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Well, one day this Tyne, he comes into my store, very hang-dog, and so famished and shaky that I couldn’t but feel sorry for him, and he asks for the job of pushing my handcart around the beach, getting stuff out of Customs, and making deliveries–he having heard I had fired my Nieue boy for pilfering.

“Fifty cents a day, Doc,” I says. “It’s hardly fit for a white man.”

“My God,” he says, in a real gentleman’s voice, “I’m starving. I’d push anything anywhere for a bite of bread and a corner of a shed to sleep in. Ain’t there a spark of charity in this town for a white man who is down on his uppers?”

I answered him with a can of sardines and some pilot break, which he went out and wolfed right there on the front stoop, and then came back wanting to know where was the cart and what was he to do? This was first how we got acquainted, Doc and me; and a remarkably finely educated man he was, too, and I don’t doubt for a minute all that he represented himself. I fixed up a small shed for him with some mats, a tin basin and a lamp; and after a day or two, seeing how willing he worked and how faithful in spite of every one staring at a white man between the shafts, I let him take his meals regular with me and Rosie like one of the family.

For all he was down and out, and trundled my things about the beach like a donkey, in knowledge and everything he was miles above me and I knew it–and he made it plain he knew it, too. He was not at all a genial man, but had a rasping, bitter way about him, and a tongue as sharp as a razor, and a line of talk as to how the world was made up of flats and sharpers, all of them hypocrites, and how there wasn’t but one sin–and that was to be found out. He talked like the devil might be expected to talk, there being no goodness or honor anywhere; and in some ways he wasn’t unlike him in looks as generally represented, being tall and thin, with keen gray eyes that seemed to bore right through you, and a wicked, sneering mouth like a slit across his face.

Very soon he was doctoring natives on the sly for quarters and half dollars and bonito hooks and tappa, and quite a row of bottles and drug-store stuff began to accumulate along the ledges of the shed walls. I didn’t think it was my business to interfere as long as he let white people alone, besides feeling sorry for him, and appreciating the way he paid no attention to Rosie’s outbreaks, sitting there like he was air, and not passing a single remark–being, for all his faults, a gentleman through and through. At last he chucked the handcart altogether, though he went on messing with me and living in my shed, his Kanaka practice growing very extensive. It grew and grew till finally the regular doctor called a halt, and he was warned in an official letter, and told he would get three months’ imprisonment if he persisted. At this I thought he would go back to the shafts again, though I didn’t care to propose it lest it should hurt his feelings. But instead he bought an accordion and did nothing but play and play on it for days, beginning awful bad like he didn’t know one end of it from another, but improving wonderful till it was dandy to hear him.

I guess there was nothing Doc couldn’t do if he tried, though why accordion was more than I could answer. But it wasn’t loafing that kept him stuffed in a hot shed all day, wheezing polkas out of the hurdy-gurdy, but a real good idea of improving on the handcart. What if he didn’t make a whole band out of himself, with a harness holding a comb across his mouth, and a bass drum for him to kick with one foot and a tambourine to frisk with the other. My, when he started off with “The Stars and Stripes Forever” you might have thought he was six, with a drum major prancing along in front! He give a demonstration that night in the Tivoli Hotel, and drew the town; and when he come home it was with a pocketful of silver and a couple of dates for a wedding and the Kaiser’s birthday.