'Ere! you 'and it to me. I'll take care of it for the gentleman.'
"All the rest of that day the Cap'n couldn't do enough for the
passenger. Give him a big dinner that took Teunis two hours to cook, and
let him use his own pet pipe with the last of Jule's tobacco in it, and
all that. And that evening in the cabin, Rosy told his story. Seems he
come from Bombay originally, where he was born an innocent and trained
to be a photographer. This was in the days when these hand cameras
wa'n't so common as they be now, and Rosy--his full name was Clarence
Rosebury, and he looked it--had a fine one. Also he had some plates and
photograph paper and a jug of 'developer' and bottles of stuff to make
more, wrapped up in an old overcoat and packed away in the carpetbag. He
had landed in the Fijis first-off and had drifted over to Hello Island,
taking pictures of places and natives and so on, intending to use 'em in
a course of lectures he was going to deliver when he got back home. He
boarded with the Kanaka lady at Hello till his money give out, and
then he married her to save board. He wouldn't talk about his married
life--just shivered instead.
"'But w'at about this good thing you was mentioning, Mr. Rosebury?' asks
Cap'n George, polite, but staring hard at the bag. Jule and the cook was
in the cabin likewise. The skipper would have liked to keep 'em out, but
they being two to one, he couldn't.
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