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South Sea Tales

by Jack London

February, 1998  [Etext #1208]


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This e-text was typed by Theresa Armao, Albany, New York.





SOUTH SEA TALES
by Jack London


CONTENTS

The House of Mapuhi

The Whale Tooth

Mauki

"Yah! Yah! Yah!"

The Heathen

The Terrible Solomons

The Inevitable White Man

The Seed of McCoy




THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI

Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in the
light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just outside
the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water, a circle of
pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in circumference, and
from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the bottom of the huge and
glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the deck of the schooner, across
the slender ring of the atoll, the divers could be seen at work. But the
lagoon had no entrance for even a trading schooner. With a favoring breeze
cutters could win in through the tortuous and shallow channel, but the
schooners lay off and on outside and sent in their small boats.

The Aorai swung out a boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen
brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet loincloths.  They took the oars,
while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young man garbed in
the tropic white that marks the European. The golden strain of Polynesia
betrayed itself in the sun-gilt of his fair skin and cast up golden sheens and
lights through the glimmering blue of his eyes. Raoul he was, Alexandre Raoul,
youngest son of Marie Raoul, the wealthy quarter-caste, who owned and managed
half a dozen trading schooners similar to the Aorai. Across an eddy just
outside the entrance, and in and through and over a boiling tide-rip, the boat
fought its way to the mirrored calm of the lagoon. Young Raoul leaped out upon
the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man's chest and
shoulders were magnificent, but the stump of a right arm, beyond the flesh of
which the age-whitened bone projected several inches, attested the encounter
with a shark that had put an end to his diving days and made him a fawner and
an intriguer for small favors.

"Have you heard, Alec?" were his first words. "Mapuhi has found a pearl--such
a pearl. Never was there one like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor in all the
Paumotus, nor in all the world.  Buy it from him. He has it now. And remember
that I told you first. He is a fool and you can get it cheap. Have you any
tobacco?"

Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed. He was
his mother's supercargo, and his business was to comb all the Paumotus for the
wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded up.

He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity, and he
suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing pearls. But
when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to suppress the startle
it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial expression on his face.
For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was large as a pigeon egg, a perfect
sphere, of a whiteness that reflected opalescent lights from all colors about
it. It was alive. Never had he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it
into his hand he was surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a
good pearl. He examined it closely, through a pocket magnifying glass. It was
without flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt into the
atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous, gleaming like
a tender moon. So translucently white was it, that when he dropped it into a
glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So straight and swiftly had it
sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight was excellent.

"Well, what do you want for it?" he asked, with a fine assumption of
nonchalance.

"I want--" Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face, the dark
faces of two women and a girl nodded concurrence in what he wanted. Their
heads were bent forward, they were animated by a suppressed eagerness, their
eyes flashed avariciously.

"I want a house," Mapuhi went on. "It must have a roof of galvanized iron and
an octagon-drop-clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around. A
big room must be in the centre, with a round table in the middle of it and the
octagon-drop-clock on the wall. There must be four bedrooms, two on each side
of the big room, and in each bedroom must be an iron bed, two chairs, and a
washstand. And back of the house must be a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots
and pans and a stove. And you must build the house on my island, which is
Fakarava."

"Is that all?" Raoul asked incredulously.

"There must be a sewing machine," spoke up Tefara, Mapuhi's wife.

"Not forgetting the octagon-drop-clock," added Nauri, Mapuhi's mother.

"Yes, that is all," said Mapuhi.

Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed he
secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built a house
in his life, and his notions concerning house building were hazy. While he
laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti for materials, of the
materials themselves, of the voyage back again to Fakarava, and the cost of
landing the materials and of building the house. It would come to four
thousand French dollars, allowing a margin for safety--four thousand French
dollars were equivalent to twenty thousad francs. It was impossible. How was
he to know the value of such a pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of
money--and of his mother's money at that.

"Mapuhi," he said, "you are a big fool. Set a money price."

But Mapuhi shook his head, and the three heads behind him shook with his.

"I want the house," he said. "It must be six fathoms long with a porch all
around--"

"Yes, yes," Raoul interrupted. "I know all about your house, but it won't do.
I'll give you a thousand Chili dollars."

The four heads chorused a silent negative.

"And a hundred Chili dollars in trade."

"I want the house," Mapuhi began.

"What good will the house do you?" Raoul demanded. "The first hurricane that
comes along will wash it away. You ought to know.

Captain Raffy says it looks like a hurricane right now."

"Not on Fakarava," said Mapuhi. "The land is much higher there.  On this
island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on
Fakarava. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around--"

And Raoul listened again to the tale of the house. Several hours he spent in
the endeavor to hammer the house obsession out of Mapuhi's mind; but Mapuhi's
mother and wife, and Ngakura, Mapuhi's daughter, bolstered him in his resolve
for the house.  Through the open doorway, while he listened for the twentieth
time to the detailed description of the house that was wanted, Raoul saw his
schooner's second boat draw up on the beach. The sailors rested on the oars,
advertising haste to be gone. The first mate of the Aorai sprang ashore,
exchanged a word with the one-armed native, then hurried toward Raoul. The day
grew suddenly dark, as a squall obscured the face of the sun. Across the
lagoon Raoul could see approaching the ominous line of the puff of wind.

"Captain Raffy says you've got to get to hell outa here," was the mate's
greeting. "If there's any shell, we've got to run the risk of picking it up
later on--so he says. The barometer's dropped to twenty-nine-seventy."

The gust of wind struck the pandanus tree overhead and tore through the palms
beyond, flinging half a dozen ripe cocoanuts with heavy thuds to the ground.
Then came the rain out of the distance, advancing with the roar of a gale of
wind and causing the water of the lagoon to smoke in driven windrows. The
sharp rattle of the first drops was on the leaves when Raoul sprang to his
feet.

"A thousand Chili dollars, cash down, Mapuhi," he said. "And two hundred Chili
dollars in trade."

"I want a house--" the other began.

"Mapuhi!" Raoul yelled, in order to make himself heard. "You are a fool!"

He flung out of the house, and, side by side with the mate, fought his way
down the beach toward the boat. They could not see the boat. The tropic rain
sheeted about them so that they could see only the beach under their feet and
the spiteful little waves from the lagoon that snapped and bit at the sand. A
figure appeared through the deluge. It was Huru-Huru, the man with the one
arm.

"Did you get the pearl?" he yelled in Raoul's ear.

"Mapuhi is a fool!" was the answering yell, and the next moment they were lost
to each other in the descending water.

Half an hour later, Huru-Huru, watching from the seaward side of the atoll,
saw the two boats hoisted in and the Aorai pointing her nose out to sea. And
near her, just come in from the sea on the wings of the squall, he saw another
schooner hove to and dropping a boat into the water. He knew her. It was the
OROHENA, owned by Toriki, the half-caste trader, who served as his own
supercargo and who doubtlessly was even then in the stern sheets of the boat.
Huru-Huru chuckled. He knew that Mapuhi owed Toriki for trade goods advanced
the year before.

The squall had passed. The hot sun was blazing down, and the lagoon was once
more a mirror. But the air was sticky like mucilage, and the weight of it
seemed to burden the lungs and make breathing difficult.

"Have you heard the news, Toriki?" Huru-Huru asked. "Mapuhi has found a pearl.
Never was there a pearl like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor anywhere in the
Paumotus, nor anywhere in all the world. Mapuhi is a fool. Besides, he owes
you money. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco?"

And to the grass shack of Mapuhi went Toriki. He was a masterful man, withal a
fairly stupid one. Carelessly he glanced at the wonderful pearl--glanced for a
moment only; and carelessly he dropped it into his pocket.

"You are lucky," he said. "It is a nice pearl. I will give you credit on the
books."

"I want a house," Mapuhi began, in consternation. "It must be six fathoms--"

"Six fathoms your grandmother!" was the trader's retort. "You want to pay up
your debts, that's what you want. You owed me twelve hundred dollars Chili.
Very well; you owe them no longer. The amount is squared. Besides, I will give
you credit for two hundred Chili. If, when I get to Tahiti, the pearl sells
well, I will give you credit for another hundred--that will make three
hundred. But mind, only if the pearl sells well. I may even lose money on it."

Mapuhi folded his arms in sorrow and sat with bowed head. He had been robbed
of his pearl. In place of the house, he had paid a debt. There was nothing to
show for the pearl.

"You are a fool," said Tefara.

"You are a fool," said Nauri, his mother. "Why did you let the pearl into his
hand?"

"What was I to do?" Mapuhi protested. "I owed him the money. He knew I had the
pearl. You heard him yourself ask to see it. I had not told him. He knew.
Somebody else told him. And I owed him the money."

"Mapuhi is a fool," mimicked Ngakura.

She was twelve years old and did not know any better. Mapuhi relieved his
feelings by sending her reeling from a box on the ear; while Tefara and Nauri
burst into tears and continued to upbraid him after the manner of women.

Huru-Huru, watching on the beach, saw a third schooner that he knew heave to
outside the entrance and drop a boat. It was the Hira, well named, for she was
owned by Levy, the German Jew, the greatest pearl buyer of them all, and, as
was well known, Hira was the Tahitian god of fishermen and thieves.

"Have you heard the news?" Huru-Huru asked, as Levy, a fat man with massive
asymmetrical features, stepped out upon the beach.  "Mapuhi has found a pearl.
There was never a pearl like it in Hikueru, in all the Paumotus, in all the
world. Mapuhi is a fool. He has sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred
Chili--I listened outside and heard. Toriki is likewise a fool. You can buy it
from him cheap. Remember that I told you first. Have you any tobacco?"

"Where is Toriki?"

"In the house of Captain Lynch, drinking absinthe. He has been there an hour."

And while Levy and Toriki drank absinthe and chaffered over the pearl,
Huru-Huru listened and heard the stupendous price of twenty-five thousand
francs agreed upon.

It was at this time that both the OROHENA and the Hira, running in close to
the shore, began firing guns and signalling frantically. The three men stepped
outside in time to see the two schooners go hastily about and head off shore,
dropping mainsails and flying jibs on the run in the teeth of the squall that
heeled them far over on the whitened water. Then the rain blotted them out.

"They'll be back after it's over," said Toriki. "We'd better be getting out of
here."

"I reckon the glass has fallen some more," said Captain Lynch.

He was a white-bearded sea-captain, too old for service, who had learned that
the only way to live on comfortable terms with his asthma was on Hikueru. He
went inside to look at the barometer.

"Great God!" they heard him exclaim, and rushed in to join him at staring at a
dial, which marked twenty-nine-twenty.

Again they came out, this time anxiously to consult sea and sky.  The squall
had cleared away, but the sky remained overcast. The two schooners, under all
sail and joined by a third, could be seen making back. A veer in the wind
induced them to slack off sheets, and five minutes afterward a sudden veer
from the opposite quarter caught all three schooners aback, and those on shore
could see the boom-tackles being slacked away or cast off on the jump. The
sound of the surf was loud, hollow, and menacing, and a heavy swell was
setting in. A terrible sheet of lightning burst before their eyes,
illuminating the dark day, and the thunder rolled wildly about them.

Toriki and Levy broke into a run for their boats, the latter ambling along
like a panic-stricken hippopotamus. As their two boats swept out the entrance,
they passed the boat of the Aorai coming in. In the stern sheets, encouraging
the rowers, was Raoul. Unable to shake the vision of the pearl from his mind,
he was returning to accept Mapuhi's price of a house.

He landed on the beach in the midst of a driving thunder squall that was so
dense that he collided with Huru-Huru before he saw him.

"Too late," yelled Huru-Huru. "Mapuhi sold it to Toriki for fourteen hundred
Chili, and Toriki sold it to Levy for twenty-five thousand francs. And Levy
will sell it in France for a hundred thousand francs. Have you any tobacco?"

Raoul felt relieved. His troubles about the pearl were over. He need not worry
any more, even if he had not got the pearl. But he did not believe Huru-Huru.
Mapuhi might well have sold it for fourteen hundred Chili, but that Levy, who
knew pearls, should have paid twenty-five thousand francs was too wide a
stretch.  Raoul decided to interview Captain Lynch on the subject, but when he
arrived at that ancient mariner's house, he found him looking wide-eyed at the
barometer.

"What do you read it?" Captain Lynch asked anxiously, rubbing his spectables
and staring again at the instrument.

"Twenty-nine-ten," said Raoul. "I have never seen it so low before."

"I should say not!" snorted the captain. "Fifty years boy and man on all the
seas, and I've never seen it go down to that.  Listen!"

They stood for a moment, while the surf rumbled and shook the house. Then they
went outside. The squall had passed. They could see the Aorai lying becalmed a
mile away and pitching and tossing madly in the tremendous seas that rolled in
stately procession down out of the northeast and flung themselves furiously
upon the coral shore. One of the sailors from the boat pointed at the mouth of
the passage and shook his head. Raoul looked and saw a white anarchy of foam
and surge.

"I guess I'll stay with you tonight, Captain," he said; then turned to the
sailor and told him to haul the boat out and to find shelter for himself and
fellows.

"Twenty-nine flat," Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look at
the barometer, a chair in his hand.

He sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out,
increasing the sultriness of the day, while the dead calm still held. The seas
continued to increase in magnitude.

"What makes that sea is what gets me," Raoul muttered petulantly.

"There is no wind, yet look at it, look at that fellow there!"

Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its impact
shook the frail atoll like an earthquake. Captain Lynch was startled.

"Gracious!" he bellowed, half rising from his chair, then sinking back.

"But there is no wind," Raoul persisted. "I could understand it if there was
wind along with it."

"You'll get the wind soon enough without worryin' for it," was the grim reply.

The two men sat on in silence. The sweat stood out on their skin in myriads of
tiny drops that ran together, forming blotches of moisture, which, in turn,
coalesced into rivulets that dripped to the ground. They panted for breath,
the old man's efforts being especially painful. A sea swept up the beach,
licking around the trunks of the cocoanuts and subsiding almost at their feet.

"Way past high water mark," Captain Lynch remarked; "and I've been here eleven
years." He looked at his watch. "It is three o'clock."

A man and woman, at their heels a motley following of brats and curs, trailed
disconsolately by. They came to a halt beyond the house, and, after much
irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later another family trailed
in from the opposite direction, the men and women carrying a heterogeneous
assortment of possessions. And soon several hundred persons of all ages and
sexes were congregated about the captain's dwelling. He called to one new
arrival, a woman with a nursing babe in her arms, and in answer received the
information that her house had just been swept into the lagoon.

This was the highest spot of land in miles, and already, in many places on
either hand, the great seas were making a clean breach of the slender ring of
the atoll and surging into the lagoon.  Twenty miles around stretched the ring
of the atoll, and in no place was it more than fifty fathoms wide. It was the
height of the diving season, and from all the islands around, even as far as
Tahiti, the natives had gathered.

"There are twelve hundred men, women, and children here," said Captain Lynch.
"I wonder how many will be here tomorrow morning."

"But why don't it blow?--that's what I want to know," Raoul demanded.

"Don't worry, young man, don't worry; you'll get your troubles fast enough."

Even as Captain Lynch spoke, a great watery mass smote the atoll.

The sea water churned about them three inches deep under the chairs. A low
wail of fear went up from the many women. The children, with clasped hands,
stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens and cats, wading
perturbedly in the water, as by common consent, with flight and scramble took
refuge on the roof of the captain's house. A Paumotan, with a litter of
new-born puppies in a basket, climbed into a cocoanut tree and twenty feet
above the ground made the basket fast. The mother floundered about in the
water beneath, whining and yelping.

And still the sun shone brightly and the dead calm continued.  They sat and
watched the seas and the insane pitching of the Aorai. Captain Lynch gazed at
the huge mountains of water sweeping in until he could gaze no more. He
covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight; then went into the
house.

"Twenty-eight-sixty," he said quietly when he returned.

In his arm was a coil of small rope. He cut it into two-fathom lengths, giving
one to Raoul and, retaining one for himself, distributed the remainder among
the women with the advice to pick out a tree and climb.

A light air began to blow out of the northeast, and the fan of it on his cheek
seemed to cheer Raoul up. He could see the Aorai trimming her sheets and
heading off shore, and he regretted that he was not on her. She would get away
at any rate, but as for the atoll--A sea breached across, almost sweeping him
off his feet, and he selected a tree. Then he remembered the barometer and ran
back to the house. He encountered Captain Lynch on the same errand and
together they went in.

"Twenty-eight-twenty," said the old mariner. "It's going to be fair hell
around here--what was that?"

The air seemed filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and
vibrated, and they heard the thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The windows
rattled. Two panes crashed; a draught of wind tore in, striking them and
making them stagger.  The door opposite banged shut, shattering the latch. The
white door knob crumbled in fragments to the floor. The room's walls bulged
like a gas balloon in the process of sudden inflation.  Then came a new sound
like the rattle of musketry, as the spray from a sea struck the wall of the
house. Captain Lyncyh looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a
coat of pilot cloth, unhooked the barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious
pocket. Again a sea struck the house, with a heavy thud, and the light
building tilted, twisted, quarter around on its foundation, and sank down, its
floor at an angle of ten degrees.

Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away.  He noted that
it had hauled around to the east. With a great effort he threw himself on the
sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch, driven like a wisp of
straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai'S sailors, leaving a cocoanut tree
to which they had been clinging, came to their aid, leaning against the wind
at impossible angles and fighting and clawing every inch of the way.

The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors, by
means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk, a few
feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the tree, fifty
feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope around the base of an
adjacent tree and stood looking on. The wind was frightful. He had never
dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached across the atoll, wetting him to
the knees ere it subsided into the lagoon. The sun had disappeared, and a
lead-colored twilight settled down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally,
struck him. The impact was like that of leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray
struck his face. It was like the slap of a man's hand. His cheeks stung, and
involuntary tears of pain were in his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives
had taken to the trees, and he could have laughed at the bunches of human
fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being Tahitian-born, he doubled his body
at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed the soles
of his feet against the near surface of the trunk, and began to walk up the
tree. At the top he found two women, two children, and a man. One little girl
clasped a housecat in her arms.

From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty patriarch
waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached much nearer--in
fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned from lead to black. Many
people were still on the ground grouped about the bases of the trees and
holding on. Several such clusters were praying, and in one the Mormon
missionary was exhorting. A weird sound, rhythmical, faint as the faintest
chirp of a far cricket, enduring but for a moment, but in the moment
suggesting to him vaguely the thought of heaven and celestial music, came to
his ear. He glanced about him and saw, at the base of another tree, a large
cluster of people holding on by ropes and by one another. He could see their
faces working and their lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he
knew that they were singing hymns.

Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could he
measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience of wind;
but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder. Not far away a
tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human beings to the ground. A sea
washed across the strip of sand, and they were gone. Things were happening
quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head silhouetted against the
churning white of the lagoon. The next instant that, too, had vanished. Other
trees were going, falling and criss-crossing like matches. He was amazed at
the power of the wind. His own tree was swaying perilously, one woman was
wailing and clutching the little girl, who in turn still hung on to the cat.

The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He looked
and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet away. It had been
torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were heaving and shoving it toward
the lagoon. A frightful wall of water caught it, tilted it, and flung it
against half a dozen cocoanut trees. The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe
cocoanuts. The subsiding wave showed them on the ground, some lying
motionless, others squirming and writhing.  They reminded him strangely of
ants. He was not shocked. He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of
course he noted the succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human
wreckage. A third wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the
church into the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward,
half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah's ark.

He looked for Captain Lynch's house, and was surprised to find it gone. Things
certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the people in the
trees that still held had descended to the ground. The wind had yet again
increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer swayed or bent over and
back.  Instead, it remained practically stationary, curved in a rigid angle
from the wind and merely vibrating. But the vibration was sickening. It was
like that of a tuning-fork or the tongue of a jew's-harp. It was the rapidity
of the vibration that made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not
stand the strain for long. Something would have to break.

Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it stood,
the remnant, broken off half-way up the trunk.  One did not know what happened
unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails of human despair
occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He chanced to be looking in
Captain Lynch's direction when it happened. He saw the trunk of the tree,
half-way up, splinter and part without noise. The head of the tree, with three
sailors of the Aorai and the old captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did
not fall to the ground, but drove through the air like a piece of chaff. For a
hundred yards he followed its flight, when it struck the water. He strained
his eyes, and was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell.

Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made signs to
descend to the ground. The man was willing, but his women were paralayzed from
terror, and he elected to remain with them. Raoul passed his rope around the
tree and slid down.  A rush of salt water went over his head. He held his
breath and clung desperately to the rope. The water subsided, and in the
shelter of the trunk he breathed once more. He fastened the rope more
securely, and then was put under by another sea. One of the women slid down
and joined him, the native remaining by the other woman, the two children, and
the cat.

The supercargo had noticed how the groups clinging at the bases of the other
trees continually diminished. Now he saw the process work out alongside him.
It required all his strength to hold on, and the woman who had joined him was
growing weaker.  Each time he emerged from a sea he was surprised to find
himself still there, and next, surprised to find the woman still there.  At
last he emerged to find himself alone. He looked up. The top of the tree had
gone as well. At half its original height, a splintered end vibrated. He was
safe. The roots still held, while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He
began to climb up. He was so weak that he went slowly, and sea after sea
caught him before he was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and
stiffened his soul to face the night and he knew not what.

He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it was the
end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still the wind
increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated was eleven
o'clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible, monstrous thing,
a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but that continued to smite
and pass on--a wall without end. It seemed to him that he had become light and
ethereal; that it was he that was in motion; that he was being driven with
inconceivable velocity through unending solidness. The wind was no longer air
in motion. It had become substantial as water or quicksilver.  He had a
feeling that he could reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do
with the meat in the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind
and hang on to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff.

The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed in
through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders. At such
moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and swollen with solid
earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the tree could he breathe.
Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted him. Body and brain became
wearied. He no longer observed, no longer thought, and was but semiconscious.
One idea constituted his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea
persisted irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.
From a state of stupor he would return to it--SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE.  Then
he would go off into another stupor.

The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in the
morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi and his
women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon, still clutching
his daughter Ngakura.  Only a South Sea islander could have lived in such a
driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he attached himself, turned over
and over in the froth and churn; and it was only by holding on at times and
waiting, and at other times shifting his grips rapidly, that he was able to
get his head and Ngakura's to the surface at intervals sufficiently near
together to keep the breath in them. But the air was mostly water, what with
flying spray and sheeted rain that poured along at right angles to the
perpendicular.

It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand.  Here, tossing
tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses, killed nine
out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage of the lagoon.
Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad mortar of the elements
and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was fortunate. His chance was the
one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage of fate. He emerged upon the sand,
bleeding from a score of wounds.

Ngakura's left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were crushed; and
cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone. He clutched a tree that yet
stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for air, while the waters of
the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times waist-high.

At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no more
than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and the sun was
shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of the lagoon, Mapuhi
saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the landing. Undoubtedly
Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the beach examining them, and
came upon his wife, lying half in and half out of the water.  He sat down and
wept, making harsh animal noises after the manner of primitive grief. Then she
stirred uneasily, and groaned. He looked more closely. Not only was she alive,
but she was uninjured. She was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one
chance in ten.

Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained. The
mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census.  The lagoon was cluttered
with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole atoll not two
stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the cocoanut palms still
stood, and they were wrecks, while on not one of them remained a single nut.

There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface seepage of
the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few soaked bags of flour
were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of the fallen cocoanut trees
and ate them.  Here and there they crawled into tiny hutches, made by
hollowing out the sand and covering over with fragments of metal roofing.  The
missionary made a crude still, but he could not distill water for three
hundred persons. By the end of the second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the
lagoon, discovered that his thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the
news, and thereupon three hundred men, women, and children could have been
seen, standing up to their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in
through their skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where
they still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead
and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.

In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been swept
away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that wounded and
bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she was thrown clear over
the atoll and carried away to sea. Here, under the amazing buffets of
mountains of water, she lost her plank. She was an old woman nearly sixty; but
she was Paumotan-born, and she had never been out of sight of the sea in her
life. Swimming in the darkness, strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she
was struck a heavy blow on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan
was formed, and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more.
Tied together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life while at the
same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly.  She was a fat woman, and she
bruised easily; but she had had experience of hurricanes, and while she prayed
to her shark god for protection from sharks, she waited for the wind to break.
But at three o'clock she was in such a stupor that she did not know. Nor did
she know at six o'clock when the dead calm settled down. She was shocked into
consciousness when she was thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and
bleeding hands and feet and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond
the reach of the waves.

She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet of
Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it.

Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she knew that
it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the cocoanuts that had
kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking water and with food. But she
did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all she wanted. Rescue was
problematical.  She saw the smoke of the rescue steamers on the horizon, but
what steamer could be expected to come to lonely, uninhabited Takokota?

From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in flinging
them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted, until her strength failed, in
thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks tore at them and devoured
them. When her strength failed, the bodies festooned her beach with ghastly
horror, and she withdrew from them as far as she could, which was not far.

By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling from
thirst. She dragged herself along the sand, looking for cocoanuts. It was
strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely, there were more
cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and lay exhausted. The
end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death.

Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a patch
of sandy-red hair on the head of a corpse. The sea flung the body toward her,
then drew it back. It turned over, and she saw that it had no face. Yet there
was something familiar about that patch of sandy-red hair. An hour passed. She
did not exert herself to make the identification. She was waiting to die, and
it mattered little to her what man that thing of horror once might have been.

But at the end of the hour she sat up slowly and stared at the corpse. An
unusually large wave had thrown it beyond the reach of the lesser waves. Yes,
she was right; that patch of red hair could belong to but one man in the
Paumotus. It was Levy, the German Jew, the man who had bought the pearl and
carried it away on the Hira. Well, one thing was evident: The Hira had been
lost. The pearl buyer's god of fishermen and thieves had gone back on him.

She crawled down to the dead man. His shirt had been torn away, and she could
see the leather money belt about his waist. She held her breath and tugged at
the buckles. They gave easier than she had expected, and she crawled hurriedly
away across the sand, dragging the belt after her. Pocket after pocket she
unbuckled in the belt and found empty. Where could he have put it? In the last
pocket of all she found it, the first and only pearl he had bought on the
voyage. She crawled a few feet farther, to escape the pestilence of the belt,
and examined the pearl. It was the one Mapuhi had found and been robbed of by
Toriki. She weighed it in her hand and rolled it back and forth caressingly.
But in it she saw no intrinsic beauty. What she did see was the house Mapuhi
and Tefara and she had builded so carefully in their minds. Each time she
looked at the pearl she saw the house in all its details, including the
octagon-drop-clock on the wall.  That was something to live for.

She tore a strip from her ahu and tied the pearl securely about her neck. Then
she went on along the beach, panting and groaning, but resolutely seeking for
cocoanuts. Quickly she found one, and, as she glanced around, a second. She
broke one, drinking its water, which was mildewy, and eating the last particle
of the meat. A little later she found a shattered dugout. Its outrigger was
gone, but she was hopeful, and, before the day was out, she found the
outrigger. Every find was an augury. The pearl was a talisman. Late in the
afternoon she saw a wooden box floating low in the water. When she dragged it
out on the beach its contents rattled, and inside she found ten tins of
salmon. She opened one by hammering it on the canoe. When a leak was started,
she drained the tin. After that she spent several hours in extracting the
salmon, hammering and squeezing it out a morsel at a time.

Eight days longer she waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened the
outrigger back on the canoe, using for lashings all the cocoanut fibre she
could find, and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was badly cracked,
and she could not make it water-tight; but a calabash made from a cocoanut she
stored on board for a bailer. She was hard put for a paddle. With a piece of
tin she sawed off all her hair close to the scalp. Out of the hair she braided
a cord; and by means of the cord she lashed a three-foot piece of broom handle
to a board from the salmon case.

She gnawed wedges with her teeth and with them wedged the lashing.

On the eighteenth day, at midnight, she launched the canoe through the surf
and started back for Hikueru. She was an old woman. Hardship had stripped her
fat from her till scarcely more than bones and skin and a few stringy muscles
remained. The canoe was large and should have been paddled by three strong
men.

But she did it alone, with a make-shift paddle. Also, the canoe leaked badly,
and one-third of her time was devoted to bailing.  By clear daylight she
looked vainly for Hikueru. Astern, Takokota had sunk beneath the sea rim. The
sun blazed down on her nakedness, compelling her body to surrender its
moisture.  Two tins of salmon were left, and in the course of the day she
battered holes in them and drained the liquid. She had no time to waste in
extracting the meat. A current was setting to the westward, she made westing
whether she made southing or not.

In the eary afternoon, standing upright in the canoe, she sighted Hikueru Its
wealth of cocoanut palms was gone. Only here and there, at wide intervals,
could she see the ragged remnants of trees. The sight cheered her. She was
nearer than she had thought. The current was setting her to the westward. She
bore up against it and paddled on. The wedges in the paddle lashing worked
loose, and she lost much time, at frequent intervals, in driving them tight.
Then there was the bailing. One hour in three she had to cease paddling in
order to bail. And all the time she driftd to the westward.

By sunset Hikueru bore southeast from her, three miles away.  There was a full
moon, and by eight o'clock the land was due east and two miles away. She
struggled on for another hour, but the land was as far away as ever. She was
in the main grip of the current; the canoe was too large; the paddle was too
inadequate; and too much of her time and strength was wasted in bailing.
Besides, she was very weak and growing weaker. Despite her efforts, the canoe
was drifting off to the westward.

She breathed a prayer to her shark god, slipped over the side, and began to
swim. She was actually refreshed by the water, and quickly left the canoe
astern. At the end of an hour the land was perceptibly nearer. Then came her
fright. Right before her eyes, not twenty feet away, a large fin cut the
water. She swam steadily toward it, and slowly it glided away, curving off
toward the right and circling around her. She kept her eyes on the fin and
swam on. When the fin disappeared, she lay face downward in the water and
watched. When the fin reappeared she resumed her swimming. The monster was
lazy--she could see that. Without doubt he had been well fed since the
hurricane. Had he been very hungry, she knew he would not have hesitated from
making a dash for her. He was fifteen feet long, and one bite, she knew, could
cut her in half.

But she did not have any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not, the
current drew away from the land just the same. A half hour went by, and the
shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew closer, in narrowing
circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as he slid past. Sooner or later,
she knew well enough, he would get up sufficient courage to dash at her.  She
resolved to play first. It was a desperate act she meditated. She was an old
woman, alone in the sea and weak from starvation and hardship; and yet she, in
the face of this sea tiger, must anticipate his dash by herself dashing at
him. She swam on, waiting her chance. At last he passed languidly by, barely
eight feet away. She rushed at him suddenly, feigning that she was attacking
him. He gave a wild flirt of his tail as he fled away, and his sandpaper hide,
striking her, took off her skin from elbow to shoulder. He swam rapidly, in a
widening circle, and at last disappeared.

In the hole in the sand, covered over by fragments of metal roofing, Mapuhi
and Tefara lay disputing.

"If you had done as I said," charged Tefara, for the thousandth time, "and
hidden the pearl and told no one, you would have it now."

"But Huru-Huru was with me when I opened the shell--have I not told you so
times and times and times without end?"

"And now we shall have no house. Raoul told me today that if you had not sold
the pearl to Toriki--"

"I did not sell it. Toriki robbed me."

"--that if you had not sold the pearl, he would give you five thousand French
dollars, which is ten thousand Chili."

"He has been talking to his mother," Mapuhi explained. "She has an eye for a
pearl."

"And now the pearl is lost," Tefara complained.

"It paid my debt with Toriki. That is twelve hundred I have made, anyway."

"Toriki is dead," she cried. "They have heard no word of his schooner. She was
lost along with the Aorai and the Hira. Will Toriki pay you the three hundred
credit he promised? No, because Toriki is dead. And had you found no pearl,
would you today owe Toriki the twelve hundred? No, because Toriki is dead, and
you cannot pay dead men."

"But Levy did not pay Toriki," Mapuhi said. "He gave him a piece of paper that
was good for the money in Papeete; and now Levy is dead and cannot pay; and
Toriki is dead and the paper lost with him, and the pearl is lost with Levy.
You are right, Tefara. I have lost the pearl, and got nothing for it. Now let
us sleep."

He held up his hand suddenly and listened. From without came a noise, as of
one who breathed heavily and with pain. A hand fumbled against the mat that
served for a door.

"Who is there?" Mapuhi cried.

"Nauri," came the answer. "Can you tell me where is my son, Mapuhi?"

Tefara screamed and gripped her husband's arm.

"A ghost! she chattered. "A ghost!"

Mapuhi's face was a ghastly yellow. He clung weakly to his wife.

"Good woman," he said in faltering tones, striving to disguise his vice, "I
know your son well. He is living on the east side of the lagoon."

From without came the sound of a sigh. Mapuhi began to feel elated. He had
fooled the ghost.

"But where do you come from, old woman?" he asked.

"From the sea," was the dejected answer.

"I knew it! I knew it!" screamed Tefara, rocking to and fro.

"Since when has Tefara bedded in a strange house?" came Nauri's voice through
the matting.

Mapuhi looked fear and reproach at his wife. It was her voice that had
betrayed them.

"And since when has Mapuhi, my son, denied his old mother?" the voice went on.

"No, no, I have not--Mapuhi has not denied you," he cried. "I am not Mapuhi.
He is on the east end of the lagoon, I tell you."

Ngakura sat up in bed and began to cry. The matting started to shake.

"What are you doing?" Mapuhi demanded.

"I am coming in," said the voice of Nauri.

One end of the matting lifted. Tefara tried to dive under the blankets, but
Mapuhi held on to her. He had to hold on to something. Together, struggling
with each other, with shivering bodies and chattering teeth, they gazed with
protruding eyes at the lifting mat. They saw Nauri, dripping with sea water,
without her ahu, creep in. They rolled over backward from her and fought for
Ngakura's blanket with which to cover their heads.

"You might give your old mother a drink of water," the ghost said plaintively.

"Give her a drink of water," Tefara commanded in a shaking voice.

"Give her a drink of water," Mapuhi passed on the command to Ngakura.

And together they kicked out Ngakura from under the blanket. A minute later,
peeping, Mapuhi saw the ghost drinking. When it reached out a shaking hand and
laid it on his, he felt the weight of it and was convinced that it was no
ghost. Then he emerged, dragging Tefara after him, and in a few minutes all
were listening to Nauri's tale. And when she told of Levy, and dropped the
pearl into Tefara's hand, even she was reconciled to the reality of her
mother-in-law.

"In the morning," said Tefara, "you will sell the pearl to Raoul for five
thousand French."

"The house?" objected Nauri.

"He will build the house," Tefara answered. "He ways it will cost four
thousand French. Also will he give one thousand French in credit, which is two
thousand Chili."

"And it will be six fathoms long?" Nauri queried.

"Ay," answered Mapuhi, "six fathoms."

"And in the middle room will be the octagon-drop-clock?"

"Ay, and the round table as well."

"Then give me something to eat, for I am hungry," said Nauri, complacently.
"And after that we will sleep, for I am weary.  And tomorrow we will have more
talk about the house before we sell the pearl. It will be better if we take
the thousand French in cash. Money is ever better than credit in buying goods
from the traders."



THE WHALE TOOTH

It was in the early days in Fiji, when John Starhurst arose in the mission
house at Rewa Village and announced his intention of carrying the gospel
throughout all Viti Levu. Now Viti Levu means the "Great Land," it being the
largest island in a group composed of many large islands, to say nothing of
hundreds of small ones. Here and there on the coasts, living by most
precarious tenure, was a sprinkling of missionaries, traders, bêche-de-mer
fishers, and whaleship deserters. The smoke of the hot ovens arose under their
windows, and the bodies of the slain were dragged by their doors on the way to
the feasting.

The Lotu, or the Worship, was progressing slowly, and, often, in crablike
fashion. Chiefs, who announced themselves Christians and were welcomed into
the body of the chapel, had a distressing habit of backsliding in order to
partake of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat or be eaten had been the law
of the land; and eat or be eaten promised to remain the law of the land for a
long time to come. There were chiefs, such as Tanoa, Tuiveikoso, and
Tuikilakila, who had literally eaten hundreds of their fellow men. But among
these gluttons Ra Undreundre ranked highest. Ra Undreundre lived at Takiraki.
He kept a register of his gustatory exploits. A row of stones outside his
house marked the bodies he had eaten. This row was two hundred and thirty
paces long, and the stones in it numbered eight hundred and seventy-two. Each
stone represented a body. The row of stones might have been longer, had not Ra
Undreundre unfortunately received a spear in the small of his back in a bush
skirmish on Somo Somo and been served up on the table of Naungavuli, whose
mediocre string of stones numbered only forty-eight.

The hard-worked, fever-stricken missionaries stuck doggedly to their task, at
times despairing, and looking forward for some special manifestation, some
outburst of Pentecostal fire that would bring a glorious harvest of souls. But
cannibal Fiji had remained obdurate. The frizzle-headed man-eaters were loath
to leave their fleshpots so long as the harvest of human carcases was
plentiful. Sometimes, when the harvest was too plentiful, they imposed on the
missionaries by letting the word slip out that on such a day there would be a
killing and a barbecue.  Promptly the missionaries would buy the lives of the
victims with stick tobacco, fathoms of calico, and quarts of trade beads.
Natheless the chiefs drove a handsome trade in thus disposing of their surplus
live meat. Also, they could always go out and catch more.

It was at this juncture that John Starhurst proclaimed that he would carry the
Gospel from coast to coast of the Great Land, and that he would begin by
penetrating the mountain fastnesses of the headwaters of the Rewa River. His
words were received with consternation.

The native teachers wept softly. His two fellow missionaries strove to
dissuade him. The King of Rewa warned him that the mountain dwellers would
surely kai-kai him--kai-kai meaning "to eat"--and that he, the King of Rewa,
having become Lotu, would be put to the necessity of going to war with the
mountain dwellers.  That he could not conquer them he was perfectly aware.
That they might come down the river and sack Rewa Village he was likewise
perfectly aware. But what was he to do? If John Starhurst persisted in going
out and being eaten, there would be a war that would cost hundreds of lives.

Later in the day a deputation of Rewa chiefs waited upon John Starhurst. He
heard them patiently, and argued patiently with them, though he abated not a
whit from his purpose. To his fellow missionaries he explained that he was not
bent upon martyrdom; that the call had come for him to carry the Gospel into
Viti Levu, and that he was merely obeying the Lord's wish.

To the traders who came and objected most strenuously of all, he said: "Your
objections are valueless. They consist merely of the damage that may be done
your businesses. You are interested in making money, but I am interested in
saving souls. The heathen of this dark land must be saved."

John Starhurst was not a fanatic. He would have been the first man to deny the
imputation. He was eminently sane and practical.

He was sure that his mission would result in good, and he had private visions
of igniting the Pentecostal spark in the souls of the mountaineers and of
inaugurating a revival that would sweep down out of the mountains and across
the length and breadth of the Great Land from sea to sea and to the isles in
the midst of the sea. There were no wild lights in his mild gray eyes, but
only calm resolution and an unfaltering trust in the Higher Power that was
guiding him.

One man only he found who approved of his project, and that was Ra Vatu, who
secretly encouraged him and offered to lend him guides to the first foothills.
John Starhurst, in turn, was greatly pleased by Ra Vatu's conduct. From an
incorrigible heathen, with a heart as black as his practices, Ra Vatu was
beginning to emanate light. He even spoke of becoming Lotu.  True, three years
before he had expressed a similar intention, and would have entered the church
had not John Starhurst entered objection to his bringing his four wives along
with him. Ra Vatu had had economic and ethical objections to monogamy.
Besides, the missionary's hair-splitting objection had offended him; and, to
prove that he was a free agent and a man of honor, he had swung his huge war
club over Starhurst's head. Starhurst had escaped by rushing in under the club
and holding on to him until help arrived. But all that was now forgiven and
forgotten. Ra Vatu was coming into the church, not merely as a converted
heathen, but as a converted polygamist as well. He was only waiting, he
assured Starhurst, until his oldest wife, who was very sick, should die.

John Starhurst journeyed up the sluggish Rewa in one of Ra Vatu's canoes. This
canoe was to carry him for two days, when, the head of navigation reached, it
would return. Far in the distance, lifted into the sky, could be seen the
great smoky mountains that marked the backbone of the Great Land. All day John
Starhurst gazed at them with eager yearning.

Sometimes he prayed silently. At other times he was joined in prayer by Narau,
a native teacher, who for seven years had been Lotu, ever since the day he had
been saved from the hot oven by Dr. James Ellery Brown at the trifling expense
of one hundred sticks of tobacco, two cotton blankets, and a large bottle of
painkiller. At the last moment, after twenty hours of solitary supplication
and prayer, Narau's ears had heard the call to go forth with John Starhurst on
the mission to the mountains.

"Master, I will surely go with thee," he had announced.

John Starhurst had hailed him with sober delight. Truly, the Lord was with him
thus to spur on so broken-spirited a creature as Narau.

"I am indeed without spirit, the weakest of the Lord's vessels," Narau
explained, the first day in the canoe.

"You should have faith, stronger faith," the missionary chided him.

Another canoe journeyed up the Rewa that day. But it journeyed an hour astern,
and it took care not to be seen. This canoe was also the property of Ra Vatu.
In it was Erirola, Ra Vatu's first cousin and trusted henchman; and in the
small basket that never left his hand was a whale tooth. It was a magnificent
tooth, fully six inches long, beautifully proportioned, the ivory turned
yellow and purple with age. This tooth was likewise the property of Ra Vatu;
and in Fiji, when such a tooth goes forth, things usually happen. For this is
the virtue of the whale tooth: Whoever accepts it cannot refuse the request
that may accompany it or follow it. The request may be anything from a human
life to a tribal alliance, and no Fijian is so dead to honor as to deny the
request when once the tooth has been accepted.  Sometimes the request hangs
fire, or the fulfilment is delayed, with untoward consequences.

High up the Rewa, at the village of a chief, Mongondro by name, John Starhurst
rested at the end of the second day of the journey. In the morning, attended
by Narau, he expected to start on foot for the smoky mountains that were now
green and velvety with nearness. Mongondro was a sweet-tempered, mild-mannered
little old chief, short-sighted and afflicted with elephantiasis, and no
longer inclined toward the turbulence of war. He received the missionary with
warm hospitality, gave him food from his own table, and even discussed
religious matters with him. Mongondro was of an inquiring bent of mind, and
pleased John Starhurst greatly by asking him to account for the existence and
beginning of things. When the missionary had finished his summary of the
Creation according to Genesis, he saw that Mongondro was deeply affected. The
little old chief smoked silently for some time.  Then he took the pipe from
his mouth and shook his head sadly.

"It cannot be," he said. "I, Mongondro, in my youth, was a good workman with
the adze. Yet three months did it take me to make a canoe--a small canoe, a
very small canoe. And you say that all this land and water was made by one
man--"

"Nay, was made by one God, the only true God," the missinary interrupted.

"It is the same thing," Mongondro went on, "that all the land and all the
water, the trees, the fish, and bush and mountains, the sun, the moon, and the
stars, were made in six days! No, no. I tell you that in my youth I was an
able man, yet did it require me three months for one small canoe. It is a
story to frighten children with; but no man can believe it."

"I am a man," the missionary said.

"True, you are a man. But it is not given to my dark understanding to know
what you believe."

"I tell you, I do believe that everything was made in six days."

"So you say, so you say," the old cannibal murmured soothingly.

It was not until after John Starhurst and Narau had gone off to bed that
Erirola crept into the chief's house, and, after diplomatic speech, handed the
whale tooth to Mongondro.

The old chief held the tooth in his hands for a long time. It was a beautiful
tooth, and he yearned for it. Also, he divined the request that must accompany
it. "No, no; whale teeth were beautiful," and his mouth watered for it, but he
passed it back to Erirola with many apologies.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   .

In the early dawn John Starhurst was afoot, striding along the bush trail in
his big leather boots, at his heels the faithful Narau, himself at the heels
of a naked guide lent him by Mongondro to show the way to the next village,
which was reached by midday. Here a new guide showed the way. A mile in the
rear plodded Erirola, the whale tooth in the basket slung on his shoulder. For
two days more he brought up the missionary's rear, offering the tooth to the
village chiefs. But village after village refused the tooth. It followed so
quickly the missionary's advent that they divined the request that would be
made, and would have none of it.

They were getting deep into the mountains, and Erirola took a secret trail,
cut in ahead of the missionary, and reached the stronghold of the Buli of
Gatoka. Now the Buli was unaware of John Starhurst's imminent arrival. Also,
the tooth was beautiful--an extraordinary specimen, while the coloring of it
was of the rarest order. The tooth was presented publicly. The Buli of Gatoka,
seated on his best mat, surrounded by his chief men, three busy fly-brushers
at his back, deigned to receive from the hand of his herald the whale tooth
presented by Ra Vatu and carried into the mountains by his cousin, Erirola. A
clapping of hands went up at the acceptance of the present, the assembled
headman, heralds, and fly-brushers crying aloud in chorus:

"A! woi! woi! woi! A! woi! woi! woi! A tabua levu! woi!  woi! A mudua, mudua,
mudua!'

"Soon will come a man, a white man," Erirola began, after the proper pause.
"He is a missionary man, and he will come today.  Ra Vatu is pleased to desire
his boots. He wishes to present them to his good friend, Mongondro, and it is
in his mind to send them with the feet along in them, for Mongondro is an old
man and his teeth are not good. Be sure, O Buli, that the feet go along in the
boots. As for the rest of him, it may stop here."

The delight in the whale tooth faded out of the Buli's eyes, and he glanced
about him dubiously. Yet had he already accepted the tooth.

"A little thing like a missionary does not matter," Erirola prompted.

"No, a little thing like a missionary does not matter," the Buli answered,
himself again. "Mongondro shall have the boots. Go, you young men, some three
or four of you, and meet the missionary on the trail. Be sure you bring back
the boots as well."

"It is too late," said Erirola. "Listen! He comes now."

Breaking through the thicket of brush, John Starhurst, with Narau close on his
heels, strode upon the scene. The famous boots, having filled in wading the
stream, squirted fine jets of water at every step. Starhurst looked about him
with flashing eyes.  Upborne by an unwavering trust, untouched by doubt or
fear, he exulted in all he saw. He knew that since the beginning of time he
was the first white man ever to tread the mountain stronghold of Gatoka.

The grass houses clung to the steep mountain side or overhung the rushing
Rewa. On either side towered a mighty precipice. At the best, three hours of
sunlight penetrated that narrow gorge. No cocoanuts nor bananas were to be
seen, though dense, tropic vegetation overran everything, dripping in airy
festoons from the sheer lips of the precipices and running riot in all the
crannied ledges. At the far end of the gorge the Rewa leaped eight hundred
feet in a single span, while the atmosphere of the rock fortress pulsed to the
rhythmic thunder of the fall.

From the Buli's house, John Starhurst saw emerging the Buli and his followers.

"I bring you good tidings," was the missionary's greeting.

"Who has sent you?" the Buli rejoined quietly.

"God."

"It is a new name in Viti Levu," the Buli grinned. "Of what islands, villages,
or passes may he be chief?"

"He is the chief over all islands, all villages, all passes," John Starhurst
answered solemnly. "He is the Lord over heaven and earth, and I am come to
bring His word to you."

"Has he sent whale teeth?" was the insolent query.

"No, but more precious than whale teeth is the--"

"It is the custom, between chiefs, to send whale teeth," the Buli interrupted.

"Your chief is either a niggard, or you are a fool, to come empty-handed into
the mountains. Behold, a more generous than you is before you."

So saying, he showed the whale tooth he had received from Erirola.

Narau groaned.

"It is the whale tooth of Ra Vatu," he whispered to Starhurst.  "I know it
well. Now are we undone."

"A gracious thing," the missionary answered, passing his hand through his long
beard and adjusting his glasses. "Ra Vatu has arranged that we should be well
received."

But Narau groaned again, and backed away from the heels he had dogged so
faithfully.

"Ra Vatu is soon to become Lotu," Starhurst explained, "and I have come
bringing the Lotu to you."

"I want none of your Lotu," said the Buli, proudly. "And it is in my mind that
you will be clubbed this day."

The Buli nodded to one of his big mountaineers, who stepped forward, swinging
a club. Narau bolted into the nearest house, seeking to hide among the woman
and mats; but John Starhurst sprang in under the club and threw his arms
around his executioner's neck. From this point of vantage he proceeded to
argue. He was arguing for his life, and he knew it; but he was neither excited
nor afraid.

"It would be an evil thing for you to kill me," he told the man.  "I have done
you no wrong, nor have I done the Buli wrong."

So well did he cling to the neck of the one man that they dared not strike
with their clubs. And he continued to cling and to dispute for his life with
those who clamored for his death.

"I am John Starhurst," he went on calmly. "I have labored in Fiji for three
years, and I have done it for no profit. I am here among you for good. Why
should any man kill me? To kill me will not profit any man."

The Buli stole a look at the whale tooth. He was well paid for the deed.

The missionary was surrounded by a mass of naked savages, all struggling to
get at him. The death song, which is the song of the oven, was raised, and his
expostulations could no longer be heard. But so cunningly did he twine and
wreathe his body about his captor's that the death blow could not be struck.
Erirola smiled, and the Buli grew angry.

"Away with you!" he cried. "A nice story to go back to the coast--a dozen of
you and one missionary, without weapons, weak as a woman, overcoming all of
you."

"Wait, O Buli," John Starhurst called out from the thick of the scuffle, "and
I will overcome even you. For my weapons are Truth and Right, and no man can
withstand them."

"Come to me, then," the Buli answered, "for my weapon is only a poor miserable
club, and, as you say, it cannot withstand you."

The group separated from him, and John Starhurst stood alone, facing the Buli,
who was leaning on an enormous, knotted warclub.

"Come to me, missionary man, and overcome me," the Buli challenged.

"Even so will I come to you and overcome you," John Starhurst made answer,
first wiping his spectacles and settling them properly, then beginning his
advance.

The Buli raised the club and waited.

"In the first place, my death will profit you nothing," began the argument.

"I leave the answer to my club," was the Buli's reply.

And to every point he made the same reply, at the same time watching the
missionary closely in order to forestall that cunning run-in under the lifted
club. Then, and for the first time, John Starhurst knew that his death was at
hand. He made no attempt to run in. Bareheaded, he stood in the sun and prayed
aloud--the mysterious figure of the inevitable white man, who, with Bible,
bullet, or rum bottle, has confronted the amazed savage in his every
stronghold. Even so stood John Starhurst in the rock fortress of the Buli of
Gatoka.

"Forgive them, for they know not what they do," he prayed. "O Lord! Have mercy
upon Fiji. Have compasssion for Fiji. O Jehovah, hear us for His sake, Thy
Son, whom Thou didst give that through Him all men might also become Thy
children. From Thee we came, and our mind is that to Thee we may return. The
land is dark, O Lord, the land is dark. But Thou art mighty to save.  Reach
out Thy hand, O Lord, and save Fiji, poor cannibal Fiji."

The Buli grew impatient.

"Now will I answer thee," he muttered, at the same time swinging his club with
both hands.

Narau, hiding among the women and the mats, heard the impact of the blow and
shuddered. Then the death song arose, and he knew his beloved missionary's
body was being dragged to the oven as he heard the words:

"Drag me gently. Drag me gently."

"For I am the champion of my land."

"Give thanks! Give thanks! Give thanks!"

Next, a single voice arose out of the din, asking:

"Where is the brave man?"

A hundred voices bellowed the answer:

"Gone to be dragged into the oven and cooked."

"Where is the coward?" the single voice demanded.

"Gone to report!" the hundred voices bellowed back. "Gone to report! Gone to
report!"

Narau groaned in anguish of spirit. The words of the old song were true. He
was the coward, and nothing remained to him but to go and report.



MAUKI

He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid, and he
was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor
purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the son of a
chief. He had three tambos.  Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and is first
cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows: First,
he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a woman's hand touch him or
any of his personal belongings; secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food
from a fire in which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a
crocodile, nor travel in a canoe that carried any part of a crocodile even if
as large as a tooth.

Of a different black were his teeeth, which were deep black, or, perhaps
better, LAMP-black. They had been made so in a single night, by his mother,
who had compressed about them a powdered mineral which was dug from the
landslide back of Port Adams.  Port Adams is a salt-water village on Malaita,
and Malaita is the most savage island in the Solomons--so savage that no
traders or planters have yet gained a foothold on it; while, from the time of
the earliest bêche-de-mer fishers and sandalwood traders down to the latest
labor recruiters equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores
of white adventurers have been passed out by tomahawks and soft-nosed Snider
bullets. So Malaita remains today, in the twentieth century, the stamping
ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for laborers who engage
and contract themselves to toil on the plantations of the neighboring and more
civilized islands for a wage of thirty dollars a year. The natives of those
neighboring and more civilized islands have themselves become too civilized to
work on plantations.

Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor two places, but in a couple
of dozen places. In one of the smaller holes he carried a clay pipe. The
larger holes were too large for such use. The bowl of the pipe would have
fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each ear he habitually wore
round wooden plugs that were an even four inches in diameter. Roughly
speaking, the circumference of said holes was twelve and one-half inches.
Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In the various smaller holes he carried such
things as empty rifle cartridges, horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of
string, braids of sennit, strips of green leaf, and, in the cool of the day,
scarlet hibiscus flowers. From which it will be seen that pockets were not
necessary to his well-being. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his only
wearing apparel consisted of a piece of calico several inches wide. A pocket
knife he wore in his hair, the blade snapped down on a kinky lock. His most
prized possession was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended from a
ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn, was passed through the
partition-cartilage of his nose.

But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice face. It was really a pretty
face, viewed by any standard, and for a Melanesian it was a remarkably
good-looking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It was softly
effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small, regular, and delicate.
The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak. There was no strength nor character
in the jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only could be caught any hint of
the unknown quantities that were so large a part of his make-up and that other
persons could not understand. These unknown quantities were pluck,
pertinacity, fearlessness, imagination, and cunning; and when they found
expression in some consistent and striking action, those about him were
astounded.

Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by birth a
salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and
oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew. He
learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he could hold his
breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom through thirty feet of
water. And at seven years he was stolen by the bushmen, who cannot even swim
and who are afraid of salt water. Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a
distance, through rifts in the jungle and from open spaces on the high
mountain sides. He became the slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of
scattered bush-villages on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of which, on
calm mornings, is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have of the
teeming interior population. For the whites do not penetrate Malaita. They
tried it once, in the days when the search was on for gold, but they always
left their heads behind to grin from the smoky rafters of the bushmen's huts.

When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He got
dreadfully out of tobacco. It was hard times in all his villages. He had been
guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a large schooner could not
swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by mangroves that overhung the deep
water. It was a trap, and into the trap sailed two white men in a small ketch.
They were after recruits, and they possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to
say nothing of three rifles and plenty of ammunition. Now there were no
salt-water men living at Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come
down to the sea. The ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty
recruits the first day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that same day the score
of new recruits chopped off the two white men's head, killed the boat's crew,
and burned the ketch.  Thereafter, and for three months, there was tobacco and
trade goods in plenty and to spare in all the bush villages. Then came the
man-of-war that threw shells for miles into the hills, frightening the people
out of their villages and into the deeper bush. Next the man-of-war sent
landing parties ashore. The villages were all burned, along with the tobacco
and trade stuff.

The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the taro gardens uprooted, and
the pigs and chickens killed.

It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he was out of tobacco. Also,
his young men were too frightened to sign on with the recruiting vessels. That
was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried down and signed on for
half a case of tobacco advance, along with knives, axes, calico, and beads,
which he would pay for with his toil on the plantations. Mauki was sorely
frightened when they brought him on board the schooner. He was a lamb led to
the slaughter. White men were ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else
they would not make a practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into
all harbors, two on a schooner, when each schooner carried from fifteen to
twenty blacks as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or seventy black
recruits. In addition to this, there was always the danger of the shore
population, the sudden attack and the cutting off of the schooner and all
hands. Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides, they were possessed of such
devil-devils--rifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron and
brass that made the schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes that talked
and laughed just as men talked and laughed.

Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose particular devil-devil was so
powerful that he could take out all his teeth and put them back at will.

Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one white man kept guard
with two revolvers in his belt. In the cabin the other white man sat with a
book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and lines. He looked at
Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced under the hollows of his
arms, and wrote in the book. Then he held out the writing stick and Mauki just
barely touched it with his hand, in so doing pledging himself to toil for
three years on the plantations of the Moongleam Soap Company. It was not
explained to him that the will of the ferocious white men would be used to
enforce the pledge, and that, behind all, for the same use, was all the power
and all the warships of Great Britain.

Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far places, and when the
white man spoke to them, they tore the long feather from Mauki's hair, cut
that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lava-lava of bright yellow
calico.

After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and islands
than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and put to work in
the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the first time he knew
what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not worked like this. And he
did not like work. It was up at dawn and in at dark, on two meals a day. And
the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time they were given nothing but sweet
potatoes to eat, and for weeks at a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut
out the cocoanut from the shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he
fed the fires that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to
felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the road-building
gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale boats, when they brought
in copra from distant beaches or when the white men went out to dynamite fish.

Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English, with which he could talk
with all white men, and with all recruits who otherwise would have talked in a
thousand different dialects.  Also, he learned certain things about the white
men, principally that they kept their word. If they told a boy he was going to
receive a stick of tobacco, he got it. If they told a boy they would knock
seven bells out of him if he did a certain thing, when he did that thing,
seven bells invariably were knocked out of him. Mauki did not know what seven
bells were, but they occurred in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to be the
blood and teeth that sometimes accompanied the process of knocking out seven
bells. One other thing he learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did
wrong. Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never
struck unless a rule had been broken.

Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son of a
chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen from Port Adams
by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the slavery under
Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with the idea of working
southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which to go home to Port Adams.

But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead than
alive.

A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys.  They got down
the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a Malaita freeman, who
dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white men came, who were
not afraid of all the village people and who knocked seven bells out of the
three runaways, tied them like pigs, and tossed them into the whale boat. But
the man in whose house they had hidden--seven times seven bells must have been
knocked out of him from the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was
discouraged for the rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.

For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy, and had good food
and easy times, with light work in keeping the house clean and serving the
white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and most hours of the
night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He had two years longer to
serve, but two years were too long for him in the throes of homesickness. He
had grown wiser with his year of service, and, being now a house-boy, he had
opportunity. He had the cleaning of the rifles, and he knew where the key to
the store room was hung. He planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys
and one boy from San Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of
the whale boats down to the beach. It was Mauki who supplied the key that
opened the padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a
dozen Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with
detonators and fuse, and ten cases of tobacco.

The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night time,
hiding by day on detached and uninhabited islets, or dragging their whale boat
into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained Guadalcanar, skirted
halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable Straits to Florida Island. It
was here that they killed the San Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking
and eating the rest of him. The Malaita coast was only twenty miles away, but
the last night a strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining
across. Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight
brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of eleven
Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions were carried
back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all the white men. And
the great white master held a court, after which, one by one, the runaways
were tied up and given twenty lashes each, and sentenced to a fine of fifteen
dollars. They were sent back to New Georgia, where the white men knocked seven
bells out of them all around and put them to work.  But Mauki was no longer
house-boy. He was put in the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had
been paid by the white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he
would have to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil. Further,
his share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of toil.

Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe one night,
hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the Straits, and began
working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to be captured, two-thirds of
the way along, by the white men on Meringe Lagoon. After a week, he escaped
from them and took to the bush. There were no bush natives on Ysabel, only
salt-water men, who were all Christians. The white men put up a reward of
five-hundred sticks of tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea
to steal a canoe he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this
passed, when, the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was
caught and sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a thousand
sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself, which
required a year and eight months' labor. So Port Adams was now five years
away.

His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him to settle
down and be good, work out his four years, and go home. The next time, he was
caught in the very act of running away. His case was brought before Mr.
Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap Company, who adjudged him an
incorrigible.  The Company had plantations on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds
of miles across the sea, and there it sent its Solomon Islands' incorrigibles.
And there Mauki was sent, though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at
Santa Anna, and in the night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and
a case of tobacco from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval.
Malaita was now to the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted
the passage, he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna,
where the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the
schooner from Santa Cruz.  The two rifles the trader recovered, but the case
of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The sum of
years he now owed the Company was six.

On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau Sound,
which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki swam ashore
with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The schooner went on,
but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand sticks, and to him Mauki
was brought by the bushmen with a year and eight months tacked on to his
account. Again, and before the schooner called in, he got away, this time in a
whale boat accompanied by a case of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale
wrecked him upon Ugi, where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned
him over to the Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives
stole meant another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.

"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and we'll
let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine, of Mauki
getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in either event."

If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north,
magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will lift the pounded
coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea.  Lord Howe is a ring of land some
one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred yards wide at
its widest, and towering in places to a height of ten feet above sea level.
Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded with coral patches. Lord
Howe belongs to the Solomons neither geographically nor ethnologically. It is
an atoll, while the Solomons are high islands; and its people and language are
Polynesian, while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.

Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which continues
to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its beaches by the
southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian drift in the period
of the northwest monsoon, is also evident.

Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes called.
Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do not dream of its
existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on its shore. Its five
thousand natives are as peaceable as they are primitive. Yet they were not
always peaceable. The Sailing Directions speak of them as hostile and
treacherous. But the men who compile the Sailing Directions have never heard
of the change that was worked in the hearts of the inhabitants, who, not many
years ago, cut off a big bark and killed all hands with the exception of the
second mate. The survivor carried the news to his brothers. The captains of
three trading schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their
vessels right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's gospel
that only white men shall kill white men and that the lesser breeds must keep
hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the lagoon, harrying and
destroying. There was no escape from the narrow sand-circle, no bush to which
to flee.  The men were shot down at sight, and there was no avoiding being
sighted. The villages were burned, the canoes smashed, the chickens and pigs
killed, and the precious cocoanut trees chopped down. For a month this
continued, when the schooner sailed away; but the fear of the white man had
been seared into the souls of the islanders and never again were they rash
enough to harm one.

Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of the
ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him on Lord Howe,
because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most out-of-the-way place to
be found. That the Company did not get rid of him was due to the difficulty of
finding another man to take his place. He was a strapping big German, with
something wrong in his brain. Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of
his condition. He was a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than
any savage on the island.

Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he first went
into the Company's employ, he was stationed on Savo.  When a consumptive
colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with his fists and sent
him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.

Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to relieve Bunster. The
Yorkshire man had a reputation as a bruiser and preferred fighting to eating.
But Bunster wouldn't fight. He was a regular little lamb--for ten days, at the
end of which time the Yorkshire man was prostrated by a combined attack of
dysentery and fever. Then Bunster went for him, among other things getting him
down and jumping on him a score or so of times. Afraid of what would happen
when his victim recovered. Bunster fled away in a cutter to Guvutu, where he
signalized himself by beating up a young Englishman already crippled by a Boer
bullet through both hips.

Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the falling-off place.
He celebrated his landing by mopping up half a case of gin and by thrashing
the elderly and wheezy mate of the schooner which had brought him. When the
schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to the beach and challenged them
to throw him in a wrestling bout, promising a case of tobacco to the one who
succeeded. Three kanakas he threw, but was promptly thrown by a fourth, who,
instead of receiving the tobacco, got a bullet through his lungs.

And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three thousand people lived in the
principal village; but it was deserted, even in broad day, when he passed
through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the dogs and pigs got
out of the way, while the king was not above hiding under a mat. The two prime
ministers lived in terror of Bunster, who never discussed any moot subject,
but struck out with his fists instead.

And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years and a
half. There was no escaping from Lord Howe. For better or worse, Bunster and
he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds. Mauki weighed one
hundred and ten.  Bunster was a degenerate brute. But Mauki was a primitive
savage. While both had wills and ways of their own.

Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to work for. He had had no
warnings, and he had concluded as a matter of course that Bunster would be
like other white men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and a lawgiver who
always kept his word and who never struck a boy undeserved. Bunster had the
advantage. He knew all about Mauki, and gloated over the coming into
possession of him. The last cook was suffering from a broken arm and a
dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made Mauki cook and general house-boy.

And Mauki soon learned that there were white men and white men.  On the very
day the schooner departed he was ordered to buy a chicken from Samisee, the
native Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed across the lagoon and would
not be back for three days. Mauki returned with the information. He climbed
the steep stairway (the house stood on piles twelve feet above the sand), and
entered the living room to report. The trader demanded the chicken. Mauki
opened his mouth to explain the missionary's absence. But Bunster did not care
for explanations. He struck out with his fist. The blow caught Mauki on the
mouth and lifted him into the air. Clear through the doorway he flew, across
the narrow veranda, breaking the top railing, and down to the ground.

His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his mouth was full of blood and
broken teeth.

"That'll teach you that back talk don't go with me," the trader shouted,
purple with rage, peering down at him over the broken railing.

Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he resolved to walk small and
never offend. He saw the boat boys knocked about, and one of them put in irons
for three days with nothing to eat for the crime of breaking a rowlock while
pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of the village and learned why Bunster
had taken a third wife--by force, as was well known. The first and second
wives lay in the graveyard, under the white coral sand, with slabs of coral
rock at head and feet. They had died, it was said, from beatings he had given
them. The third wife was certainly ill-used, as Mauki could see for himself.

But there was no way by which to avoid offending the white man who seemed
offended with life. When Mauki kept silent, he was struck and called a sullen
brute. When he spoke, he was struck for giving back talk. When he was grave,
Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him a thrashing in advance; and when
he strove to be cheerful and to smile, he was charged with sneering at his
lord and master and given a taste of stick. Bunster was a devil.

The village would have done for him, had it not remembered the lesson of the
three schooners. It might have done for him anyway, if there had been a bush
to which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white men, of any white man,
would bring a man-of-war that would kill the offenders and chop down the
precious cocoanut trees. Then there were the boat boys, with minds fully made
up to drown him by accident at the first opportunity to capsize the cutter.
Only Bunster saw to it that the boat did not capsize.

Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being impossible while Bunster
lived, he was resolved to get the white man. The trouble was that he could
never find a chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day and night his revolvers
were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to pass behind his back, as Mauki
learned after having been knocked down several times. Bunster knew that he had
more to fear from the good-natured, even sweet-faced, Malaita boy than from
the entire population of Lord Howe; and it gave added zest to the programme of
torment he was carrying out. And Mauki walked small, accepted his punishments,
and waited.

All other white men had respected his tambos, but not so Bunster.

Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks. Bunster passed them to his
woman and ordered Mauki to receive them from her hand. But this could not be,
and Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way he was made to miss many a
meal, and to go hungry many a day. He was ordered to make chowder out of the
big clams that grew in the lagoon. This he could not do, for clams were tambo.
Six times in succession he refused to touch the clams, and six times he was
knocked senseless. Bunster knew that the boy would die first, but called his
refusal mutiny, and would have killed him had there been another cook to take
his place.

One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's kinky locks and bat
his head against the wall. Another trick was to catch Mauki unawares and
thrust the live end of a cigar against his flesh. This Bunster called
vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times a week. Once, in a
rage, Bunster ripped the cup handle from Mauki's nose, tearing the hole clear
out of the cartilage.

"Oh, what a mug!" was his comment, when he surveyed the damage he had wrought.

The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray fish is like a
rasp. In the South Seas the natives use it as a wood file in smoothing down
canoes and paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray fish skin. The first time
he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the hand it fetched the skin off his
back from neck to armpit. Bunster was delighted. He gave his wife a taste of
the mitten, and tried it out thoroughly on the boat boys. The prime ministers
came in for a stroke each, and they had to grin and take it for a joke.

"Laugh, damn you, laugh!" was the cue he gave.

Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a day passed without
a caress from it. There were times when the loss of so much cuticle kept him
awake at night, and often the half-healed surface was raked raw afresh by the
facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his patient wait, secure in the
knowledge that sooner or later his time would come. And he knew just what he
was going to do, down to the smallest detail, when the time did come.

One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking seven bells out of the
universe. He began on Mauki, and wound up on Mauki, in the interval knocking
down his wife and hammering all the boat boys. At breakfast he called the
coffee slops and threw the scalding contents of the cup into Mauki's face. By
ten o'clock Bunster was shivering with ague, and half an hour later he was
burning with fever. It was no ordinary attack. It quickly became pernicious,
and developed into black-water fever. The days passed, and he grew weaker and
weaker, never leaving his bed.  Mauki waited and watched, the while his skin
grew intact once more. He ordered the boys to beach the cutter, scrub her
bottom, and give her a general overhauling. They thought the order emanated
from Bunster, and they obeyed. But Bunster at the time was lying unconscious
and giving no orders. This was Mauki's chance, but still he waited.

When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but weak
as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china cup handle, into
his trade box. Then he went over to the village and interviewed the king and
his two prime ministers.

"This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too much?" he asked.

They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The
ministers poured forth a recital of all the indignities and wrongs that had
been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki interrupted rudely.

"You savve me--me big fella marster my country. You no like m this fella white
marster. Me no like m. Plenty good you put hundred cocoanut, two hundred
cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter. Him finish, you go sleep m good
fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good fella. Bime by big fella noise along
house, you no savve hear m that fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella
too much."

In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered Bunster's wife
to return to her family house. Had she refused, he would have been in a
quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to lay hands on her.

The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay in a
doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish mitten on
his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten that removed the
skin the full length of his nose.

"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept the
forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his face. "Laugh,
damn you, laugh."

Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses, heard
the "big fella noise" that Bunster made and continued to make for an hour or
more.

When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and
ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases of
tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing came out
of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in the sand and
mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked toward it and
hesitated.  Then he went over and removed the head, which he wrapped in a mat
and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.

So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they did not
see the cutter run out through the passage and head south, close-hauled on the
southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack to the
shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat from there to Malaita. He
landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles and tobacco such as no one man
had ever possessed before. But he did not stop there. He had taken a white
man's head, and only the bush could shelter him.  So back he went to the bush
villages, where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made
himself the chief over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's brother
ruled in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the
resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes of
Malaita.

More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up to him in
the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and one-half years of
labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then appeared the inevitable white
man, the captain of the schooner, the only white man during Mauki's reign, who
ventured the bush and came out alive. This man not only came out, but he
brought with him seven hundred and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money
price of eight years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles
and cases of tobacco.

Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is three times
its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many other things--rifles and
revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent collection of bushmen's
heads. But more precious than the entire collection is another head, perfectly
dried and cured, with sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped
in the finest of fibre lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond
his realm, he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,
contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls on
the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The head is
esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the possession of it
is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.



"YAH! YAH! YAH!"

He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat, beginning
with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and thereafter repeating
it at regular intervals throughout the day till bedtime, which was usually
midnight.  He slept but five hours out of the twenty-four, and for the
remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and decently drunk. During the eight
weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll, I never saw him draw a sober breath.
In fact, his sleep was so short that he never had time to sober up. It was the
most beautiful and orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.

McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins. His
hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured his
whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been twenty-eight
years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the German Solomons, and
so thoroughly had he become identified with that portion of the world, that he
habitually spoke in that bastard lingo called "bech-de-mer." Thus, in
conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that
dinner was served; and BELLY BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at
his stomach. He was a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside
by ardent spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a
man, a little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by
starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him away.
He weighed ninety pounds.

But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled. Oolong
Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One steered by compass
course in its lagoon. It was populated by five thousand Polynesians, all
strapping men and women, many of them standing six feet in height and weighing
a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was two hundred and fifty miles from the
nearest land.  Twice a year a little schooner called to collect copra. The one
white man on Oolong was McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler;
and he ruled Oolong and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said
come, and they came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor
judgment. He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered
continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's daughter, wanted
to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said yes; but
McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the king wanted to
buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest, McAllister said no.
The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of 180,000 cocoanuts, and
until that was paid he was not to spend a single cocoanut on anything else.

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they hated
him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the priests at
the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death. The devil-devils
they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since McAllister did not believe
in devil-devils, they were without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all
signs fail. They gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an
empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his
spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived
on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds;
dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that
attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He
must have been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I
used to imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders
as fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.

I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up with
that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not died
suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people were
high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet of the
graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades, rusty old
bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons, bomb guns,
bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's trying-out furnace,
and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that verified the traditions of
the early Spanish navigators. Ship after ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not
thirty years before, the whaler BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for
repair, had been cut off with all hands.  In similar fashion had the crew of
the GASKET, a sandalwood trader, perished.  There was a big French bark, the
TOULON, becalmed off the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp
tussle and wrecked in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors
escaping in the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of
the loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is a
matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING DIRECTORY.
But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to learn. In the
meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let one degenerate
Scotch despot live.

One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over the
lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across the
hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the reef. It was
dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and the sun was
directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before on its journey
south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season of the southeast
trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest monsoon had not yet
begun to blow.

"They can't dance worth a damn," said McAllister.

I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to the
Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than his
cantankerousness.  But it was too not to argue, and I said nothing. Besides, I
had never seen the Oolong people dance.

"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover boy,
a labor recruit, who served as cook and general house servant. "Hey, you, boy,
you tell 'm one fella king come along me."

The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at ease,
and garrulous with apologetic explanation. In short, the king slept, and was
not to be disturbed.

"King he plenty strong fella sleep," was his final sentence.

McAllister was in such a rage that the prime minister incontinently fled, to
return with the king himself. They were a magnificent pair, the king
especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches in height. His
features had the eagle-like quality that is so frequently found in those of
the North American Indian. He had been molded and born to rule. His eyes
flashed as he listened, but right meekly he obeyed McAllister's command to
fetch a couple of hundred of the best dancers, male and female, in the
village. And dance they did, for two mortal hours, under that broiling sun.
They did not love him for it, and little he cared, in the end dismissing them
with abuse and sneers.

The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How could it
be? What was the secret of his rule? More and more I puzzled as the days went
by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his undisputed sovereignty,
never a clew was there as to how it was.

One day I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade for a
beautiful pair of orange cowries. The pair was worth five pounds in Sydney if
it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks of tobacco to the owner,
who had held out for three hundred. When I casually mentioned the situation,
McAllister immediately sent for the man, took the shells from him, and turned
them over to me. Fifty sticks were all he permitted me to pay for them. The
man accepted the tobacco and seemed overjoyed at getting off so easily. As for
me, I resolved to keep a bridle on my tongue in the future. And still I mulled
over the secret of McAllister's power. I even went to the extent of asking him
directly, but all he did was to cock one eye, look wise, and take another
drink.

One night I was out fishing in the lagoon with Oti, the man who had been
mulcted of the cowries. Privily, I had made up to him an additional hundred
and fifty sticks, and he had come to regard me with a respect that was almost
veneration, which was curious, seeing that he was an old man, twice my age at
least.

"What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?" I began on him. "This
fella trader he one fella. You fella kanaka plenty fella too much. You fella
kanaka just like 'm dog--plenty fright along that fella trader. He no eat you,
fella. He no get 'm teeth along him. What name you too much fright?"

"S'pose plenty fella kanaka kill m?" he asked.

"He die," I retorted. "You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man long
time before. What name you fright this fella white man?"

"Yes, we kill 'm plenty," was his answer. "My word! Any amount! Long time
before. One time, me young fella too much, one big fella ship he stop outside.
Wind he no blow. Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe, plenty fella canoe, we
go catch 'm that fella ship. My word--we catch 'm big fella fight. Two, three
white men shoot like hell. We no fright. We come alongside, we go up side,
plenty fella, maybe I think fifty-ten (five hundred). One fella white Mary
(woman) belong that fella ship. Never before I see 'm white Mary. Bime by
plenty white man finish. One fella skipper he no die. Five fella, six fella
white man no die. Skipper he sing out. Some fella white man he fight. Some
fella white man he lower away boat. After that, all together over the side
they go. Skipper he sling white Mary down. After that they washee (row) strong
fella plenty too much. Father belong me, that time he strong fella. He throw
'm one fella spear. That fella spear he go in one side that white Mary. He no
stop.  My word, he go out other side that fella Mary. She finish. Me no
fright.  Plenty kanaka too much no fright."

Old Oti's pride had been touched, for he suddenly stripped down his lava-lava
and showed me the unmistakable scar of a bullet. Before I could speak, his
line ran out suddenly. He checked it and attempted to haul in, but found that
the fish had run around a coral branch. Casting a look of reproach at me for
having beguiled him from his watchfulness, he went over the side, feet first,
turning over after he got under and following his line down to bottom. The
water was ten fathoms. I leaned over and watched the play of his feet, growing
dim and dimmer, as they stirred the wan phosphorescence into ghostly fires.
Ten fathoms--sixty feet--it was nothing to him, an old man, compared with the
value of a hook and line. After what seemed five minutes, though it could not
have been more than a minute, I saw him flaming whitely upward. He broke
surface and dropped a ten pound rock cod into the canoe, the line and hook
intact, the latter still fast in the fish's mouth.

"It may be," I said remorselessly. "You no fright long ago. You plenty fright
now along that fella trader."

"Yes, plenty fright," he confessed, with an air of dismissing the subject. For
half an hour we pulled up our lines and flung them out in silence. Then small
fish-sharks began to bite, and after losing a hook apiece, we hauled in and
waited for the sharks to go their way.

"I speak you true," Oti broke into speech, "then you savve we fright now."

I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in atrocious
bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in spirit and order of
narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.

"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times with the
strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had beaten them. A few
of us were killed, but what was that compared with the stores of wealth of a
thousand thousand kinds that we found on the ships? And then one day, maybe
twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there came a schooner right through the
passage and into the lagoon. It was a large schooner with three masts. She had
five white men and maybe forty boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and
New Britain; and she had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across
the lagoon from here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere,
making camps on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them
weak by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the schooner at
Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others farther away still.

"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that paddled
all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word to the people of
Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the fishing camps at the one time
and that it was for them to take the schooner. We who brought the word were
tired with the paddling, but we took part in the attack. On the schooner were
two white men, the skipper and the second mate, with half a dozen black boys.
The skipper with three boys we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of
us the skipper killed with his two revolvers. We fought close together, you
see, at hand grapples.

"The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put food
and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small that it was no
more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the schooner, a thousand men,
covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing conch shells,
singing war songs, and striking the sides of the canoes with our paddles. What
chance had one white man and three black boys against us? No chance at all,
and the mate knew it.

"White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now, and I
understand at last why the white men have taken to themselves all the islands
in the sea. It is because they are hell. Here are you in the canoe with me.
You are hardly more than a boy. You are not wise, for each day I tell you many
things you do not know. When I was a little pickaninny, I knew more about fish
and the ways of fish than you know now. I am an old man, but I swim down to
the bottom of the lagoon, and you cannot follow me. What are you good for,
anyway?  I do not know, except to fight. I have never seen you fight, yet I
know that you are like your brothers and that you will fight like hell. Also,
you are a fool, like your brothers. You do not know when you are beaten. You
will fight until you die, and then it will be too late to know that you are
beaten.

"Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the sea and
blowing our conches, he put off from the schooner in the small boat, along
with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage. There again he was a
fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so small a boat. The sides of it
were not four inches above the water. Twenty canoes went after him, filled
with two hundred young men. We paddled five fathoms while his black boys were
rowing one fathom. He had no chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the
boat with a rifle, and he shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we
drew close many of us were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.

"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were forty feet
away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick of dynamite with
the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and another, and threw them
at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now that he must have split the ends
of the fuses and stuck in match heads, because they lighted so quickly. Also,
the fuses were very short. Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air,
but most of them went off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a
canoe, that canoe was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed to
pieces. The canoe I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men who sat
next to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes turned and ran
away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us. Also he went at us again
with his rifle, so that many were killed through the back as they fled away.
And all the time the black boys in the boat went on rowing. You see, I told
you true, that mate was hell.

"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire, and fixed
up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at one time. There were
hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the fire, heaving up water from
overside, when the schooner blew up. So that all we had fought for was lost to
us, besides many more of us being killed. Sometimes, even now, in my old age,
I have bad dreams in which I hear that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice
of thunder he yells, Yah! Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were
killed.

"The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the end of
him we made sure, for how could so small a boat, with four men in it, live on
the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning, between two rain squalls, a
schooner sailed in through our passage and dropped anchor before the village.
The king and the headmen made big talk, and it was agreed that we would take
the schooner in two or three days. In the meantime, as it was our custom
always to appear friendly, we went off to her in canoes, bringing strings of
cocoanuts, fowls, and pigs, to trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes
of us, the men on board began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled away
I saw the mate who had gone to sea in the little boat spring upon the rail and
dance and yell,  Yah! Yah! Yah!'

"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats filled with
white men. They went right through the village, shooting every man they saw.
Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not killed got away in canoes
and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking back, we could see all the houses on
fire.  Late in the afternoon we saw many canoes coming from Nihi, which is the
village near the Nihi Passage in the northeast. They were all that were left,
and like us their village had been burned by a second schooner that had come
through Nihi Passage.

"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the middle of
the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big fleet of canoes.
They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise was in ashes, for a
third schooner had come in through the Pauloo Passage. You see, that mate,
with his black boys, had not been drowned. He had made the Solomon Islands,
and there told his brothers of what we had done in Oolong. And all his
brothers had said they would come and punish us, and there they were in the
three schooners, and our three villages were wiped out.

"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from
windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The trade wind was
blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down. And the rifles never
ceased talking. We scattered like flying fish before the bonita, and there
were so many of us that we escaped by thousands, this way and that, to the
islands on the rim of the atoll.

"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or three
days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward the other end of
the lagoon.  And so it went. We no longer counted nor remembered our dead.
True, we were many and they were few. But what could we do? I was in one of
the twenty canoes filled with men who were not afraid to die. We attacked the
smallest schooner.  They shot us down in heaps. They threw dynamite into the
canoes, and when the dynamite gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And
the rifles never ceased talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot
as they swam away.  And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and
yelled, "Yah! Yah! Yah!'

"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl was
left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or else
heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong before the
three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the schooners left, we
were but three thousand, as you shall see.

"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So they
went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then they drove us
steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as well. They beat up
every island as they moved along. They drove us, drove us, drove us day by
day.  And every night the three schooners and the nine boats made a chain of
watchfulness that stretched across the lagoon from rim to rim, so that we
could not escape back.

"They could not drive us forever that way, for the lagoon was only so large,
and at last all of us that yet lived were driven upon the last sand bank to
the west.  Beyond lay the open sea. There were ten thousand of us, and we
covered the sand bank from the lagoon edge to the pounding surf on the other
side. No one could lie down. There was no room. We stood hip to hip and
shoulder to shoulder. Two days they kept us there, and the mate would climb up
in the rigging to mock us and yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' till we were well sorry
that we had ever harmed him or his schooner a month before. We had no food,
and we stood on our feet two days and nights. The little babies died, and the
old and weak died, and the wounded died. And worst of all, we had no water to
quench our thirst, and for two days the sun beat down on us, and there was no
shade. Many men and women waded out into the ocean and were drowned, the surf
casting their bodies back on the beach. And there came a pest of flies. Some
men swam to the sides of the schooners, but they were shot to the last one.
And we that lived were very sorry that in our pride we tried to take the
schooner with the three masts that came to fish for beche-de-mer.

"On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three schooners and
that mate in a small boat. They carried rifles, all of them, and revolvers,
and they made talk. It was only that they were weary of killing us that they
had stopped, they told us. And we told them that we were sorry, that never
again would we harm a white man, and in token of our submission we poured sand
upon our heads. And all the women and children set up a great wailing for
water, so that for some time no man could make himself heard. Then we were
told our punishment.  We must fill the three schooners with copra and
beche-de-mer. And we agreed, for we wanted water, and our hearts were broken,
and we knew that we were children at fighting when we fought with white men
who fight like hell. And when all the talk was finished, the mate stood up and
mocked us, and yelled, Yah! Yah!  Yah!' After that we paddled away in our
canoes and sought water.

"And for weeks we toiled at catching beche-de-mer and curing it, in gathering
the cocoanuts and turning them into copra. By day and night the smoke rose in
clouds from all the beaches of all the islands of Oolong as we paid the
penalty of our wrongdoing. For in those days of death it was burned clearly on
all our brains that it was very wrong to harm a white man.

"By and by, the schooners full of copra and beche-de-mer and our trees empty
of cocoanuts, the three skippers and that mate called us all together for a
big talk. And they said they were very glad that we had learned our lesson,
and we said for the ten-thousandth time that we were sorry and that we would
not do it again. Also, we poured sand upon our heads. Then the skippers said
that it was all very well, but just to show us that they did not forget us,
they would send a devil-devil that we would never forget and that we would
always remember any time we might feel like harming a white man. After that
the mate mocked us one more time and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' Then six of our
men, whom we thought long dead, were put ashore from one of the schooners, and
the schooners hoisted their sails and ran out through the passage for the
Solomons.

"The six men who were put ashore were the first to catch the devil-devil the
skippers sent back after us."

"A great sickness came," I interrupted, for I recognized the trick. The
schooner had had measles on board, and the six prisoners had been deliberately
exposed to it.

"Yes, a great sickness," Oti went on. "It was a powerful devil-devil. The
oldest man had never heard of the like. Those of our priests that yet lived we
killed because they could not overcome the devil-devil. The sickness spread.
I have said that there were ten thousand of us that stood hip to hip and
shoulder to shoulder on the sandbank. When the sickness left us, there were
three thousand yet alive. Also, having made all our cocoanuts into copra,
there was a famine.

"That fella trader," Oti concluded, "he like 'm that much dirt. He like 'm
clam he die KAI-KAI (meat) he stop, stink 'm any amount. He like 'm one fella
dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him. We no fright along that
fella trader. We fright because he white man. We savve plenty too much no good
kill white man. That one fella sick dog trader he plenty brother stop along
him, white men like 'm you fight like hell. We no fright that damn trader.
Some time he made kanaka plenty cross along him and kanaka want 'm kill m,
kanaka he think devil-devil and kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah!
Yah! Yah!' and kanaka no kill m."

Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his teeth from
the live and squirming monster, and hook and bait sank in white flames to the
bottom.

"Shark walk about he finish," he said. "I think we catch 'm plenty fella
fish."

His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand, and landed
a big gasping rock cod in the bottom of the canoe.

"Sun he come up, I make 'm that dam fella trader one present big fella fish,"
said Oti.


THE HEATHEN

I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the hurricane
on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone to pieces under
us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I had seen him with the rest
of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not consciously been aware of his
existence, for the Petite Jeanne was rather overcrowded. In addition to her
eight or ten kanaka seamen, her white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her
six cabin passengers, she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five
deck passengers-- Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with
a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes bundles.

The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were returning to
Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers. Two were Americans,
one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever known), one was a German,
one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half dozen.

It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint, nor
one of the eighty-five deck passengers either.  All had done well, and all
were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete.

Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy tons, and
she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board. Beneath her
hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and copra. Even the trade
room was packed full with shell. It was a miracle that the sailors could work
her.  There was no moving about the decks. They simply climbed back and forth
along the rails.

In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck, I'll
swear, two deep. Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on deck, and sacks of
yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings of drinking
cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the fore and main
shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for the foreboom to swing
clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty bunches of bananas were
suspended.

It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two or three
days that would have been required if the southeast trades had been blowing
fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh.  After the first five hours the trade
died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm continued all that night and
the next day--one of those glaring, glassy, calms, when the very thought of
opening one's eyes to look at it is sufficient to cause a headache.

The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers that
season in the lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how smallpox could
come on board, when there had been no known cases ashore when we left
Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was, though--smallpox, a man dead, and three
others down on their backs.

There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could we
care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do but rot
and die--that is, there was nothing to do after the night that followed the
first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the Polish Jew, and four
native divers sneaked away in the large whale boat. They were never heard of
again. In the morning the captain promptly scuttled the remaining boats, and
there we were.

That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it jumped to
eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives, for instance, fell
into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The captain--Oudouse, his name was, a
Frenchman--became very nervous and voluble. He actually got the twitches. He
was a large fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly
became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.

The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch whiskey,
and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely, if we kept
ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came into contact with
us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the theory worked, though I
must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah Choon were attacked by the
disease either. The Frenchman did not drink at all, while Ah Choon restricted
himself to one drink daily.

It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was straight
overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which blew fiercely
for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by deluging us with rain.
After each squall, the awful sun would come out, drawing clouds of steam from
the soaked decks.

The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with millions and
millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw it going up from
the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three more drinks, mixing them
exceptionally stiff.  Also, we made it a rule to take an additional several
each time they hove the dead over to the sharks that swarmed about us.

We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well, or I
shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what followed, as
you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two men did pull
through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was what I heard
Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware of the heathen's
existence. But to come back.

It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl buyers
sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in the cabin
companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90, and it was quite
customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00, or even 30.05; but to
see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient to sober the most drunken
pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox microbes in Scotch whiskey.

I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he had
watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but that
little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took off the light
sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life lines, and waited for
the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the wind came. He hove to on
the port tack, which was the right thing to do south of the Equator, if--and
there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the direct path of the hurricane.

We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of the
wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him to turn and
run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer ceased falling, and
then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to hysteria, but budge he
would not. The worst of it was that I could not get the rest of the pearl
buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to know more about the sea and its
ways than a properly qualified captain? was what was in their minds, I knew.

Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never forget
the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen off, as vessels
do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean breach. The life
lines were only for the strong and well, and little good were they even for
them when the women and children, the bananas and cocoanuts, the pigs and
trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were swept along in a solid, screeching,
groaning mass.

The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne'S decks flush with the rails; and, as
her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the miserable dunnage of
life and luggage poured aft. It was a human torrent. They came head first,
feet first, sidewise, rolling over and over, twisting, squirming, writhing,
and crumpling up. Now and again one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope;
but the weight of the bodies behind tore such grips loose.

One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard bitt.
His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top of the
cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one of the
Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them. The American
was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff. Ah Choon caught a
spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a strapping Raratonga vahine
(woman)--she must have weighed two hundred and fifty--brought up against him,
and got an arm around his neck. He clutched the kanaka steersman with his
other hand; and just at that moment the schooner flung down to starboard.

The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between the
cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away they
went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon grin at me
with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went under.

The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By the
time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps a dozen
gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling about or
attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as did the wreckage
of the two remaining boats. The other pearl buyers and myself, between seas,
managed to get about fifteen women and children into the cabin, and battened
down. Little good it did the poor creatures in the end.

Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible for the
wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one describe a
nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the clothes off our
bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not asking you to believe it.
I am merely telling something that I saw and felt. There are times when I do
not believe it myself. I went through it, and that is enough. One could not
face that wind and live. It was a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous
thing about it was that it increased and continued to increase.

Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this sand
tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or any other number
of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be invisible, impalpable,
yet to retain all the weight and density of sand. Do all this, and you may get
a vague inkling of what that wind was like.

Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible,
impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every
molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself.  Then try to imagine the
multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may be
adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot possibly
express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind. It would have
been better had I stuck by my original intention of not attempting a
description.

I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down by
that wind. 'more: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up in the
maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of space which
previously had been occupied by the air.

Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had on the
Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea schooner--a sea
anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of which was kept open by a
huge loop of iron. The sea anchor was bridled something like a kite, so that
it bit into the water as a kite bites into the air, but with a difference. The
sea anchor remained just under the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular
position. A long line, in turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result,
the Petite Jeanne rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.

The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the path of
the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the gaskets, jerked
out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear, but still we would
have come through nicely had we not been square in front of the advancing
storm center. That was what fixed us. I was in a state of stunned, numbed,
paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of the wind, and I think I was
just about ready to give up and die when the center smote us.  The blow we
received was an absolute lull. There was not a breath of air. The effect on
one was sickening.

Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension, withstanding
the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly, the pressure was removed.
I know that I felt as though I was about to expand, to fly apart in all
directions. It seemed as if every atom composing my body was repelling every
other atom and was on the verge of rushing off irresistibly into space. But
that lasted only for a moment. Destruction was upon us.

In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it leaped, it
soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point of the compass
that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center of calm. The result
was that the seas sprang up from every point of the compass. There was no wind
to check them. They popped up like corks released from the bottom of a pail of
water. There was no system to them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal
seas. They were eighty feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They
resembled no sea a man had ever seen.

They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that were eighty
feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty.  They went over our mastheads.
They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell anywhere, anyhow.
They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed together and collapsed
upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand waterfalls all at once. It was
no ocean any man had ever dreamed of, that hurricane center. It was confusion
thrice confounded. It was anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad.

The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that he did
not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten into a pulp,
smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to I was in the water,
swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds drowned. How I got there
I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at
what must have been the instant that my own consciousness was buffeted out of
me. But there I was, with nothing to do but make the best of it, and in that
best there was little promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much
smaller and more regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center.
Fortunately, there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the
ravenous horde that had surrounded the death ship and fed off the dead.

It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must have
been two hours afterwards when I picked up with one of her hatch covers. Thick
rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest chance that flung me and
the hatch cover together. A short length of line was trailing from the rope
handle; and I knew that I was good for a day, at least, if the sharks did not
return. Three hours later, possibly a little longer, sticking close to the
cover, and with closed eyes, concentrating my whole soul upon the task of
breathing in enough air to keep me going and at the same time of avoiding
breathing in enough water to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices.
The rain had ceased, and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty feet
away from me, on another hatch cover were Captain Oudouse and the heathen.
They were fighting over the possession of the cover--at least, the Frenchman
was. "Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick the
kanaka.

Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and they were
heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen on the mouth and
the point of the chin, half stunning him. I looked for him to retaliate, but
he contented himself with swimming about forlornly a safe ten feet away.
Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the Frenchman, hanging on with
his hands, kicked out at him with both feet. Also, at the moment of delivering
each kick, he called the kanaka a black heathen.

"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I
yelled.

The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought of
the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the kanaka to come to
me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him. Otoo, he told me his name
was (pronounced o-to-o ); also, he told me that he was a native of Bora Bora,
the most westerly of the Society Group. As I learned afterward, he had got the
hatch cover first, and, after some time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had
offered to share it with him, and had been kicked off for his pains.

And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter. He was all
sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood nearly six feet
tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no fighter, but he was also no
coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in the years that followed I have seen
him run risks that I would never dream of taking. What I mean is that while he
was no fighter, and while he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran
away from trouble when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once Otoo
went into action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred
in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the American
Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of those
hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as well. He
picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him once before Otoo
felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it lasted four minutes, at the
end of which time Bill King was the unhappy possessor of four broken ribs, a
broken forearm, and a dislocated shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of
scientific boxing. He was merely a manhandler; and Bill King was something
like three months in recovering from the bit of manhandling he received that
afternoon on Apia beach.

But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us. We
took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting, while the
other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands. For two days and
nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water, we drifted over the
ocean.  Towards the last I was delirious most of the time; and there were
times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving in his native tongue. Our
continuous immersion prevented us from dying of thirst, though the sea water
and the sunshine gave us the prettiest imaginable combination of salt pickle
and sunburn.

In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty feet
from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut leaves. No one
but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the leaves for shade. He was
lying beside me. I went off again; and the next time I came round, it was cool
and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a drinking cocoanut to my lips.

We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must have
succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover drifted ashore
without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the atoll for a week, when
we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken to Tahiti. In the meantime,
however, we had performed the ceremony of exchanging names. In the South Seas
such a ceremony binds two men closer together than blood brothership. The
initiative had been mine; and Otoo was rapturously delighted when I suggested
it.

"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for two
days on the lips of Death."

"But death stuttered," I smiled.

"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not vile
enough to speak."

"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings. "We have
exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And between you and
me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I shall be Otoo. It is the
way of the custom. And when we die, if it does happen that we live again
somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still shall you be Charley to me, and
I Otoo to you."

"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.

"There you go!" I cried indignantly.

"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my lips.
But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall think of
you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And beyond the sky
and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be Otoo to me. Is it well,
master?"

I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.

We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on in a
cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back. I was
surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was returning to
her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.

"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.

I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.

"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all the
islands that are in the sea."

"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."

I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's brothers, I
doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what Otoo was to me. He
was brother and father and mother as well. And this I know: I lived a
straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared little for other men, but I
had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because of him I dared not tarnish
myself. He made me his ideal, compounding me, I fear, chiefly out of his own
love and worship and there were times when I stood close to the steep pitch of
hell, and would have taken the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained
me. His pride in me entered into me, until it became one of the major rules in
my personal code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.

Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me. He
never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held in his
eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I could inflict
upon him by being anything less than my best.

For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at my
shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and wounds--ay, and
receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the same ships with me; and
together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to Sydney Head, and from Torres
Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded from the New Hebrides and the Line
Islands over to the westward clear through the Louisades, New Britain, New
Ireland, and New Hanover. We were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the
Santa Cruz group, and in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar
promised in the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill
turtle shell, and stranded wrecks.

It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was going with
me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof. There was a club in
those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders, captains, and riffraff of
South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play ran high, and the drink ran high;
and I am very much afraid that I kept later hours than were becoming or
proper. No matter what the hour was when I left the club, there was Otoo
waiting to see me safely home.

At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I stood in
need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when I came out of the
club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I discovered that he still saw me
home, lurking across the street among the shadows of the mango trees. What
could I do? I know what I did do.

Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in the
thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming to me of
Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes. Truly, he made a
better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he knew nothing of common
Christian morality. All the people on Bora Bora were Christians; but he was a
heathen, the only unbeliever on the island, a gross materialist, who believed
that when he died he was dead. He believed merely in fair play and square
dealing. Petty meanness, in his code, was almost as serious as wanton
homicide; and I do believe that he respected a murderer more than a man given
to small practices.

Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was hurtful
to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself. But late
hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men who did not
take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler, and welcomed a
stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On the other hand, he
believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many men killed or disgraced by
square-face or Scotch.

Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my
plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first, when I
was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to divine my
intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated going partners
with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I did not know he was a
knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither did Otoo know, but he saw how
thick we were getting, and found out for me, and without my asking him. Native
sailors from the ends of the seas knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and
Otoo, suspicious merely, went among them till he had gathered sufficient data
to justify his suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters.
I couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it home
to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first steamer to
Aukland.

At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking his
nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and soon I had
to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his eyes open always to my
main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and far-sighted. In time he became
my counselor, until he knew more of my business than I did myself.  He really
had my interest at heart more than I did. 'mine was the magnificent
carelessness of youth, for I preferred romance to dollars, and adventure to a
comfortable billet with all night in. So it was well that I had some one to
look out for me. I know that if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here
today.

Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in
blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on the
beach in Samoa--we really were on the beach and hard aground--when my chance
came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on before the mast;
and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we knocked about the
wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he always pulled stroke-oar
in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was to land the recruiter on the
beach. The covering boat always lay on its oars several hundred feet off
shore, while the recruiter's boat, also lying on its oars, kept afloat on the
edge of the beach. When I landed with my trade goods, leaving my steering
sweep apeak, Otoo left his stroke position and came into the stern sheets,
where a Winchester lay ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew
was also armed, the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length
of the gunwales.

While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to come
and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often and often
his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending treachery.
Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a nigger over, that
was the first warning I received. And in my rush to the boat his hand was
always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I remember, on SANTA ANNA, the
boat grounded just as the trouble began. The covering boat was dashing to our
assistance, but the several score of savages would have wiped us out before it
arrived. Otoo took a flying leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods,
and scattered tobacco, beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all
directions.

This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet away.
And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four hours.

The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage island
in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably friendly; and how
were we to know that the whole village had been taking up a collection for
over two years with which to buy a white man's head? The beggars are all
head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white man's head. The fellow who
captured the head would receive the whole collection.  As I say, they appeared
very friendly; and on this day I was fully a hundred yards down the beach from
the boat. Otoo had cautioned me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came
to grief.

The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp at me. At
least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run, but tripped over one
that was fast in my calf, and went down. The woolly-heads made a run for me,
each with a long-handled, fantail tomahawk with which to hack off my head.
They were so eager for the prize that they got in one another's way. In the
confusion, I avoided several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the
sand.

Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a heavy
war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon than a
rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could not spear him,
while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was fighting for me, and
he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled that club was amazing.

Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had driven
them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that he received his
first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear thrusts, got his
Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then we pulled aboard the
schooner, and doctored up.

Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a supercargo,
a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.

"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day. "It is
easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be spent, and you
will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master. I have studied the
way of white men. On the beaches are many old men who were young once, and who
could get money just like you. Now they are old, and they have nothing, and
they wait about for the young men like you to come ashore and buy drinks for
them.

"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a year.
He works hard. The overseer does not work hard.

He rides a horse and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred
dollars a year. I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month.
That is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul a rope
or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month. I am a sailor.
He is a navigator. 'master, I think it would be very good for you to know
navigation."

Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later on it
was:

"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping, and he is
never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better paid--the owner who
sits ashore with many servants and turns his money over."

"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at that," I
objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five thousand dollars."

"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing ashore
at the cocoanut-fringed beach.

We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts along
the east coast of Guadalcanar.

"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said.

"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land four
miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco, ten bottles
of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe, one hundred dollars.
Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and the next year, or the year
after, you sell and become the owner of a ship."

I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years, instead
of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty thousand acres,
on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years' lease at a nominal sum.
I owned the lease for precisely ninety days, when I sold it to a company for
half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who looked ahead and saw the opportunity.
He was responsible for the salving of the Doncaster--bought in at auction for
a hundred pounds, and clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He
led me into the Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.

We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off. I
married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same old-time
Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office, his wooden pipe
in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a four-shilling lava-lava
about his loins. I could not get him to spend money. There was no way of
repaying him except with love, and God knows he got that in full measure from
all of us. The children worshipped him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife
would surely have been his undoing.

The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their feet in
the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat up with them
when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely toddlers, he took
them down to the lagoon, and made them into amphibians. He taught them more
than I ever knew of the habits of fish and the ways of catching them. In the
bush it was the same thing. At seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever
dreamed existed. At six, Mary went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and
I have seen strong men balk at that feat.  And when Frank had just turned six
he could bring up shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.

"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians; and I do
not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with the idea of
getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully his, had been
trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island in one of our
schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a record breaker in the
matter of prodigal expense.

I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to me. I
struggled long with him to enter into partnership.

"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down," he said at
last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become partners by the law.
I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I drink and eat and smoke in
plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not pay for the playing of billiards, for
I play on your table; but still the money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a
rich man's pleasure. It is shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes;
it is necessary that we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get
it from the head clerk in the office."

So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled to
complain.

"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint, a
miserable land crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our partnership
has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me this paper. It says
that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven dollars and twenty cents."

"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.

"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.

His face brightened, as with an immense relief.

"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account of it. When
I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent missing.

"If there is,:" he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of the
clerk's wages."

And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by Carruthers,
and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's safe.

But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.

It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the wild
young days, and where we were once more-- principally on a holiday,
incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look over the
pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at Savo, having run in
to trade for curios.

Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of burying
their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from making the
adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard in a tiny,
overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There were four
woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The schooner was a
hundred yards away.

I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to scream.
Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of the canoe were
dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch and disappeared. A
shark had got him.

The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the bottom of
the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with my fist, but it
was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could barely have supported
one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled sidewise, throwing them
back into the water.

I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting to be
picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers elected to come
with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now and again putting our
faces into the water and peering about for sharks. The screams of the man who
stayed by the canoe informed us that he was taken. I was peering into the
water when I saw a big shark pass directly beneath me. He was fully sixteen
feet in length. I saw the whole thing. He got the woolly-head by the middle,
and away he went, the poor devil, head, shoulders, and arms out of the water
all the time, screeching in a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this
fashion for several hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.

I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark. But there
was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives earlier, or
whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do not know. At any
rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could not swim so rapidly now,
for a large part of my effort was devoted to keeping track of him. I was
watching him when he made his first attack. By good luck I got both hands on
his nose, and, though his momentum nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep
him off. He veered clear, and began circling about again. A second time I
escaped him by the same manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He
sheered at the moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his
sandpaper hide (I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm
from elbow to shoulder.

By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still two
hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him manoeuvre
for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.

"Swim for the schooner, master!" he said. And he spoke gayly, as though the
affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."

I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between
me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.

"The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he explained,
a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.

By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could
scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but they
continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had
become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there
just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo could have saved
himself any time. But he stuck by me.

"Good-by, Charley! I'm finished!" I just managed to gasp.

I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up my
hands and go down.

But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:

"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!"

He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.

"A little more to the left!" he next called out. "There is a line there on the
water. To the left, master--to the left!"

I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board.
I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke
surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.

"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled
in his voice.

Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that
name.

"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.

Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the
captain's arms.

And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the
end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of a shark, with
seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of which I dare to assert
has never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be
from His high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His kingdom
shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora.



THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS

There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of islands.
On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But to the new chum
who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in the rough, the
Solomons may indeed prove terrible.

It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about, that
loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a poison that
bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant ulcers, and that
many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks to their own
countries.  It is also true that the natives of the Solomons are a wild lot,
with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for collecting human heads.
Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to catch a man with his back turned
and to smite him a cunning blow with a tomahawk that severs the spinal column
at the base of the brain.  It is equally true that on some islands, such as
Malaita, the profit and loss account of social intercourse is calculated in
homicides. Heads are a medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely
valuable. Very often a dozen villages make a jack-pot, which they fatten moon
by moon, against the time when some brave warrior presents a white man's head,
fresh and gory, and claims the pot.

All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have lived in
the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they go away from
them. A man needs only to be careful-- and lucky--to live a long time in the
Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort. He must have the hallmark of
the inevitable white man stamped upon his soul. He must be inevitable. He must
have a certain grand carelessness of odds, a certain colossal
self-satisfaction, and a racial egotism that convinces him that one white is
better than a thousand niggers every day in the week, and that on Sunday he is
able to clean out two thousand niggers. For such are the things that have made
the white man inevitable. Oh, and one other thing--the white man who wishes to
be inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot of
himself; he must also fail to be too long on imagination. He must not
understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes of the
blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that the
white race has tramped its royal road around the world.

Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely strung,
and he possessed too much imagination. The world was too much with him. He
projected himself too quiveringly into his environment. Therefore, the last
place in the world for him to come was the Solomons. He did not come,
expecting to stay. A five weeks' stop-over between steamers, he decided, would
satisfy the call of the primitive he felt thrumming the strings of his being.
At least, so he told the lady tourists on the MAKEMBO, though in different
terms; and they worshipped him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they
would know only the safety of the steamer's deck as she threaded her way
through the Solomons.

There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He was a
little shriveled wisp of a man, with a withered skin the color of mahogany.
His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his other name, Captain
Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to scare naughty
pickaninnies to righteousness from New Hanover to the New Hebrides. He had
farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and hardship, the crack of Sniders
and the lash of the overseers, had wrested five millions of money in the form
of bêche-de-mer, sandalwood, pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and
copra, grasslands, trading stations, and plantations. Captain Malu's little
finger, which was broken, had more inevitableness in it than Bertie
Arkwright's whole carcass. But then, the lady tourists had nothing by which to
judge save appearances, and Bertie certainly was a fine-looking man.

Bertie talked with Captain Malu in the smoking room, confiding to him his
intention of seeing life red and bleeding in the Solomons. Captain Malu agreed
that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not until several days
later that he became interested in Bertie, when that young adventurer insisted
on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol. Bertie explained the mechanism
and demonstrated by slipping a loaded magazine up the hollow butt.

"It is so simple," he said. He shot the outer barrel back along the inner one.
"That loads it and cocks it, you see. And then all I have to do is pull the
trigger, eight times, as fast as I can quiver my finger. See that safety
clutch. That's what I like about it. It is safe. It is positively fool-proof."
He slipped out the magazine. "You see how safe it is."

As he held it in his hand, the muzzle came in line with Captain Malu's
stomach. Captain Malu's blue eyes looked at it unswervingly.

"Would you mind pointing it in some other direction?" he asked.

"It's perfectly safe," Bertie assured him. "I withdrew the magazine. It's not
loaded now, you know."

"A gun is always loaded."

"But this one isn't."

"Turn it away just the same."

Captain Malu's voice was flat and metallic and low, but his eyes never left
the muzzle until the line of it was drawn past him and away from him.

"I'll bet a fiver it isn't loaded," Bertie proposed warmly.

The other shook his head.

"Then I'll show you."

Bertie started to put the muzzle to his own temple with the evident intention
of pulling the trigger.

"Just a second," Captain Malu said quietly, reaching out his hand. "Let me
look at it."

He pointed it seaward and pulled the trigger. A heavy explosion followed,
instantaneous with the sharp click of the mechanism that flipped a hot and
smoking cartridge sidewise along the deck.

Bertie's jaw dropped in amazement.

"I slipped the barrel back once, didn't I?" he explained. It was silly of me,
I must say."

He giggled flabbily, and sat down in a steamer chair. The blood had ebbed from
his face, exposing dark circles under his eyes.  His hands were trembling and
unable to guide the shaking cigarette to his lips. The world was too much with
him, and he saw himself with dripping brains prone upon the deck

"Really," he said, ". . . really."

"It's a pretty weapon," said Captain Malu, returning the automatic to him.

The Commissioner was on board the Makembo, returning from Sydney, and by his
permission a stop was made at Ugi to land a missionary. And at Ugi lay the
ketch ARLA, Captain Hansen, skipper. Now the Arla was one of many vessels
owned by Captain Malu, and it was at his suggestion and by his invitation that
Bertie went aboard the Arla as guest for a four days' recruiting cruise on the
coast of Malaita. Thereafter the ARLA would drop him at Reminge Plantation
(also owned by Captain Malu), where Bertie could remain for a week, and then
be sent over to Tulagi, the seat of government, where he would become the
Commissioner's guest. Captain Malu was responsible for two other suggestions,
which given, he disappears from this narrative. One was to Captain Hansen, the
other to Mr. Harriwell, manager of Reminge Plantation. Both suggestions were
similar in tenor, namely, to give Mr. Bertram Arkwright an insight into the
rawness and redness of life in the Solomons. Also, it is whispered that
Captain Malu mentioned that a case of Scotch would be coincidental with any
particularly gorgeous insight Mr. Arkwright might receive.     .   .   .   .
.   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

"Yes, Swartz always was too pig-headed. You see, he took four of his boat's
crew to Tulagi to be flogged--officially, you know--then started back with
them in the whaleboat. It was pretty squally, and the boat capsized just
outside. Swartz was the only one drowned. Of course, it was an accident."

"Was it? Really?" Bertie asked, only half-interested, staring hard at the
black man at the wheel.

Ugi had dropped astern, and the ARLA was sliding along through a summer sea
toward the wooded ranges of Malaita. The helmsman who so attracted Bertie's
eyes sported a ten penny nail, stuck skewerwise through his nose. About his
neck was a string of pants buttons. Thrust through holes in his ears were a
can opener, the broken handle of a toothbrush, a clay pipe, the brass wheel of
an alarm clock, and several Winchester rifle cartridges.

On his chest, suspended from around his neck hung the half of a china plate.
Some forty similarly appareled blacks lay about the deck, fifteen of which
were boat's crew, the remainder being fresh labor recruits.

"Of course it was an accident," spoke up the ARLA'S mate, Jacobs, a slender,
dark-eyed man who looked more a professor than a sailor. "Johnny Bedip nearly
had the same kind of accident. He was bringing back several from a flogging,
when they capsized him. But he knew how to swim as well as they, and two of
them were drowned. He used a boat stretcher and a revolver. Of course it was
an accident."

"Quite common, them accidents," remarked the skipper. "You see that man at the
wheel, Mr. Arkwright? He's a man eater. Six months ago, he and the rest of the
boat's crew drowned the then captain of the ARLA. They did it on deck, sir,
right aft there by the mizzen-traveler."

"The deck was in a shocking state," said the mate.

"Do I understand--?" Bertie began.

"Yes, just that," said Captain Hansen. "It was an accidental drowning."

"But on deck--?"

"Just so. I don't mind telling you, in confidence, of course, that they used
an axe."

"This present crew of yours?"

Captain Hansen nodded.

"The other skipper always was too careless," explained the mate.  He but just
turned his back, when they let him have it."

"We haven't any show down here," was the skipper's complaint.  "The government
protects a nigger against a white every time.  You can't shoot first. You've
got to give the nigger first shot, or else the government calls it murder and
you go to Fiji.  That's why there's so many drowning accidents."

Dinner was called, and Bertie and the skipper went below, leaving the mate to
watch on deck.

"Keep an eye out for that black devil, Auiki," was the skipper's parting
caution. "I haven't liked his looks for several days."

"Right O," said the mate.

Dinner was part way along, and the skipper was in the middle of his story of
the cutting out of the Scottish Chiefs.

"Yes," he was saying, "she was the finest vessel on the coast.  But when she
missed stays, and before ever she hit the reef, the canoes started for her.
There were five white men, a crew of twenty Santa Cruz boys and Samoans, and
only the supercargo escaped. Besides, there were sixty recruits. They were all
kai-kai'd. Kai-kai?--oh, I beg your pardon. I mean they were eaten. Then there
was the James Edwards, a dandy-rigged--"

But at that moment there was a sharp oath from the mate on deck and a chorus
of savage cries. A revolver went off three times, and then was heard a loud
splash. Captain Hansen had sprung up the companionway on the instant, and
Bertie's eyes had been fascinated by a glimpse of him drawing his revolver as
he sprang.

Bertie went up more circumspectly, hesitating before he put his head above the
companionway slide. But nothing happened. The mate was shaking with
excitement, his revolver in his hand. Once he startled, and half-jumped
around, as if danger threatened his back.

"One of the natives fell overboard," he was saying, in a queer tense voice.
"He couldn't swim."

"Who was it?" the skipper demanded.

"Auiki," was the answer.

"But I say, you know, I heard shots," Bertie said, in trembling eagerness, for
he scented adventure, and adventure that was happily over with.

The mate whirled upon him, snarling:

"It"s a damned lie. There ain't been a shot fired. The nigger fell overboard."

Captain Hansen regarded Bertie with unblinking, lack-luster eyes.

"I--I thought--" Bertie was beginning.

"Shots?" said Captain Hansen, dreamily. "Shots? Did you hear any shots, Mr.
Jacobs?"

"Not a shot," replied Mr. Jacobs.

The skipper looked at his guest triumphantly, and said:

"Evidently an accident. Let us go down, Mr. Arkwright, and finish dinner."

Bertie slept that night in the captain's cabin, a tiny stateroom off the main
cabin. The for'ard bulkhead was decorated with a stand of rifles. Over the
bunk were three more rifles. Under the bunk was a big drawer, which, when he
pulled it out, he found filled with ammunition, dynamite, and several boxes of
detonators. He elected to take the settee on the opposite side.  Lying
conspicuously on the small table, was the Arla's log.  Bertie did not know
that it had been especially prepared for the occasion by Captain Malu, and he
read therein how on September 21, two boat's crew had fallen overboard and
been drowned.  Bertie read between the lines and knew better. He read how the
Arla's whale boat had been bushwhacked at Su'u and had lost three men; of how
the skipper discovered the cook stewing human flesh on the galley fire--flesh
purchased by the boat's crew ashore in Fui; of how an accidental discharge of
dynamite, while signaling, had killed another boat's crew; of night attacks;
ports fled from between the dawns; attacks by bushmen in mangrove swamps and
by fleets of salt-water men in the larger passages. One item that occurred
with monotonous frequency was death by dysentery. He noticed with alarm that
two white men had so died--guests, like himself, on the Arla.

"I say, you know," Bertie said next day to Captain Hansen. "I've been glancing
through your log."

The skipper displayed quick vexation that the log had been left lying about.

"And all that dysentery, you know, that's all rot, just like the accidental
drownings," Bertie continued. "What does dysentery really stand for?"

The skipper openly admired his guest's acumen, stiffened himself to make
indignant denial, then gracefully surrendered.

"You see, it's like this, Mr. Arkwright. These islands have got a bad enough
name as it is. It's getting harder every day to sign on white men. Suppose a
man is killed. The company has to pay through the nose for another man to take
the job. But if the man merely dies of sickness, it's all right. The new chums
don't mind disease. What they draw the line at is being murdered. I thought
the skipper of the Arla had died of dysentery when I took his billet. Then it
was too late. I'd signed the contract."

"Besides," said Mr. Jacobs, "there's altogether too many accidental drownings
anyway. It don't look right. It's the fault of the government. A white man
hasn't a chance to defend himself from the niggers."

"Yes, look at the Princess and that Yankee mate," the skipper took up the
tale. "She carried five white men besides a government agent. The captain, the
agent, and the supercargo were ashore in the two boats. They were killed to
the last man.  The mate and boson, with about fifteen of the crew--Samoans and
Tongans--were on board. A crowd of niggers came off from shore.  First thing
the mate knew, the boson and the crew were killed in the first rush. The mate
grabbed three cartridge belts and two Winchesters and skinned up to the
cross-trees. He was the sole survivor, and you can't blame him for being mad.
He pumped one rifle till it got so hot he couldn't hold it, then he pumped the
other. The deck was black with niggers. He cleaned them out.  He dropped them
as they went over the rail, and he dropped them as fast as they picked up
their paddles. Then they jumped into the water and started to swim for it, and
being mad, he got half a dozen more. And what did he get for it?"

"Seven years in Fiji," snapped the mate.

"The government said he wasn't justified in shooting after they'd taken to the
water," the skipper explained.

"And that's why they die of dysentery nowadays," the mate added.

"Just fancy," said Bertie, as he felt a longing for the cruise to be over.

Later on in the day he interviewed the black who had been pointed out to him
as a cannibal. This fellow's name was Sumasai. He had spent three years on a
Queensland plantation. He had been to Samoa, and Fiji, and Sydney; and as a
boat's crew had been on recruiting schooners through New Britain, New Ireland,
New Guinea, and the Admiralties. Also, he was a wag, and he had taken a line
on his skipper's conduct. Yes, he had eaten many men. How many? He could not
remember the tally. Yes, white men, too; they were very good, unless they were
sick. He had once eaten a sick one.

"My word!" he cried, at the recollection. "Me sick plenty along him. 'my belly
walk about too much."

Bertie shuddered, and asked about heads. Yes, Sumasai had several hidden
ashore, in good condition, sun-dried, and smoke-cured. One was of the captain
of a schooner. It had long whiskers. He would sell it for two quid. Black
men's heads he would sell for one quid. He had some pickaninny heads, in poor
condition, that he would let go for ten bob.

Five minutes afterward, Bertie found himself sitting on the companionway-slide
alongside a black with a horrible skin disease. He sheered off, and on inquiry
was told that it was leprosy. He hurried below and washed himself with
antiseptic soap. He took many antiseptic washes in the course of the day, for
every native on board was afflicted with malignant ulcers of one sort or
another.

As the Arla drew in to an anchorage in the midst of mangrove swamps, a double
row of barbed wire was stretched around above her rail. That looked like
business, and when Bertie saw the shore canoes alongside, armed with spears,
bows and arrows, and Sniders, he wished more earnestly than ever that the
cruise was over.

That evening the natives were slow in leaving the ship at sundown. A number of
them checked the mate when he ordered them ashore. "Never mind, I'll fix
them," said Captain Hansen, diving below.

When he cam back, he showed Bertie a stick of dynamite attached to a fish
hook. Now it happens that a paper-wrapped bottle of chlorodyne with a piece of
harmless fuse projecting can fool anybody. It fooled Bertie, and it fooled the
natives. When Captain Hansen lighted the fuse and hooked the fish hook into
the tail end of a native's loin cloth, that native was smitten with so an
ardent a desire for the shore that he forgot to shed the loin cloth. He
started for'ard, the fuse sizzling and spluttering at his rear, the natives in
his path taking headers over the barbed wire at every jump. Bertie was
horror-stricken.  So was Captain Hansen. He had forgotten his twenty-five
recruits, on each of which he had paid thirty shillings advance.  They went
over the side along with the shore-dwelling folk and followed by him who
trailed the sizzling chlorodyne bottle.

Bertie did not see the bottle go off; but the mate opportunely discharging a
stick of real dynamite aft where it would harm nobody, Bertie would have sworn
in any admiralty court to a nigger blown to flinders. The flight of the
twenty-five recruits had actually cost the Arla forty pounds, and, since they
had taken to the bush, there was no hope of recovering them. The skipper and
his mate proceeded to drown their sorrow in cold tea.

The cold tea was in whiskey bottles, so Bertie did not know it was cold tea
they were mopping up. All he knew was that the two men got very drunk and
argued eloquently and at length as to whether the exploded nigger should be
reported as a case of dysentery or as an accidental drowning. When they snored
off to sleep, he was the only white man left, and he kept a perilous watch
till dawn, in fear of an attack from shore and an uprising of the crew.

Three more days the Arla spent on the coast, and three more nights the skipper
and the mate drank overfondly of cold tea, leaving Bertie to keep the watch.
They knew he could be depended upon, while he was equally certain that if he
lived, he would report their drunken conduct to Captain Malu. Then the Arla
dropped anchor at Reminge Plantation, on Guadalcanar, and Bertie landed on the
beach with a sigh of relief and shook hands with the manager. 'mr. Harriwell
was ready for him.

"Now you mustn't be alarmed if some of our fellows seem downcast," Mr.
Harriwell said, having drawn him aside in confidence. "There's been talk of an
outbreak, and two or three suspicious signs I'm willing to admit, but
personally I think it's all poppycock."

"How--how many blacks have you on the plantation?" Bertie asked, with a
sinking heart.

"We're working four hundred just now," replied Mr. Harriwell, cheerfully; but
the three of us, with you, of course, and the skipper and mate of the Arla,
can handle them all right."

Bertie turned to meet one McTavish, the storekeeper, who scarcely acknowledged
the introduction, such was his eagerness to present his resignation.

"It being that I'm a married man, Mr. Harriwell, I can't very well afford to
remain on longer. Trouble is working up, as plain as the nose on your face.
The niggers are going to break out, and there'll be another Hohono horror
here."

"What's a Hohono horror?" Bertie asked, after the storekeeper had been
persuaded to remain until the end of the month.

"Oh, he means Hohono Plantation, on Ysabel," said the manager.  "The niggers
killed the five white men ashore, captured the schooner, killed the captain
and mate, and escaped in a body to Malaita. But I always said they were
careless on Hohono. They won't catch us napping here. Come along, Mr.
Arkwright, and see our view from the veranda."

Bertie was too busy wondering how he could get away to Tulagi to the
Commissioner's house, to see much of the view. He was still wondering, when a
rifle exploded very near to him, behind his back. At the same moment his arm
was nearly dislocated, so eagerly did Mr. Harriwell drag him indoors.

"I say, old man, that was a close shave," said the manager, pawing him over to
see if he had been hit. "I can't tell you how sorry I am. But it was broad
daylight, and I never dreamed."

Bertie was beginning to turn pale.

"They got the other manager that way," McTavish vouchsafed. "And a dashed fine
chap he was. Blew his brains out all over the veranda. You noticed that dark
stain there between the steps and the door?"

Bertie was ripe for the cocktail which Mr. Harriwell pitched in and compounded
for him; but before he could drink it, a man in riding trousers and puttees
entered.

"What's the matter now?" the manager asked, after one look at the newcomer's
face. "Is the river up again?"

"River be blowed--it's the niggers. Stepped out of the cane grass, not a dozen
feet away, and whopped at me. It was a Snider, and he shot from the hip. Now
what I want to know is where'd he get that Snider?--Oh, I beg pardon. Glad to
know you, Mr. Arkwright."

"Mr. Brown is my assistant," explained Mr. Harriwell. "And now let's have that
drink."

"But where'd he get that Snider?" Mr. Brown insisted. "I always objected to
keeping those guns on the premises."

"They're still there," Mr. Harriwell said, with a show of heat.

Mr. Brown smiled incredulously.

"Come along and see," said the manager.

Bertie joined the procession into the office, where Mr. Harriwell pointed
triumphantly at a big packing case in a dusty corner.

"Well, then where did the beggar get that Snider?" harped Mr. Brown.

But just then McTavish lifted the packing case. The manager started, then tore
off the lid. The case was empty. They gazed at one another in horrified
silence. Harriwell drooped wearily.

Then McVeigh cursed.

"What I contended all along--the house-boys are not to be trusted."

"It does look serious," Harriwell admitted, "but we'll come through it all
right. What the sanguinary niggers need is a shaking up. Will you gentlemen
please bring your rifles to dinner, and will you, Mr. Brown, kindly prepare
forty or fifty sticks of dynamite. 'make the fuses good and short. We'll give
them a lesson. And now, gentlemen, dinner is served."

One thing that Bertie detested was rice and curry, so it happened that he
alone partook of an inviting omelet. He had quite finished his plate, when
Harriwell helped himself to the omelet.  One mouthful he tasted, then spat out
vociferously.

"That's the second time," McTavish announced ominously.

Harriwell was still hawking and spitting.

"Second time, what?" Bertie quavered.

"Poison," was the answer. "That cook will be hanged yet."

"That's the way the bookkeeper went out at Cape March," Brown spoke up. "Died
horribly. They said on the Jessie that they heard him screaming three miles
away."

"I'll put the cook in irons," sputtered Harriwell. "Fortunately we discovered
it in time."

Bertie sat paralyzed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to speak,
but only an inarticulate gurgle resulted.  All eyed him anxiously.

"Don't say it, don't say it," McTavish cried in a tense voice.

"Yes, I ate it, plenty of it, a whole plateful!" Bertie cried explosively,
like a diver suddenly regaining breath.

The awful silence continued half a minute longer, and he read his fate in
their eyes.

"Maybe it wasn't poison after all," said Harriwell, dismally.

"Call in the cook," said Brown.

In came the cook, a grinning black boy, nose-spiked and ear-plugged.

"Here, you, Wi-wi, what name that?" Harriwell bellowed, pointing accusingly at
the omelet.

Wi-wi was very naturally frightened and embarrassed.

"Him good fella kai-kai," he murmured apologetically.

"Make him eat it," suggested McTavish. "That's a proper test."

Harriwell filled a spoon with the stuff and jumped for the cook, who fled in
panic.

"That settles it," was Brown's solemn pronouncement. "He won't eat it."

"Mr. Brown, will you please go and put the irons on him?"  Harriwell turned
cheerfully to Bertie. "It's all right, old man, the Commissioner will deal
with him, and if you die, depend upon it, he will be hanged."

"Don't think the government'll do it," objected McTavish.

"But gentlemen, gentlemen," Bertie cried. "In the meantime think of me."

Harriwell shrugged his shoulders pityingly.

"Sorry, old man, but it's a native poison, and there are no known antidotes
for native poisons. Try and compose yourself and if--"

Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse, and
Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle and sat down to table.

"The cook's dead," he said. "Fever. A rather sudden attack."

"I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native
poisons--"

"Except gin," said Brown.

Harriwell called himself an absent-minded idiot and rushed for the gin bottle.

"Neat, man, neat," he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler two-thirds full
of the raw spirits, and coughed and choked from the angry bite of it till the
tears ran down his cheeks.

Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him,
and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned.  Brown and McTavish also
doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices. His appetite
had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table. There was
no question but what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin
he had taken. 'mcTavish, rifle in hand, went out on the veranda to
reconnoiter.

"They're massing up at the cook-house," was his report. "And they've no end of
Sniders. 'my idea is to sneak around on the other side and take them in flank.
Strike the first blow, you know. Will you come along, Brown?"

Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had leaped
up five beats. Nevertheless, he could not help jumping when the rifles began
to go off. Above the scattering of Sniders could be heard the pumping of
Brown's and McTavish's Winchesters--all against a background of demoniacal
screeching and yelling.

"They've got them on the run," Harriwell remarked, as voices and gunshots
faded away in the distance.

Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter
reconnoitered.

"They've got dynamite," he said.

"Then let's charge them with dynamite," Harriwell proposed.

Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping themselves
with lighted cigars, they started for the door. And just then it happened.
They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted that the charge had
been a trifle excessive. But at any rate it went off under the house, which
lifted up cornerwise and settled back on its foundations. Half the china on
the table was shattered, while the eight-day clock stopped. Yelling for
vengeance, the three men rushed out into the night, and the bombardment began.

When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away to the
office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a gin-soaked
nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the valorous fight went on
around him. In the morning, sick and headachey from the gin, he crawled out to
find the sun still in the sky and God presumable in heaven, for his hosts were
alive and uninjured.

Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing
immediately on the Arla for Tulagi, where, until the following steamer day, he
stuck close by the Commissioner's house. There were lady tourists on the
outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while Captain Malu, as usual,
passed unnoticed. But Captain Malu sent back from Sydney two cases of the best
Scotch whiskey on the market, for he was not able to make up his mind as to
whether it was Captain Hansen or Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright
the more gorgeous insight into life in the Solomons.



THE INEVITABLE WHITE MAN

"The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long
as black is black and white is white."

So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts' pub in
Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the aforesaid
Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens, famous for having
invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred on by Nile thirst--the
Stevens who was responsible for "With Kitchener to Kartoun," and who passed
out at the siege of Ladysmith.

Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic
sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke
from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a
tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement,
front and rear, on the right side of his neck, where an arrow had at one time
entered and been pulled clean through. As he explained, he had been in a hurry
on that occasion--the arrow impeded his running--and he felt that he could not
take the time to break off the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come
in. At the present moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer that
recruited labor from the westward for the German plantations on Samoa.

"Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites," said Roberts, pausing to
take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy in affectionate
terms. "If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the
workings of the black man's mind, most of the messes would be avoided."

"I've seen a few who claimed they understood niggers," Captain Woodward
retorted, "and I always took notice that they were the first to be kai-kai'd
(eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New Hebrides--the
martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the Austrian expedition
that was cut to pieces in the Solomons, in the bush of Guadalcanar. And look
at the traders themselves, with a score of years' experience, making their
brag that no nigger would ever get them, and whose heads to this day are
ornamenting the rafters of the canoe houses. There was old Johnny
Simons--twenty-six years on the raw edges of Melanesia, swore he knew the
niggers like a book and that they'd never do for him, and he passed out at
Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and
an old nigger with only one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a
shark while diving for dynamited fish. There was Billy Watts, horrible
reputation as a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at
Cape Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of
trade-tobacco--cost him about three dollars and a half. In retaliation he
turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned two
villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that he was jumped
along with fifty Buku boys he had with him fishing bêche-de-mer. In five
minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys who got away in a
canoe. Don't talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man's
mission is to farm the world, and it's a big enough job cut out for him. What
time has he got left to understand niggers anyway?"

"Just so," said Roberts. "And somehow it doesn't seem necessary, after all, to
understand the niggers. In direct proportion to the white man's stupidity is
his success in farming the world--"

"And putting the fear of God into the nigger's heart," Captain Woodward
blurted out. "Perhaps you're right, Roberts. Perhaps it's his stupidity that
makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his inability to
understand the niggers. But there's one thing sure, the white has to run the
niggers whether he understands them or not. It's inevitable. It's fate."

"And of course the white man is inevitable--it's the niggers' fate," Roberts
broke in. "Tell the white man there's pearl shell in some lagoon infested by
ten-thousand howling cannibals, and he'll head there all by his lonely, with
half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for chronometer, all packed
like sardines on a commodious, five-ton ketch. Whisper that there's a gold
strike at the North Pole, and that same inevitable white-skinned creature will
set out at once, armed with pick and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest
patent rocker--and what's more, he'll get there. Tip it off to him that
there's diamonds on the red-hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will storm
the ramparts and set old Satan himself to pick-and-shovel work.  That's what
comes of being stupid and inevitable."

"But I wonder what the black man must think of the--the inevitableness," I
said.

Captain Woodward broke into quiet laughter. His eyes had a reminiscent gleam.

"I'm just wondering what the niggers of Malu thought and still must be
thinking of the one inevitable white man we had on board when we visited them
in the DUCHESS," he explained.

Roberts mixed three more Abu Hameds.

"That was twenty years ago. Saxtorph was his name. He was certainly the most
stupid man I ever saw, but he was as inevitable as death. There was only one
thing that chap could do, and that was shoot. I remember the first time I ran
into him--right here in Apia, twenty years ago. That was before your time,
Roberts. I was sleeping at Dutch Henry's hotel, down where the market is now.
Ever heard of him? He made a tidy stake smuggling arms in to the rebels, sold
out his hotel, and was killed in Sydney just six weeks afterward in a saloon
row.

"But Saxtorph. One night I'd just got to sleep, when a couple of cats began to
sing in the courtyard. It was out of bed and up window, water jug in hand. But
just then I heard the window of the next room go up. Two shots were fired, and
the window was closed. I fail to impress you with the celerity of the
transaction. Ten seconds at the outside. Up went the window, bang bang went
the revolver, and down went the window. Whoever it was, he had never stopped
to see the effect of his shots. He knew. Do you follow me?--he KNEW. There was
no more cat concert, and in the morning there lay the two offenders, stone
dead. It was marvelous to me. It still is marvelous. First, it was starlight,
and Saxtorph shot without drawing a bead; next, he shot so rapidly that the
two reports were like a double report; and finally, he knew he had hit his
marks without looking to see.


"Two days afterward he came on board to see me. I was mate, then, on the
Duchess, a whacking big one-hundred-and fifty-ton schooner, a blackbirder. And
let me tell you that blackbirders were blackbirders in those days. There
weren't any government protection for US, either. It was rough work, give and
take, if we were finished, and nothing said, and we ran niggers from every
south sea island they didn't kick us off from. Well, Saxtorph came on board,
John Saxtorph was the name he gave. He was a sandy little man, hair sandy,
complexion sandy, and eyes sandy, too. Nothing striking about him. His soul
was as neutral as his color scheme. He said he was strapped and wanted to ship
on board. Would go cabin boy, cook, supercargo, or common sailor. Didn't know
anything about any of the billets, but said that he was willing to learn. I
didn't want him, but his shooting had so impressed me that I took him as
common sailor, wages three pounds per month.

"He was willing to learn all right, I'll say that much. But he was
constitutionally unable to learn anything. He could no more box the compass
than I could mix drinks like Roberts here. And as for steering, he gave me my
first gray hairs. I never dared risk him at the wheel when we were running in
a big sea, while full-and-by and close-and-by were insoluble mysteries.
Couldn't ever tell the difference between a sheet and a tackle, simply
couldn't. The fore-throat-jig and the jib-jig were all one to him. Tell him to
slack off the mainsheet, and before you know it, he'd drop the peak. He fell
overboard three times, and he couldn't swim. But he was always cheerful, never
seasick, and he was the most willing man I ever knew. He was an
uncommunicative soul. Never talked about himself. His history, so far as we
were concerned, began the day he signed on the DUCHESS. Where he learned to
shoot, the stars alone can tell. He was a Yankee--that much we knew from the
twang in his speech. And that was all we ever did know.

"And now we begin to get to the point. We had bad luck in the New Hebrides,
only fourteen boys for five weeks, and we ran up before the southeast for the
Solomons. 'malaita, then as now, was good recruiting ground, and we ran into
Malu, on the northwestern corner. There's a shore reef and an outer reef, and
a mighty nervous anchorage; but we made it all right and fired off our
dynamite as a signal to the niggers to come down and be recruited. In three
days we got not a boy. The niggers came off to us in their canoes by hundreds,
but they only laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and
talked of the delights of plantation work in Samoa.

"On the fourth day there came a change. Fifty-odd boys signed on and were
billeted in the main-hold, with the freedom of the deck, of course. And of
course, looking back, this wholesale signing on was suspicious, but at the
time we thought some powerful chief had removed the ban against recruiting.
The morning of the fifth day our two boats went ashore as usual--one to cover
the other, you know, in case of trouble. And, as usual, the fifty niggers on
board were on deck, loafing, talking, smoking, and sleeping.  Saxtorph and
myself, along with four other sailors, were all that were left on board. The
two boats were manned with Gilbert Islanders. In the one were the captain, the
supercargo, and the recruiter. In the other, which was the covering boat and
which lay off shore a hundred yards, was the second mate. Both boats were
well-armed, though trouble was little expected.

"Four of the sailors, including Saxtorph, were scraping the poop rail. The
fifth sailor, rifle in hand, was standing guard by the water-tank just for'ard
of the mainmast. I was for'ard, putting in the finishing licks on a new jaw
for the fore-gaff. I was just reaching for my pipe where I had laid it down,
when I heard a shot from shore. I straightened up to look. Something struck me
on the back of the head, partially stunning me and knocking me to the deck.
'my first thought was that something had carried away aloft; but even as I
went down, and before I struck the deck, I heard the devil's own tattoo of
rifles from the boats, and twisting sidewise, I caught a glimpse of the sailor
who was standing guard. Two big niggers were holding his arms, and a third
nigger from behind was braining him with a tomahawk.

"I can see it now, the water-tank, the mainmast, the gang hanging on to him,
the hatchet descending on the back of his head, and all under the blazing
sunlight. I was fascinated by that growing vision of death. The tomahawk
seemed to take a horribly long time to come down. I saw it land, and the man's
legs give under him as he crumpled. The niggers held him up by sheer strength
while he was hacked a couple of times more. Then I got two more hacks on the
head and decided that I was dead. So did the brute that was hacking me. I was
too helpless to move, and I lay there and watched them removing the sentry's
head. I must say they did it slick enough. They were old hands at the
business.

"The rifle firing from the boats had ceased, and I made no doubt that they
were finished off and that the end had come to everything. It was only a
matter of moments when they would return for my head. They were evidently
taking the heads from the sailors aft. Heads are valuable on Malaita,
especially white heads. They have the place of honor in the canoe houses of
the salt-water natives. What particular decorative effect the bushmen get out
of them I didn't know, but they prize them just as much as the salt-water
crowd.

"I had a dim notion of escaping, and I crawled on hands and knees to the
winch, where I managed to drag myself to my feet. From there I could look aft
and see three heads on top the cabin--the heads of three sailors I had given
orders to for months. The niggers saw me standing, and started for me. I
reached for my revolver, and found they had taken it. I can't say that I was
scared. I've been near to death several times, but it never seemed easier than
right then. I was half-stunned, and nothing seemed to matter.

"The leading nigger had armed himself with a cleaver from the galley, and he
grimaced like an ape as he prepared to slice me down. But the slice was never
made. He went down on the deck all of a heap, and I saw the blood gush from
his mouth. In a dim way I heard a rifle go off and continue to go off. Nigger
after nigger went down. 'my senses began to clear, and I noted that there was
never a miss. Every time that the rifle went off a nigger dropped. I sat down
on deck beside the winch and looked up. Perched in the crosstrees was
Saxtorph. How he had managed it I can't imagine, for he had carried up with
him two Winchesters and I don't know how many bandoliers of ammunition; and he
was now doing the one only thing in this world that he was fitted to do.

"I've seen shooting and slaughter, but I never saw anything like that. I sat
by the winch and watched the show. I was weak and faint, and it seemed to be
all a dream. Bang, bang, bang, bang, went his rifle, and thud, thud, thud,
thud, went the niggers to the deck. It was amazing to see them go down. After
their first rush to get me, when about a dozen had dropped, they seemed
paralyzed; but he never left off pumping his gun. By this time canoes and the
two boats arrived from shore, armed with Sniders, and with Winchesters which
they had captured in the boats. The fusillade they let loose on Saxtorph was
tremendous. Luckily for him the niggers are only good at close range. They are
not used to putting the gun to their shoulders. They wait until they are right
on top of a man, and then they shoot from the hip. When his rifle got too hot,
Saxtorph changed off. That had been his idea when he carried two rifles up
with him.

"The astounding thing was the rapidity of his fire. Also, he never made a
miss. If ever anything was inevitable, that man was. It was the swiftness of
it that made the slaughter so appalling. The niggers did not have time to
think. When they did manage to think, they went over the side in a rush,
capsizing the canoes of course. Saxtorph never let up. The water was covered
with them, and plump, plump, plump, he dropped his bullets into them. Not a
single miss, and I could hear distinctly the thud of every bullet as it buried
in human flesh.

"The niggers spread out and headed for the shore, swimming. The water was
carpeted with bobbing heads, and I stood up, as in a dream, and watched it
all--the bobbing heads and the heads that ceased to bob. Some of the long
shots were magnificent. Only one man reached the beach, but as he stood up to
wade ashore, Saxtorph got him. It was beautiful. And when a couple of niggers
ran down to drag him out of the water, Saxtorph got them, too.

"I thought everything was over then, when I heard the rifle go off again. A
nigger had come out of the cabin companion on the run for the rail and gone
down in the middle of it. The cabin must have been full of them. I counted
twenty. They came up one at a time and jumped for the rail. But they never got
there. It reminded me of trapshooting. A black body would pop out of the
companion, bang would go Saxtorph's rifle, and down would go the black body.
Of course, those below did not know what was happening on deck, so they
continued to pop out until the last one was finished off.

"Saxtorph waited a while to make sure, and then came down on deck. He and I
were all that were left of the DUCHESS'S complement, and I was pretty well to
the bad, while he was helpless now that the shooting was over. Under my
direction he washed out my scalp wounds and sewed them up. A big drink of
whiskey braced me to make an effort to get out. There was nothing else to do.
All the rest were dead. We tried to get up sail, Saxtorph hoisting and I
holding the turn. He was once more the stupid lubber. He couldn't hoist worth
a cent, and when I fell in a faint, it looked all up with us.

"When I came to, Saxtorph was sitting helplessly on the rail, waiting to ask
me what he should do. I told him to overhaul the wounded and see if there were
any able to crawl. He gathered together six. One, I remember, had a broken
leg; but Saxtorph said his arms were all right. I lay in the shade, brushing
the flies off and directing operations, while Saxtorph bossed his hospital
gang. I'll be blessed if he didn't make those poor niggers heave at every rope
on the pin-rails before he found the halyards. One of them let go the rope in
the midst of the hoisting and slipped down to the deck dead; but Saxtorph
hammered the others and made them stick by the job. When the fore and main
were up, I told him to knock the shackle out of the anchor chain and let her
go. I had had myself helped aft to the wheel, where I was going to make a
shift at steering. I can't guess how he did it, but instead of knocking the
shackle out, down went the second anchor, and there we were doubly moored.

"In the end he managed to knock both shackles out and raise the staysail and
jib, and the Duchess filled away for the entrance.  Our decks were a
spectacle. Dead and dying niggers were everywhere. They were wedged away some
of them in the most inconceivable places. The cabin was full of them where
they had crawled off the deck and cashed in. I put Saxtorph and his graveyard
gang to work heaving them overside, and over they went, the living and the
dead. The sharks had fat pickings that day.  Of course our four murdered
sailors went the same way. Their heads, however, we put in a sack with
weights, so that by no chance should they drift on the beach and fall into the
hands of the niggers.

"Our five prisoners I decided to use as crew, but they decided otherwise. They
watched their opportunity and went over the side. Saxtorph got two in mid-air
with his revolver, and would have shot the other three in the water if I
hadn't stopped him.  I was sick of the slaughter, you see, and besides, they'd
helped work the schooner out. But it was mercy thrown away, for the sharks got
the three of them.

"I had brain fever or something after we got clear of the land.  Anyway, the
DUCHESS lay hove to for three weeks, when I pulled myself together and we
jogged on with her to Sydney. Anyway those niggers of Malu learned the
everlasting lesson that it is not good to monkey with a white man. In their
case, Saxtorph was certainly inevitable."

Charley Roberts emitted a long whistle and said:

"Well I should say so. But whatever became of Saxtorph?"

"He drifted into seal hunting and became a crackerjack. For six years he was
high line of both the Victoria and San Francisco fleets. The seventh year his
schooner was seized in Bering Sea by a Russian cruiser, and all hands, so the
talk went, were slammed into the Siberian salt mines. At least I've never
heard of him since."

"Farming the world," Roberts muttered. "Farming the world. Well here's to
them. Somebody's got to do it--farm the world, I mean."

Captain Woodward rubbed the criss-crosses on his bald head.

"I've done my share of it," he said. "Forty years now. This will be my last
trip. Then I'm going home to stay."

"I'll wager the wine you don't," Roberts challenged. "You'll die in the
harness, not at home."

Captain Woodward promptly accepted the bet, but personally I think Charley
Roberts has the best of it.



THE SEED OF McCOY

The Pyrenees, her iron sides pressed low in the water by her cargo of wheat,
rolled sluggishly, and made it easy for the man who was climbing aboard from
out a tiny outrigger canoe. As his eyes came level with the rail, so that he
could see inboard, it seemed to him that he saw a dim, almost indiscernible
haze. It was more like an illusion, like a blurring film that had spread
abruptly over his eyes. He felt an inclination to brush it away, and the same
instant he thought that he was growing old and that it was time to send to San
Francisco for a pair of spectacles.

As he came over the rail he cast a glance aloft at the tall masts, and, next,
at the pumps. They were not working. There seemed nothing the matter with the
big ship, and he wondered why she had hoisted the signal of distress. He
thought of his happy islanders, and hoped it was not disease. Perhaps the ship
was short of water or provisions. He shook hands with the captain whose gaunt
face and care-worn eyes made no secret of the trouble, whatever it was. At the
same moment the newcomer was aware of a faint, indefinable smell. It seemed
like that of burnt bread, but different.

He glanced curiously about him. Twenty feet away a weary-faced sailor was
calking the deck. As his eyes lingered on the man, he saw suddenly arise from
under his hands a faint spiral of haze that curled and twisted and was gone.
By now he had reached the deck. His bare feet were pervaded by a dull warmth
that quickly penetrated the thick calluses. He knew now the nature of the
ship's distress. His eyes roved swiftly forward, where the full crew of
weary-faced sailors regarded him eagerly. The glance from his liquid brown
eyes swept over them like a benediction, soothing them, rapping them about as
in the mantle of a great peace. "How long has she been afire, Captain?" he
asked in a voice so gentle and unperturbed that it was as the cooing of a
dove.

At first the captain felt the peace and content of it stealing in upon him;
then the consciousness of all that he had gone through and was going through
smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this ragged beachcomber, in
dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest such a thing as peace and
content to him and his overwrought, exhausted soul? The captain did not reason
this; it was the unconscious process of emotion that caused his resentment.

"Fifteen days," he answered shortly. "Who are you?"

"My name is McCoy," came the answer in tones that breathed tenderness and
compassion.

"I mean, are you the pilot?"

McCoy passed the benediction of his gaze over the tall, heavy-shouldered man
with the haggard, unshaven face who had joined the captain.

"I am as much a pilot as anybody," was McCoy's answer. "We are all pilots
here, Captain, and I know every inch of these waters."

But the captain was impatient.

"What I want is some of the authorities. I want to talk with them, and blame
quick."

"Then I'll do just as well."

Again that insidious suggestion of peace, and his ship a raging furnace
beneath his feet! The captain's eyebrows lifted impatiently and nervously, and
his fist clenched as if he were about to strike a blow with it.

"Who in hell are you?" he demanded.

"I am the chief magistrate," was the reply in a voice that was still the
softest and gentlest imaginable.

The tall, heavy-shouldered man broke out in a harsh laugh that was partly
amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain regarded McCoy with
incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted beachcomber should possess
such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable. His cotton shirt, unbuttoned,
exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that there was no undershirt beneath.

A worn straw hat failed to hide the ragged gray hair. Halfway down his chest
descended an untrimmed patriarchal beard. In any slop shop, two shillings
would have outfitted him complete as he stood before them.

"Any relation to the McCoy of the Bounty?" the captain asked.

"He was my great-grandfather."

"Oh," the captain said, then bethought himself. 'my name is Davenport, and
this is my first mate, Mr. Konig."

They shook hands.

"And now to business." The captain spoke quickly, the urgency of a great haste
pressing his speech. "We've been on fire for over two weeks. She's ready to
break all hell loose any moment.  That's why I held for Pitcairn. I want to
beach her, or scuttle her, and save the hull."

"Then you made a mistake, Captain, said McCoy. "You should have slacked away
for Mangareva. There's a beautiful beach there, in a lagoon where the water is
like a mill pond."

"But we're here, ain't we?" the first mate demanded. "That's the point. We're
here, and we've got to do something."

McCoy shook his head kindly.

"You can do nothing here. There is no beach. There isn't even anchorage."

"Gammon!" said the mate. "Gammon!" he repeated loudly, as the captain signaled
him to be more soft spoken. "You can't tell me that sort of stuff. Where d'ye
keep your own boats, hey--your schooner, or cutter, or whatever you have? Hey?
Answer me that."

McCoy smiled as gently as he spoke. His smile was a caress, an embrace that
surrounded the tired mate and sought to draw him into the quietude and rest of
McCoy's tranquil soul.

"We have no schooner or cutter," he replied. "And we carry our canoes to the
top of the cliff."

"You've got to show me," snorted the mate. "How d'ye get around to the other
islands, heh? Tell me that."

"We don't get around. As governor of Pitcairn, I sometimes go.  When I was
younger, I was away a great deal--sometimes on the trading schooners, but
mostly on the missionary brig. But she's gone now, and we depend on passing
vessels. Sometimes we have had as high as six calls in one year. At other
times, a year, and even longer, has gone by without one passing ship. Yours is
the first in seven months."

"And you mean to tell me--" the mate began.

But Captain Davenport interfered.

"Enough of this. We're losing time. What is to be done, Mr. McCoy?"

The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman's, shoreward, and both
captain and mate followed his gaze around from the lonely rock of Pitcairn to
the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the announcement of a
decision. 'mcCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and slowly, step by step,
with the certitude of a mind that was never vexed or outraged by life.

"The wind is light now," he said finally. "There is a heavy current setting to
the westward."

"That's what made us fetch to leeward," the captain interrupted, desiring to
vindicate his seamanship.

"Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward," McCoy went on.  "Well, you can't
work up against this current today. And if you did, there is no beach. Your
ship will be a total loss."

He paused, and captain and mate looked despair at each other.

"But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen tonight around
midnight--see those tails of clouds and that thickness to windward, beyond the
point there? That's where she'll come from, out of the southeast, hard. It is
three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away for it. There is a beautiful bed
for your ship there."

The mate shook his head.

"Come in to the cabin, and we'll look at the chart," said the captain.

McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin.  Stray
waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes and made them sting. The deck was
hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured out of his
body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This malignant, internal
heat was astounding. It was a marvel that the cabin did not burst into flames.
He had a feeling as if of being in a huge bake oven where the heat might at
any moment increase tremendously and shrivel him up like a blade of grass.

As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his trousers,
the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.

"The anteroom of hell," he said. "Hell herself is right down there under your
feet."

"It's hot!" McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana
handkerchief.

"Here's Mangareva," the captain said, bending over the table and pointing to a
black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the chart. "And here, in
between, is another island. Why not run for that?"

McCoy did not look at the chart.

"That's Crescent Island," he answered. "It is uninhabited, and it is only two
or three feet above water. Lagoon, but no entrance. No, Mangareva is the
nearest place for your purpose."

"Mangareva it is, then," said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate's
growling objection. "Call the crew aft, Mr. Konig."

The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully endeavoring
to make haste. Exhaustion was evident in every movement. The cook came out of
his galley to hear, and the cabin boy hung about near him.

When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his intention
of running for Mangareva, an uproar broke out.  Against a background of
throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with here and there a
distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney voice soared and
dominated for a moment, crying: "Gawd! After bein' in ell for fifteen
days--an' now e wants us to sail this floatin' ell to sea again?"

The captain could not control them, but McCoy's gentle presence seemed to
rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until the full
crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the captain, yearned
dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling coast of Pitcairn.

Soft as a spring zephyr was the voice of McCoy:

"Captain, I thought I heard some of them say they were starving."

"Ay," was the answer, "and so we are. I've had a sea biscuit and a spoonful of
salmon in the last two days. We're on whack. You see, when we discovered the
fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the fire. And then we found
how little food there was in the pantry. But it was too late. We didn't dare
break out the lazarette. Hungry? I'm just as hungry as they are."

He spoke to the men again, and again the throat rumbling and cursing arose,
their faces convulsed and animal-like with rage.  The second and third mates
had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of the poop. Their
faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored, more than anything else,
by this mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport glanced questioningly at his
first mate, and that person merely shrugged his shoulders in token of his
helplessness.

"You see," the captain said to McCoy, "you can't compel sailors to leave the
safe land and go to sea on a burning vessel. She has been their floating
coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved out, and
they've got enough of her.  We'll beat up for Pitcairn."

But the wind was light, the Pyrenees' bottom was foul, and she could not beat
up against the strong westerly current. At the end of two hours she had lost
three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength they could
compel the PYRENEES against the adverse elements. But steadily, port tack and
starboard tack, she sagged off to the westward. The captain paced restlessly
up and down, pausing occasionally to survey the vagrant smoke wisps and to
trace them back to the portions of the deck from which they sprang. The
carpenter was engaged constantly in attempting to locate such places, and,
when he succeeded, in calking them tighter and tighter.

"Well, what do you think?" the captain finally asked McCoy, who was watching
the carpenter with all a child's interest and curiosity in his eyes.

McCoy looked shoreward, where the land was disappearing in the thickening
haze.

"I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that breeze
that is coming, you'll be there tomorrow evening."

"But what if the fire breaks out? It is liable to do it any moment."

"Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your boats to
Mangareva if the ship burns out from under."

Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the question he
had not wanted to hear, but which he knew was surely coming.

"I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly speck. I
would not know where to look for the entrance into the lagoon. Will you come
along and pilot her in for me?"

McCoy's serenity was unbroken.

"Yes, Captain," he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which he would
have accepted an invitation to dinner; "I'll go with you to Mangareva."

Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the break of
the poop.

"We've tried to work her up, but you see how we've lost ground.  She's setting
off in a two-knot current. This gentleman is the Honorable McCoy, Chief
Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will come along with us to
Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so dangerous. He would not make
such an offer if he thought he was going to lose his life. Besides, whatever
risk there is, if he of his own free will come on board and take it, we can do
no less. What do you say for Mangareva?"

This time there was no uproar. 'mcCoy's presence, the surety and calm that
seemed to radiate from him, had had its effect. They conferred with one
another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually unanimous,
and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That worthy was
overwhelmed with consciousness of the heroism of himself and his mates, and
with flashing eyes he cried:

"By Gawd! If 'e will, we will!"

The crew mumbled its assent and started forward.

"One moment, Captain," McCoy said, as the other was turning to give orders to
the mate. "I must go ashore first."

Mr. Konig was thunderstruck, staring at McCoy as if he were a madman.

"Go ashore!" the captain cried. "What for? It will take you three hours to get
there in your canoe."

McCoy measured the distance of the land away, and nodded.

"Yes, it is six now. I won't get ashore till nine. The people cannot be
assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze freshens up tonight, you can begin
to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow morning."

"In the name of reason and common sense," the captain burst forth, "what do
you want to assemble the people for? Don't you realize that my ship is burning
beneath me?"

McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other's anger produced not the
slightest ripple upon it.

"Yes, Captain," he cooed in his dove-like voice. "I do realize that your ship
is burning. That is why I am going with you to Mangareva. But I must get
permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important matter when
the governor leaves the island. The people's interests are at stake, and so
they have the right to vote their permission or refusal. But they will give
it, I know that."

"Are you sure?"

"Quite sure."

"Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it?  Think of the
delay--a whole night."

"It is our custom," was the imperturbable reply. "Also, I am the governor, and
I must make arrangements for the conduct of the island during my absence."

"But it is only a twenty-four hour run to Mangareva," the captain objected.
"Suppose it took you six times that long to return to windward; that would
bring you back by the end of a week."

McCoy smiled his large, benevolent smile.

"Very few vessels come to Pitcairn, and when they do, they are usually from
San Francisco or from around the Horn. I shall be fortunate if I get back in
six months. I may be away a year, and I may have to go to San Francisco in
order to find a vessel that will bring me back. 'my father once left Pitcairn
to be gone three months, and two years passed before he could get back.  Then,
too, you are short of food. If you have to take to the boats, and the weather
comes up bad, you may be days in reaching land. I can bring off two canoe
loads of food in the morning.  Dried bananas will be best. As the breeze
freshens, you beat up against it. The nearer you are, the bigger loads I can
bring off. Goodby."

He held out his hand. The captain shook it, and was reluctant to let go. He
seemed to cling to it as a drowning sailor clings to a life buoy.

"How do I know you will come back in the morning?" he asked.

"Yes, that's it!" cried the mate. "How do we know but what he's skinning out
to save his own hide?"

McCoy did not speak. He looked at them sweetly and benignantly, and it seemed
to them that they received a message from his tremendous certitude of soul.

The captain released his hand, and, with a last sweeping glance that embraced
the crew in its benediction, McCoy went over the rail and descended into his
canoe.

The wind freshened, and the Pyrenees, despite the foulness of her bottom, won
half a dozen miles away from the westerly current.  At daylight, with Pitcairn
three miles to windward, Captain Davenport made out two canoes coming off to
him. Again McCoy clambered up the side and dropped over the rail to the hot
deck.  He was followed by many packages of dried bananas, each package wrapped
in dry leaves.

"Now, Captain," he said, "swing the yards and drive for dear life. You see, I
am no navigator," he explained a few minutes later, as he stood by the captain
aft, the latter with gaze wandering from aloft to overside as he estimated the
Pyrenees' speed. "You must fetch her to Mangareva. When you have picked up the
land, then I will pilot her in. What do you think she is making?"

"Eleven," Captain Davenport answered, with a final glance at the water rushing
past.

"Eleven. Let me see, if she keeps up that gait, we'll sight Mangareva between
eight and nine o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll have her on the beach by ten or
by eleven at latest. And then your troubles will be all over."

It almost seemed to the captain that the blissful moment had already arrived,
such was the persuasive convincingness of McCoy.

Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his burning
ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he had had enough.

A heavier flaw of wind struck the back of his neck and whistled by his ears.
He measured the weight of it, and looked quickly overside.

"The wind is making all the time," he announced. "The old girl's doing nearer
twelve than eleven right now. If this keeps up, we'll be shortening down
tonight."

All day the Pyrenees, carrying her load of living fire, tore across the
foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and topgallantsails were in, and she flew on
into the darkness, with great, crested seas roaring after her. The auspicious
wind had had its effect, and fore and aft a visible brightening was apparent.
In the second dog-watch some careless soul started a song, and by eight bells
the whole crew was singing.

Captain Davenport had his blankets brought up and spread on top the house.

"I've forgotten what sleep is," he explained to McCoy. "I'm all in. But give
me a call at any time you think necessary."

At three in the morning he was aroused by a gentle tugging at his arm. He sat
up quickly, bracing himself against the skylight, stupid yet from his heavy
sleep. The wind was thrumming its war song in the rigging, and a wild sea was
buffeting the PYRENEES.  Amidships she was wallowing first one rail under and
then the other, flooding the waist more often than not. 'mcCoy was shouting
something he could not hear. He reached out, clutched the other by the
shoulder, and drew him close so that his own ear was close to the other's
lips.

"It's three o'clock," came McCoy's voice, still retaining its dovelike
quality, but curiously muffled, as if from a long way off. "We've run two
hundred and fifty. Crescent Island is only thirty miles away, somewhere there
dead ahead. There's no lights on it. If we keep running, we'll pile up, and
lose ourselves as well as the ship."

"What d' ye think--heave to?"

"Yes; heave to till daylight. It will only put us back four hours."

So the Pyrenees, with her cargo of fire, was hove to, bitting the teeth of the
gale and fighting and smashing the pounding seas.  She was a shell, filled
with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell, clinging precariously,
the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped her in the battle.

"It is most unusual, this gale," McCoy told the captain, in the lee of the
cabin. "By rights there should be no gale at this time of the year. But
everything about the weather has been unusual. There has been a stoppage of
the trades, and now it's howling right out of the trade quarter." He waved his
hand into the darkness, as if his vision could dimly penetrate for hundreds of
miles. "It is off to the westward. There is something big making off there
somewhere--a hurricane or something. We're lucky to be so far to the eastward.
But this is only a little blow," he added. "It can't last. I can tell you that
much."

By daylight the gale had eased down to normal. But daylight revealed a new
danger. It had come on thick. The sea was covered by a fog, or, rather, by a
pearly mist that was fog-like in density, in so far as it obstructed vision,
but that was no more than a film on the sea, for the sun shot it through and
filled it with a glowing radiance.

The deck of the Pyrenees was making more smoke than on the preceding day, and
the cheerfulness of officers and crew had vanished. In the lee of the galley
the cabin boy could be heard whimpering. It was his first voyage, and the fear
of death was at his heart. The captain wandered about like a lost soul,
nervously chewing his mustache, scowling, unable to make up his mind what to
do.

"What do you think?" he asked, pausing by the side of McCoy, who was making a
breakfast off fried bananas and a mug of water.

McCoy finished the last banana, drained the mug, and looked slowly around. In
his eyes was a smile of tenderness as he said:

"Well, Captain, we might as well drive as burn. Your decks are not going to
hold out forever. They are hotter this morning. You haven't a pair of shoes I
can wear? It is getting uncomfortable for my bare feet."

The Pyrenees shipped two heavy seas as she was swung off and put once more
before it, and the first mate expressed a desire to have all that water down
in the hold, if only it could be introduced without taking off the hatches.
'mcCoy ducked his head into the binnacle and watched the course set.

"I'd hold her up some more, Captain," he said. "She's been making drift when
hove to."

"I've set it to a point higher already," was the answer. "Isn't that enough?"

"I'd make it two points, Captain. This bit of a blow kicked that westerly
current ahead faster than you imagine."

Captain Davenport compromised on a point and a half, and then went aloft,
accompanied by McCoy and the first mate, to keep a lookout for land. Sail had
been made, so that the Pyrenees was doing ten knots. The following sea was
dying down rapidly.  There was no break in the pearly fog, and by ten o'clock
Captain Davenport was growing nervous. Al l hands were at their stations,
ready, at the first warning of land ahead, to spring like fiends to the task
of bringing the Pyrenees up on the wind.  That land ahead, a surf-washed outer
reef, would be perilously close when it revealed itself in such a fog.

Another hour passed. The three watchers aloft stared intently into the pearly
radiance."What if we miss Mangareva?" Captain Davenport asked abruptly.

McCoy, without shifting his gaze, answered softly:

"Why, let her drive, captain. That is all we can do. All the Paumotus are
before us. We can drive for a thousand miles through reefs and atolls. We are
bound to fetch up somewhere."

"Then drive it is." Captain Davenport evidenced his intention of descending to
the deck. "We've missed Mangareva. God knows where the next land is. I wish
I'd held her up that other half-point," he confessed a moment later. "This
cursed current plays the devil with a navigator."

"The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago," McCoy
said, when they had regained the poop. "This very current was partly
responsible for that name."

"I was talking with a sailor chap in Sydney, once," said Mr. Konig. "He'd been
trading in the Paumotus. He told me insurance was eighteen per cent. Is that
right?"

McCoy smiled and nodded.

"Except that they don't insure," he explained. "The owners write off twenty
per cent of the cost of their schooners each year."

"My God!" Captain Davenport groaned. "That makes the life of a schooner only
five years!" He shook his head sadly, murmuring, "Bad waters! Bad waters!"

Again they went into the cabin to consult the big general chart; but the
poisonous vapors drove them coughing and gasping on deck.

"Here is Moerenhout Island," Captain Davenport pointed it out on the chart,
which he had spread on the house. "It can't be more than a hundred miles to
leeward."

"A hundred and ten." 'mcCoy shook his head doubtfully. "It might be done, but
it is very difficult. I might beach her, and then again I might put her on the
reef. A bad place, a very bad place."

"We'll take the chance," was Captain Davenport's decision, as he set about
working out the course.

Sail was shortened early in the afternoon, to avoid running past in the night;
and in the second dog-watch the crew manifested its regained cheerfulness.
Land was so very near, and their troubles would be over in the morning.

But morning broke clear, with a blazing tropic sun. The southeast trade had
swung around to the eastward, and was driving the PYRENEES through the water
at an eight-knot clip. Captain Davenport worked up his dead reckoning,
allowing generously for drift, and announced Moerenhout Island to be not more
than ten miles off. The Pyrenees sailed the ten miles; she sailed ten miles
more; and the lookouts at the three mastheads saw naught but the naked,
sun-washed sea.

"But the land is there, I tell you," Captain Davenport shouted to them from
the poop.

McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman,
fetched his sextant, and took a chronometer sight.

"I knew I was right, he almost shouted, when he had worked up the observation.
"Twenty-one, fifty-five, south; one-thirty-six, two, west. There you are.
We're eight miles to windward yet. What did you make it out, Mr. Konig?"

The first mate glanced at his own figures, and said in a low voice:

"Twenty-one, fifty-five all right; but my longitude's one-thirty-six,
forty-eight. That puts us considerably to leeward--"

But Captain Davenport ignored his figures with so contemptuous a silence as to
make Mr. Konig grit his teeth and curse savagely under his breath.

"Keep her off," the captain ordered the man at the wheel. "Three
points--steady there, as she goes!"

Then he returned to his figures and worked them over. The sweat poured from
his face. He chewed his mustache, his lips, and his pencil, staring at the
figures as a man might at a ghost. Suddenly, with a fierce, muscular outburst,
he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and crushed it under foot. 'mr.
Konig grinned vindictively and turned away, while Captain Davenport leaned
against the cabin and for half an hour spoke no word, contenting himself with
gazing to leeward with an expression of musing hopelessness on his face.

"Mr. McCoy," he broke silence abruptly. "The chart indicates a group of
islands, but not how many, off there to the north'ard, or nor'-nor'westward,
about forty miles--the Acteon Islands. What about them?"

"There are four, all low," McCoy answered. "First to the southeast is
Matuerui--no people, no entrance to the lagoon.  Then comes Tenarunga. There
used to be about a dozen people there, but they may be all gone now. Anyway,
there is no entrance for a ship--only a boat entrance, with a fathom of water.
Vehauga and Teua-raro are the other two. No entrances, no people, very low.
There is no bed for the Pyrenees in that group. She would be a total wreck."

"Listen to that!" Captain Davenport was frantic. "No people! No entrances!
What in the devil are islands good for?

"Well, then, he barked suddenly, like an excited terrier, "the chart gives a
whole mess of islands off to the nor'west. What about them? What one has an
entrance where I can lay my ship?"

McCoy calmly considered. He did not refer to the chart. All these islands,
reefs, shoals, lagoons, entrances, and distances were marked on the chart of
his memory. He knew them as the city dweller knows his buildings, streets, and
alleys.

"Papakena and Vanavana are off there to the westward, or west-nor'westward a
hundred miles and a bit more," he said. "One is uninhabited, and I heard that
the people on the other had gone off to Cadmus Island. Anyway, neither lagoon
has an entrance.  Ahunui is another hundred miles on to the nor'west. No
entrance, no people."

"Well, forty miles beyond them are two islands?" Captain Davenport queried,
raising his head from the chart.

McCoy shook his head.

"Paros and Manuhungi--no entrances, no people. Nengo-Nengo is forty miles
beyond them, in turn, and it has no people and no entrance. But there is Hao
Island. It is just the place. The lagoon is thirty miles long and five miles
wide. There are plenty of people. You can usually find water. And any ship in
the world can go through the entrance."

He ceased and gazed solicitously at Captain Davenport, who, bending over the
chart with a pair of dividers in hand, had just emitted a low groan.

"Is there any lagoon with an entrance anywhere nearer than Hao Island?" he
asked.

"No, Captain; that is the nearest."

"Well, it's three hundred and forty miles." Captain Davenport was speaking
very slowly, with decision. "I won't risk the responsibility of all these
lives. I'll wreck her on the Acteons. And she's a good ship, too," he added
regretfully, after altering the course, this time making more allowance than
ever for the westerly current.

An hour later the sky was overcast. The southeast trade still held, but the
ocean was a checker board of squalls.

"We'll be there by one o'clock," Captain Davenport announced confidently. "By
two o'clock at the outside. 'mcCoy, you put her ashore on the one where the
people are."

The sun did not appear again, nor, at one o'clock, was any land to be seen.
Captain Davenport looked astern at the Pyrenees' canting wake.

"Good Lord!" he cried. "An easterly current? Look at that!"

Mr. Konig was incredulous. 'mcCoy was noncommittal, though he said that in the
Paumotus there was no reason why it should not be an easterly current. A few
minutes later a squall robbed the Pyrenees temporarily of all her wind, and
she was left rolling heavily in the trough.

"Where's that deep lead? Over with it, you there!" Captain Davenport held the
lead line and watched it sag off to the northeast. "There, look at that! Take
hold of it for yourself."

McCoy and the mate tried it, and felt the line thrumming and vibrating
savagely to the grip of the tidal stream.

"A four-knot current," said Mr. Konig.

"An easterly current instead of a westerly," said Captain "Davenport, glaring
accusingly at McCoy, as if to cast the blame for it upon him.

"That is one of the reasons, Captain, for insurance being eighteen per cent in
these waters," McCoy answered cheerfully.  "You can never tell. The currents
are always changing. There was a man who wrote books, I forget his name, in
the yacht Casco.

He missed Takaroa by thirty miles and fetched Tikei, all because of the
shifting currents. You are up to windward now, and you'd better keep off a few
points."

"But how much has this current set me?" the captain demanded irately. "How am
I to know how much to keep off?"

"I don't know, Captain," McCoy said with great gentleness.

The wind returned, and the PYRENEES, her deck smoking and shimmering in the
bright gray light, ran off dead to leeward.  Then she worked back, port tack
and starboard tack, crisscrossing her track, combing the sea for the Acteon
Islands, which the masthead lookouts failed to sight.

Captain Davenport was beside himself. His rage took the form of sullen
silence, and he spent the afternoon in pacing the poop or leaning against the
weather shrouds. At nightfall, without even consulting McCoy, he squared away
and headed into the northwest.  Mr. Konig, surreptitiously consulting chart
and binnacle, and McCoy, openly and innocently consulting the binnacle, knew
that they were running for Hao Island. By midnight the squalls ceased, and the
stars came out. Captain Davenport was cheered by the promise of a clear day.

"I'll get an observation in the morning," he told McCoy, "though what my
latitude is, is a puzzler. But I'll use the Sumner method, and settle that. Do
you know the Sumner line?"

And thereupon he explained it in detail to McCoy.

The day proved clear, the trade blew steadily out of the east, and the
Pyrenees just as steadily logged her nine knots. Both the captain and mate
worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon agreed
again, and verified the morning sights by the noon sights.

"Another twenty-four hours and we'll be there," Captain Davenport assured
McCoy. :"It's a miracle the way the old girl's decks hold out. But they can't
last. They can't last. Look at them smoke, more and more every day. Yet it was
a tight deck to begin with, fresh-calked in Frisco. I was surprised when the
fire first broke out and we battened down. Look at that!"

He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled and
twisted in the lee of the mizzenmast twenty feet above the deck.

"Now, how did that get there?" he demanded indignantly.

Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from the
wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that height. It
writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the captain like some
threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked it away, and the
captain's jaw returned to place.

"As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised.  It was a
tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a sieve. And we've calked and calked ever
since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive so much smoke
through."

That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly weather set
in. The wind shifted back and forth between southeast and northeast, and at
midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp squall from the southwest,
from which point the wind continued to blow intermittently.

"We won't make Hao until ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained at seven
in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been erased by hazy
cloud masses in the eastern sky.  And the next moment he was plaintively
demanding, "And what are the currents doing?"

Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in
drizzling calms and violent squalls. By nightfall a heavy sea began to make
from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no wind, and still
the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the Pyrenees was rolling madly in
the huge waves that marched in an unending procession from out of the darkness
of the west. Sail was shortened as fast as both watches could work, and, when
the tired crew had finished, its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly
animal-like and menacing, could be heard in the darkness. Once the starboard
watch was called aft to lash down and make secure, and the men openly
advertised their sullenness and unwillingness. Every slow movement was a
protest and a threat. The atmosphere was moist and sticky like mucilage, and
in the absence of wind all hands seemed to pant and gasp for air. The sweat
stood out on faces and bare arms, and Captain Davenport for one, his face more
gaunt and care-worn than ever, and his eyes troubled and staring, was
oppressed by a feeling of impending calamity.

"It's off to the westward," McCoy said encouragingly. "At worst, we'll be only
on the edge of it."

But Captain Davenport refused to be comforted, and by the light of a lantern
read up the chapter in his Epitome that related to the strategy of shipmasters
in cyclonic storms. From somewhere amidships the silence was broken by a low
whimpering from the cabin boy.

"Oh, shut up!" Captain Davenport yelled suddenly and with such force as to
startle every man on board and to frighten the offender into a wild wail of
terror.

"Mr. Konig," the captain said in a voice that trembled with rage and nerves,
"will you kindly step for'ard and stop that brat's mouth with a deck mop?"

But it was McCoy who went forward, and in a few minutes had the boy comforted
and asleep.

Shortly before daybreak the first breath of air began to move from out the
southeast, increasing swiftly to a stiff and stiffer breeze. All hands were on
deck waiting for what might be behind it. "We're all right now, Captain," said
McCoy, standing close to his shoulder. "The hurricane is to the west'ard, and
we are south of it. This breeze is the in-suck. It won't blow any harder. You
can begin to put sail on her."

"But what's the good? Where shall I sail? This is the second day without
observations, and we should have sighted Hao Island yesterday morning. Which
way does it bear, north, south, east, or what? Tell me that, and I'll make
sail in a jiffy."

"I am no navigator, Captain," McCoy said in his mild way.

"I used to think I was one," was the retort, "before I got into these
Paumotus."

At midday the cry of "Breakers ahead!" was heard from the lookout. The
Pyrenees was kept off, and sail after sail was loosed and sheeted home. The
Pyrenees was sliding through the water and fighting a current that threatened
to set her down upon the breakers. Officers and men were working like mad,
cook and cabin boy, Captain Davenport himself, and McCoy all lending a hand.
It was a close shave. It was a low shoal, a bleak and perilous place over
which the seas broke unceasingly, where no man could live, and on which not
even sea birds could rest. The PYRENEES was swept within a hundred yards of it
before the wind carried her clear, and at this moment the panting crew, its
work done, burst out in a torrent of curses upon the head of McCoy --of McCoy
who had come on board, and proposed the run to Mangareva, and lured them all
away from the safety of Pitcairn Island to certain destruction in this
baffling and terrible stretch of sea. But McCoy's tranquil soul was
undisturbed. He smiled at them with simple and gracious benevolence, and,
somehow, the exalted goodness of him seemed to penetrate to their dark and
somber souls, shaming them, and from very shame stilling the curses vibrating
in their throats.

"Bad waters! Bad waters!" Captain Davenport was murmuring as his ship forged
clear; but he broke off abruptly to gaze at the shoal which should have been
dead astern, but which was already on the PYRENEES' weather-quarter and
working up rapidly to windward.

He sat down and buried his face in his hands. And the first mate saw, and
McCoy saw, and the crew saw, what he had seen. South of the shoal an easterly
current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an equally swift
westerly current had clutched the ship and was sweeping her away.

"I've heard of these Paumotus before," the captain groaned, lifting his
blanched face from his hands. "Captain Moyendale told me about them after
losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back. God forgive me,
I laughed at him. What shoal is that?" he broke off, to ask McCoy.

"I don't know, Captain."

"Why don't you know?"

"Because I never saw it before, and because I have never heard of it. I do
know that it is not charted. These waters have never been thoroughly
surveyed."

"Then you don't know where we are?"

"No more than you do," McCoy said gently.

At four in the afternoon cocoanut trees were sighted, apparently growing out
of the water. A little later the low land of an atoll was raised above the
sea.

"I know where we are now, Captain." McCoy lowered the glasses from his eyes.
"That's Resolution Island. We are forty miles beyond Hao Island, and the wind
is in our teeth."

"Get ready to beach her then. Where's the entrance?"

"There's only a canoe passage. But now that we know where we are, we can run
for Barclay de Tolley. It is only one hundred and twenty miles from here, due
nor'-nor'west. With this breeze we can be there by nine o'clock tomorrow
morning."

Captain Davenport consulted the chart and debated with himself.

"If we wreck her here," McCoy added, "we'd have to make the run to Barclay de
Tolley in the boats just the same."

The captain gave his orders, and once more the Pyrenees swung off for another
run across the inhospitable sea.

And the middle of the next afternoon saw despair and mutiny on her smoking
deck. The current had accelerated, the wind had slackened, and the Pyrenees
had sagged off to the west. The lookout sighted Barclay de Tolley to the
eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and for hours the
PYRENEES tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the cocoanut trees
hovered on the horizon, visible only from the masthead. From the deck they
were hidden by the bulge of the world.

Again Captain Davenport consulted McCoy and the chart. 'makemo lay
seventy-five miles to the southwest. Its lagoon was thirty miles long, and its
entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders, the crew
refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell fire under their
feet. There was the land. What if the ship could not make it? They could make
it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their lives amounted to something to
them. They had served faithfully the ship, now they were going to serve
themselves.

They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the way,
and proceeded to swing the boats out and to prepare to lower away. Captain
Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were advancing to the break
of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the cabin, began to speak.

He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike, cooing voice
they paused to hear. He extended to them his own ineffable serenity and peace.
His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out to them in a magic stream,
soothing them against their wills. Long forgotten things came back to them,
and some remembered lullaby songs of childhood and the content and rest of the
mother's arm at the end of the day. There was no more trouble, no more danger,
no more irk, in all the world.  Everything was as it should be, and it was
only a matter of course that they should turn their backs upon the land and
put to sea once more with hell fire hot beneath their feet.

McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality that
spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an alchemy of soul
occultly subtile and profoundly deep--a mysterious emanation of the spirit,
seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly imperious. It was illumination in the
dark crypts of their souls, a compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly
greater than that which resided in the shining, death-spitting revolvers of
the officers.

The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed the
turns made them fast again. Then one, and then another, and then all of them,
began to sidle awkwardly away.

McCoy's face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from the top
of the cabin. Thee was no trouble. For that matter there had been no trouble
averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was no place for such in
the blissful world in which he lived.

"You hypnotized em," Mr. Konig grinned at him, speaking in a low voice.

"Those boys are good," was the answer. "Their hearts are good.  They have had
a hard time, and they have worked hard, and they will work hard to the end."

Mr. Konig had not time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the sailors
were springing to obey, and the PYRENEES was paying slowly off from the wind
until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.

The wind was very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was insufferably
warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep.  The deck was too hot to
lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams, crept like evil
spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and windpipes of the unwary
and causing fits of sneezing and coughing. The stars blinked lazily in the dim
vault overhead; and the full moon, rising in the east, touched with its light
the myriads of wisps and threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined
and writhed and twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and
shrouds.

"Tell me," Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, "what happened
with that BOUNTY crowd after they reached Pitcairn? The account I read said
they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered until many years
later. But what happened in the meantime? I've always been curious to know.
They were men with their necks in the rope. There were some native men, too.
And then there were women. That made it look like trouble right from the
jump."

"There was trouble," McCoy answered. "They were bad men. They quarreled about
the women right away. One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his wife. All the
women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the cliffs when hunting sea
birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men away from him. All the
native men were made very angry by this, and they killed off nearly all the
mutineers. Then the mutineers that escaped killed off all the native men. The
women helped. And the natives killed each other. Everybody killed everybody.
They were terrible men.

"Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair in
friendship. The white men had sent them to do it.  Then the white men killed
them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she wanted a white man
for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden His face from them. At the
end of two years all the native men were murdered, and all the white men
except four. They were Young, John Adams, McCoy, who was my great-grandfather,
and Quintal. He was a very bad man, too.  Once, just because his wife did not
catch enough fish for him, he bit off her ear."

"They were a bad lot!" Mr. Konig exclaimed.

"Yes, they were very bad," McCoy agreed and went on serenely cooing of the
blood and lust of his iniquitous ancestry. "My great-grandfather escaped
murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and manufactured
alcohol from the roots of the ti-plant. Quintal was his chum, and they got
drunk together all the time. At last McCoy got delirium tremens, tied a rock
to his neck, and jumped into the sea.

"Quintal's wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by falling from
the cliffs. Then Quintal went to Young and demanded his wife, and went to
Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were afraid of Quintal. They knew
he would kill them. So they killed him, the two of them together, with a
hatchet. Then Young died. And that was about all the trouble they had."

"I should say so," Captain Davenport snorted. "There was nobody left to kill."

"You see, God had hidden His face," McCoy said.

By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and, unable
to make appreciable southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up full-and-by on
the port track. He was afraid of that terrible westerly current which had
cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day the calm continued, and
all night, while the sailors, on a short ration of dried banana, were
grumbling. Also, they were growing weak and complaining of stomach pains
caused by the straight banana diet. All day the current swept the PYRENEES to
the westward, while there was no wind to bear her south. In the middle of the
first dogwatch, cocoanut trees were sighted due south, their tufted heads
rising above the water and marking the low-lying atoll beneath.

"That is Taenga Island," McCoy said. "We need a breeze tonight, or else we'll
miss Makemo."

"What's become of the southeast trade?" the captain demanded.  "Why don't it
blow? What's the matter?"

"It is the evaporation from the big lagoons--there are so many of them," McCoy
explained. The evaporation upsets the whole system of trades. It even causes
the wind to back up and blow gales from the southwest. This is the Dangerous
Archipelago, Captain."

Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to curse,
but paused and refrained. 'mcCoy's presence was a rebuke to the blasphemies
that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx. 'mcCoy's influence had
been growing during the many days they had been together. Captain Davenport
was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man, never bridling his tongue, and now
he found himself unable to curse in the presence of this old man with the
feminine brown eyes and the voice of a dove.  When he realized this, Captain
Davenport experienced a distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of
McCoy, of McCoy of the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited
him in England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood
and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.

Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad impulse
to cast himself at the other's feet--and to say he knew not what. It was an
emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than a coherent thought, and he was
aware in some vague way of his own unworthiness and smallness in the presence
of this other man who possessed the simplicity of a child and the gentleness
of a woman.

Of course he could not so humble himself before the eyes of his officers and
men. And yet the anger that had prompted the blasphemy still raged in him. He
suddenly smote the cabin with his clenched hand and cried:

"Look here, old man, I won't be beaten. These Paumotus have cheated and
tricked me and made a fool of me. I refuse to be beaten. I am going to drive
this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the Paumotus to China
but what I find a bed for her. If every man deserts, I'll stay by her. I'll
show the Paumotus. They can't fool me. She's a good girl, and I'll stick by
her as long as there's a plank to stand on. You hear me?"

"And I'll stay with you, Captain," McCoy said.

During the night, light, baffling airs blew out of the south, and the frantic
captain, with his cargo of fire, watched and measured his westward drift and
went off by himself at times to curse softly so that McCoy should not hear.

Daylight showed more palms growing out of the water to the south.

"That's the leeward point of Makemo," McCoy said. "Katiu is only a few miles
to the west. We may make that."

But the current, sucking between the two islands, swept them to the northwest,
and at one in the afternoon they saw the palms of Katiu rise above the sea and
sink back into the sea again.

A few minutes later, just as the captain had discovered that a new current
from the northeast had gripped the Pyrenees, the masthead lookouts raised
cocoanut palms in the northwest.

"It is Raraka," said McCoy. "We won't make it without wind. The current is
drawing us down to the southwest. But we must watch out. A few miles farther
on a current flows north and turns in a circle to the northwest. This will
sweep us away from Fakarava, and Fakarava is the place for the Pyrenees to
find her bed."

"They can sweep all they da--all they well please," Captain Davenport remarked
with heat. "We'll find a bed for her somewhere just the same."

But the situation on the Pyrenees was reaching a culmination.  The deck was so
hot that it seemed an increase of a few degrees would cause it to burst into
flames. In many places even the heavy-soled shoes of the men were no
protection, and they were compelled to step lively to avoid scorching their
feet. The smoke had increased and grown more acrid. Every man on board was
suffering from inflamed eyes, and they coughed and strangled like a crew of
tuberculosis patients. In the afternoon the boats were swung out and equipped.
The last several packages of dried bananas were stored in them, as well as the
instruments of the officers. Captain Davenport even put the chronometer into
the longboat, fearing the blowing up of the deck at any moment.

All night this apprehension weighed heavily on all, and in the first morning
light, with hollow eyes and ghastly faces, they stared at one another as if in
surprise that the Pyrenees still held together and that they still were alive.

Walking rapidly at times, and even occasionally breaking into an undignified
hop-skip-and-run, Captain Davenport inspected his ship's deck.

"It is a matter of hours now, if not of minutes," he announced on his return
to the poop.

The cry of land came down from the masthead. From the deck the land was
invisible, and McCoy went aloft, while the captain took advantage of the
opportunity to curse some of the bitterness out of his heart. But the cursing
was suddenly stopped by a dark line on the water which he sighted to the
northeast. It was not a squall, but a regular breeze--the disrupted trade
wind, eight points out of its direction but resuming business once more.

"Hold her up, Captain," McCoy said as soon as he reached the poop. "That's the
easterly point of Fakarava, and we'll go in through the passage full-tilt, the
wind abeam, and every sail drawing."

At the end of an hour, the cocoanut trees and the low-lying land were visible
from the deck. The feeling that the end of the PYRENEES' resistance was
imminent weighed heavily on everybody. Captain Davenport had the three boats
lowered and dropped short astern, a man in each to keep them apart. The
Pyrenees closely skirted the shore, the surf-whitened atoll a bare two cable
lengths away.

And a minute later the land parted, exposing a narrow passage and the lagoon
beyond, a great mirror, thirty miles in length and a third as broad.

"Now, Captain."

For the last time the yards of the Pyrenees swung around as she obeyed the
wheel and headed into the passage. The turns had scarcely been made, and
nothing had been coiled down, when the men and mates swept back to the poop in
panic terror. Nothing had happened, yet they averred that something was going
to happen. They could not tell why. They merely knew that it was about to
happen. 'mcCoy started forward to take up his position on the bow in order to
con the vessel in; but the captain gripped his arm and whirled him around.

"Do it from here," he said. "That deck's not safe. What's the matter?" he
demanded the next instant. "We're standing still."

McCoy smiled.

"You are bucking a seven-knot current, Captain," he said. "That is the way the
full ebb runs out of this passage."

At the end of another hour the Pyrenees had scarcely gained her length, but
the wind freshened and she began to forge ahead.

"Better get into the boats, some of you," Captain Davenport commanded.

His voice was still ringing, and the men were just beginning to move in
obedience, when the amidship deck of the Pyrenees, in a mass of flame and
smoke, was flung upward into the sails and rigging, part of it remaining there
and the rest falling into the sea. The wind being abeam, was what had saved
the men crowded aft. They made a blind rush to gain the boats, but McCoy's
voice, carrying its convincing message of vast calm and endless time, stopped
them.

"Take it easy," he was saying. Everything is all right. Pass that boy down
somebody, please."

The man at the wheel had forsaken it in a funk, and Captain Davenport had
leaped and caught the spokes in time to prevent the ship from yawing in the
current and going ashore.

"Better take charge of the boats," he said to Mr. Konig. "Tow one of them
short, right under the quarter. . . . When I go over, it'll be on the jump."

Mr. Konig hesitated, then went over the rail and lowered himself into the
boat.

"Keep her off half a point, Captain."

Captain Davenport gave a start. He had thought he had the ship to himself.

"Ay, ay; half a point it is," he answered.

Amidships the Pyrenees was an open flaming furnace, out of which poured an
immense volume of smoke which rose high above the masts and completely hid the
forward part of the ship. 'mcCoy, in the shelter of the mizzen-shrouds,
continued his difficult task of conning the ship through the intricate
channel. The fire was working aft along the deck from the seat of explosion,
while the soaring tower of canvas on the mainmast went up and vanished in a
sheet of flame. Forward, though they could not see them, they knew that the
head-sails were still drawing.

"If only she don't burn all her canvas off before she makes inside,:" the
captain groaned.

"She'll make it," McCoy assured him with supreme confidence.  "There is plenty
of time. She is bound to make it. And once inside, we'll put her before it;
that will keep the smoke away from us and hold back the fire from working
aft."

A tongue of flame sprang up the mizzen, reached hungrily for the lowest tier
of canvas, missed it, and vanished. From aloft a burning shred of rope stuff
fell square on the back of Captain Davenport's neck. He acted with the
celerity of one stung by a bee as he reached up and brushed the offending fire
from his skin.

"How is she heading, Captain?"

"Nor'west by west."

"Keep her west-nor-west."

Captain Davenport put the wheel up and steadied her.

"West by north, Captain."

"West by north she is."

"And now west."

Slowly, point by point, as she entered the lagoon, the PYRENEES described the
circle that put her before the wind; and point by point, with all the calm
certitude of a thousand years of time to spare, McCoy chanted the changing
course.

"Another point, Captain."

"A point it is."

Captain Davenport whirled several spokes over, suddenly reversing and coming
back one to check her.

"Steady."

"Steady she is--right on it."

Despite the fact that the wind was now astern, the heat was so intense that
Captain Davenport was compelled to steal sidelong glances into the binnacle,
letting go the wheel now with one hand, now with the other, to rub or shield
his blistering cheeks.

McCoy's beard was crinkling and shriveling and the smell of it, strong in the
other's nostrils, compelled him to look toward McCoy with sudden solicitude.
Captain Davenport was letting go the spokes alternately with his hands in
order to rub their blistering backs against his trousers. Every sail on the
mizzenmast vanished in a rush of flame, compelling the two men to crouch and
shield their faces.

"Now," said McCoy, stealing a glance ahead at the low shore, "four points up,
Captain, and let her drive."

Shreds and patches of burning rope and canvas were falling about them and upon
them. The tarry smoke from a smouldering piece of rope at the captain's feet
set him off into a violent coughing fit, during which he still clung to the
spokes.

The Pyrenees struck, her bow lifted and she ground ahead gently to a stop. A
shower of burning fragments, dislodged by the shock, fell about them. The ship
moved ahead again and struck a second time. She crushed the fragile coral
under her keel, drove on, and struck a third time.

"Hard over," said McCoy. "Hard over?" he questioned gently, a minute later.

"She won't answer," was the reply.

"All right. She is swinging around." 'mcCoy peered over the side. "Soft, white
sand. Couldn't ask better. A beautiful bed."

As the Pyrenees swung around her stern away from the wind, a fearful blast of
smoke and flame poured aft. Captain Davenport deserted the wheel in blistering
agony. He reached the painter of the boat that lay under the quarter, then
looked for McCoy, who was standing aside to let him go down.

"You first," the captain cried, gripping him by the shoulder and almost
throwing him over the rail. But the flame and smoke were too terrible, and he
followed hard after McCoy, both men wriggling on the rope and sliding down
into the boat together. A sailor in the bow, without waiting for orders,
slashed the painter through with his sheath knife. The oars, poised in
readiness, bit into the water, and the boat shot away.

"a beautiful bed, Captain," McCoy murmured, looking back.

"Ay, a beautiful bed, and all thanks to you," was the answer.

The three boats pulled away for the white beach of pounded coral, beyond
which, on the edge of a cocoanut grove, could be seen a half dozen grass
houses and a score or more of excited natives, gazing wide-eyed at the
conflagration that had come to land.

The boats grounded and they stepped out on the white beach.

"And now," said McCoy, "I must see about getting back to Pitcairn."





End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of South Sea Tales, by Jack London