“The priest?” says Case.  “O! he was hammering on the door outside, and crying on the natives to come and beat it in, and singing out it was a soul he wished to save, and that.  He was in a rare taking, was the priest.  But what would you have?  Johnny had slipped his cable; no more Johnny in the market; and the administration racket clean played out.  Next thing, word came to Randall the priest was praying upon Johnny’s grave.  Papa was pretty full, and got a club, and lit out straight for the place, and there was Galoshes on his knees, and a lot of natives looking on.  You wouldn’t think Papa cared — that much about anything, unless it was liquor; but he and the priest stuck to it two hours, slanging each other in native, and every time Galoshes tried to kneel down Papa went for him with the club.  There never were such larks in Falesa.  The end of it was that Captain Randall knocked over with some kind of a fit or stroke, and the priest got in his goods after all.  But he was the angriest priest you ever heard of, and complained to the chiefs about the outrage, as he called it.  That was no account, for our chiefs are Protestant here; and, anyway, he had been making trouble about the drum for morning school, and they were glad to give him a wipe.  Now he swears old Randall gave Adams poison or something, and when the two meet they grin at each other like baboons.”

He told this story as natural as could be, and like a man that enjoyed the fun; though, now I come to think of it after so long, it seems rather a sickening yarn.  However, Case never set up to be soft, only to be square and hearty, and a man all round; and, to tell the truth, he puzzled me entirely.

I went home and asked Uma if she were a Popey, which I had made out to be the native word for Catholics.

“E Le Ai!” says she.  She always used the native when she meant “no” more than usually strong, and, indeed, there’s more of it.  “No good Popey,” she added.

Then I asked her about Adams and the priest, and she told me much the same yarn in her own way.  So that I was left not much farther on, but inclined, upon the whole, to think the bottom of the matter was the row about the sacrament, and the poisoning only talk.

The next day was a Sunday, when there was no business to be looked for.  Uma asked me in the morning if I was going to “pray”; I told her she bet not, and she stopped home herself with no more words.  I thought this seemed unlike a native, and a native woman, and a woman that had new clothes to show off; however, it suited me to the ground, and I made the less of it.  The queer thing was that I came next door to going to church after all, a thing I’m little likely to forget.  I had turned out for a stroll, and heard the hymn tune up.  You know how it is.  If you hear folk singing, it seems to draw you; and pretty soon I found myself alongside the church.  It was a little long low place, coral built, rounded off at both ends