Obviously, a presence had entered the bar. The blackbearded man, a head shorter than he and barely taller than Lindy, was recharging the air. When the blue eyes smiled, the place came alive. The guitarists were reborn. The spoon-clinker offered the Frenchman a half-filled beer bottle. He shook his head and placed the jug on the bar for Henri to refill. The man had even white teeth and laugh-crinkles, but his eyes were deep and thoughtful. He wore faded cut-off denims, leather sandals, and a scrimshawed pigstooth on a silver necklace. He was very solid, with broad seaman’s shoulders and pink Gallic cheeks. His movements were sure, despite the limp, and young, though he was not: he might have been thirty, or forty.

A half-dozen natives had crowded into the bar, square-shouldered, lean-hipped young men of bronze, in clean Aloha shirts. They had high cheekbones and hook-noses. They were a leaner breed of cat, Mitch decided, than the Hawaiians and the occasional Tahitian he had met in Honolulu. Marquesans were cannibals, reputedly, only a few generations back: “Inveterate gormandizers of human flesh,” according to Melville’s not-so-tongue-in-cheek account. Anyway, from an ancient memorial to fallen French soldiers, which he had noticed by the road, he concluded that they had apparently been less digestible to French colonialism than the Tahitians further west.

The young men at the bar were trying to draw the blackbearded Frenchman into their midst, pressing their beer on him and crowding close. But his eyes were on Lindy’s again, the son of a bitch; no, they flicked to his own. They were the deepest blue Mitch had ever seen. The man smiled. Mitch found himself smiling back. The Frenchman left his jug on the bar and moved across the room. His right calf was badly scarred.

“You are the white ketch, I think? An Atkins?”

He had a faint French accent, but his English was American, not British, and very good. Beneath the full black beard another vicious scar curved from his temple to his jaw; along it, the whiskers curled whitely. More closely observed, with the wrinkles better etched by the afternoon sun through the window, he looked closer to forty than thirty.

Mitch stuck out his hand. “I’m Mitch Gordon. This is my wife, Lindy. Are you anchored here?”

The Frenchman nodded and they shook hands. His clasp was firm and very un-French. He told them he had the orange ketch Xanadu they had passed on entering. “And that ketch, I am afraid she is my wife.”

“That must save you a lot of confusion,” remarked Lindy.

Now what the hell had she meant by that? Mitch studied her thoughtfully. The trip had toughened her; she was lithe and golden and very slender. With the Frenchman near, she glowed. He felt uncomfortable, and annoyed at himself. He was damned if he was going to be jealous of a stranger met in a bar.