Captain Flint Gets the Black Spot
The houseboat man, Captain Flint, sometimes known as Uncle Jim, was alone with his green parrot in the cabin of his ship grimly trying to put things straight after his visitors. First there had been the burglars, and then this morning there had been all the people who wanted to see what damage had been done, besides Sammy and the other policeman and the sergeant from Rio, who had sent Sammy to the foot of the lake and the other policeman up to the other end to make inquiries. The burglars had turned everything upside down. Every one of the neat lockers and cupboards had its door swinging open and its contents raked out. The assegais and tomahawks and shark’s-tooth necklaces and boomerangs and green and scarlet painted gourds, that were relics of Captain Flint’s travels and had hung in honoured places on the cabin walls, had been torn down. It was like trying to tidy up after a whirlwind. Captain Flint trod on a little ebony elephant from Colombo. He picked it up, thinking of glue, but it had lost its tusks, its trunk and two of its legs, and he threw it desperately through the open cabin window.
The green parrot, perched on the edge of the cabin table, was trying to bite off the head of a little jade image of Buddha that Captain Flint had bought in Hong-Kong.
“Go ahead, Polly,” said Captain Flint, “smash it up.”
“Pretty Polly,” said the parrot, and holding the little idol in one claw twisted at it with its strong curved beak.
“Why on earth they couldn’t have taken some of these things if they wanted them, beats me,” said Captain Flint, who from living alone so