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Time was running away on us, and me and Tom got tired of saying the same things over and over, and always getting the same answers, and finally we lost our tempers, and said we’d go home. Then he said he’d come home, too, and we said No, we had washed our hands of him. Then he said he was only a poor old man and would blow his brains out, and we said he might, if he wanted to. Then, when we had gone about twenty paces, he come lumbering after us, saying, “For God’s sake, stop!” and swearing he would go up peaceful, and make no more trouble.

We tied him in like a baby in a high chair, I going up to receive him, while my wife and Tom laid on to the rope with a yeo-heave-yeo under their breaths. All the fight had clean gone out of him, and the only thing he did was to squeal a little when he bumped against the trunk, and tried to fill up with air to make himself lighter. But he reached the top all right, and I landed him very careful, he squatting down on the floor and saying, “Oh, my God!” I was too busy clearing away, and letting the block down to Tom, for me to hear much else he said, but when I was through and went to take a last look at him, he seemed quite snug and contented, and glad he had come. He shook hands very grateful, looking for me to come back the following night and report, I to make an owl signal like we had agreed on previously.

I wished him happy dreams, and come down, all three of us setting out for home with the truck and the gear, my wife in a tantrum at our having threatened to desert Old Dibs when he acted so cowardly. Tom made it worse by saying the Kanakas were losing all respeck for whites, and if he was married to a Tongan, and was spoken to like that, he’d quit–by gum, that’s what he’d do! Then she said it would serve me right if she went away in the schooner with the white men, and I would never see her again. And I said, “Oh, dear, but I’d feel sorry for the white man that got you!” Then she said she’d give all the gold Old Dibs had made her a present of to be back home in Tonga; and then I said I’d gladly add mine to hers. And when Tom added his, I thought we were in for a race war.

We all got back pretty cross and tired, but a little beer put heart in us; and I pulled her down on my knee and said she was the only girl in the world, and that I wouldn’t trade her for a ten-ton cutter; while Tom counted out the money Old Dibs had given us previous, and said we were all a pack of fools, and that he was as fond of Sarah as anybody. So peace descended like a beautiful vision, and there was four hundred and forty dollars for each of us, with a twenty over that we tossed for, and engineered to let Sarah win. Tom said we might shake hands on a good night’s work, and went home in high spirits, jingling his money in a bandanner.

It wasn’t long after breakfast the next morning when I heard a great stamping and tramping out in front, and there, if you please, was the whole schooner party, Phelps, Nettleship, the bookkeeper, and the captain. They had thrown off the mask now, and Phelps had a warrant a yard long for the apprehension of Runyon Rufe, which he read aloud to me, while the others listened with their hats off like it was church.

“I thought you gentlemen were in the guano business,” says I, when he had finished.