They joked Count Polonsky about his girl, and he began to explain.

“I was here a year before I found one that suited me,” he said as he rode beside the wagon.  “I don’t love her, nor she me, but I pay her well, and ask only physical fidelity for my physical safety.  Her father is practical and influential, and will help me with my plans for development of the Papenoo valley, which I have bought.”

Three tall and robust natives in pareus of red and yellow, and carrying long spears, went by, accompanied by a dozen dogs.  We stopped them, and they said they were from the Papara district on their way to hunt pig in the Papenoo Mountains for Count Polonsky.  The latter remembered he had ordered such a hunt, and explained through Llewellyn that he was their employer.

They faced him, and seldom was greater contrast.  Magnificent semi-savages, clothed in only a rag, their powerful muscles responsive to every demand of their minds, and health glowing in their laughing countenances:  Polonsky, slight, bent, baldish, arrayed in Paris fashions, a figure from the Bois de Boulogne, his glass screwed in his weak eye, the other myopic, teeth missing, and face pale.  But at his command they hunted, for he had that which they craved, the money of civilization, to buy its toys and poisons.  Polonsky had a reputation for generous dealing.

A bent native man repairing the road near Faaripoo had his face swathed in bandages.  He greeted us with the courteous, “Ia ora na!” but did not lift his head.

“He is a leper,” said Llewellyn.  “I have seen him for years on this road.  He may not be here many more days, because they are segregating the lepers.  The Government has built a lazaretto for them up that road.”

We saw a group of little houses a short distance removed from the road.  They were fenced in and had an institutional look.

“There’s hundreds of lepers in Tahiti,” remarked McHenry.

“Mac, you’re a damned liar,” replied Llewellyn.  He was an overlord in manner when with natives, but his quarter aboriginal blood caused the least aspersion on them by others to touch him on the raw.

“Well, there’s a bloody lot o’them,” broke in Lying Bill.

“Eighty only,” stated Llewellyn, conclusively.  “The Government has taken a census, and they ’re all to be brought here.  Did you hear that Tissot left for Raiatea when he heard of the census?  He’s a leper and a white man.  They seized young Briand yesterday.”

I was astonished, because the latter had lived opposite the Tiare Hotel, and I had met him often at the barber’s.  I had been “next” to him at Marechal’s shop a week before.