straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of
uplifted coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from
merchants who needed ready cash, from impecunious natives, from
riotous traders' sons, from widows and orphans and the lepers
deported to Molokai; and, somehow, as the years went by, the pieces
of land he had bought proved to be needed for warehouses, or coffee
buildings, or hotels. He leased, and rented, sold and bought, and
resold again.

But there were other things as well. He put his confidence and his
money into Parkinson, the renegade captain whom nobody would trust.
And Parkinson sailed away on mysterious voyages in the little Vega.
Parkinson was taken care of until he died, and years afterward
Honolulu was astonished when the news leaked out that the Drake and
Acorn guano islands had been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for
three-quarters of a million. Then there were the fat, lush days of
King Kalakaua, when Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for
the opium licence. If he paid a third of a million for the drug
monopoly, the investment was nevertheless a good one, for the
dividends bought him the Kalalau Plantation, which, in turn, paid
him thirty per cent for seventeen years and was ultimately sold by
him for a million and a half.

It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his
own country as Chinese Consul--a position that was not altogether
unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his
citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella
Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more
of Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian. In fact,
the random breeds in her were so attenuated that they were valued at