Insensibly I began to keep better hours.  On wet and stormy nights, in the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes.  Truly, he had made a better man of me.  Yet he was not strait-laced.  And he knew nothing of common Christian morality.  All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead.  He believed merely in fair play and square dealing.  Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.

Otoo had my welfare always at heart.  He thought ahead for me, weighed my plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself.  At first, when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture.  I did not know he was a knave.  Nor did any white man in Papeete.  Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking him.  Native sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his suspicions.  Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters.  I couldn’t believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first steamer to Aukland.

At first, I am free to confess, I couldn’t help resenting Otoo’s poking his nose into my business.  But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion.  He had his eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and far-sighted.  In time he became my counsellor, until he knew more of my business than I did myself.  He really had my interest at heart more than I did.  Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night in.  So it was well that I had some one to look out for me.  I know that if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here to-day.

Of numerous instances, let me give one.  I had had some experience in blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus.  Otoo and I were in Samoa—­we really were on the beach and hard aground—­when my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig.  Otoo signed on before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia.  Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar in my boat.  Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the beach.  The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter’s boat, also lying