“Was the Chinaman sure dead when you put the leaves over him?” I asked, influenced by his staring eyes.

McHenry grinned foully.

“Aye, man, you want too much,” he replied.  “I say his face was white, and he was on his back in the marsh.  If he was alive, the leaves didn’t finish him, and if he was croaked, it didn’t matter.  I was obligin’ a friend.  You’d have done as much.”  He took up his glass and muttered dramatically, “A few leaves for a friend.”

I shuddered, but Landers leaned over the table and said to me, sotto voce: 

“McHenry’s tellin’ his usual bloody lie.  Brown got the vanilla all right, but what he did was to have the bloomin’ Chink consign it to him proper’, and not give him a receipt.  Then he denied all knowledge of it, and it bein’ all the bleedin’ Chinaman had, he died of a broken heart—­with maybe too many pipes of opium to help him on a bit.  McHenry and Pincher are terrible liars.  They call Pincher ‘Lyin’ Bill,’ though I ’d take his word in trade or about schooners any day.”

I had been introduced to a Doctor Funk by Count Polonsky, who told me it was made of a portion of absinthe, a dash of grenadine,—­a syrup of the pomegranate fruit,—­the juice of two limes, and half a pint of siphon water.  Dr. Funk of Samoa, who had been a physician to Robert Louis Stevenson, had left the receipt for the concoction when he was a guest of the club.  One paid half a franc for it, and it would restore self-respect and interest in one’s surroundings when even Tahiti rum failed.

“Zat was ze drink I mix for Paul Gauguin, ze peintre sauvage, here before he go to die in les isles Marquises,” remarked Levy, the millionaire pearl-buyer, as he stood by the table to be introduced to me.

“Absinthe seul he general’ take,” said Joseph, the steward.

“I bid fifty thousand francs for one of Gauguin’s paintings in Paris last year,” Count Polonsky said as he claimed his game of ecarte against Tati, the chief of Papara district.  “I failed to get it, too.  I bought many here for a few thousand francs each before that.”

“Blow me!” cried Pincher, the skipper of the Morning Star. “’E was a bleedin’ ijit.  I fetched ’im absinthe many a time in Atuona.  ’E said Dr. Funk was a bloomin’ ass for inventin’ a drink that spoiled good Pernoud with water.  ’E was a rare un.  ’E was like Stevenson ’at wrote ‘Treasure Island.’  Comes into my pub in Taiohae in the Marquesas Islands did Stevenson off’n his little Casco, and says he, ’’Ave ye any whisky,’ ’e says, ’’at ’asn’t been watered?  These South Seas appear to ‘ave flooded every bloomin’ gallon,’ ’e says.  This painter Gauguin wasn’t such good company as Stevenson, because ’e parleyvoud, but ’e was a bloody worker with ’is brushes at Atuona.  ‘E was cuttin’ wood or paintin’ all the time.”

“He was a damn’ fool,” said Hallman, who had come in to the Cercle to take away Captain Pincher.  “I lived close to him at Atuona all the time he was there till he died.  He was bughouse.  I don’t know much about painting, but if you call that crazy stuff of Gauguin’s proper painting, then I’m a furbelowed clam.”