Short Stories
news leaked out that the Drake and Acorn guano islands had
been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for three-quarters of a
million. Then there were the fat, lush days of King Kalakaua,
when Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for the opi-
um licence. If he paid a third of a million for the drug monopoly,
the investment was nevertheless a good one, for the dividends
bought him the Kalalau Plantation, which, in turn, paid him thir-
ty per cent for seventeen years and was ultimately sold by him
for a million and a half.
It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had
served his own country as Chinese Consul—a position that was
not altogether unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV
that he changed his citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject
in order to marry Stella Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-
skinned king, though more of Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her
veins than of Polynesian. In fact, the random breeds in her were
so attenuated that they were valued at eighths and sixteenths. In
the latter proportions was the blood of her great-grandmother,
Paahao—the Princess Paahao, for she came of the royal line. Stel-
la Allendale's great-grandfather had been a Captain Blunt, an
English adventurer who took service under Kamehameha I and
was made a tabu chief himself. Her grandfather had been a New
Bedford whaling captain, while through her own father had
been introduced a remote blend of Italian and Portuguese which
had been grafted upon his own English stock. Legally a Hawai-
ian, Ah Chun's spouse was more of any one of three other na-
tionalities.
And into this conglomerate of the races, Ah Chun introduced
the Mongolian mixture. Thus, his children by Mrs. Ah Chun
were one thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one
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