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This wasn’t all he got neither, for she was a great one with her needle, and did texts better nor a Sailors’ Home. Coe’s cabin was more like a little Bethel than the inside of a trading ship, for there was six of them, and a red worsted dog extra, playing with a blue worsted ball, and “Jesus, Lover of my Soul” and “Where is my Wandering Boy To-night?” The biggest joke of all was in the trade room, where there was “Honesty is the Best Policy,” and “God Sees You”; and the boys guyed Coe about it unmerciful till he laid out Tom Dawlish with a fancy lamp, and said a gentleman ought to know where to stop. He was an awful thin-skinned kind of Christian when it came to any remarks being passed on Mrs. Tweedie, and Tom has a scar there to this day, though Coe made it up to him afterwards with a melodian worth nine dollars.

But Coe wasn’t the only dog around the Mission house. Mrs. Tweedie started up another, a scamp of a chief named Afiola. In every community there’s some fellar who’s at the root of all the mischief that happens, so that if anybody gets speared of a dark night, or a girl is missing from home, you know just where to look for who done it. In Puna Punou you looked for Afiola, and the chances were you’d find him drunk on orange beer and laying for trouble with a gun. Oh, yes, indeed, there was two to his credit, to my certain knowledge, murders both, and I’ll bet a ton of shell to an old hat besides that he had a hand in taking off the Chinaman at Oa Bay. A regular bad lot, and, like every big scalawag, every little scalawag had to tail along with him, too, for company and mutual protection; so his houses was the kind of Bowery of Puna Punou, with the whalers going to him to buy girls, and all that.

There were higher chiefs than Afiola in the settlement–five or six of them, at least, not to speak of the king–but none of them seemed able to do a thing to stop him. They were all a slack lot at any time, and thought excommunicating him enough, and taking away his communion ticket. I guess he had been out of the church for a matter of six years, and, as I said before, he was the scandal of the place and a terror. They were all dead scared of him, that was the truth, and, though his following was small, they were ugly customers and well armed, and could line up a dozen rifles in the twinkling of an eye. We often talked it over among ourselves how to break the gang up, but, as he always left the whites alone, and was even a favorite with the worst, it ended like it begun–in smoke.

This Afiola wasn’t of any particular age, because the natives don’t know when they are born, and have nothing to go by like dates and sich. I suppose Afiola was somewheres around thirty, for he had two children, about eight or nine each, a girl and a boy, who lived with him in his house, together with Talavao, his old mother, Sosofina, his aunt, Oloa, his uncle, his brother Filipo, and a raft of other blood relations whose names I disremember. Like all the chiefs of Puna Punou, Afiola was a tall, fine-looking man, very vigorous, lordly, and pleasant spoken, and if it weren’t for his pock-marked face and the wickedest eyes I ever saw in a man’s head, you would have said he was a perfect gentleman, and handsome, as Kanakas go. I had never had a bit of trouble with him myself, and whenever I put business in his way he had always come down prompt with pigs and mats and masoa.