Short Stories
This he could not do, for clams were tambo. Six times in suc-
cession he refused to touch the clams, and six times he was
knocked senseless. Bunster knew that the boy would die first,
but called his refusal mutiny, and would have killed him had
there been another cook to take his place.
One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's
kinky locks and bat his head against the wall. Another trick
was to catch Mauki unawares and thrust the live end of a cigar
against his flesh. This Bunster called vaccination, and Mauki
was vaccinated a number of times a week. Once, in a rage,
Bunster ripped the cup handle from Mauki's nose, tearing the
hole clear out of the cartilage.
"Oh, what a mug!" was his comment, when he surveyed
the damage he had wrought.
The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray
fish is like a rasp. In the South Seas the natives use it as a wood
file in smoothing down canoes and paddles. Bunster had a
mitten made of ray fish skin. The first time he tried it on Mauki,
with one sweep of the hand it fetched the skin off his back from
neck to armpit. Bunster was delighted. He gave his wife a taste
of the mitten, and tried it out thoroughly on the boat-boys.
The prime ministers came in for a stroke each, and they
had to grin and take it for a joke.
"Laugh, you, laugh!" was the cue he gave.
Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a
day passed without a caress from it. There were times when the
loss of so much cuticle kept him awake at night, and often the
half-healed surface was raked raw afresh by the facetious Mr.
Bunster. Mauki continued his patient wait, secure in the knowle-
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