When Lovaina inquired the price, she smiled her sweetest, rubbed the saleslady’s back, and uttered some joke that made her sway with laughter, so that price became of no importance.  But a sour-faced white or a pompous bureaucrat paid her saving, and Chinese, who kept the restaurants, invoked the curse of barrenness upon the venders.

The day came for the new scheme of fish-selling to go into effect.  The mayor, a long-bearded and shrewd druggist, had bought up all the half-way accurate scales in the city, for there had not been a balance in the market.  Everything was by strings, bunches, feels, and hefts.  The fish counters, polished by the guardian of the marche, were now brilliant with the shiny apparatus.

The long-awaited morning found a crowd peeping through the railing half an hour earlier than usual.  All would have a fill of delicacies.  Lovaina with the Dummy drove down to the Annexe for me.  Vava was making queer signs to her which either were unintelligible or which she thought absurd.  She waved her long forefinger before him, which meant:  “Don’t talk foolishness.  I am not a fool.”

We reached the market-place when only a score or two had gathered.

A thousand devils! there was not a fish on the slabs.  The merry wives were absent.  The condition was plain.

The Dummy uttered a demoniacal grunt, and shook his head and hands before Lovaina in accusation.  She answered him with a movement of her head up and down, which signified acquiescence.

“Dummy know,” she said mysteriously.  “That Vava he find everything.  He like old-time tahutahu, sorcerer.  He tell me Annexe no fish.  He say now no fish till finish those masheen.”

She laughed and rubbed my shoulders.

“The fish slip away,” she said, “and leave only their scales!  Aue!”

M. Lontane, the second in command of the gendarmes, was sent scouting, and reported to the governor—­not the one who originated the manifesto—­that the famine was the result of an organized revolt against the law and order of the land.  Fishermen he had questioned, replied simply, “Aita faito, paru!  Aita hoo, paru!” Which, holy blue! meant, “No scales, fish!  No price, fish!”

What to do?  One cannot make a horse drink unless one gives him red peppers to eat.  Even the Government could not make a fisherman fish for market, as there was a law against enforced labor except as punishment for crime or in emergencies, such as during the existence of martial law, the guarding against a conflagration, or a tidal wave or cyclone.  At the Cercle Militaire many of the bureaucrats, and especially the doctor who had treated the cow-boy, were for martial law, anyway.  Napoleon knew, said the fierce medecin.  “A whiff of grapeshot, and the reef would be again gleaming with lights, and the diligences would pour in with loads of fish.”

Doctor Cassiou, a very old resident, and not at all fierce, asked his confrere against whom would the grapeshot be directed.  Would he gather the fishermen from all over Tahiti, and decimate them, the way the Little Corporal purged mutiny out of his regiments?  Lontane was sent out again.  In the Cerele Bougainville he took a rum punch before starting on his bicycle, and he swore by his patron saint, Bacchus, that he would solve the problem even if denied the remedy of force majeure.