Ormsby puffed his pipe as Tahia put her hand in his.  Her action was that of a small dog who puts his paw on his master’s sleeve, hesitating, hopeful, but uncertain.  She regarded me with slightly veiled hostility.  I was a white who might be taking him away to foreign things.

“She’s heard us talking about Atuona and Hiva-Oa, and she thinks maybe I ’ve concluded to go.  I can’t do it, O’Brien.  If I go there, I’ll go native forever.  I’ve got a streak of some dam’ savage in me.  Listen!  I’ve got to go on the Etoile to Kaukura tojmorrow.  Now, the natives are always kind to any one, but sickness they are not interested in.  You go and see her, won’t you?  She’s about all in, and it won’t hurt you.”

Ormsby went to the Dangerous Isles on the Etoile, and did not return for three weeks.  He did not find Tahia in her shack on the hill.  She was in the cemetery,—­in the plot reserved for the natives of other islands,—­and her babe unborn.  She had died alone.  I think she made up her mind to relieve the Englishman of her care, and willed to die at once.  Dr. Cassiou, with whom I visited her, said: 

“She ought to have lasted several months.  Mais, c’est curieux.  I have treated these Polynesians for many years, and I never found one I could keep alive when he wanted to die.  She had already sent away her spirit, the ame, or essence vitale, or whatever it is, and then the body simply grows cold.”

Ormsby and I talked it all over in the parc.  He was deeply affected, and he uncovered his own soul, as men seldom do.

“I ‘m dam’ glad she’s dead,” he said, with intense feeling.  “I might have failed, and she died before I did fail.  I’m going back to Warwick now at first chance, and whatever I do or don’t do, I’ve got that exception to my credit.  It’s one, too, to the credit of the whites that have cursed these poor islanders.”

He had chalked it down on a record he thought quite black, but which I believe was better than our average.  He and I went to the cemetery and had a wooden slab put up: 

    Tahia a Atuona
    Tamau te maitai.

    Tahia of Atuona
    She held fast.

The Christchurch Kid and I were friendly, and he allowed me once a day during his training periods to put on the gloves with him for a mild four rounds.  He was an open-hearted fellow, with a cauliflower ear and a nose a trifle awry from “a couple of years with the pork-and-beaners in California,” as he explained, but with a magnificent body.  He also lived at the Annexe, and did his training in the garden under Afa’s clever hands.  The Dummy must have admired him, for he would watch him exercising and boxing for hours, and make farcical sounds and grotesque gestures to indicate his understanding of the motions and blows.

The Kid asked me if I knew Ernest Darling, “the nature man,” and identified the too naked wearer of toga and sandals on the San Francisco wharf as Darling.