did not see the captain leaning against a stanchion with his automatic leveled. Nor did he see the fever beat fold upon fold on the sick man till he dropped the gun and sank sobbing to his knees.
The burly white-suited stranger saw nothing and heard nothing as he went away to life and to safety.
It was a long time before the captain got to his feet again. His face was streaming and drawn when he finally staggered to the door of the cabin from which the stranger had come. He opened it and looked inside. What he saw stiffened him for a moment. His slack jaw came up feebly and every fever-racked muscle tensed.
“All right, Billy,” he whispered hoarsely. “All right. I’ll square.…”
Then, without warning, the fever shook him and laid him low. He choked and slipped to the deck, and the world faded from his eyes.
When the second mate of the barque Wanderer came aboard after a riotous time ashore, he found his captain unconscious in the open doorway of the mate’s cabin. The mate stretched inside with his face kicked to a pulp and a bullet wound in his throat.
* * * *
Melita’s Hotel, standing near Mulinu’u Point, about two miles from Apia, was the centre of the intricate intrigues that on occasions swept the Islands to life. Was there a schooner sunk for the sake of the insurance, was there a fine pearl discovered, did someone want someone else’s wife or woman? Melita heard of the thing sooner or later, and she heard as well the deep undercurrents that swayed each affair. She knew not only the results achieved, which everyone knew sooner or later, but she also heard the way the results were won, the causes behind and beyond, secret whispered things not for the average islander to understand.
To Melita came the big pearl buyers, the island traders, the schooner captains, and the freelance adventurers whenever they wanted information about some man or woman or matter. And if Melita did not happen to have the information on the tip of her tongue, she had ways and means of soon acquiring it. And for the services she thus rendered she exacted her due, each man paying according to his ability as judged by the shrewd woman.
She was the daughter of an island adventurer, one of those hardy Scotchmen who stormed the savage Pacific in the old days, and tamed it, somewhat, for the younger generation to rule. Her mother had been a Tahitian princess of the blood, and the runaway match between her father and her mother had been ideally happy for both.
The Scotchman had died, as all men died in those days, violently, a spear passing through his throat in a long-forgotten fray on a long-forgotten island. The princess had gone after him into the Shadow with a broken heart soon after. For Melita there was nothing left but the mission school in Apia, where her father’s friends accordingly placed her, and then forgot the whole affair.
In her sixteenth year, possessed of all her mother’s glorious beauty, the girl had been courted by a notorious French adventurer who had finally induced her to run away with him, which she did, only to be stranded in San Francisco some two years later.
Her history from that time is uncertain. That she saw many people and places is known. She came back to the islands—her native blood made that inevitable—twenty-six, darkly beautiful, and with a refinement that was not to be learned in the home of the average European. Also she brought with her a fierce resentment of mankind that hid itself under a smiling exterior like the leopard’s claws hide under the velvet pads.
She had started the hotel, and she had in time become the pivot round which the island life swung. Her fame ran far and wide, and with it the fame of her beauty.
All island roads led to Melita. If one spent long enough at the hotel, one would sooner or later meet everyone worth meeting between America and Australia. The island traders even made it a practice to purposely miss the tide of an evening, and thus be forced to anchor off the Point for a few hours before they could run into Apia. Not that the hotel was a place for the common sailor-man. There were such places in Apia itself. No one less than a ship’s first officer was allowed inside. Melita’s hotel, like Melita herself, was select.
CHAPTER II
A BRIBE REFUSED
One night an unwelcome guest climbed the pathway of the Point, and stopped at the top to light a cheroot. His fat body was glowing with the unaccustomed exertion of toiling up the slope, and his breath came in short, painful gasps. His height was perhaps five-feet ten; and what with his paunch and his heavy shoulders he looked a formidable man. He was Steinberger, the owner of the brig Atlantis, and one of the biggest pearl buyers and traders in the south.
Off the Point his brig was even then laying and swinging at anchor, while her officers cursed their employer at holding them up on the voyage while he went to visit a woman.
The beefy German waited until he had in some measure recovered his breath, and, mopping his brow with a white silk handkerchief, stepped up on the broad veranda of the hotel, pulled aside the heavy draperies that served as the house front in hot weather, and entered the big, dim-lit room beyond.
In three tall braziers incense was burning, the heavy blue fumes shrouding the room and making one cough when entering from the clean night air. Soft mats, cushions of various hues, divans and colored rugs were scattered everywhere in profusion, nearly all occupied by white duck-suited figures. The dozen or more ships anchored near Steinberger’s brig told where they had come from.
Two native girls were plucking gently at some string instruments in a far corner shrouded in shadow, and others were moving softly about carrying trays or pitchers. All were dressed native fashion in girdles, beads, flowers. They wore nothing more.
On a great heap of gaudy cushions, in the centre of the room, reclined Melita. She was dressed in silk of some dark color, and her wonderful shoulders shimmered white beneath the soft glow from the dim lamps overhead. Half a dozen girls, each a beauty, reclined near, though one would rise now and then to execute some languidly given order.
Several men were sitting cross-legged by the pile of cushions, out-doing each other in praises and spinning fantastic yarns of some outlandish adventures for the delight of the laughing half-caste. Other men were lying dreamy-eyed in other parts of the room, sipping drinks or bestowing their attentions on some minor star of the notorious hotel.
The big German picked a careful way across the littered room, and handing his cap to an attendant, he came to a halt before the cushion dais half seen in the red lamp glow. Melita flung some laughing response to one of the men who had caught her hand and kissed it. With nothing but her great eyes showing above her fan she faced the newcomer. The fan was instantly lowered.
“Why, it is Wilhelm,” she laughed gaily, and extended her hand to the other. With an attempt at gallantry the German removed his cheroot from his lips and stooped over the slim fingers, but before he could reach them they slipped from his palm. He stood up with a scowl, sneered at the assembled men about, and then looked insolently at the half-caste.
“I want to talk with you,” he stated, jamming his cheroot back in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. It was many years since Steinberger had left the Fatherland, and he spoke with no appreciable accent.
Melita looked bored, but she rose just the same. Steinberger was one of the hotel’s best customers, and she could hardly afford to offend him. His arrogant manner and insolent contempt for all women jarred on her, and some day she would send him away and bid him come no more; till then.… She shrugged and with a murmur of apology to the other men attending her she led the way to a room at the back end of the house, as exotically furnished as the big front room was. Steinberger closed the door behind him, and Melita sank easily onto a low divan.
* * * *
THE room was small, but a cunning arrangement of mirrors gave it an appearance of vast dimensions. On two sides the walls had been removed, for the sake of coolness, and copper mesh substituted. On the inside of this mesh hung flimsy, cloudy draperies that effectively prevented any one on the outside from seeing in.
Indifferently Melita waited for the German to begin. He pursed his thick lips, drew hard on his cheroot and breathed heavily. The butt glowed