Rídan The Devil, page 99 by Louis Becke
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o had saved his son. Beside him stood Lokolol, his arm in a sling, and tears running down his cheeks, for he knew he would see Maurice no more.
Then Captain Williams came on deck and showed the chief the little cabin boy, lying in a hammock under the poop awning. The burly savage came over to him, and taking Maurice's hand in his, placed it tenderly upon his huge, hairy bosom in token of gratitude. Then he spoke to the captain through Tommy Sandwich.
'Tell this good captain that I, Baringa, am for ever the white man's friend. And tell him, too, that all this pearl shell here is my gift to him and the boy who helped my son to escape from captivity. Half is for the good captain; half is for the brave white boy.'
Then, after remaining on board till the ship was many miles away from the land, the chief and his son bade the wounded boy farewell and went back to the shore.
Maurice soon recovered, and when the Boadicea arrived at Hong Kong, and Captain Williams had sold the pearl shell, he said to his cabin boy,--
'Maurice, my lad, I've sold the pearl shell, and what do you think I've been paid for it? Well, just eight thousand dollars--£1600 in English money. You're quite a rich boy now, Maurice. It's not every lad that gets four thousand dollars for saving a nigger's life.'
Maurice's bright blue eyes filled with honest tears. 'Shure, sor, he was a naygur, thrue enough. But thin, yere honour, he had a foine bould heart to do what he did for Maurice Kinane.'
And, as I have said, this is a true story, and old Maurice Kinane, who is alive now, himself told it to me.
THE 'KILLERS' OF TWOFOLD BAY
Enbosomed in the verdure-clad hills of the southern coast of sunny New South Wales lies a fisherman's paradise, named Twofold Bay. Its fame is but local, or known only to outsiders who may have spent a day there when travelling from Sydney to Tasmania in the fine steamers of the Union Company, which occasionally put in there to sh