Limekiller!

Night. and not plenilune, either. You can bet your boots. Limekiller has no boots, he has, though, a shovel. Limekiller feels that if he eats another pannikin of rice and beans or of the thin chowder called fish-tea that he. that he. What he is after, he is after turtle-eggs so significant a source of insult in the rich, rich Chinese culture, largely represented in British Hidalgo, by the canny and philoprogenitive merchant Aurelio Aung and about 327 of his descendants. Better be exceedingly careful in talking about turtles to the Aung. More better say as little as possible about eggs at all to any of them. To ask, even to ask. “Don Aurelio, do you think it’s going to rain?” would bring conversation to a sudden and deathly-still halt. As for that sole man ever known to have placed his hand on the ancient and naked head of old Aurelio Aung (for what reason, knows only God), death did not exactly come on swift wings, but it is certain that Aurelio Aung III felled him with a kick he had learned before kung fu became well-known in the regions of the dark west and that Aurelio Aung, Jr. had assisted III to propel the man down a flight of steps at the bottoms of which a throng or tong of unnumbered Aung were waiting to and did kick him with many sharp kicks of their sharp- pointed shoes (they being fashionable, and Old Aung had imported them and sold them in considerable numbers) before P.C. Oscar Spencer C. Featherstonehaugh Smith, then on duty, had finished strolling over quite leisurely. It may not have been a capital offense “to kill a Chinaman” in Pecos, Texas, during the incumbency of Judge Roy Bean; but it was quite a serious offense to insult Aurelio Aung in King Town, the ancient and moldering capital — as the man commonly called Bloody Whoop-whoop, a citizen of a Commonwealth Country (not, thank God, Canada!) soon found out. For not only was he subsequently refused service at hotels, bars, and brothels, but within no less than eighty-seven hours had been declared an Inadmissible Person (“in that he did disturb the peace of Her Majesty’s Realm in British Hidalgo in a state of drunkenness by shouting ‘Delete the Oueen and all those other damn Dutch delete,’ and did assault one Aurelio Aung Senior a loyal subject of her Majesty,” etc. etc. for several other charges: of which others he had indeed been guilty but otherwise nothing more than a tolerant smile would have come of them); and was propelled by the pink palms of no less than three police sergeants across the Spanish-speaking border of a neighboring Republic. Which was the end of that. Though the pelicans and the hedgehogs may have picked his bones, and the satyrs danced upon them; serve him right.

For, over the course of many, many years, as John Lutwidge (Jack) Limekiller had learned, as follows: the turtle having a shell cannot copulate with other turtles and hence has conjugal union with a snake and is therefore (the turtle) w-ritten with the Chinese character meaning Forgets Filial Piety; by touching with one’s palm the shell of the turtle one can tell if it is going to rain or not (Jack did not learn exactly how, and very much forebore to ask): therefore to imply that some one is a turtle or a turtle’s eggs is somehow to insinuate several ugly matrimonial skeletons in some one’s family- closet… or sandalwood chest. Oh dear.

And as for the flexible yet muscular neck-and-head of the turtle extendable and retractable, references to and comparison with any particular member peculiar to the male anatomy are surely so obvious that only a turtle — But enough. The Aung family was clever. It was cognitive. It was commercial. It would do business in almost anything from galbanum to guppies. But it would not do business with turtles. And it would certainly not do business with turtles’ eggs. Indeed as a general thing it would not admit knowing that turtles had eggs.

This left the local turtle-egg-hunting field narrowed down to only the Bayfolk, the Black Arawack, the White Creoles, and the Brown Panyars. All of whom admired the Aung family tremendously.

But did not share their prejudices.

At all.

But Smith-Piggott cared for none of these things.

Augustus Smith-Piggott, Permanent Undersecretary to Government, was a fixture. Legislatures, Governors, Cabinet Ministers, came and went: Smith-Piggott alone remained. His laccolithic face was in itself a monument to Empire; indeed, he was a one-man proverb all in his own right, to wit, “You no say ‘No’ to Smeet-Peeggott!” And on the day when he had decided that the turtles of the deeps (and perhaps even the shallows) might be endangered, the fate of legal hunting of their eggs was sealed.