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By Root 4317 0

known, in South America. He could taste them now, and he imagined them being forced into cans cut to their size. He was haunted by this perfect pineapple, which he knew existed but which lay beyond his reach, and he became obsessed with the idea of acquiring a bundle of mother plants. For a time he considered a secret overland expedition from Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana, but discussions with geographers who knew the area convinced him that the intervening jungle was impenetrable. He tried suborning French colonial officials, but the government trusted its own subordinates no more than it trusted Whipple Hoxworth and checked them constantly, so that even though he poured some twenty thousand dollars' worth of bribes into Guiana, he got no pineapple plants in return.

And then one day a lanky Englishman named Schilling rode up to Hanakai on a wobbly horse, dismounted and asked for a whiskey soda. "I believe I am the man you are looking for," Schilling said in clipped accents.

"I don't need any more lunas," Whip replied, "and besides, you aren't husky enough."

"I have no intention of working for a living," the lanky Englishman replied. "I have come to sell you something."

"I can think of nothing that I require," Whip snapped.

"I can think of something that you will want to pay a great deal of money for, Mr. Hoxworth."

"What?"

"Two thousand prime Cayenne crowns."

As if his hand had frozen, Whip stopped pouring the whiskey. He made no pretense of not being interested, and his Adam's apple moved up and down in his dry throat. He put the whiskey bottle down, turned, and looked steadily at his visitor. "Cayenne?" he asked.

"Prime crowns."

"How?"

"My father was a Dutchman before he became a British subject. He knows people in the Guianas."

"Are the crowns vital?"

"They're already growing in a hothouse in England."

Wildly Hoxworth grabbed the tall man's arm. "You're sure they're growing?"

"I've brought a photograph," Schilling replied, and he produced a snapshot of himself standing inside a greenhouse with pineapples growing about his feet, and from the hearts of several of the plants rose incontestably the distinctive Cayenne fruit.

"Mr. Schilling . . ." Whip began nervously.

"Dr. Schilling, botanist. I'D sell you the Cayennes, Mr. Hoxworth, but I want the job of raising them here in Hawaii."

"A deal!" Wild Whip agreed. "I'll send a special ship to pick them up. Can you keep them alive across the Atlantic and around the Horn?"

"I'm a botanist," Dr. Schilling replied.

While he waited for the Englishman's, return, Wild Whip directed his feverish energy into laying out a special field to accommodate the two thousand crowns that Schilling had contracted to deliver, and as he worked he thought: "I'd like to find a man I could trust to care for these pineapples the way I'd do it." And he remembered the stocky Japanese field hand who had been willing to fight him over the matter of galvanized iron for the hot bath. "That's the kind of man I want," he mused. "Someone with guts."

He saddled his horse and rode out to the sugar fields until he spotted Kamejiro. "Eh, you one fella!" he shouted.

"You speak me?" the rugged little Japanese asked with a friendly grin.

"How you like work boss-man one field?" And the compact was sealed. Now Kamejiro ran each morning from the camp to till the pineapple field, pulverizing the earth with his hands. And each night he ran back to tend his hot bath. Wild Whip, seeing him always in a hurry, thought: "That one does the work of three men," and he raised his pay to seventy-five cents a day.

Under Whip's direction, Kamejiro plowed the land to a depth of two feet, and when its rich redness lay in the sunlight, Whip was pleased, for books had told him that above all else the pineapple required iron, and Kauai was practically solid iron. Every three months the field was turned again and special guano fertilizers were introduced to make it productive. Ditches were dug completely around the area to draw off unnecessary water, and a windbreak or wild plum and casuarina was planted to ward off