Free 02 South Sea Adventure by Willard Price

with a slight hunch in his back came towards him.
    He did not smile or offer to shake hands. He only said gruffly:
    ‘What took you so long? I saw your ship come in and I’ve been waiting here for half an hour.’ He cast a suspicious glance at the clerk. ‘Let’s get out of here - go some place where we can talk.’
    They went out into the street and turned at the next corner into a quiet lane. It wound away towards the hills between thatch huts set in lush gardens from which came the perfume of jasmine, frangipani, cinnamon, and aloes. Crab and his companion walked under a huge breadfruit tree from which hung fruits almost as big as footballs. They passed dozens of strange plants and trees - it was like going through a botanical garden.
    The people were as fine as the trees. The men were more than six feet tall and powerful muscles rippled under their brown skins. Women wore white flowers in their hair. The babies were fat and cheerful. One of them sat in the road directly in the path of the big man. It laughed up at him.
    He scooped it up with his foot and gave it a fling into the bushes, whereupon it broke into a loud wail.
    Crab grew more and more nervous. It was evident that the man was in a bad temper. What Crab had to tell him would not make him any happier.
    They came to a European-style house in a garden of orange and lemon trees, mangosteens, pomegranates, and peacock palms.
    The man flung open the door and took Crab into a musty parlour. Two Ponapean servants promptly appeared - a woman who arranged the chairs and a man who asked in broken English whether master would like to have drinks. ‘Get out of here!’ roared the big man. ‘Get out, both of you!’ He helped them with a push or two and slammed the door after them.
    ‘Dirty scum!’ he said savagely. ‘Curse their brown hides. If I was Uncle Sam I’d wipe ‘em all clean off the island.’
    He motioned Crab to sit down and took a chair facing him. He drew it close and leaned forward until his eyes were not two feet from Crab’s. His hunched back gave him the appearance of a crouching lion about to spring.
    ‘All right, out with it!’ he snapped. ‘Did you get the bearings?’
    Crab could hardly breathe. He must stall for time. ‘It was a hard job you gave me. I did my best. I listened in on him and his kid brother too but they never said anything. I went through all their things …’
    ‘Never mind all that. Did you get the location of the island?’ ‘Can’t say that I did but…’
    He got no farther. A crashing blow from the big man’s fist spun his head backwards, overturned his chair, and left him in a half-conscious heap on the floor. He got up shakily, dabbing at his bleeding nose. ‘You’ll be sorry for that, Kaggs.’
    ‘You threaten me?’ said the man called Kaggs, looming over Crab like a cliff about to fall upon his head. Looking down. Crab saw that the big man’s hand held a revolver. He dropped back.
    ‘1 didn’t mean anything, Mr Kaggs.’
    For which he got a clout on the head with the butt of the gun. ‘Shut up! Don’t use my name. I don’t intend anybody to know me here.’
    ‘Not know you? Why everybody knows you’re the biggest pearl trader from Thursday Island to the Sulu Sea.’
    ‘Down there they know. Not up here. Nobody thinks pearls up here. And these navy kids - what do they know about the Pacific? Most of them are just fresh out of school.’
    ‘So if you aren’t Merlin Kaggs - the crookedest pearl trader south of the equator - just who are you?’
    The big man straightened slightly and nearly allowed a smile to take over his face. ‘I am, if you please, the Reverend Archibald Jones. I am a missionary of the Go-Ye-Forth Church of America. I have flown here from San Francisco bearing glad tidings to the heathen of these benighted islands.’
    Crab snorted. ‘How can you make anybody believe you’re a missionary? You, with two murders and a spell in San Quentin to your credit!’
    ‘You’d be