The only things black in the composition of the small James Douglas—leaving out his later dislike of the police—were his perfectly straight hair and wide, sparkling eyes. For the rest he was a very seemly bronze colour—and this was far from being a prodigy or portent, since Wylde Stark, who fathered him, was a Delaware Indian from the regions of the Great Bear Lake. How a Delaware Indian came by the name of Wylde Stark is another matter, but the affair sounds as though possibly a Kentucky Colonel had at one time or another been following the grand old Kentucky custom of playing fast and loose among the Delawares.

Another fact which remains obscure is Wylde Stark’s reason for leaving the Great Bear Lake. All that is clear is that he arrived in Australia by cattle-boat, aged somewhere about thirty, and made straight as a homing-pigeon for the gold-fields. Here he enjoyed some considerable measure of success, both financial and personal. The latter rested mainly on his shooting of Higgins the outlaw, who made an ill-advised attempt to relieve the diggers of their dust. Wylde Stark’s bullet bored through his stomach, and there was no more Higgins the outlaw, but only an occasion for celebration—which, although it not merely wetted but flooded the whistles of his admirers, never made the stern Red-Indian face look any the less like carved mahogany.

When Wylde Stark came to New Zealand—not, this time, by cattle-boat—he had money and prestige. He settled down in the Governor Grey Hotel, and ruled his customers with a rod of iron, while the private comforts of his establishment rested in the slender hands of his wife—a tall girl born in Madrid, and of Spanish blood. How she came to marry her husband is not to be explained. But their life in Invercargill was a queer compromise between traditions. There was no Spanish background in her children’s early days except the occasional plaintive and broken spinning-thread of a song in the language that they never understood. New Zealand society having no gift of tongues, the Starks settled on English and stuck to it.

Wylde Stark was a dignified, almost an austere, figure, and physically superb. He stood six feet four-and-a-half inches high, and his wife was only six inches below him in stature—nothing at all below him in dignity. Whether their two racial prides ever fretted each other, their children had no inkling. They made common cause together in a society which could understand them very little. The colour line was much less rigid in New Zealand than it would have been in any other British dominion, but Wylde Stark was not to be satisfied with the good-humoured tolerance bestowed by the white New Zealander on his Maori brother. The Maori population in the South Island was scanty, and largely made up of slave tribes. The Maori who drifted into South Island towns smiled and lounged in the easy background of life. Wylde Stark, his straight-backed, pale-faced wife at his elbow, stalked through the psychological fences like some mahogany Moses.

Had James Douglas Stark at the age of one hour been able to appreciate the world at large, he must have admitted that his audience was worth notice. First, his enormously tall father, whose thin copper face was rendered amazing by its growth of white whiskers. Then, as the lovely moon-stone blue of dawn deepened and faded outside the windows of the Governor Grey Hotel, and the birds, awakening, showered down their many-coloured raindrop voices from the pines, two very singular figures crept into the room and stood over him like fairies at a christening. His brother, George, at the age of nine, was perhaps not very fairylike. He showed signs already of becoming the prodigy in height that a few years would make him. Trouser-legs, cuffs, collars, suffered wretched fates on an anatomy which grew and grew. George Stark’s complexion was considerably lighter than the new baby’s, but his thin lips and chiselled features were his father’s.

The second figure really was a fairy … a cousin to Rima herself, escaped from Green Mansions and tiptoeing here with her pointed, bronze-tinted face, her great eyes, her hair falling softly in ringlets upon narrow shoulders. Rose Stark won out of the grudging hands of destiny that loveliness which, when sometimes we see it in its lazy, unconscious moments, seems to us incredible. She was four years old and a sprite, neither Spaniard nor Indian, but a fusing of those two strange metals. Of the two hanging over the baby’s cot, Rose had the lively and laughing disposition; her brother, George, was a sober gentleman who even then resolved, from his superior height and age, to take the youngster in hand.

An astrologer might tell clearly how the stars stood at 1.30 a.m. on July 4th, 1898. But this much is certain.