You must not kill one
another, and you must leave your neighbours' wives alone. All this
is life for you, because you think but one day at a time, while we,
your chiefs, think for you all days and for days ahead.'"
"Like a cloud on the mountain-top that comes down and wraps about
you and that you dimly see is a cloud, so is your wisdom to me,
Kanaka Oolea," Kumuhana murmured. "Yet is it sad that I should be
born a common man and live all my days a common man."
"That is because you were of yourself common," Hardman Pool assured
him. "When a man is born common, and is by nature uncommon, he
rises up and overthrows the chiefs and makes himself chief over the
chiefs. Why do you not run my ranch, with its many thousands of
cattle, and shift the pastures by the rain-fall, and pick the
bulls, and arrange the bargaining and the selling of the meat to
the sailing ships and war vessels and the people who live in the
Honolulu houses, and fight with lawyers, and help make laws, and
even tell the King what is wise for him to do and what is
dangerous? Why does not any man do this that I do? Any man of all
the men who work for me, feed out of my hand, and let me do their
thinking for them--me, who work harder than any of them, who eats
no more than any of them, and who can sleep on no more than one
lauhala mat at a time like any of them?"
"I am out of the cloud, Kanaka Oolea," said Kumuhana, with a
visible brightening of countenance.
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