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Tom knew right away he was a defaulter, and said we were in powerful luck to have got him. It was fine of Tom to take it like that, for what luck there was was mine, and he said he’d help out with chickens and fresh fish and some extra superior canned stuff he had, so that Old Dibs would be comfortable and want to stay. Tom was a good deal like that professor who could make a prehistoric animal out of one prehistoric bone, and then, when later on they discovered the whole beast entire, it was head and tail with the one he had drawn on the blackboard. And by the time the square-face had made a second round, Tom’s fancy had flown higher than a yellow-back novel, Old Dibs being dead, blessing me with his last breath and making me the heir of all his riches!

Tom walked home with me, still talking, for we had now bought a ninety-ton schooner with my legacy, me captain and him supercargo, and we had taken out French naturalization papers so we might be free of the Paumotu and Tubuai groups. When we said good night, whispering so as not to disturb Old Dibs, who was snoring out serene, it had grown to be a fleet, with headquarters at Papiete, and a steam service to ‘Frisco! We were a pair of boys, both of us, and could make squid taste like lamb chops just by telling ourselves it was so!

I reckon Old Dibs was a little suspicious of me and Tom, and small blame to him for that, the Islands being pretty full of tough customers, with never no law nor order nor nobody to appeal to in trouble unless it was your gun. He made me put a stout bolt on his door and chicken wire over the windows, and always slept with the lamp burning in his room; and it was noticeable, too, that he never cared to wander far away from the house. He was given to playing the flute in the stern of an old whaleboat, which was drawn up near the station with a cocoanut shelter over it. He never went anywhere, except to the native pastor’s (Iosefo his name was). I suppose he felt a kind of protection in him–Iosefo being the nearest thing to an official in the island–and he made himself very solid in that quarter, giving to the church lavish and going there every Sunday. He always come back from them visits with a ruminating look in his eye, and the first thing he did was to make a bee line for his room, like somebody might have been tampering with his trunks.

Finally one day he took me aside and said: “Bill, that Iosefo is a very agreeable man, and if it would be the same to you, I’d like to have him a little about the house.”

“Why, Mr. Smith,” I said, “you needn’t have troubled to ask me that; any friend of yours is welcome, I am sure, and I never saw no harm in Iosefo, even if he is a missionary.”

I thought he meant to have the fellow in to talk with him or play checkers, to while away the time that hung so heavy on his hands. But it wasn’t this at all–except for a halfway pretense at the beginning. No; he paid Iosefo ten dollars a week, for what do you think? To sit on one of his trunks ( the trunk, I reckon) from seven in the morning till six at night, barring service time Sundays. Yes, sir; nothing else than a squatting sentry, mounting guard over the boodle inside the trunk and protecting it from me! I wonder what the home missionary society would have said to see Brother Iosefo yawning all day on the top of a trunk, or writing his sermon on his knee, Saturdays!