Page:Jack Heaton, Wireless Operator (Collins, 1919).djvu/115

 Her face was thin and small and was topped by an enormous mass of frizzled hair while her eyes set at a slight angle so that you couldn’t just tell whether she was looking at you to the leeward or a rubber tree to the windward.

Although her eyes were thus slightly out of alignment and her mouth was cut on much too large a scale, which gave her a hard look, she was always smiling good naturedly.

The first thing I knew Princess Mabel began to hang around me and to eat and drink out of my cocoa-nut shell. She was an artistic creation in olive drab, small, and lithe, but withal a very amiable and charming maiden as cannibal maidens go.

She hadn’t been spoiled by working in high-toned families in Montclair yet. I fought shy of her for some time for I thought they wanted to put up a job on me and that the moment I gave her a pleasant look I’d be on my way to the stew pot; this belief was further fixed in my mind by occasionally finding a skull, a rib, ulna, fibula, and other parts of the human skeleton lying around loose.

The rubber men, who could speak the Indian tongue a little, assured me, however, that the