speck that resolved itself into a launch—two launches, one towing the other. The first was a noble affair of white enamel and glittering brass; I could see Nares's mouth watering as he looked at it. The other was his own.
"Say," exclaimed Rands, with the glasses to his eyes, "it's him, all right; I can see Pink-and-White. There are two others in topees, and the rest's nigs. What do we do about it?"
"Do?" repeated Webb dully; it was the first time he had spoken that day. "It's the Government, and a squad of comic-opera police. Do? Sit here and wait for 'em. What else?"
"Not by a jugful," cried the hopeful Rands. "We'll get up into the hills—hide. They'll think we've cleared."
"How?" droned Webb.
"Swum, flown—anything they like. Aw, make a fight for it, Webb."
"Too hot," said Webb.
It took a good quarter of an hour to argue Webb out of his chair on the veranda, and then he only came to satisfy us.
We of Malita trailed into the hills, a harassed and perspiring flock of refugees. From a ledge high up on the volcanic rock we looked down on our pygmy world—the bandbox bungalow, the pathetic square of black dots that had once been a banana patch, the landing like a centipede thrusting its body into the fair face of the Pacific. "It's not a bad old spot, you know," mused Tomlin sentimentally. His words echoed the thoughts in each one of our minds. Malita was very dear now that she was slipping from us.
"If we can only stick it out a day or two," Rands suggested, "we might be able to slip down in the night and vamose in the launch. What's the matter with Samoa or Tonga?"
"It's the Government," droned Webb, his every word pulverizing Rands's ideas like a sledge hammer. "It's a man hunt. Ever seen a Government man hunt? They've got us labelled and pigeonholed in their old barn at Suva by this time, and wherever we go, whatever we do, they'll be somewhere in the background. Slow, but—oh, lor'!—sure."
There was deathly silence as the two launches came to rest and spilled their pygmy people onto the landing. Sterling led the procession to the bungalow, and without hesitation, passed inside, followed by the Government. The police squatted in a formal row in the com- pound, while one of their number remained with the launch.
"That's that," remarked Tomlin.
"Rats in a trap!" murmured Nares, presumably to add to the general gaiety.
Presently the three white men came out, the police sprang to their feet, and the entire cortège spread itself over Malita. Throughout the brazen day we lay on our ledge in agonized suspense. No one came near us. We were hungry, aching, and, above all, thirsty.
Toward evening the party returned along the beach from the direction of the native village. Sterling and the Government took up their quarters in my bungalow, and the police disposed themselves among the buris (outhouses) in the compound. A yellow, homelike glow sprang into being at the living-room window, and we pictured the pink young man telling the Government over a glass of amber liquid that something or other was "topping."
Then it rained—the warm, penetrating douche of the tropics.
Webb sat with his feet dangling over the ledge like overweighted pendulums, the lining of the white pulp that had once been his solar topee emitting green cataracts down his sodden ducks.
"This will go on, and on, and on until they get us," he rumbled. "They've written a 'report' on their first day's 'investigations.' There'll be another to-morrow, and another the day after that, until they'll be able to write down, very neatly: 'On January 26, at 10 a.m, the prisoners were discovered' Pah!" he bellowed, and scrambled to his feet. "What's the use?"
"What are you going to do?" inquired someone.
"Go down and give myself up," he retorted. "A cell's dry."
And—would you believe it?—we all followed him. Like a flock of sodden sheep we trailed down that hillside and up the bungalow path. What we must have looked like standing in pools of our own making on the veranda, I have no idea, though I believe Sterling has.
Webb marched in on a homely little scene. The Government was leaning over a plan of Malita outspread on my table. Sterling was sprawled in my favourite chair, blowing smoke rings from a noble-looking cigar and staring dreamily at the ceiling. "Where on earth have you been?" he demanded at sight of the apparition.
"Little pleasure excursion up the hillside," said Webb. "What are you going to do with us?"
"Sorry," Sterling apologized, and poured out five ample tots of a brandy that was new to me but uncommonly mellow. "Hadn't you better change?" he suggested.
We changed in stony silence.
"And now," he said, "I want to thank you for the top—splendid time you gave me, and apologize for my hasty departure. That room"
"We'd rather you wouldn't be funny about it," said Webb. "Come to the point."
"Very well," agreed Sterling; "what about those pineapples?"
"Pineapples!"
"Yes; you're not going to tell me you fellows went through the agonies you must have suffered without there being something in this pineapple idea?"
"Who are these?" demanded Webb, suddenly indicating the gaping Government with a hairy hand.
"Surveyors," said Sterling. "Who did you think they were?"
"That doesn't matter," said Webb; "but"
A pained expression passed over Sterling's pink face. "You're not going to let me down," he wailed—"after me buying the island for you, mortgages and all?"
And to this day Sterling cannot be brought to believe that Webb's intentions with the rope on the veranda were serious. The argument invariably causes one to say: "Top—splendid!" and the other to swing an enormous foot, when we foregather on the veranda of a large white bungalow overlooking the Malita Pinepple Estate Incorporated.