“And what was done to the other man?”

“Done! why there was no one to do anything, unless I had shot him, or marooned him.  No law runs in these parts.  Thompson was the best partner I ever had; he was with me in that lark with the tabooed pig.”

“What lark?”

“Oh, I’ve often spun you the yarn.”

“Never!”

“Well, it was like this.  Thompson and I, and some other chaps, started in a boat, with provisions, just prospecting about the islands.  So we went in and out among the straits—­horrid places, clear water full of sharks, and nothing but mangroves on every side.  One of these sounds is just like another.  Once I was coming home in a coasting steamer, and got them to set me down on a point that I believed was within half-a-mile of my place.  Well, I was landed, and I began walking homewards, when I found I was on the wrong track, miles and miles of mangrove swamp, cut up with a dozen straits of salt water, lay between me and the station.  The first stretch of water I came to, gad!  I didn’t like it.  I kept prospecting for sharks very close before I swam it, with my clothes on my head.  I was in awful luck all the way, though,—­not one of them had a snap at me.”

“But about the taboo pig?  Revenons a nos cochons!”

“I’m coming to that.  Well, we landed at an island we had never been on before, where there was a village of Coast natives.  A crowd of beehive-shaped huts, you know, the wall about three feet high, and all the rest roof, wattle, and clay, and moss, built as neat as a bird’s-nest outside, not very sweet inside.  So we landed and got out the grub, and marched up to the village.  Not a soul to be seen; not a black in the place.  Their gear was all cleaned out too; there wasn’t a net, nor a spear, nor a mat, nor a bowl (they’re great beggars for making pipkins), not a blessed fetich stone even, in the whole place.  You never saw anything so forsaken.  But just in the middle of the row of huts, you might call it a street if you liked, there lay, as happy as if he was by the fireside among the children in Galway, a great big fat beast of a hog.  Well, we couldn’t make out what had become of the people.  Thought we had frightened them away, only then they’d have taken the hog.  Suddenly, out of some corner, comes a black fellow making signs of peace.  He held up his hands to show he had no weapon in them, and then he held up his feet ditto.”

“Why on earth did he hold up his feet?”

“To show he wasn’t trailing a spear between his toes; that is a common dodge of theirs.  We made signs to him to come up, and up he came, speaking a kind of pigeon English.  It seems he was an interpreter by trade, paying a visit to his native village; so we tried to get out of him what it was all about.  Just what we might have expected.  A kid had been born in the village that day.”

“What had the birth of a kid got to do with it?”