A story once told, even facts thoroughly well known, changed with each repetition.  A month after an occurrence one might search in vain for the actuality.  It was more difficult to learn truthful details than anywhere I had been.  The French are niggardly of publications concerning Tahiti.  An almanac once a year contained a few figures and facts of interest, but with no newspapers within thousands of miles, every person was his own journal, and prejudices and interest dictated all oral records.

McHenry hushed war reports to talk about Brown, an American merchant who had left the club a moment before, after a Bourbon straight alone at the bar.  McHenry was a trader, mariner, adventurer, gambler, and boaster.  Rough and ready, witty, profane, and obscene, he bubbled over with tales of reef and sea, of women and men he had met, of lawless tricks on natives, of storm and starvation, and of his claimed illicit loves.  Loud-mouthed, bullet-headed, beady-eyed, a chunk of rank flesh shaped by a hundred sordid deeds, he must get the center of attention by any hazard.

“Brown’s purty stuck up now,” he said acridly.  “I remember the time when he didn’t have a pot to cook in.  He had thirty Chile dollars a month wages.  We come on the beach the same day in the same ship.  His shoes were busted out, and he was crazy to get money for a new girl he had.  There was a Chink had eighteen tins of vanilla-beans worth about two hundred American dollars each.  He got the Chink to believe he could handle the vanilla for him, and got hold of it, and then out by the vegetable garden Brown hit the poor devil of a Chink over the nut with a club.”

McHenry got up from the table, and with Llewellyn’s walking-stick showed exactly how the blow was struck.  He brought down the cane so viciously against the edge of the table that he spilled our rum punches.

“Mac,” exclaimed Llewellyn, testily, as he shot him a hot glance from the melancholy eyes under his black thatch of brows, “behave yourself!  You know you’re lying.”

McHenry laughed sourly, and went on: 

“I was chums with Brown then, and when I caught up to him,—­I was walkin’ behind them,—­he asked me to see if the Chink was dead.  I went back to where he had tumbled him.  He was layin’ on his back in a kind o’ ditch, and he was white instead o’ yeller.  He was white as Lyin’ Bill’s schooner.  How would you ‘a’ done?  Well, to protect that dirty pup Brown, I covered him over with leaves from head to foot—­big bread-fruit and cocoanut-leaves.  He never showed up again, and Brown had the vanilla.  That’s how he got his start, and, so help me God!  I never got a franc from the business.”

There was venom in McHenry’s tone, and he looked at me, the newcomer, to see what impression he had made.  The others said not a word of comment, and it may have been an often-told tale by him.  He had emptied his glass of the potent Martinique rum four or five times.