APDL Eductation Resources/APDL Eductation Resources.iso/text/authors/london/stories/STORIES_2

Text File | 1996-07-21 | 225.5 KB | 4,183 lines

   Koolau the Leper Converts to The House of Pride and other Tales of
Hawaii, Macmillan, 1912 "Because we are sick they take away our liberty.
We have obeyed the law. We have done no wrong. And yet they would put us
in prison. Molokai is a prison. That you know. Niuli, there, his sister
was sent to Molokai seven years ago. He has not seen her since. Nor will
he ever see her. She must stay there until she dies. This is not her
will. It is not Niuli's will. It is the will of the white men who rule
the land. And who are these white men?

"We know. We have it from our fathers and our fathers' fathers. They
came like lambs, speaking softly. Well might they speak softly, for we
were many and strong, and all the islands were ours. As I say, they
spoke softly. They were of two kinds. The one kind asked our permission,
our gracious permission, to preach to us the word of God. The other kind
asked our permission, our gracious permission, to trade with us. That
was the beginning. To-day all the islands are theirs, all the land, all
the cattle - everything is theirs. They that preached the word of
God and they that preached the word of Rum have foregathered and become
great chiefs. They live like kings in houses of many rooms, with
multitudes of servants to care for them. They who had nothing have
everything, and if you, or I, or any Kanaka be hungry, they sneer and
say, &onq;Well, why don't you work? There are the plantations.&cnq;"

Koolau paused. He raised one hand, and with gnarled and twisted fingers
lifted up the blazing wreath of hibiscus that crowned his black hair.
The moonlight bathed the scene in silver. It was a night of peace,
though those who sat about him and listened had all the seeming of
battle-wrecks. Their faces were leonine. Here a space yawned in a face
where should have been a nose, and there an arm-stump showed where a
hand had rotted off. They were men and women beyond the pale, the thirty
of them, for upon them had been placed the mark of the beast.

They sat, flower-garlanded, in the perfumed, luminous  night, and their
lips made uncouth noises and their throats rasped approval of Koolau's
speech. They were creatures who once had been men and women. But they
were men and women no longer. They were monsters - in face and
form grotesque caricatures of everything human. They were hideously
maimed and distorted, and had the seeming of creatures that had been
racked in millenniums of hell. Their hands, when they possessed them,
were like harpy-claws. Their faces were the misfits and slips, crushed
and bruised by some mad god at play in the machinery of life. Here and
there were features which the mad god had smeared half away, and one
woman wept scalding tears from twin pits of horror, where her eyes once
had been. Some were in pain and groaned from their chests. Others
coughed, making sounds like the tearing of tissue. Two were idiots, more
like huge apes marred in the making, until even an ape were an angel.
They mowed and gibbered in the moonlight, under crowns of drooping,
golden blossoms. One, whose bloated ear-lobe flapped like a fan upon his
shoulder, caught up a gorgeous flower of orange and scarlet and with it
decorated the monstrous ear that flip-flapped with his every movement.

And over these things Koolau was king. And this was his kingdom, -
a flower-throttled gorge, with beetling cliffs and crags, from which
floated the blattings of wild goats. On three sides the grim walls rose,
festooned in fantastic draperies of tropic vegetation and pierced by
cave-entrances - the rocky lairs of Koolau's subjects. On the
fourth side the earth fell away into a tremendous abyss, and, far below,
could be seen the summits of lesser peaks and crags, at whose bases
foamed and rumbled the Pacific surge. In fine weather a boat could land
on the rocky beach that marked the entrance of Kalalau Valley, but the
weather must be very fine. And a cool-headed mountaineer might climb
from the beach to the head of Kalalau Valley, to this pocket among the
peaks where Koolau ruled; but such a mountaineer must be very cool of
head, and he must know the wild-goat trails as well. The marvel was that
the mass of human wreckage that constituted Koolau's people should have
been able to drag its helpless misery over the giddy goat-trails to this
inaccessible spot.

"Brothers," Koolau began.

 But one of the mowing, apelike travesties emitted a wild shriek of
madness, and Koolau waited while the shrill cachinnation was tossed back
and forth among the rocky walls and echoed distantly through the
pulseless night.

"Brothers, is it not strange?  Ours was the land, and behold, the land
is not ours. What did these preachers of the word of God and the word of
Rum give us for the land?  Have you received one dollar, as much as one
dollar, any one of you, for the land?  Yet it is theirs, and in return
they tell us we can go to work on the land, their land, and that what we
produce by our toil shall be theirs. Yet in the old days we did not have
to work. Also, when we are sick, they take away our freedom."

"Who brought the sickness, Koolau?" demanded Kiloliana, a lean and wiry
man with a face so like a laughing faun's that one might expect to see
the cloven hoofs under him. They were cloven, it was true, but the
cleavages were great ulcers and livid putrefactions. Yet this was
Kiloliana, the most daring climber of them all, the man who knew every
goat-trail and who had led Koolau and his wretched followers into the
recesses of Kalalau.

"Ay, well questioned," Koolau answered. "Because we would not work the
miles of sugar-cane where once our horses pastured, they brought the
Chinese slaves from over seas. And with them came the Chinese sickness
- that which we suffer from and because of which they would
imprison us on Molokai. We were born on Kauai. We have been to the other
islands, some here and some there, to Oahu, to Maui, to Hawaii, to
Honolulu. Yet always did we come back to Kauai. Why did we come back?
There must be a reason. Because we love Kauai. We were born here. Here
we have lived. And here shall we die - unless - unless
- there be weak hearts amongst us. Such we do not want. They are
fit for Molokai. And if there be such, let them not remain. To-morrow
the soldiers land on the shore. Let the weak hearts go down to them.
They will be sent swiftly to Molokai. As for us, we shall stay and
fight. But know that we will not die. We have rifles. You know the
narrow trails where men must creep, one by one. I, alone, Koolau, who
was once a cowboy on Niihau, can hold the trail against a thousand men.
Here is  Kapahei, who was once a judge over men and a man with honor,
but who is now a hunted rat, like you and me. Hear him. He is wise."

Kapahei arose. Once he had been a judge. He had gone to college at
Punahou. He had sat at meat with lords and chiefs and the high
representatives of alien powers who protected the interests of traders
and missionaries. Such had been Kapahei. But now, as Koolau had said, he
was a hunted rat, a creature outside the law, sunk so deep in the mire
of human horror that he was above the law as well as beneath it. His
face was featureless, save for gaping orifices and for the lidless eyes
that burned under hairless brows. "Let us not make trouble," he began.
"We ask to be left alone. But if they do not leave us alone, then is the
trouble theirs, and the penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see." He
held up his stumps of hands that all might see. "Yet have I the joint of
one thumb left, and it can pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost
neighbor in the old days. We love Kauai. Let us live here, or die here,
but do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness is not ours.
We have not sinned. The men who preached the word of God and the word of
Rum brought the sickness with the coolie slaves who work the stolen
land. have been a judge. I know the law and the justice, and I say to
you it is unjust to steal a man's land, to make that man sick with the
Chinese sickness, and then to put that man in prison for life."

"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau. "Let us
drink and dance and be happy as we can."

From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and passed around.
The calabashes were filled with the fierce distillation of the root of
the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed through them and mounted to
their brains, they forgot that they had once been men and women, for
they were men and women once more. The woman who wept scalding tears
from open eye-pits was indeed a woman apulse with life as she plucked
the strings of an ukulele and lifted her voice in a barbaric love-call
such as might have come from the dark forest-depths of the primeval
world. The air tingled with her cry, softly imperious and seductive.
Upon a mat, timing his rhythm to the woman's song, Kiloliana danced. It
was unmistakable.  Love danced in all his movements, and, next, dancing
with him on the mat, was a woman whose heavy hips and generous breast
gave the lie to her disease-corroded face. It was a dance of the living
dead, for in their disintegrating bodies life still loved and longed.
Ever the woman whose sightless eyes ran scalding tears chanted her
love-cry, ever the dancers danced of love in the warm night, and ever
the calabashes went around till in all their brains were maggots
crawling of memory and desire. And with the woman on the mat danced a
slender maid whose face was beautiful and unmarred, but whose twisted
arms that rose and fell marked the disease's ravage. And the two idiots,
gibbering and mouthing strange noises, danced apart, grotesque,
fantastic, travestying love as they themselves had been travestied by
life.

But the woman's love-cry broke midway, the calabashes were lowered, and
the dancers ceased, as all gazed into the abyss above the sea, where a
rocket flared like a wan phantom through the moonlit air.

"It is the soldiers," said Koolau. "To-morrow there will be fighting. It
is well to sleep and be prepared."

The lepers obeyed, crawling away to their lairs in the cliff, until only
Koolau remained, sitting motionless in the moonlight, his rifle across
his knees, as he gazed far down to the boats landing on the beach.

The far head of Kalalau Valley had been well chosen as a refuge. Except
Kiloliana, who knew back-trails up the precipitous walls, no man could
win to the gorge save by advancing across a knife-edged ridge. This
passage was a hundred yards in length. At best, it was a scant twelve
inches wide. On either side yawned the abyss. A slip, and to right or
left the man would fall to his death. But once across he would find
himself in an earthly paradise. A sea of vegetation laved the landscape,
pouring its green billows from wall to wall, dripping from the
cliff-lips in great vine-masses, and flinging a spray of ferns and
air-plants into the multitudinous crevices. During the many months of
Koolau's rule, he and his followers had fought with this vegetable sea.
The choking jungle, with its riot of blossoms, had been driven back from
the bananas, oranges, and mangoes that grew wild. In little clearings
grew the wild arrowroot; on stone terraces, filled with  soil scrapings,
were the taro patches and the melons; and in every open space where the
sunshine penetrated, were <emph rend='italic'>papaia trees burdened with
their golden fruit.

Koolau had been driven to this refuge from the lower valley by the
beach. And if he were driven from it in turn, he knew of gorges among
the jumbled peaks of the inner fastnesses where he could lead his
subjects and live. And now he lay with his rifle beside him, peering
down through a tangled screen of foliage at the soldiers on the beach.
He noted that they had large guns with them, from which the sunshine
flashed as from mirrors. The knife-edged passage lay directly before
him. Crawling upward along the trail that led to it he could see tiny
specks of men. He knew they were not the soldiers, but the police. When
they failed, then the soldiers would enter the game.

He affectionately rubbed a twisted hand along his rifle barrel and made
sure that the sights were clean. He had learned to shoot as a
wild-cattle hunter on Niihau, and on that island his skill as a marksman
was unforgotten. As the toiling specks of men grew nearer and larger, he
estimated the range, judged the deflection of the wind that swept at
right angles across the line of fire, and calculated the chances of
overshooting marks that were so far below his level. But he did not
shoot. Not until they reached the beginning of the passage did he make
his presence known. He did not disclose himself, but spoke from the
thicket.

"What do you want?" he demanded.

"We want Koolau, the leper," answered the man who led the native police,
himself a blue-eyed American.

"You must go back," Koolau said.

He knew the man, a deputy sheriff, for it was by him that he had been
harried out of Niihau, across Kauai, to Kalalau Valley, and out of the
valley to the gorge.

"Who are you?" the sheriff asked.

"I am Koolau, the leper," was the reply.

"Then come out. We want you. Dead or alive, there is a thousand dollars
on your head. You cannot escape."

Koolau laughed aloud in the thicket.

"Come out!" the sheriff commanded, and was answered by silence.

 He conferred with the police, and Koolau saw that they were preparing
to rush him.

"Koolau," the sheriff called. "Koolau, I am coming across to get you."

"Then look first and well about you at the sun and sea and sky, for it
will be the last time you behold them."

"That's all right, Koolau," the sheriff said soothingly. "know you're a
dead shot. But you won't shoot me. I have never done you any wrong."

Koolau grunted in the thicket.

"I say, you know, I've never done you any wrong, have I?" the sheriff
persisted.

"You do me wrong when you try to put me in prison," was the reply. "And
you do me wrong when you try for the thousand dollars on my head. If you
will live, stay where you are."

"I've got to come across and get you. I'm sorry. But it is my duty."

"You will die before you get across."

The sheriff was no coward. Yet was he undecided. He gazed into the gulf
on either side, and ran his eyes along the knife-edge he must travel.
Then he made up his mind.

"Koolau," he called.

But the thicket remained silent.

"Koolau, don't shoot. I am coming."

The sheriff turned, gave some orders to the police, then started on his
perilous way. He advanced slowly. It was like walking a tight rope. He
had nothing to lean upon but the air. The lava rock crumbled under his
feet, and on either side the dislodged fragments pitched downward
through the depths. The sun blazed upon him, and his face was wet with
sweat. Still he advanced, until the halfway point was reached.

"Stop!" Koolau commanded from the thicket. "One more step and I shoot."

The sheriff halted, swaying for balance as he stood poised above the
void. His face was pale, but his eyes were determined. He licked his dry
lips before he spoke.

"Koolau, you won't shoot me. I know you won't."

He started once more. The bullet whirled him half about. On his face was
an expression of querulous surprise as he  reeled to the fall. He tried
to save himself by throwing his body across the knife-edge; but at that
moment he knew death. The next moment the knife-edge was vacant. Then
came the rush, five policemen, in single file, with superb steadiness,
running along the knife-edge. At the same instant the rest of the posse
opened fire on the thicket. It was madness. Five times Koolau pulled the
trigger, so rapidly that his shots constituted a rattle. Changing his
position and crouching low under the bullets that were biting and
singing through the bushes, he peered out. Four of the police had
followed the sheriff. The fifth lay across the knife-edge, still alive.
On the farther side, no longer firing, were the surviving police. On the
naked rock there was no hope for them. Before they could clamber down
Koolau could have picked off the last man. But he did not fire, and,
after a conference, one of them took off a white undershirt and waved it
as a flag. Followed by another, he advanced along the knife-edge to
their wounded comrade. Koolau gave no sign, but watched them slowly
withdraw and become specks as they descended into the lower valley.

Two hours later, from another thicket, Koolau watched a body of police
trying to make the ascent from the opposite side of the valley. He saw
the wild goats flee before them as they climbed higher and higher, until
he doubted his judgment and sent for Kiloliana who crawled in beside
him.

"No, there is no way," said Kiloliana.

"The goats?" Koolau questioned.

"They come over from the next valley, but they cannot pass to this.
There is no way. Those men are not wiser than goats. They may fall to
their deaths. Let us watch."

"They are brave men," said Koolau. "Let us watch."

Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the yellow
blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead, watching the motes
of men toil upward, till the thing happened, and three of them,
slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-lip and fell sheer half
a thousand feet.

Kiloliana chuckled.

"We will be bothered no more," he said.

"They have war guns," Koolau made answer. "The soldiers have not yet
spoken."

 In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock dens
asleep. Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and ready, dozed
in the entrance to his own den. The maid with the twisted arm lay below
in the thicket and kept watch on the knife-edge passage. Suddenly Koolau
was startled wide awake by the sound of an explosion on the beach. The
next instant the atmosphere was incredibly rent asunder. The terrible
sound frightened him. It was as if all the gods had caught the envelope
of the sky in their hands and were ripping it apart as a woman rips
apart a sheet of cotton cloth. But it was such an immense ripping,
growing swiftly nearer. Koolau glanced up apprehensively, as if
expecting to see the thing. Then high up on the cliff overhead the shell
burst in a fountain of black smoke. The rock was shattered, the
fragments falling to the foot of the cliff.

Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow. He was terribly shaken.
He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this was more dreadful
than anything he had imagined.

"One," said Kapahei, suddenly bethinking himself to keep count.

A second and a third shell flew screaming over the top of the wall,
bursting beyond view. Kapahei methodically kept the count. The lepers
crowded into the open space before the caves. At first they were
frightened, but as the shells continued their flight overhead the leper
folk became reassured and began to admire the spectacle. The two idiots
shrieked with delight, prancing wild antics as each air-tormenting shell
went by. Koolau began to recover his confidence. No damage was being
done. Evidently they could not aim such large missiles at such long
range with the precision of a rifle.

But a change came over the situation. The shells began to fall short.
One burst below in the thicket by the knife-edge. Koolau remembered the
maid who lay there on watch, and ran down to see. The smoke was still
rising from the bushes when he crawled in. He was astounded. The
branches were splintered and broken. Where the girl had lain was a hole
in the ground. The girl herself was in shattered fragments. The shell
had burst right on her.

First peering out to make sure no soldiers were attempting the passage,
Koolau started back on the run for the caves. All  the time the shells
were moaning, whining, screaming by, and the valley was rumbling and
reverberating with the explosions. As he came in sight of the caves, he
saw the two idiots cavorting about, clutching each other's hands with
their stumps of fingers. Even as he ran, Koolau saw a spout of black
smoke rise from the ground, near to the idiots. They were flung apart
bodily by the explosion. One lay motionless, but the other was dragging
himself by his hands toward the cave. His legs trailed out helplessly
behind him, while the blood was pouring from his body. He seemed bathed
in blood, and as he crawled he cried like a little dog. The rest of the
lepers, with the exception of Kapahei, had fled into the caves.

"Seventeen," said Kapahei. "Eighteen," he added.

This last shell had fairly entered into one of the caves. The explosion
caused all the caves to empty. But from the particular cave no one
emerged. Koolau crept in through the pungent, acrid smoke. Four bodies,
frightfully mangled, lay about. One of them was the sightless woman
whose tears till now had never ceased.

Outside, Koolau found his people in a panic and already beginning to
climb the goat trail that led out of the gorge and on among the jumbled
heights and chasms. The wounded idiot, whining feebly and dragging
himself along on the ground by his hands, was trying to follow. But at
the first pitch of the wall his helplessness overcame him and he fell
back.

"It would be better to kill him," said Koolau to Kapahei, who still sat
in the same place.

"Twenty-two," Kapahei answered. "Yes, it would be a wise thing to kill
him. Twenty-three - twenty-four."

The idiot whined sharply when he saw the rifle leveled at him. Koolau
hesitated, then lowered the gun.

"It is a hard thing to do," he said.

"You are a fool, twenty-six, twenty-seven," said Kapahei. "Let me show
you."

He arose and, with a heavy fragment of rock in his hand, approached the
wounded thing. As he lifted his arm to strike, a shell burst full upon
him, relieving him of the necessity of the act and at the same time
putting an end to his count.

 Koolau was alone in the gorge. He watched the last of his people drag
their crippled bodies over the brow of the height and disappear. Then he
turned and went down to the thicket where the maid had been killed. The
shell-fire still continued, but he remained; for far below he could see
the soldiers climbing up. A shell burst twenty feet away. Flattening
himself into the earth, he heard the rush of the fragments above his
body. A shower of hau blossoms rained upon him. He lifted his head to
peer down the trail, and sighed. He was very much afraid. Bullets from
rifles would not have worried him, but this shell-fire was abominable.
Each time a shell shrieked by he shivered and crouched; but each time he
lifted his head again to watch the trail.

At last the shells ceased. This, he reasoned, was because the soldiers
were drawing near. They crept along the trail in single file, and he
tried to count them until he lost track. At any rate, there were a
hundred or so of them - all come after Koolau the leper. He felt a
fleeting prod of pride. With war guns and rifles, police and soldiers,
they came for him, and he was only one man, a crippled wreck of a man at
that. They offered a thousand dollars for him, dead or alive. In all his
life he had never possessed that much money. The thought was a bitter
one. Kapahei had been right. He, Koolau, had done no wrong. Because the
haoles wanted labor with which to work the stolen land, they had brought
in the Chinese coolies, and with them had come the sickness. And now,
because he had caught the sickness, he was worth a thousand dollars
- but not to himself. It was his worthless carcass, rotten with
disease or dead from a bursting shell, that was worth all that money.

When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was prompted to
warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the murdered maid, and he
kept silent. When six had ventured on the knife-edge, he opened fire.
Nor did he cease when the knife-edge was bare. He emptied his magazine,
reloaded, and emptied it again. He kept on shooting. All his wrongs were
blazing in his brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance. All down the
goat trail the soldiers were firing, and though they lay flat and sought
to shelter themselves in the shallow inequalities of the surface,  they
were exposed marks to him. Bullets whistled and thudded about him, and
an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air. One bullet ploughed
a crease through his scalp, and a second burned across his
shoulder-blade without breaking the skin.

It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The soldiers began
to retreat, helping along their wounded. As Koolau picked them off he
became aware of the smell of burnt meat. He glanced about him at first,
and then discovered that it was his own hands. The heat of the rifle was
doing it. The leprosy had destroyed most of the nerves in his hands.
Though his flesh burned and he smelled it, there was no sensation.

He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war guns.
Without doubt they would open up on him again, and this time upon the
very thicket from which he had inflicted the damage. Scarcely had he
changed his position to a nook behind a small shoulder of the wall where
he had noted that no shells fell, than the bombardment recommenced. He
counted the shells. Sixty more were thrown into the gorge before the
war-guns ceased. The tiny area was pitted with their explosions, until
it seemed impossible that any creature could have survived. So the
soldiers thought, for, under the burning afternoon sun, they climbed the
goat trail again. And again the knife-edged passage was disputed, and
again they fell back to the beach.

For two days longer Koolau held the passage, though the soldiers
contented themselves with flinging shells into his retreat. Then Pahau,
a leper boy, came to the top of the wall at the back of the gorge and
shouted down to him that Kiloliana, hunting goats that they might eat,
had been killed by a fall, and that the women were frightened and knew
not what to do. Koolau called the boy down and left him with a spare gun
with which to guard the passage. Koolau found his people disheartened.
The majority of them were too helpless to forage food for themselves
under such forbidding circumstances, and all were starving. He selected
two women and a man who were not too far gone with the disease, and sent
them back to the gorge to bring up food and mats. The rest  he cheered
and consoled until even the weakest took a hand in building rough
shelters for themselves.

But those he had dispatched for food did not return, and he started back
for the gorge. As he came out on the brow of the wall, half a dozen
rifles cracked. A bullet tore through the fleshy part of his shoulder,
and his cheek was cut by a sliver of rock where a second bullet smashed
against the cliff. In the moment that this happened, and he leaped back,
he saw that the gorge was alive with soldiers. His own people had
betrayed him. The shell-fire had been too terrible, and they had
preferred the prison of Molokai.

Koolau dropped back and unslung one of his heavy cartridge-belts. Lying
among the rocks, he allowed the head and shoulders of the first soldier
to rise clearly into view before pulling trigger. Twice this happened,
and then, after some delay, in place of a head and shoulders a white
flag was thrust above the edge of the wall. "What do you want?" he
demanded.

"I want you, if you are Koolau the leper," came the answer.

Koolau forgot where he was, forgot everything, as he lay and marvelled
at the strange persistence of these haoles who would have their will
though the sky fell in. Aye, they would have their will over all men and
all things, even though they died in getting it. He could not but admire
them, too, what of that will in them that was stronger than life and
that bent all things to their bidding. He was convinced of the
hopelessness of his struggle. There was no gainsaying that terrible will
of the haoles. Though he killed a thousand, yet would they rise like the
sands of the sea and come upon him, ever more and more. They never knew
when they were beaten. That was their fault and their virtue. It was
where his own kind lacked. He could see, now, how the handful of the
preachers of God and the preachers of Rum had conquered the land. It was
because -

"Well, what have you got to say?  Will you come with me?"

It was the voice of the invisible man under the white flag. There he
was, like any haole, driving straight toward the end determined.

"Let us talk," said Koolau.

 The man's head and shoulders arose, then his whole body. He was a
smooth-faced, blue-eyed youngster of twenty-five, slender and natty in
his captain's uniform. He advanced until halted, then seated himself a
dozen feet away: -

"You are a brave man," said Koolau wonderingly. "I could kill you like a
fly."

"No, you couldn't," was the answer.

"Why not?"

"Because you are a man, Koolau, though a bad one. I know your story. You
kill fairly."

Koolau grunted, but was secretly pleased.

"What have you done with my people?" he demanded. "The boy, the two
women, and the man?"

"They gave themselves up, as I have now come for you to do."

Koolau laughed incredulously.

"I am a free man," he announced. "I have done no wrong. All ask is to be
left alone. I have lived free, and I shall die free. will never give
myself up."

"Then your people are wiser than you," answered the young captain. "Look
- they are coming now."

Koolau turned and watched the remnant of his band approach. Groaning and
sighing, a ghastly procession, it dragged its wretchedness past. It was
given to Koolau to taste a deeper bitterness, for they hurled
imprecations and insults at him as they went by; and the panting hag who
brought up the rear halted, and with skinny, harpy-claws extended,
shaking her snarling death's head from side to side, she laid a curse
upon him. One by one they dropped over the lip-edge and surrendered to
the hiding soldiers.

"You can go now," said Koolau to the captain. "I will never give myself
up. That is my last word. Good-by."

The captain slipped over the cliff to his soldiers. The next moment, and
without a flag of truce, he hoisted his hat on his scabbard, and
Koolau's bullet tore through it. That afternoon they shelled him out
from the beach, and as he retreated into the high inaccessible pockets
beyond, the soldiers followed him.

For six weeks they hunted him from pocket to pocket, over the volcanic
peaks and along the goat trails. When he hid in  the lantana jungle,
they formed lines of beaters, and through lantana jungle and guava scrub
they drove him like a rabbit. But ever he turned and doubled and eluded.
There was no cornering him. When pressed too closely, his sure rifle
held them back and they carried their wounded down the goat trails to
the beach. There were times when they did the shooting as his brown body
showed for a moment through the underbrush. Once, five of them caught
him on an exposed goat trail between pockets. They emptied their rifles
at him as he limped and climbed along his dizzy way. Afterward they
found blood-stains and knew that he was wounded. At the end of six weeks
they gave up. The soldiers and police returned to Honolulu, and Kalalau
Valley was left to him for his own, though head-hunters ventured after
him from time to time and to their own undoing.

Two years later, and for the last time, Koolau crawled unto a thicket
and lay down among the ti-leaves and wild ginger blossoms. Free he had
lived, and free he was dying. A slight drizzle of rain began to fall,
and he drew a ragged blanket about the distorted wreck of his limbs. His
body was covered with an oilskin coat. Across his chest he laid his
Mauser rifle, lingering affectionately for a moment to wipe the dampness
from the barrel. The hand with which he wiped had no fingers left upon
it with which to pull the trigger.

He closed his eyes, for, from the weakness in his body and the fuzzy
turmoil in his brain, he knew that his end was near. Like a wild animal
he had crept into hiding to die. Half-conscious, aimless and wandering,
he lived back in his life to his early manhood on Niihau. As life faded
and the drip of the rain grew dim in his ears, it seemed to him that he
was once more in the thick of the horse-breaking, with raw colts rearing
and bucking under him, his stirrups tied together beneath, or charging
madly about the breaking corral and driving the helping cowboys over the
rails. The next instant, and with seeming naturalness, he found himself
pursuing the wild bulls of the upland pastures, roping them and leading
them down to the valleys. Again the sweat and dust of the branding pen
stung his eyes and bit his nostrils.

All his lusty, whole-bodied youth was his, until the sharp pangs of
impending dissolution brought him back. He lifted  his monstrous hands
and gazed at them in wonder. But how?  Why?  Why should the wholeness of
that wild youth of his change to this?  Then he remembered, and once
again, and for a moment, he was Koolau, the leper. His eyelids fluttered
wearily down and the drip of the rain ceased in his ears. A prolonged
trembling set up in his body. This, too, ceased. He half-lifted his
head, but it fell back. Then his eyes opened, and did not close. His
last thought was of his Mauser, and he pressed it against his chest with
his folded, fingerless hands.

   The Strength of the Strong Converts to The Strength of the Strong,
Macmillan, 1914   Parables don't lie, but liars will parable.
  - Lip-King

Old Long Beard paused in his narrative, licked his greasy fingers, and
wiped them on his naked sides where his one piece of ragged bearskin
failed to cover him. Crouched around him, on their hams, were three
young men, his grandsons, Deer-Runner, Yellow-Head, and
Afraid-of-the-Dark. In appearance they were much the same. Skins of wild
animals partly covered them. They were lean and meager of build,
narrow-hipped and crooked-legged, and at the same time deep-chested,
with heavy arms and enormous hands. There was much hair on their chests
and shoulders, and on the outsides of their arms and legs. Their heads
were matted with uncut hair, long locks of which often strayed before
their eyes, beady and black and glittering like the eyes of birds. They
were narrow between the eyes and broad between the cheeks, while their
lower jaws were projecting and massive.

It was a night of clear starlight, and below them, stretching away
remotely, lay range on range of forest-covered hills. In the distance
the heavens were red from the glow of a volcano. At their backs yawned
the black mouth of a cave, out of which, from time to time, blew
draughty gusts of wind. Immediately in front of them blazed a fire. At
one side, partly devoured, lay the carcass of a bear, with about it, at
a respectable distance, several large dogs, shaggy and wolf-like. Beside
each man lay his bow and arrows and a huge club. In the cave-mouth a
number of rude spears leaned against the rock.

"So that was how we moved from the cave to the tree," old Long Beard
spoke up.

They laughed boisterously, like big children, at recollection of a
previous story his words called up. Long Beard laughed, too, the
five-inch bodkin of bone, thrust midway through the cartilage of his
nose, leaping and dancing and adding to his ferocious appearance. He did
not exactly say the words recorded, but he made animal-like sounds with
his mouth that meant the same thing.

 "And that is the first I remember of the Sea Valley," Long Beard went
on. "We were a very foolish crowd. We did not know the secret of
strength. For, behold, each family lived by itself, and took care of
itself. There were thirty families, but we got no strength from one
another. We were in fear of each other all the time. No one ever paid
visits. In the top of our tree we built a grass house, and on the
platform outside was a pile of rocks, which were for the heads of any
that might chance to try to visit us. Also, we had our spears and
arrows. We never walked under the trees of the other families, either.
My brother did, once, under old Boo-oogh's tree, and he got his head
broken and that was the end of him.

"Old Boo-oogh was very strong. It was said he could pull a grown man's
head right off. I never heard of him doing it, because no man would give
him a chance. Father wouldn't. One day, when father was down on the
beach, Boo-oogh took after mother. She couldn't run fast, for the day
before she had got her leg clawed by a bear when she was up on the
mountain gathering berries. So Boo-oogh caught her and carried her up
into his tree. Father never got her back. He was afraid. Old Boo-oogh
made faces at him.

"But father did not mind. Strong-Arm was another strong man. He was one
of the best fishermen. But one day, climbing after seagull eggs, he had
a fall from the cliff. He was never strong after that. He coughed a
great deal, and his shoulders drew near to each other. So father took
Strong-Arm's wife. When he came around and coughed under our tree,
father laughed at him and threw rocks at him. It was our way in those
days. We did not know how to add strength together and become strong."
"Would a brother take a brother's wife?" Deer-Runner demanded.

"Yes, if he had gone to live in another tree by himself."

"But we do not do such things now," Afraid-of-the-Dark objected.

"It is because I have taught your fathers better." Long Beard thrust his
hairy paw into the bear meat and drew out a handful of suet, which he
sucked with a meditative air. Again he wiped his hands on his naked
sides and went on.  "What I am telling you happened in the long ago,
before we knew any better."

"You must have been fools not to know better," was Deer-Runner's
comment, Yellow-Head grunting approval.

"So we were, but we became bigger fools, as you shall see. Still, we did
learn better, and this was the way of it. We Fish-Eaters had not learned
to add our strength until our strength was the strength of all of us.
But the Meat-Eaters, who lived across the divide in the Big Valley,
stood together, hunted together, fished together, and fought together.
One day they came into our valley. Each family of us got into its own
cave and tree. There were only ten Meat-Eaters, but they fought
together, and we fought each family by itself."

Long Beard counted long and perplexedly on his fingers.

"There were sixty men of us," was what he managed to say with fingers
and lips combined. "And we were very strong, only we did not know it. So
we watched the ten men attack Boo-oogh's tree. He made a good fight, but
he had no chance. We looked on. When some of the Meat-Eaters tried to
climb the tree, Boo-oogh had to show himself in order to drop stones on
their heads, whereupon the other Meat-Eaters, who were waiting for that
very thing, shot him full of arrows. And that was the end of Boo-oogh.

"Next, the Meat-Eaters got One-Eye and his family in his cave. They
built a fire in the mouth and smoked him out, like we smoked out the
bear there to-day. Then they went after Six-Fingers, up his tree, and,
while they were killing him and his grown son, the rest of us ran away.
They caught some of our women, and killed two old men who could not run
fast and several children. The women they carried away with them to the
Big Valley.

"After that the rest of us crept back, and, somehow, perhaps because we
were in fear and felt the need for one another, we talked the thing
over. It was our first council - our first real council. And in
that council we formed our first tribe. For we had learned the lesson.
Of the ten Meat-Eaters, each man had had the strength of ten, for the
ten had fought as one man. They had added their strength together. But
of the thirty families and the sixty men of us, we had had the strength
of but one man, for each had fought alone.

 "It was a great talk we had, and it was hard talk, for we did not have
the words then as now with which to talk. The Bug made some of the words
long afterward, and so did others of us make words from time to time.
But in the end we agreed to add our strength together and to be as one
man when the Meat-Eaters came over the divide to steal our women. And
that was the tribe.

"We set two men on the divide, one for the day and one for the night, to
watch if the Meat-Eaters came. These were the eyes of the tribe. Then,
also, day and night, there were to be ten men awake with their clubs and
spears and arrows in their hands, ready to fight. Before, when a man
went after fish, or clams, or gull-eggs, he carried his weapons with
him, and half the time he was getting food and half the time watching
for fear some other man would get him. Now that was all changed. The men
went out without their weapons and spent all their time getting food.
Likewise, when the women went into the mountains after roots and
berries, five of the ten men went with them to guard them. While all the
time, day and night, the eyes of the tribe watched from the top of the
divide.

"But troubles came. As usual, it was about the women. Men without wives
wanted other men's wives, and there was much fighting between men, and
now and again one got his head smashed or a spear through his body.
While one of the watchers was on top the divide, another man stole his
wife, and he came down to fight. Then the other watcher was in fear that
someone would take his wife, and he came down likewise. Also, there was
trouble among the ten men who carried always their weapons, and they
fought five against five, till some ran away down the coast and the
others ran after them.

"So it was that the tribe was left without eyes or guards. We had not
the strength of sixty. We had no strength at all. So we held a council
and made our first laws. I was but a cub at the time, but remember. We
said that, in order to be strong, we must not fight one another, and we
made a law that when a man killed another him would the tribe kill. We
made another law that whoso stole another man's wife him would the tribe
kill. We said that whatever man had too great  strength, and by that
strength hurt his brothers in the tribe, him would we kill that his
strength might hurt no more. For, if we let his strength hurt, the
brothers would become afraid and the tribe would fall apart, and we
would be as weak as when the Meat-Eaters first came upon us and killed
Boo-oogh.

"Knuckle-Bone was a strong man, a very strong man, and he knew not law.
He knew only his own strength, and in the fullness thereof he went forth
and took the wife of Three-Clams. Three-Clams tried to fight, but
Knuckle-Bone clubbed out his brains. Yet had Knuckle-Bone forgotten that
all the men of us had added our strength to keep the law among us, and
him we killed, at the foot of his tree, and hung his body on a branch as
a warning that the law was stronger than any man. For we were the law,
all of us, and no man was greater than the law.

"Then there were other troubles, for know, O Deer-Runner, and
Yellow-Head, and Afraid-of-the-Dark, that it is not easy to make a
tribe. There were many things, little things, that it was a great
trouble to call all the men together to have a council about. We were
having councils morning, noon, and night, and in the middle of the
night. We could find little time to go out and get food, what of the
councils, for there was always some little thing to be settled, such as
naming two new watchers to take the place of the old ones on the hill,
or naming how much food should fall to the share of the men who kept
their weapons always in their hands and got no food for themselves.

"We stood in need of a chief man to do these things, who would be the
voice of the council, and who would account to the council for the
things he did. So we named Fith-Fith the chief man. He was a strong man,
too, and very cunning, and when he was angry he made noises just like
that, fith-fith, like a wildcat.

"The ten men who guarded the tribe were set to work making a wall of
stones across the narrow part of the valley. The women and large
children helped, as did other men, until the wall was strong. After
that, all the families came down out of their caves and trees and built
grass houses behind the shelter of the wall. These houses were large and
much better than  the caves and trees, and everybody had a better time
of it because the men had added their strength together and become a
tribe. Because of the wall and the guards and the watchers, there was
more time to hunt and fish and pick roots and berries; there was more
food, and better food, and no one went hungry. And Three-Legs, so named
because his legs had been smashed when a boy and who walked with a stick
- Three-Legs got the seed of the wild corn and planted it in the
ground in the valley near his house. Also, he tried planting fat roots
and other things he found in the mountain valleys.

"Because of the safety in the Sea Valley, which was because of the wall
and the watchers and the guards, and because there was food in plenty
for all without having to fight for it, many families came in from the
coast valleys on both sides and from the high back mountains where they
had lived more like wild animals than men. And it was not long before
the Sea Valley filled up, and in it were countless families. But, before
this happened, the land, which had been free to all and belonged to all,
was divided up. Three-Legs began it when he planted corn. But most of us
did not care about the land. We thought the marking of the boundaries
with fences of stone was a foolishness. We had plenty to eat, and what
more did we want? I remember that my father and I built stone fences for
Three-Legs and were given corn in return.

"So only a few got all the land, and Three-Legs got most of it. Also,
others that had taken land gave it to the few that held on, being paid
in return with corn and fat roots, and bearskins, and fishes which the
farmers got from the fishermen in exchange for corn. And, the first
thing we knew, all the land was gone.

"It was about this time that Fith-Fith died and Dog-Tooth, his son, was
made chief. He demanded to be made chief anyway, because his father had
been chief before him. Also, he looked upon himself as a greater chief
than his father. He was a good chief at first, and worked hard, so that
the council had less and less to do. Then arose a new voice in the Sea
Valley. It was Twisted-Lip. We had never thought much of him, until he
began to talk with the spirits of the dead. Later we called him Big-Fat,
because he ate over-much, and did no  work, and grew round and large.
One day Big-Fat told us that the secrets of the dead were his, and that
he was the voice of God. He became great friends with Dog-Tooth, who
commanded that we build Big-Fat a grass house. And Big-Fat put taboos
all around this house and kept God inside.

"More and more Dog-Tooth became greater than the council, and when the
council grumbled and said it would name a new chief, Big-Fat spoke with
the voice of God and said no. Also, Three-Legs and the others who held
the land stood behind Dog-Tooth. Moreover, the strongest man in the
council was Sea-Lion, and him the land-owners gave land to secretly,
along with many bearskins and baskets of corn. So Sea-Lion said that
Big-Fat's voice was truly the voice of God and must be obeyed. And soon
afterward Sea-Lion was named the voice of Dog-Tooth and did most of his
talking for him.

"Then there was Little-Belly, a little man, so thin in the middle that
he looked as if he had never had enough to eat. Inside the mouth of the
river, after the sand-bar had combed the strength of the breakers, he
built a big fish-trap. No man had ever seen or dreamed a fish-trap
before. He worked weeks on it, with his son and his wife, while the rest
of us laughed at their labors. But, when it was done, the first day he
caught more fish in it than could the whole tribe in a week, whereat
there was great rejoicing. There was only one other place in the river
for a fish-trap, but, when my father and I and a dozen other men started
to make a very large trap, the guards came from the big grass-house we
had built for Dog-Tooth. And the guards poked us with their spears and
told us begone, because Little-Belly was going to build a trap there
himself on the word of Sea-Lion, who was the voice of Dog-Tooth. "There
was much grumbling, and my father called a council. But, when he rose to
speak, him the Sea-Lion thrust through the throat with a spear and he
died. And Dog-Tooth and Little-Belly, and Three-Legs and all that held
land said it was good. And Big-Fat said it was the will of God. And
after that all men were afraid to stand up in the council, and there was
no more council.

"Another man, Pig-Jaw, began to keep goats. He had heard  about it as
among the Meat-Eaters, and it was not long before he had many flocks.
Other men, who had no land and no fish-traps, and who else would have
gone hungry, were glad to work for Pig-Jaw, caring for his goats,
guarding them from wild dogs and tigers, and driving them to the feeding
pastures in the mountains. In return, Pig-Jaw gave them goat-meat to eat
and goat-skins to wear, and sometimes they traded the goat-meat for fish
and corn and fat roots.

"It was this time that money came to be. Sea-Lion was the man who first
thought of it, and he talked it over with Dog-Tooth and Big-Fat. You
see, these three were the ones that got a share of everything in the Sea
Valley. One basket out of every three of corn was theirs, one fish out
of every three, one goat out of every three. In return, they fed the
guards and the watchers, and kept the rest for themselves. Sometimes,
when a big haul of fish was made, they did not know what to do with all
their share. So Sea-Lion set the women to making money out of shell
- little round pieces, with a hole in each one, and all made
smooth and fine. These were strung on strings, and the strings were
called money.

"Each string was of the value of thirty fish, or forty fish, but the
women, who made a string a day, were given two fish each. The fish came
out of the shares of Dog-Tooth, Big-Fat, and Sea-Lion, which they three
did not eat. So all the money belonged to them. Then they told
Three-Legs and the other land owners that they would take their share of
corn and roots in money, Little-Belly that they would take their share
of fish in money, the Pig-Jaw that they would take their share of goats
and cheese in money. Thus, a man who had nothing, worked for one who
had, and was paid in money. With this money he bought corn, and fish,
and meat, and cheese. And Three-Legs and all owners of things paid
Dog-Tooth and Sea-Lion and Big-Fat their share in money. And they paid
the guards and watchers in money, and the guards and watchers bought
their food with the money. And, because money was cheap, Dog-Tooth made
many more men into guards. And, because money was cheap to make, a
number of men began to make money out of shell themselves. But the
guards stuck spears in them and shot them full of arrows, because they
were trying to break up the tribe. It was bad to  break up the tribe,
for then the Meat-Eaters would come over the divide and kill them all.

"Big-Fat was the voice of God, but he took Broken-Rib and made him into
a priest, so that he became the voice of Big-Fat and did most of his
talking for him. And both had other men to be servants to them. So,
also, did Little-Belly and Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw have other men to lie
in the sun about their grass houses and carry messages for them and give
commands. And more and more were men taken away from work, so that those
that were left worked harder than ever before. It seemed that men
desired to do no work and strove to seek out other ways whereby men
should work for them. Crooked-Eyes found such a way. He made the first
fire-brew out of corn. And thereafter he worked no more, for he talked
secretly with Dog-Tooth and Big-Fat and the other masters, and it was
agreed that he should be the only one to make fire-brew. But
Crooked-Eyes did no work himself. Men made the brew for him, and he paid
them in money. Then he sold the fire-brew for money, and all men bought.
And many strings of money did he give Dog-Tooth and Sea-Lion and all of
them. "Big-Fat and Broken-Rib stood by Dog-Tooth when he took his second
wife, and his third wife. They said Dog-Tooth was different from other
men and second only to God that Big-Fat kept in his taboo house, and
Dog-Tooth said so, too, and wanted to know who were they to grumble
about how many wives he took. Dog-Tooth had a big canoe made, and many
more men he took from work, who did nothing and lay in the sun, save
only when Dog-Tooth went in the canoe, when they paddled for him. And he
made Tiger-Face head man over all the guards, so that Tiger-Face became
his right arm, and when he did not like a man Tiger-Face killed that man
for him. And Tiger-Face, also, made another man to be his right arm, and
to give commands, and to kill for him.

"But this was the strange thing: as the days went by we who were left
worked harder and harder, and yet did we get less and less to eat."

"But what of the goats and the corn and the fat roots and the
fish-trap," spoke up Afraid-of-the-Dark, "what of all this? Was there
not more food to be gained by man's work?"

 "It is so," Long-Beard agreed. "Three men on the fish-trap got more
fish than the whole tribe before there was a fish-trap. But have not
said we were fools?  The more food we were able to get, the less food
did we have to eat."

"But was it not plain that the many men who did not work ate it all up?"
Yellow-Head demanded.

Long-Beard nodded his head sadly. "Dog-Tooth's dogs were stuffed with
meat, and the men who lay in the sun and did no work were rolling in
fat, and, at the same time, there were little children crying themselves
to sleep with hunger biting them with every wail."

Deer-Runner was spurred by the recital of famine to tear out a chunk of
bear-meat and broil it on a stick over the coals. This he devoured with
smacking lips, while Long-Beard went on:

"When we grumbled Big-Fat arose, and with the voice of God said that God
had chosen the wise men to own the land and the goats and the fish-trap
and the fire-brew, and that without these wise men we would all be
animals, as in the days when we lived in trees.

"And there arose one who became a singer of songs for the king. Him they
called the Bug, because he was small and ungainly of face and limb and
excelled not in work or deed. He loved the fattest marrow bones, the
choicest fish, the milk warm from the goats, the first corn that was
ripe, and the snug place by the fire. And thus, becoming singer of songs
to the king, he found a way to do nothing and be fat. And when the
people grumbled more and more, and some threw stones at the king's grass
house, the Bug sang a song of how good it was to be a Fish-Eater. In his
song he told that the Fish-Eaters were the chosen of God and the finest
men God had made. He sang of the Meat-Eaters as pigs and crows, and sang
how fine and good it was for the Fish-Eaters to fight and die doing
God's work, which was the killing of Meat-Eaters. The words of his song
were like fire in us, and we clamored to be led against the Meat-Eaters.
And we forgot that we were hungry, and why we had grumbled, and were
glad to be led by Tiger-Face over the divide, where we killed many
Meat-Eaters and were content.

"But things were no better in the Sea Valley. The only way  to get food
was to work for Three-Legs or Little-Belly or Pig-Jaw; for there was no
land that a man might plant with corn for himself. And often there were
more men than Three-Legs and the others had work for. So these men went
hungry, and so did their wives and children and their old mothers.
Tiger-Face said they could become guards if they wanted to, and many of
them did, and thereafter they did no work except to poke spears in the
men who did work and who grumbled at feeding so many idlers.

"And when we grumbled, ever the Bug sang new songs. He said that
Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and the rest were strong men, and that that was
why they had so much. He said that we should be glad to have strong men
with us, else would we perish of our own worthlessness and the
Meat-Eaters. Therefore, we should be glad to let such strong men have
all they could lay hands on. And Big-Fat and Pig-Jaw and Tiger-Face and
all the rest said it was true.

"&onq;All right,&cnq; said Long-Fang, &onq;then will I, too, be a strong
man.&cnq; And he got himself corn and began to make fire-brew and sell
it for strings of money. And, when Crooked-Eyes complained, Long-Fang
said that he was himself a strong man, and that if Crooked-Eyes made any
more noise he would bash his brains out for him. Whereat Crooked-Eyes
was afraid and went and talked with Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw. And all
three went and talked to Dog-Tooth. And Dog-Tooth spoke to Sea-Lion, and
Sea-Lion sent a runner with a message to Tiger-Face. And Tiger-Face sent
his guards, who burned Long-Fang's house along with the fire-brew he had
made. Also, they killed him and all his family. And Big-Fat said it was
good, and the Bug sang another song about how good it was to observe the
law, and what a fine land the Sea Valley was, and how every man who
loved the Sea Valley should go forth and kill the bad Meat-Eaters. And
again his song was as fire to us, and we forgot to grumble.

"It was very strange. When Little-Belly caught too many fish, so that it
took a great many to sell for a little money, he threw many of the fish
back into the sea, so that more money would be paid for what was left.
And Three-Legs often let many large fields lie idle so as to get more
money for his corn. And the women, making so much money out of shell
that  much money was needed to buy with, Dog-Tooth stopped the making of
money. And the women had no work, so they took the places of the men. I
worked on the fish-trap, getting a string of money every five days. But
my sister now did my work, getting a string of money for every ten days.
The women worked cheaper, and there was less food, and Tiger-Face said
for us to become guards. Only I could not become a guard because I was
lame of one leg and Tiger-Face would not have me. And there were many
like me. We were broken men and only fit to beg for work or to take care
of the babies while the women worked."

Yellow-Head, too, was made hungry by the recital and broiled a piece of
bear-meat on the coals.

"But why didn't you rise up, all of you, and kill Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw
and Big-Fat and the rest and get enough to eat?" Afraid-in-the-Dark
demanded.

"Because we could not understand," Long-Beard answered. "There was too
much to think about, and, also, there were the guards sticking spears
into us, and Big-Fat talking about God, and the Bug singing new songs.
And when any man did think right, and said so, Tiger-Face and the guards
got him, and he was tied out to the rocks at low tide so that the rising
waters drowned him.

"It was a strange thing - the money. It was like the Bug's songs.
It seemed all right, but it wasn't, and we were slow to understand.
Dog-Tooth began to gather the money in. He put it in a big pile, in a
grass house, with guards to watch it day and night. And the more money
he piled in the house the dearer money became, so that a man worked a
longer time for a string of money than before. Then, too, there was
always talk of war with the Meat-Eaters, and Dog-Tooth and Tiger-Face
filled many houses with corn, and dried fish, and smoked goat-meat, and
cheese. And with the food piled there in mountains the people had not
enough to eat. But what did it matter? Whenever the people grumbled too
loudly the Bug sang a new song, and Big-Fat said it was God's word that
we should kill Meat-Eaters, and Tiger-Face led us over the divide to
kill and be killed. I was not good enough to be a guard and lie fat in
the sun, but, when we made war, Tiger-Face was glad to take me along.
And when we had eaten all the  food stored in the houses we stopped
fighting and went back to work to pile up more food."

"Then were you all crazy," commented Deer-Runner.

"Then were we indeed all crazy," Long-Beard agreed. "It was strange, all
of it. There was Split-Nose. He said everything was wrong. He said it
was true that we grew strong by adding our strength together. And he
said that, when we first formed the tribe, it was right that the men
whose strength hurt the tribe should be shorn of their strength -
men who bashed their brothers' heads and stole their brothers' wives.
And now, he said, the tribe was not getting stronger, but was getting
weaker, because there were men with another kind of strength that were
hurting the tribe - men who had the strength of the land, like
Three-Legs; who had the strength of the fish-trap, like Little-Belly;
who had the strength of all the goat meat, like Pig-Jaw. The thing to
do, Split-Nose said, was to shear these men of their evil strength; to
make them go to work, all of them, and to let no man eat who did not
work.

"And the Bug sang another song about men like Split-Nose, who wanted to
go back and live in trees.

"Yet Split-Nose said no; that he did not want to go back, but ahead;
that they grew strong only as they added their strength together; and
that, if the Fish-Eaters would add their strength to the Meat-Eaters,
there would be no more fighting and no more watchers and no more guards,
and that, with all men working, there would be so much food that each
man would have to work not more than two hours a day.

"Then the Bug sang again, and he sang that Split-Nose was lazy, and he
sang also the &onq;Song of the Bees.&cnq; It was a strange song, and
those who listened were made mad, as from the drinking of strong
fire-brew. The song was of a swarm of bees, and of a robber wasp who had
come in to live with the bees and who was stealing all their honey. The
wasp was lazy and told them there was no need to work; also, he told
them to make friends with the bears, who were not honey-stealers but
only very good friends. And the Bug sang in crooked words, so that those
who listened knew that the swarm was the Sea Valley tribe, that the
bears were the Meat-Eaters, and that the lazy wasp was Split-Nose. And,
when the Bug sang  that the bees listened to the wasp till the swarm was
near to perishing, the people growled and snarled, and when the Bug sang
that at last the good bees arose and stung the wasp to death, the people
picked up stones from the ground and stoned Split-Nose to death till
there was naught to be seen of him but the heap of stones they had flung
on top of him. And there were many poor people who worked long and hard
and had not enough to eat that helped throw the stones on Split-Nose.

"And, after the death of Split-Nose, there was but one other man that
dared rise up and speak his mind, and that man was Hair-Face. &onq;Where
is the strength of the strong?&cnq; he asked. &onq;We are the strong,
all of us, and we are stronger than Dog-Tooth and Tiger-Face and
Three-Legs and Pig-Jaw and all the rest who do nothing and eat much and
weaken us by the hurt of their strength which is bad strength. Men who
are slaves are not strong. If the man who first found the virtue and use
of fire had used his strength we would have been his slaves, as we are
the slaves to-day of Little-Belly, who found the virtue and use of the
fish-trap; and of the men who found the virtue and use of the land, and
the goats, and the fire-brew. Before, we lived in trees, my brothers,
and no man was safe. But we fight no more with one another. We have
added our strength together. Then let us fight no more with the
Meat-Eaters. Let us add our strength and their strength together. Then
will we be indeed strong. And then we will go out together, the
Fish-Eaters and the Meat-Eaters, and we will kill the tigers and the
lions and the wolves and the wild dogs, and we will pasture our goats on
all the hillsides and plant our corn and fat roots in all the high
mountain valleys. In that day we will be so strong that all the wild
animals will flee before us and perish. And nothing will withstand us,
for the strength of each man will be the strength of all men in the
world.&cnq;

"So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a
wild man and wanted to go back and live in a tree. It was very strange.
Whenever a man arose and wanted to go forward all those that stood still
said he went backward and should be killed. And the poor people helped
stone him, and were fools. We were all fools, except those who were fat
and did no work. The fools were called wise, and the wise were stoned.
Men who worked did not get enough to eat, and the men who did not work
ate too much.

"And the tribe went on losing strength. The children were weak and
sickly. And, because we ate not enough, strange sicknesses came among us
and we died like flies. And then the Meat-Eaters came upon us. We had
followed Tiger-Face too often over the divide and killed them. And now
they came to repay in blood. We were too weak and sick to man the big
wall. And they killed us, all of us, except some of the women, which
they took away with them. The Bug and I escaped, and I hid in the
wildest places, and became a hunter of meat and went hungry no more.
stole a wife from the Meat-Eaters, and went to live in the caves of the
high mountains where they could not find me. And we had three sons, and
each son stole a wife from the Meat-Eaters. And the rest you know, for
are you not the sons of my sons?"

"But the Bug?" queried Deer-Runner. "What became of him?"

"He went to live with the Meat-Eaters and to be a singer of songs to the
king. He is an old man now, but he sings the same old songs; and, when a
man rises up to go forward, he sings that that man is walking backward
to live in a tree."

Long Beard dipped into the bear-carcass and sucked with toothless gums
at a fist of suet.

"Some day," he said, wiping his hands on his sides, "all the fools will
be dead and then all live men will go forward. The strength of the
strong will be theirs, and they will add their strength together, so
that, of all the men in the world, not one will fight with another.
There will be no guards nor watchers on the walls. And all the hunting
animals will be killed, and, as Hair-Face said, all the hillsides will
be pastured with goats and all the high mountain valleys will be planted
with corn and fat roots. And all men will be brothers, and no man will
lie idle in the sun and be fed by his fellows. And all that will come to
pass in the time when the fools are dead, and when there will be no more
singers to stand still and sing the &onq;Song of the Bees.&cnq; Bees are
not men."

   War Converts to The Night-born, The Century Co., 1913 He was a young
man, not more than twenty-four or five, and he might have sat his horse
with the careless grace of his youth had he not been so catlike and
tense. His black eyes roved everywhere, catching the movements of twigs
and branches where small birds hopped, questing ever onward through the
changing vistas of trees and brush, and returning always to the clumps
of undergrowth on either side. And as he watched, so did he listen,
though he rode on in silence, save for the boom of heavy guns from far
to the west. This had been sounding monotonously in his ears for hours,
and only its cessation would have aroused his notice. For he had
business closer to hand. Across his saddle-bow was balanced a carbine.

So tensely was he strung, that a bunch of quail, exploding into flight
from under his horse's nose, startled him to such an extent that
automatically, instantly, he had reined in and fetched the carbine
halfway to his shoulder. He grinned sheepishly, recovered himself, and
rode on. So tense was he, so bent upon the work he had to do, that the
sweat stung his eyes unwiped, and unheeded rolled down his nose and
spattered his saddle pommel. The band of his cavalryman's hat was
fresh-stained with sweat. The roan horse under him was likewise wet. It
was high noon of a breathless day of heat. Even the birds and squirrels
did not dare the sun, but sheltered in shady hiding places among the
trees.

Man and horse were littered with leaves and dusted with yellow pollen,
for the open was ventured no more than was compulsory. They kept to the
brush and trees, and invariably the man halted and peered out before
crossing a dry glade or naked stretch of upland pasturage. He worked
always to the north, though his way was devious, and it was from the
north that he seemed most to apprehend that for which he was looking. He
was no coward, but his courage was only that of the average civilized
man, and he was looking to live, not die.

Up a small hillside he followed a cowpath through such  dense scrub that
he was forced to dismount and lead his horse. But when the path swung
around to the west, he abandoned it and headed to the north again along
the oak-covered top of the ridge.

The ridge ended in a steep descent - so steep that he zigzagged
back and forth across the face of the slope, sliding and stumbling among
the dead leaves and matted vines and keeping a watchful eye on the horse
above that threatened to fall down upon him. The sweat ran from him, and
the pollen-dust, settling pungently in mouth and nostrils, increased his
thirst. Try as he would, nevertheless the descent was noisy, and
frequently he stopped, panting in the dry heat and listening for any
warning from beneath.

At the bottom he came out on a flat, so densely forested that he could
not make out its extent. Here the character of the woods changed, and he
was able to remount. Instead of the twisted hillside oaks, tall straight
trees, big-trunked and prosperous, rose from the damp fat soil. Only
here and there were thickets, easily avoided, while he encountered
winding, park-like glades where the cattle had pastured in the days
before war had run them off.

His progress was more rapid now, as he came down into the valley, and at
the end of half an hour he halted at an ancient rail fence on the edge
of a clearing. He did not like the openness of it, yet his path lay
across to the fringe of trees that marked the banks of the stream. It
was a mere quarter of a mile across that open, but the thought of
venturing out in it was repugnant. A rifle, a score of them, a thousand,
might lurk in that fringe by the stream.

Twice he essayed to start, and twice he paused. He was appalled by his
own loneliness. The pulse of war that beat from the West suggested the
companionship of battling thousands; here was naught but silence, and
himself, and possible death-dealing bullets from a myriad ambushes. And
yet his task was to find what he feared to find. He must go on, and on,
till somewhere, some time, he encountered another man, or other men,
from the other side, scouting, as he was scouting, to make report, as he
must make report, of having come in touch. Changing his mind, he skirted
inside the woods for a distance,  and again peeped forth. This time, in
the middle of the clearing, he saw a small farmhouse. There were no
signs of life. No smoke curled from the chimney, not a barnyard fowl
clucked and strutted. The kitchen door stood open, and he gazed so long
and hard into the black aperture that it seemed almost that a farmer's
wife must emerge at any moment.

He licked the pollen and dust from his dry lips, stiffened himself, mind
and body, and rode out into the blazing sunshine. Nothing stirred. He
went on past the house, and approached the wall of trees and bushes by
the river's bank. One thought persisted maddeningly. It was of the crash
into his body of a high-velocity bullet. It made him feel very fragile
and defenseless, and he crouched lower in the saddle.

Tethering his horse in the edge of the wood, he continued a hundred
yards on foot till he came to the stream. Twenty feet wide it was,
without perceptible current, cool and inviting, and he was very thirsty.
But he waited inside his screen of leafage, his eyes fixed on the screen
on the opposite side. To make the wait endurable, he sat down, his
carbine resting on his knees. The minutes passed, and slowly his
tenseness relaxed. At last he decided there was no danger; but just as
he prepared to part the bushes and bend down to the water, a movement
among the opposite bushes caught his eye.

It might be a bird. But he waited. Again there was an agitation of the
bushes, and then, so suddenly that it almost startled a cry from him,
the bushes parted and a face peered out. It was a face covered with
several weeks' growth of ginger-colored beard. The eyes were blue and
wide apart, with laughter-wrinkles in the corners that showed despite
the tired and anxious expression of the whole face.

All this he could see with microscopic clearness, for the distance was
no more than twenty feet. And all this he saw in such brief time, that
he saw it as he lifted his carbine to his shoulder. He glanced along the
sights, and knew that he was gazing upon a man who was as good as dead.
It was impossible to miss at such point blank range.

But he did not shoot. Slowly he lowered the carbine and watched. A hand,
clutching a water-bottle, became visible and the ginger beard bent
downward to fill the bottle. He could hear the gurgle of the water. Then
arm and bottle and ginger  beard disappeared behind the closing bushes.
A long time he waited, when, with thirst unslaked, he crept back to his
horse, rode slowly across the sun-washed clearing, and passed into the
shelter of the woods beyond.



 Another day, hot and breathless. A deserted farmhouse, large, with many
outbuildings and an orchard, standing in a clearing. From the woods, on
a roan horse, carbine across pommel, rode the young man with the quick
black eyes. He breathed with relief as he gained the house. That a fight
had taken place here earlier in the season was evident. Clips and empty
cartridges, tarnished with verdigris, lay on the ground, which, while
wet, had been torn up by the hoofs of horses. Hard by the kitchen garden
were graves, tagged and numbered. From the oak tree by the kitchen door,
in tattered, weather-beaten garments, hung the bodies of two men. The
faces, shriveled and defaced, bore no likeness to the faces of men. The
roan horse snorted beneath them, and the rider caressed and soothed it
and tied it farther away.

Entering the house, he found the interior a wreck. He trod on empty
cartridges as he walked from room to room to reconnoiter from the
windows. Men had camped and slept everywhere, and on the floor of one
room he came upon stains unmistakable where the wounded had been laid
down.

Again outside, he led the horse around behind the barn and invaded the
orchard. A dozen trees were burdened with ripe apples. He filled his
pockets, eating while he picked. Then a thought came to him, and he
glanced at the sun, calculating the time of his return to camp. He
pulled off his shirt, tying the sleeves and making a bag. This he
proceeded to fill with apples.

As he was about to mount his horse, the animal suddenly pricked up its
ears. The man, too, listened, and heard, faintly, the thud of hoofs on
soft earth. He crept to the corner of the barn and peered out. A dozen
mounted men, strung out loosely, approaching from the opposite side of
the clearing, were only a matter of a hundred yards or so away. They
rode on to the house. Some dismounted, while others remained in  the
saddle as an earnest that their stay would be short. They seemed to be
holding a council, for he could hear them talking excitedly in the
detested tongue of the alien invader. The time passed, but they seemed
unable to reach a decision. He put the carbine away in its boot,
mounted, and waited impatiently, balancing the shirt of apples on the
pommel.

He heard footsteps approaching, and drove his spurs so fiercely into the
roan as to force a surprised groan from the animal as it leaped forward.
At the corner of the barn he saw the intruder, a mere boy of nineteen or
twenty for all of his uniform, jump back to escape being run down. At
the same moment the roan swerved, and its rider caught a glimpse of the
aroused men by the house. Some were springing from their horses, and he
could see the rifles going to their shoulders. He passed the kitchen
door and the dried corpses swinging in the shade, compelling his foes to
run around the front of the house. A rifle cracked, and a second, but he
was going fast, leaning forward, low in the saddle, one hand clutching
the shirt of apples, the other guiding the horse.

The top bar of the fence was four feet high, but he knew his roan and
leaped it at full career to the accompaniment of several scattered
shots. Eight hundred yards straight away were the woods, and the roan
was covering the distance with mighty strides. Every man was now firing.
They were pumping their guns so rapidly that he no longer heard
individual shots. A bullet went through his hat, but he was unaware,
though he did know when another tore through the apples on the pommel.
And he winced and ducked even lower when a third bullet, fired low,
struck a stone between his horse's legs and ricochetted off through the
air, buzzing and humming like some incredible insect.

The shots died down as the magazines were emptied, until, quickly, there
was no more shooting. The young man was elated. Through that astonishing
fusillade he had come unscathed. He glanced back. Yes, they had emptied
their magazines. He could see several reloading. Others were running
back behind the house for their horses. As he looked, two already
mounted, came back into view around the corner, riding hard. And at the
same moment, he saw the man with the  unmistakable ginger beard kneel
down on the ground, level his gun, and coolly take his time for the long
shot.

The young man threw his spurs into the horse, crouched very low, and
swerved in his flight in order to distract the other's aim. And still
the shot did not come. With each jump of the horse, the woods sprang
nearer. They were only two hundred yards away, and still the shot was
delayed.

And then he heard it, the last thing he was to hear, for he was dead ere
he hit the ground in the long crashing fall from the saddle. And they,
watching at the house, saw him fall, saw his body bounce when it struck
the earth, and saw the burst of red-cheeked apples that rolled about
him. They laughed at the unexpected eruption of apples, and clapped
their hands in applause of the long shot by the man with the ginger
beard.

   The Mexican Converts to The Night-born, The Century Co., 1913 Nobody
knew his history - they of the Junta least of all. He was their
"little mystery," their "big patriot," and in his way he worked as hard
for the coming Mexican Revolution as did they. They were tardy in
recognizing this, for not one of the Junta liked him. The day he first
drifted into their crowded, busy rooms, they all suspected him of being
a spy - one of the bought tools of the Diaz secret service. Too
many of the comrades were in civil and military prisons scattered over
the United States, and others of them, in irons, were even then being
taken across the border to be lined up against adobe walls and shot.

At the first sight the boy did not impress them favorably. Boy he was,
not more than eighteen and not over large for his years. He announced
that he was Felipe Rivera, and that it was his wish to work for the
Revolution. That was all - not a wasted word, no further
explanation. He stood waiting. There was no smile on his lips, no
geniality in his eyes. Big dashing Paulino Vera felt an inward shudder.
Here was something forbidding, terrible, inscrutable. There was
something venomous and snakelike in the boy's black eyes. They burned
like cold fire, as with a vast, concentrated bitterness. He flashed them
from the faces of the conspirators to the typewriter which little Mrs.
Sethby was industriously operating. His eyes rested on hers but an
instant - she had chanced to look up - and she, too, sensed
the nameless something that made her pause. She was compelled to read
back in order to regain the swing of the letter she was writing.

Paulino Vera looked questioningly at Arrellano and Ramos, and
questioningly they looked back and to each other. The indecision of
doubt brooded in their eyes. This slender boy was the Unknown, vested
with all the menace of the Unknown. He was unrecognizable, something
quite beyond the ken of honest, ordinary revolutionists whose fiercest
hatred for Diaz and his tyranny after all was only that of honest and
ordinary patriots. Here was something else, they knew not  what. But
Vera, always the most impulsive, the quickest to act, stepped into the
breach.

"Very well," he said coldly. "You say you want to work for the
Revolution. Take off your coat. Hang it over there. I will show you
- come - where are the buckets and cloths. The floor is
dirty. You will begin by scrubbing it, and by scrubbing the floors of
the other rooms. The spittoons need to be cleaned. Then there are the
windows."

"Is it for the Revolution?" the boy asked.

"It is for the Revolution," Vera answered.

Rivera looked cold suspicion at all of them, then proceeded to take off
his coat.

"It is well," he said.

And nothing more. Day after day he came to his work - sweeping,
scrubbing, cleaning. He emptied the ashes from the stoves, brought up
the coal and kindling, and lighted the fires before the most energetic
one of them was at his desk.

"Can I sleep here?" he asked once. Ah, ha!  So that was it - the
hand of Diaz showing through!  To sleep in the rooms of the Junta meant
access to their secrets, to the lists of names, to the addresses of
comrades down on Mexican soil. The request was denied, and Rivera never
spoke of it again. He slept they knew not where, and ate they knew not
where nor how. Once, Arrellano offered him a couple of dollars. Rivera
declined the money with a shake of the head. When Vera joined in and
tried to press it upon him, he said:

"I am working for the Revolution."

It takes money to raise a modern revolution, and always the Junta was
pressed. The members starved and toiled, and the longest day was none
too long, and yet there were times when it appeared as if the Revolution
stood or fell on no more than the matter of a few dollars. Once, the
first time, when the rent of the house was two months behind and the
landlord was threatening dispossession, it was Felipe Rivera, the
scrub-boy in the poor, cheap clothes, worn and threadbare, who laid
sixty dollars in gold on May Sethby's desk. There were other times.
Three hundred letters, clicked out on the busy typewriters (appeals for
assistance, for sanctions from the organized labor groups, requests for
square news  deals to the editors of newspapers, protests against the
high-handed treatment of revolutionists by the United States courts),
lay unmailed, awaiting postage. Vera's watch had disappeared - the
old-fashioned gold repeater that had been his father's. Likewise had
gone the plain gold band from May Sethby's third finger. Things were
desperate. Ramos and Arrellano pulled their long mustaches in despair.
The letters must go off, and the Post Office allowed no credit to
purchasers of stamps. Then it was that Rivera put on his hat and went
out. When he came back he laid a thousand two-cent stamps on May
Sethby's desk.

"I wonder if it is the cursed gold of Diaz?" said Vera to the comrades.

They elevated their brows and could not decide. And Felipe Rivera, the
scrubber for the Revolution, continued, as occasion arose, to lay down
gold and silver for the Junta's use.

And still they could not bring themselves to like him. They did not know
him. His ways were not theirs. He gave no confidences. He repelled all
probing. Youth that he was, they could never nerve themselves to dare to
question him.

"A great and lonely spirit, perhaps, I do not know, I do not know,"
Arrellano said helplessly.

"He is not human," said Ramos.

"His soul has been seared," said May Sethby. "Light and laughter have
been burned out of him. He is like one dead, and yet he is fearfully
alive."

"He has been through hell," said Vera. "No man could look like that who
has not been through hell - and he is only a boy."

Yet they could not like him. He never talked, never inquired, never
suggested. He would stand listening, expressionless, a thing dead, save
for his eyes, coldly burning, while their talk of the Revolution ran
high and warm. From face to face and speaker to speaker his eyes would
turn, boring like gimlets of incandescent ice, disconcerting and
perturbing.

"He is no spy," Vera confided to May Sethby. "He is a patriot -
mark me, the greatest patriot of us all. I know it, I feel it, here in
my heart and head I feel it. But him I know not at all."

 "He has a bad temper," said May Sethby.

"I know," said Vera, with a shudder. "He has looked at me with those
eyes of his. They do not love; they threaten; they are savage as a wild
tiger's. I know, if I should prove unfaithful to the Cause, that he
would kill me. He has no heart. He is pitiless as steel, keen and cold
as frost. He is like moonshine in a winter night when a man freezes to
death on some lonely mountain top. I am not afraid of Diaz and all his
killers; but this boy, of him am I afraid. I tell you true. I am afraid.
He is the breath of death."

Yet Vera it was who persuaded the others to give the first trust to
Rivera. The line of communication between Los Angeles and Lower
California had broken down. Three of the comrades had dug their own
graves and been shot into them. Two more were United States prisoners in
Los Angeles. Juan Alvarado, the Federal commander, was a monster. All
their plans did he checkmate. They could no longer gain access to the
active revolutionists, and the incipient ones, in Lower California.

Young Rivera was given his instructions and dispatched south. When he
returned, the line of communication was re    stablished, and Juan
Alvarado was dead. He had been found in bed, a knife hilt-deep in his
breast. This had exceeded Rivera's instructions, but they of the Junta
knew the times of his movements. They did not ask him. He said nothing.
But they looked at one another and conjectured.

"I have told you," said Vera. "Diaz has more to fear from this youth
than from any man. He is implacable. He is the hand of God."

The bad temper, mentioned by May Sethby, and sensed by them all, was
evidenced by physical proofs. Now he appeared with a cut lip, a
blackened cheek, or a swollen ear. It was patent that he brawled,
somewhere in that outside world where he ate and slept, gained money,
and moved in ways unknown to them. As the time passed, he had come to
set type for the little revolutionary sheet they published weekly. There
were occasions when he was unable to set type, when his knuckles were
bruised and battered, when his thumbs were injured and helpless, when
one arm or the other hung wearily at his side while his face was drawn
with unspoken pain.

 "A wastrel," said Arrellano.

"A frequenter of low places," said Ramos.

"But where does he get the money?" Vera demanded. "Only to-day, just
now, have I learned that he paid the bill for white paper - one
hundred and forty dollars."

"There are his absences," said May Sethby. "He never explains them."

"We should set a spy upon him," Ramos propounded.

"I should not care to be that spy," said Vera. "I fear you would never
see me again, save to bury me. He has a terrible passion. Not even God
would he permit to stand between him and the way of his passion."

"I feel like a child before him," Ramos confessed.

"To me he is power - he is the primitive, the wild wolf, -
the striking rattlesnake, the stinging centipede," said Arrellano.

"He is the Revolution incarnate," said Vera. "He is the flame and the
spirit of it, the insatiable cry for vengeance that makes no cry but
that slays noiselessly. He is a destroying angel moving through the
still watches of the night."

"I could weep over him," said May Sethby. "He knows nobody. He hates all
people. Us he tolerates, for we are the way of his desire. He is alone .
. . lonely." Her voice broke in a half sob and there was dimness in her
eyes.

Rivera's ways and times were truly mysterious. There were periods when
they did not see him for a week at a time. Once, he was away a month.
These occasions were always capped by his return, when, without
advertisement or speech, he laid gold coins on May Sethby's desk. Again,
for days and weeks, he spent all his time with the Junta. And yet again,
for irregular periods, he would disappear through the heart of each day,
from early morning until late afternoon. At such times he came early and
remained late. Arrellano had found him at midnight, setting type with
fresh swollen knuckles, or mayhap it was his lip, new-split, that still
bled.



 The time of the crisis approached. Whether or not the Revolution would
be depended upon the Junta, and the Junta  was hard-pressed. The need
for money was greater than ever before, while money was harder to get.
Patriots had given their last cent and now could give no more. Section
gang laborers - fugitive peons from Mexico - were
contributing half their scanty wages. But more than that was needed. The
heart-breaking, conspiring, undermining toil of years approached
fruition. The time was ripe. The Revolution hung on the balance. One
shove more, one last heroic effort, and it would tremble across the
scales to victory. They knew their Mexico. Once started, the Revolution
would take care of itself. The whole Diaz machine would go down like a
house of cards. The border was ready to rise. One Yankee, with a hundred
I. W. W. men, waited the word to cross over the border and begin the
conquest of Lower California. But he needed guns. And clear across to
the Atlantic, the Junta in touch with them all and all of them needing
guns, mere adventurers, soldiers of fortune, bandits, disgruntled
American union men, socialists, anarchists, rough-necks, Mexican exiles,
peons escaped from bondage, whipped miners from the bull-pens of
Cœur d'Alene and Colorado who desired only the more vindictively
to fight - all the flotsam and jetsam of wild spirits from the
madly complicated modern world. And it was guns and ammunition,
ammunition and guns - the unceasing and eternal cry.

Fling this heterogeneous, bankrupt, vindictive mass across the border,
and the Revolution was on. The custom house, the northern ports of
entry, would be captured. Diaz could not resist. He dared not throw the
weight of his armies against them, for he must hold the south. And
through the south the flame would spread despite. The people would rise.
The defenses of city after city would crumple up. State after state
would totter down. And at last, from every side, the victorious armies
of the Revolution would close in on the City of Mexico itself, Diaz's
last stronghold.

But the money. They had the men, impatient and urgent, who would use the
guns. They knew the traders who would sell and deliver the guns. But to
culture the Revolution thus far had exhausted the Junta. The last dollar
had been spent, the last resource and the last starving patriot milked
dry, and the great adventure still trembled on the scales. Guns and
ammunition!   The ragged battalions must be armed. But how?  Ramos
lamented his confiscated estates. Arrellano wailed the spendthriftness
of his youth. May Sethby wondered if it would have been different had
they of the Junta been more economical in the past.

"To think that the freedom of Mexico should stand or fall on a few
paltry thousands of dollars," said Paulino Vera.

Despair was in all their faces. José Amarillo, their last hope, a
recent convert, who had promised money, had been apprehended at his
hacienda in Chihuahua and shot against his own stable wall. The news had
just come through.

Rivera, on his knees, scrubbing, looked up, with suspended brush, his
bare arms flecked with soapy, dirty water.

"Will five thousand do it?" he asked.

They looked their amazement. Vera nodded and swallowed. He could not
speak, but he was on the instant invested with a vast faith.

"Order the guns," Rivera said, and thereupon was guilty of the longest
flow of words they had ever heard him utter. "The time is short. In
three weeks I shall bring you the five thousand. It is well. The weather
will be warmer for those who fight. Also, it is the best can do."

Vera fought his faith. It was incredible. Too many fond hopes had been
shattered since he had begun to play the revolution game. He believed
this threadbare scrubber of the Revolution, and yet he dared not
believe.

"You are crazy," he said.

"In three weeks," said Rivera. "Order the guns."

He got up, rolled down his sleeves, and put on his coat.

"Order the guns," he said. "I am going now."



 After hurrying and scurrying, much telephoning and bad language, a
night session was held in Kelly's office. Kelly was rushed with
business; also, he was unlucky. He had brought Danny Ward out from New
York, arranged the fight for him with Billy Carthey, the date was three
weeks away, and for two days now, carefully concealed from the sporting
writers, Carthey had been lying up, badly injured. There was no one  to
take his place. Kelly had been burning the wires East to every eligible
lightweight, but they were tied up with dates and contracts. And now
hope had revived, though faintly.

"You 've got a hell of a nerve," Kelly addressed Rivera, after one look,
as soon as they got together.

Hate that was malignant was in Rivera's eyes, but his face remained
impassive.

"I can lick Ward," was all he said.

"How do you know?  Ever see him fight?"

Rivera shook his head.

"He can beat you up with one hand and both eyes closed."

Rivera shrugged his shoulders. "Have n't you got anything to say?" the
fight promoter snarled.

"I can lick him."

"Who 'd you ever fight, anyway?" Michael Kelly demanded. Michael was the
promoter's brother, and ran the Yellowstone pool rooms where he made
goodly sums on the fight game.

Rivera favored him with a bitter, unanswering stare.

The promoter's secretary, a distinctively sporty young man, sneered
audibly.

"Well, you know Roberts," Kelly broke the hostile silence. "He ought to
be here. I 've sent for him. Sit down and wait, though from the looks of
you, you have n't got a chance. I can't throw the public down with a bum
fight. Ringside seats are selling at fifteen dollars, you know that."

When Roberts arrived, it was patent that he was mildly drunk. He was a
tall, lean, slack-jointed individual, and his walk, like his talk, was a
smooth and languid drawl.

Kelly went straight to the point.

"Look here, Roberts, you 've been braggin' you discovered this little
Mexican. You know Carthey's broke his arm. Well, this little yellow
streak has the gall to blow in to-day and say he 'll take Carthey's
place. What about it?"

"It 's all right, Kelly," came the slow response. "He can put up a
fight."

"I suppose you 'll be sayin' next that he can lick Ward," Kelly snapped.

Roberts considered judicially.

 "No, I won't say that. Ward 's a top-notcher and a ring general. But he
can't hashhouse Rivera in short order. I know Rivera. Nobody can get his
goat. He ain't got a goat that I could ever discover. And he 's a
two-handed fighter. He can throw in the sleep-makers from any position."

"Never mind that. What kind of a show can he put up?  You 've been
conditioning and training fighters all your life. I take off my hat to
your judgment. Can he give the public a run for its money?"

"He sure can, and he 'll worry Ward a mighty heap on top of it. You
don't know that boy. I do. I discovered him. He ain't got a goat. He 's
a devil. He 's a wizzy-wooz if anybody should ask you. He 'll make Ward
sit up with a show of local talent that 'll make the rest of you sit up.
I won't say he 'll lick Ward, but he 'll put up such a show that you 'll
all know he 's a comer."

"All right." Kelly turned to his secretary. "Ring up Ward. warned him to
show up if I thought it worth while. He 's right across at the
Yellowstone, throwin' chests and doing the popular." Kelly turned back
to the conditioner. "Have a drink?"

Roberts sipped his highball and unburdened himself.

"Never told you how I discovered the little cuss. It was a couple of
years ago he showed up out at the quarters. I was getting Prayne ready
for his fight with Delaney. Prayne 's wicked. He ain't got a tickle of
mercy in his make-up. He 'd chopped up his pardner's something cruel,
and I could n't find a willing boy that 'd work with him. I 'd noticed
this little starved Mexican kid hanging around, and was desperate. So I
grabbed him, slammed on the gloves, and put him in. He was tougher 'n
rawhide, but weak. And he did n't know the first letter in the alphabet
of boxing. Prayne chopped him to ribbons. But he hung on for two
sickening rounds, when he fainted. Starvation, that was all. Battered?
You could n't have recognized him. I gave him half a dollar and a square
meal. You oughta seen him wolf it down. He had n't had a bite for a
couple of days. That 's the end of him, thinks I. But next day he showed
up, stiff an' sore, ready for another half and a square meal. And he
done better as  time went by. Just a born fighter, and tough beyond
belief. He has n't a heart. He 's a piece of ice. And he never talked
eleven words in a string since I know him. He saws wood and does his
work."

"I 've seen 'm," the secretary said. "He 's worked a lot for you."

"All the big little fellows has tried out on him," Roberts answered.
"And he 's learned from 'em. I 've seen some of them he could lick. But
his heart was n't in it. I reckoned he never liked the game. He seemed
to act that way."

"He 's been fighting some before the little clubs the last few months,"
Kelly said.

"Sure. But I don't know what struck 'm. All of a sudden his heart got
into it. He just went out like a streak and cleaned up all the little
local fellows. Seemed to want the money, and he 's won a bit, though his
clothes don't look it. He 's peculiar. Nobody knows his business. Nobody
knows how he spends his time. Even when he 's on the job, he plumb up
and disappears most of each day soon as his work is done. Sometimes he
just blows away for weeks at a time. But he don't take advice. There 's
a fortune in it for the fellow that gets the job of managin' him, only
he won't consider it. And you watch him hold out for the cash money when
you get down to terms."

It was at this stage that Danny Ward arrived. Quite a party it was. His
manager and trainer were with him, and he breezed in like a gusty
draught of geniality, good-nature, and all-conqueringness. Greetings
flew about, a joke here, a retort there, a smile or a laugh for
everybody. Yet it was his way, and only partly sincere. He was a good
actor, and he had found geniality a most valuable asset in the game of
getting on in the world. But down underneath he was the deliberate,
cold-blooded fighter and business man. The rest was a mask. Those who
knew him or trafficked with him said that when it came to brass tacks he
was Danny-on-the-Spot. He was invariably present at all business
discussions, and it was urged by some that his manager was a blind whose
only function was to serve as Danny's mouth-piece.

Rivera's way was different. Indian blood, as well as Spanish, <pb
n='930'> was in his veins, and he sat back in a corner, silent,
immobile, only his black eyes passing from face to face and noting
everything.

"So that 's the guy," Danny said, running an appraising eye over his
proposed antagonist. "How de do, old chap."

Rivera's eyes burned venomously, but he made no sign of acknowledgment.
He disliked all Gringos, but this Gringo he hated with an immediacy that
was unusual even in him.

"Gawd!" Danny protested facetiously to the promoter. "You ain't
expectin' me to fight a deef mute." When the laughter subsided, he made
another hit. "Los Angeles must be on the dink when this is the best you
can scare up. What kindergarten did you get 'm from?"

"He 's a good little boy, Danny, take it from me," Roberts defended.
"Not as easy as he looks."

"And half the house is sold already," Kelly pleaded. "You 'll have to
take 'm on, Danny. It 's the best we can do."

Danny ran another careless and unflattering glance over Rivera and
sighed.

"I gotta be easy with 'm, I guess. If only he don't blow up."

Roberts snorted.

"You gotta be careful," Danny's manager warned. "No taking chances with
a dub that 's likely to sneak a lucky one across."

"Oh, I 'll be careful all right, all right," Danny smiled. "I 'll get 'm
at the start an' nurse 'm along for the dear public's sake. What d' ye
say to fifteen rounds, Kelly - An' then the hay for him?"

"That 'll do," was the answer. "As long as you make it realistic."

"Then let 's get down to biz." Danny paused and calculated. "Of course,
sixty-five per cent. of gate receipts, same as with Carthey. But the
split 'll be different. Eighty will just about suit me." And to his
manager, "That right?"

The manager nodded.

"Here, you, did you get that?" Kelly asked Rivera.

Rivera shook his head.

"Well, it 's this way," Kelly exposited. "The purse 'll be sixty-five
per cent. of the gate receipts. You 're a dub, and an  unknown. You and
Danny split, twenty per cent. goin' to you, an' eighty to Danny. That 's
fair, is n't it, Roberts?"

"Very fair, Rivera," Roberts agreed. "You see, you ain't got a
reputation yet."

"What will sixty-five per cent. of the gate receipts be?" Rivera
demanded.

"Oh, maybe five thousand, maybe as high as eight thousand," Danny broke
in to explain. "Something like that. Your share 'll come to something
like a thousand or sixteen hundred. Pretty good for takin' a licking
from a guy with my reputation. What d' ye say?"

Then Rivera took their breaths away.

"Winner takes all," he said with finality.

A dead silence prevailed.

"It 's like candy from a baby," Danny's manager proclaimed.

Danny shook his head.

"I 've been in the game too long," he explained. "I 'm not casting
reflections on the referee, or the present company. I 'm not sayin'
nothing about book-makers an' frame-ups that sometimes happen. But what
I do say is that it 's poor business for a fighter like me. play safe.
There 's no tellin'. Mebbe I break my arm, eh? Or some guy slips me a
bunch of dope?" He shook his head solemnly. "Win or lose, eighty is my
split. What d' ye say, Mexican?"

Rivera shook his head.

Danny exploded. He was getting down to brass tacks now.

"Why, you dirty little greaser!  I 've a mind to knock your block off
right now."

Roberts drawled his body to interposition between hostilities.

"Winner takes all," Rivera repeated sullenly.

"Why do you stand out that way?" Danny asked.

"I can lick you," was the straight answer.

Danny half started to take off his coat. But, as his manager knew, it
was a grand stand play. The coat did not come off, and Danny allowed
himself to be placated by the group. Everybody sympathized with him.
Rivera stood alone.

"Look here, you little fool," Kelly took up the argument. "You 're
nobody. We know what you 've been doing the last  few months -
putting away little local fighters. But Danny is class. His next fight
after this will be for the championship. And you 're unknown. Nobody
ever heard of you out of Los Angeles."

"They will," Rivera answered with a shrug, "after this fight."

"You think for a second you can lick me?" Danny blurted in.

Rivera nodded.

"Oh, come; listen to reason," Kelly pleaded. "Think of the advertising."

"I want the money," was Rivera's answer.

"You could n't win from me in a thousand years," Danny assured him.

"Then what are you holding out for?" Rivera countered. "If the money 's
that easy, why don't you go after it?"

"I will, so help me!" Danny cried with abrupt conviction. "I 'll beat
you to death in the ring, my boy - you monkeyin' with me this way.
Make out the articles, Kelly. Winner take all. Play it up in the
sportin' columns. Tell 'em it 's a grudge fight. I 'll show this fresh
kid a few."

Kelly's secretary had begun to write, when Danny interrupted.

"Hold on!" He turned to Rivera. "Weights?"

"Ringside," came the answer.

"Not on your life, Fresh Kid. If winner takes all, we weigh in at ten
a.m."

"And winner takes all?" Rivera queried. Danny nodded. That settled it.
He would enter the ring in his full ripeness of strength.

"Weigh in at ten," Rivera said.

The secretary's pen went on scratching.

"It means five pounds," Roberts complained to Rivera. "You 've given too
much away. You 've thrown the fight right there. Danny 'll be as strong
as a bull. You 're a fool. He 'll lick you sure. You ain't got the
chance of a dewdrop in hell."

Rivera's answer was a calculated look of hatred. Even this Gringo he
despised, and him had he found the whitest Gringo of them all.



 Barely noticed was Rivera as he entered the ring. Only a very slight
and very scattering ripple of half-hearted hand-clapping greeted him.
The house did not believe in him. He was the lamb led to slaughter at
the hands of the great Danny. Besides, the house was disappointed. It
had expected a rushing battle between Danny Ward and Billy Carthey, and
here it must put up with this poor little tyro. Still further, it had
manifested its disapproval of the change by betting two, and even three,
to one on Danny. And where a betting audience's money is, there is its
heart.

The Mexican boy sat down in his corner and waited. The slow minutes
lagged by. Danny was making him wait. It was an old trick, but ever it
worked on the young, new fighters. They grew frightened, sitting thus
and facing their own apprehensions and a callous, tobacco-smoking
audience. But for once the trick failed. Roberts was right. Rivera had
no goat. He, who was more delicately coördinated, more finely
nerved and strung than any of them, had no nerves of this sort. The
atmosphere of foredoomed defeat in his own corner had no effect on him.
His handlers were Gringos and strangers. Also they were scrubs -
the dirty driftage of the fight game, without honor, without efficiency.
And they were chilled, as well, with certitude that theirs was the
losing corner.

"Now you gotta be careful," Spider Hagerty warned him. Spider was his
chief second. "Make it last as long as you can - them 's my
instructions from Kelly. If you don't, the papers 'll call it another
bum fight and give the game a bigger black eye in Los Angeles."

All of which was not encouraging. But Rivera took no notice. He despised
prize fighting. It was the hated game of the hated Gringo. He had taken
up with it, as a chopping block for others in the training quarters,
solely because he was starving. The fact that he was marvelously made
for it, had meant nothing. He hated it. Not until he had come in to the
Junta, had he fought for money, and he had found the money easy. Not
first among the sons of men had he been to find himself successful at a
despised vocation.

He did not analyze. He merely knew that he must win this  fight. There
could be no other outcome. For behind him, nerving him to this belief,
were profounder forces than any the crowded house dreamed. Danny Ward
fought for money, and for the easy ways of life that money would bring.
But the things Rivera fought for burned in his brain - blazing and
terrible visions, that, with eyes wide open, sitting lonely in the
corner of the ring and waiting for his tricky antagonist, he saw as
clearly as he had lived them.

He saw the white-walled, water-power factories of Rio Blanco. He saw the
six thousand workers, starved and wan, and the little children, seven
and eight years of age, who toiled long shifts for ten cents a day. He
saw the perambulating corpses, the ghastly death's heads of men who
labored in the dye-rooms. He remembered that he had heard his father
call the dye-rooms the "suicide-holes," where a year was death. He saw
the little patio, and his mother cooking and moiling at crude
housekeeping and finding time to caress and love him. And his father he
saw, large, big-moustached and deep-chested, kindly above all men, who
loved all men and whose heart was so large that there was love to
over-flowing still left for the mother and the little muchacho playing
in the corner of the patio. In those days his name had not been Felipe
Rivera. It had been Fernandez, his father's and mother's name. Him had
they called Juan. Later, he had changed it himself, for he had found the
name of Fernandez hated by prefects of police, jefes politicos, and
rurales.

Big, hearty Joaquin Fernandez!  A large place he occupied in Rivera's
visions. He had not understood at the time, but looking back he could
understand. He could see him setting type in the little printery, or
scribbling endless hasty, nervous lines on the much-cluttered desk. And
he could see the strange evenings, when workmen, coming secretly in the
dark like men who did ill deeds, met with his father and talked long
hours where he, the muchacho, lay not always asleep in the corner.

As from a remote distance he could hear Spider Hagerty saying to him:
"No layin' down at the start. Them 's instructions. Take a beatin' an'
earn your dough."

Ten minutes had passed, and he still sat in his corner. There <pb
n='935'> were no signs of Danny, who was evidently playing the trick to
the limit.

But more visions burned before the eye of Rivera's memory. The strike,
or, rather, the lockout, because the workers of Rio Blanco had helped
their striking brothers of Puebla. The hunger, the expeditions in the
hills for berries, the roots and herbs that all ate and that twisted and
pained the stomachs of all of them. And then, the nightmare; the waste
of ground before the company's store; the thousands of starving workers;
General Rosalio Martinez and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz; and the
death-spitting rifles that seemed never to cease spitting, while the
workers' wrongs were washed and washed again in their own blood. And
that night!  He saw the flat cars, piled high with the bodies of the
slain, consigned to Vera Cruz, food for the sharks of the bay. Again he
crawled over the grisly heaps, seeking and finding, stripped and
mangled, his father and his mother. His mother he especially remembered
- only her face projecting, her body burdened by the weight of
dozens of bodies. Again the rifles of the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz
cracked, and again he dropped to the ground and slunk away like some
hunted coyote of the hills.

To his ears came a great roar, as of the sea, and he saw Danny Ward,
leading his retinue of trainers and seconds, coming down the center
aisle. The house was in wild uproar for the popular hero who was bound
to win. Everybody proclaimed him. Everybody was for him. Even Rivera's
own seconds warmed to something akin to cheerfulness when Danny ducked
jauntily through the ropes and entered the ring. His face continually
spread to an unending succession of smiles, and when Danny smiled he
smiled in every feature, even to the laughter-wrinkles of the corners of
the eyes and into the depths of the eyes themselves. Never was there so
genial a fighter. His face was a running advertisement of good feeling,
of good fellowship. He knew everybody. He joked, and laughed, and
greeted his friends through the ropes. Those farther away, unable to
suppress their admiration, cried loudly: "Oh, you Danny!" It was a
joyous ovation of affection that lasted a full five minutes. Rivera was
disregarded. For all that the audience noticed,  he did not exist.
Spider Hagerty's bloated face bent down close to his.

"No gettin' scared," the Spider warned. "An' remember instructions. You
gotta last. No layin' down. If you lay down, we got instructions to beat
you up in the dressing rooms. Savve?  You just gotta fight."

The house began to applaud. Danny was crossing the ring to him. Danny
bent over, caught Rivera's right hand in both his own and shook it with
impulsive heartiness. Danny's smile-wreathed face was close to his. The
audience yelled its appreciation of Danny's display of sporting spirit.
He was greeting his opponent with the fondness of a brother. Danny's
lips moved, and the audience, interpreting the unheard words to be those
of a kindly-natured sport, yelled again. Only Rivera heard the low
words.

"You little Mexican rat," hissed from between Danny's gaily smiling
lips, "I 'll fetch the yellow outa you."

Rivera made no move. He did not rise. He merely hated with his eyes.

"Get up, you dog!" some man yelled through the ropes from behind.

The crowd began to hiss and boo him for his unsportsmanlike conduct, but
he sat unmoved. Another great outburst of applause was Danny's as he
walked back across the ring.

When Danny stripped, there was ohs! and ahs! of delight. His body was
perfect, alive with easy suppleness and health and strength. The skin
was white as a woman's, and as smooth. All grace, and resilience, and
power resided therein. He had proved it in scores of battles. His
photographs were in all the physical culture magazines.

A groan went up as Spider Hagerty peeled Rivera's sweater over his head.
His body seemed leaner, because of the swarthiness of the skin. He had
muscles, but they made no display like his opponent's. What the audience
neglected to see was the deep chest. Nor could it guess the toughness of
the fiber of the flesh, the instantaneousness of the cell explosions of
the muscles, the fineness of the nerves that wired every part of him
into a splendid fighting mechanism. All the audience saw was a
brown-skinned boy of eighteen with what seemed the body of a boy. With
Danny it was different. Danny was a  man of twenty-four, and his body
was a man's body. The contrast was still more striking as they stood
together in the center of the ring receiving the referee's last
instructions.

Rivera noticed Roberts sitting directly behind the newspaper men. He was
drunker than usual, and his speech was correspondingly slower.

"Take it easy, Rivera," Roberts drawled. "He can't kill you, remember
that. He 'll rush you at the go-off, but don't get rattled. You just
cover up, and stall, and clinch. He can't hurt you much. Just make
believe to yourself that he 's choppin' out on you at the trainin'
quarters."

Rivera made no sign that he had heard.

"Sullen little devil," Roberts muttered to the man next to him. "He
always was that way." But Rivera forgot to look his usual hatred. A
vision of countless rifles blinded his eyes. Every face in the audience,
far as he could see, to the high dollar-seats, was transformed into a
rifle. And he saw the long Mexican border arid and sun-washed and
aching, and along it he saw the ragged bands that delayed only for the
guns.

Back in his corner he waited, standing up. His seconds had crawled out
through the ropes, taking the canvas stool with them. Diagonally across
the squared ring, Danny faced him. The gong struck, and the battle was
on. The audience howled its delight. Never had it seen a battle open
more convincingly. The papers were right. It was a grudge fight.
Three-quarters of the distance Danny covered in the rush to get
together, his intention to eat up the Mexican lad plainly advertised. He
assailed with not one blow, nor two, nor a dozen. He was a gyroscope of
blows, a whirlwind of destruction. Rivera was nowhere. He was
overwhelmed, buried beneath avalanches of punches delivered from every
angle and position by a past master in the art. He was overborne, swept
back against the ropes, separated by the referee, and swept back against
the ropes again.

It was not a fight. It was a slaughter, a massacre. Any audience, save a
prize fighting one, would have exhausted its emotions in that first
minute. Danny was certainly showing what he could do - a splendid
exhibition. Such was the certainty of the audience, as well as its
excitement and favoritism,  that it failed to take notice that the
Mexican still stayed on his feet. It forgot Rivera. It rarely saw him,
so closely was he enveloped in Danny's man-eating attack. A minute of
this went by, and two minutes. Then, in a separation, it caught a clear
glimpse of the Mexican. His lip was cut, his nose was bleeding. As he
turned and staggered into a clinch, the welts of oozing blood, from his
contacts with the ropes, showed in red bars across his back. But what
the audience did not notice was that his chest was not heaving and that
his eyes were coldly burning as ever. Too many aspiring champions, in
the cruel welter of the training camps, had practiced this man-eating
attack on him. He had learned to live through for a compensation of from
half a dollar a go up to fifteen dollars a week - a hard school,
and he was schooled hard.

Then happened the amazing thing. The whirling, blurring mix-up ceased
suddenly. Rivera stood alone. Danny, the redoubtable Danny, lay on his
back. His body quivered as consciousness strove to return to it. He had
not staggered and sunk down, nor had he gone over in a long slumping
fall. The right hook of Rivera had dropped him in midair with the
abruptness of death. The referee shoved Rivera back with one hand, and
stood over the fallen gladiator counting the seconds. It is the custom
of prizefighting audiences to cheer a clean knock-down blow. But this
audience did not cheer. The thing had been too unexpected. It watched
the toll of the seconds in tense silence, and through this silence the
voice of Roberts rose exultantly:

"I told you he was a two-handed fighter!"

By the fifth second, Danny was rolling over on his face, and when seven
was counted, he rested on one knee, ready to rise after the count of
nine and before the count of ten. If his knee still touched the floor at
"ten," he was considered "down," and also "out." The instant his knee
left the floor, he was considered "up," and in that instant it was
Rivera's right to try and put him down again. Rivera took no chances.
The moment that knee left the floor he would strike again. He circled
around, but the referee circled in between, and Rivera knew that the
seconds he counted were very slow. All Gringos were against him, even
the referee.

At "nine" the referee gave Rivera a sharp thrust back. It
 was unfair, but it enabled Danny to rise, the smile back on his lips.
Doubled partly over, with arms wrapped about face and abdomen, he
cleverly stumbled into a clinch. By all the rules of the game the
referee should have broken it, but he did not, and Danny clung on like a
surf-battered barnacle and moment by moment recuperated. The last minute
of the round was going fast. If he could live to the end, he would have
a full minute in his corner to revive. And live to the end he did,
smiling through all desperateness and extremity.

"The smile that won't come off!" somebody yelled, and the audience
laughed loudly in its relief.

"The kick that Greaser 's got is something God-awful," Danny gasped in
his corner to his adviser while his handlers worked frantically over
him.

The second and third rounds were tame. Danny, a tricky and consummate
ring general, stalled and blocked and held on, devoting himself to
recovering from that dazing first-round blow. In the fourth round he was
himself again. Jarred and shaken, nevertheless his good condition had
enabled him to regain his vigor. But he tried no man-eating tactics. The
Mexican had proved a tartar. Instead, he brought to bear his best
fighting powers. In tricks and skill and experience he was the master,
and though he could land nothing vital, he proceeded scientifically to
chop and wear down his opponent. He landed three blows to Rivera's one,
but they were punishing blows only, and not deadly. It was the sum of
many of them that constituted deadliness. He was respectful of this
two-handed dub with the amazing short-arm kicks in both his fists.

In defense, Rivera developed a disconcerting straight-left. Again and
again, attack after attack he straight-lefted away from him with
accumulated damage to Danny's mouth and nose. But Danny was protean.
That was why he was the coming champion. He could change from style to
style of fighting at will. He now devoted himself to infighting. In this
he was particularly wicked, and it enabled him to avoid the other's
straight-left. Here he set the house wild repeatedly, capping it with a
marvelous lock-break and lift of an inside upper-cut that raised the
Mexican in the air and dropped him to the mat. Rivera rested on one
knee, making the most of the  count, and in the soul of him he knew the
referee was counting short seconds on him.

Again, in the seventh, Danny achieved the diabolical inside uppercut. He
succeeded only in staggering Rivera, but, in the ensuing moment of
defenseless helplessness, he smashed him with another blow through the
ropes. Rivera's body bounced on the heads of the newspaper men below,
and they boosted him back to the edge of the platform outside the ropes.
Here he rested on one knee, while the referee raced off the seconds.
Inside the ropes, through which he must duck to enter the ring, Danny
waited for him. Nor did the referee intervene or thrust Danny back.

The house was beside itself with delight.

"Kill 'm, Danny, kill 'm!" was the cry.

Scores of voices took it up until it was like a war-chant of wolves.

Danny did his best, but Rivera, at the count of eight, instead of nine,
came unexpectedly through the ropes and safely into a clinch. Now the
referee worked, tearing him away so that he could be hit, giving Danny
every advantage that an unfair referee can give.

But Rivera lived, and the daze cleared from his brain. It was all of a
piece. They were the hated Gringos and they were all unfair. And in the
worst of it visions continued to flash and sparkle in his brain -
long lines of railroad track that simmered across the desert; rurales
and American constables; prisons and calabooses; tramps at water tanks
- all the squalid and painful panorama of his odyssey after Rio
Blanca and the strike. And, resplendent and glorious, he saw the great,
red Revolution sweeping across his land. The guns were there before him.
Every hated face was a gun. It was for the guns he fought. He was the
guns. He was the Revolution. He fought for all Mexico.

The audience began to grow incensed with Rivera. Why did n't he take the
licking that was appointed him?  Of course he was going to be licked,
but why should he be so obstinate about it?  Very few were interested in
him, and they were the certain, definite percentage of a gambling crowd
that plays long shots. Believing Danny to be the winner, nevertheless
they had put their money on the Mexican at four to ten and  one to
three. More than a trifle was up on the point of how many rounds Rivera
could last. Wild money had appeared at the ringside proclaiming that he
could not last seven rounds, or even six. The winners of this, now that
their cash risk was happily settled, had joined in cheering on the
favorite.

Rivera refused to be licked. Through the eighth round his opponent
strove vainly to repeat the uppercut. In the ninth, Rivera stunned the
house again. In the midst of a clinch he broke the lock with a quick,
lithe movement, and in the narrow space between their bodies his right
lifted from the waist. Danny went to the floor and took the safety of
the count. The crowd was appalled. He was being bested at his own game.
His famous right-uppercut had been worked back on him. Rivera made no
attempt to catch him as he arose at "nine." The referee was openly
blocking that play, though he stood clear when the situation was
reversed and it was Rivera who desired to rise.

Twice in the tenth, Rivera put through the right-uppercut, lifted from
waist to opponent's chin. Danny grew desperate. The smile never left his
face, but he went back to his man-eating rushes. Whirlwind as he would,
he could not damage Rivera, while Rivera, through the blur and whirl,
dropped him to the mat three times in succession. Danny did not
recuperate so quickly now, and by the eleventh round he was in a serious
way. But from then till the fourteenth he put up the gamest exhibition
of his career. He stalled and blocked, fought parsimoniously, and strove
to gather strength. Also, he fought as foully as a successful fighter
knows how. Every trick and device he employed, butting in the clinches
with the seeming of accident, pinioning Rivera's glove between arm and
body, heeling his glove on Rivera's mouth to clog his breathing. Often,
in the clinches, through his cut and smiling lips he snarled insults
unspeakable and vile in Rivera's ear. Everybody, from the referee to the
house, was with Danny and was helping Danny. And they knew what he had
in mind. Bested by this surprise-box of an unknown, he was pinning all
on a single punch. He offered himself for punishment, fished, and
feinted, and drew, for that one opening that would enable him to whip a
blow through with all his strength and turn the tide. As another and
greater fighter had  done before him, he might do - a right and
left, to solar plexus and across the jaw. He could do it, for he was
noted for the strength of punch that remained in his arms as long as he
could keep his feet.

Rivera's seconds were not half-caring for him in the intervals between
rounds. Their towels made a showing, but drove little air into his
panting lungs. Spider Hagerty talked advice to him, but Rivera knew it
was wrong advice. Everybody was against him. He was surrounded by
treachery. In the fourteenth round he put Danny down again, and himself
stood resting, hands dropped at side, while the referee counted. In the
other corner Rivera had been noting suspicious whisperings. He saw
Michael Kelly make his way to Roberts and bend and whisper. Rivera's
ears were a cat's, desert-trained, and he caught snatches of what was
said. He wanted to hear more, and when his opponent arose he maneuvered
the fight into a clinch over against the ropes.

"Got to," he could hear Michael, while Roberts nodded. "Danny 's got to
win - I stand to lose a mint - I 've got a ton of money
covered - my own - If he lasts the fifteenth I 'm bust
- The boy 'll mind you. Put something across."

And thereafter Rivera saw no more visions. They were trying to job him.
Once again he dropped Danny and stood resting, his hands at his side.
Roberts stood up.

"That settled him," he said. "Go to your corner."

He spoke with authority, as he had often spoken to Rivera at the
training quarters. But Rivera looked hatred at him and waited for Danny
to rise. Back in his corner in the minute interval, Kelly, the promoter,
came and talked to Rivera.

"Throw it, damn you," he rasped in a harsh low voice. "You gotta lay
down, Rivera. Stick with me and I 'll make your future. I 'll let you
lick Danny next time. But here 's where you lay down."

Rivera showed with his eyes that he heard, but he made neither sign of
assent nor dissent.

"Why don't you speak?" Kelly demanded angrily.

"You lose, anyway," Spider Hagerty supplemented. "The referee 'll take
it away from you. Listen to Kelly, and lay down."

 "Lay down, kid," Kelly pleaded, "and I 'll help you to the
championship."

Rivera did not answer.

"I will, so help me, kid."

At the strike of the gong Rivera sensed something impending. The house
did not. Whatever it was it was there inside the ring with him and very
close. Danny's earlier surety seemed returned to him. The confidence of
his advance frightened Rivera. Some trick was about to be worked. Danny
rushed, but Rivera refused the encounter. He side-stepped away into
safety. What the other wanted was a clinch. It was in some way necessary
to the trick. Rivera backed and circled away, yet he knew, sooner or
later, the clinch and the trick would come. Desperately he resolved to
draw it. He made as if to effect the clinch with Danny's next rush.
Instead, at the last instant, just as their bodies should have come
together, Rivera darted nimbly back. And in the same instant Danny's
corner raised a cry of foul. Rivera had fooled them. The referee paused
irresolutely. The decision that trembled on his lips was never uttered,
for a shrill, boy's voice from the gallery piped, "Raw work!"

Danny cursed Rivera openly, and forced him, while Rivera danced away.
Also, Rivera made up his mind to strike no more blows at the body. In
this he threw away half his chance of winning, but he knew if he was to
win at all it was with the outfighting that remained to him. Given the
least opportunity, they would lie a foul on him. Danny threw all caution
to the winds. For two rounds he tore after and into the boy who dared
not meet him at close quarters. Rivera was struck again and again; he
took blows by the dozens to avoid the perilous clinch. During this
supreme final rally of Danny's the audience rose to its feet and went
mad. It did not understand. All it could see was that its favorite was
winning after all. "Why don't you fight?" it demanded wrathfully of
Rivera. "You 're yellow!  You 're yellow!" "Open up, you cur!  Open up!"
"Kill 'm, Danny!  Kill 'm!" "You sure got 'm!  Kill 'm!"

In all the house, bar none, Rivera was the only cold man. By temperament
and blood he was the hottest-passioned there; but he had gone through
such vastly greater heats that  this collective passion of ten thousand
throats, rising surge on surge, was to his brain no more than the velvet
cool of a summer twilight.

Into the seventeenth round Danny carried his rally. Rivera, under a
heavy blow, drooped and sagged. His hands dropped helplessly as he
reeled backward. Danny thought it was his chance. The boy was at his
mercy. Thus Rivera, feigning, caught him off his guard, lashing out a
clean drive to the mouth. Danny went down. When he arose, Rivera felled
him with a down-chop of the right on neck and jaw. Three times he
repeated this. It was impossible for any referee to call these blows
foul.

"Oh, Bill!  Bill!" Kelly pleaded to the referee.

"I can't," that official lamented back. "He won't give me a chance."

Danny, battered and heroic, still kept coming up. Kelly and others near
to the ring began to cry out to the police to stop it, though Danny's
corner refused to throw in the towel. Rivera saw the fat police captain
starting awkwardly to climb through the ropes, and was not sure what it
meant. There were so many ways of cheating in this game of the Gringos.
Danny, on his feet, tottered groggily and helplessly before him. The
referee and the captain were both reaching for Rivera when he struck the
last blow. There was no need to stop the fight, for Danny did not rise.

"Count!" Rivera cried hoarsely to the referee.

And when the count was finished, Danny's seconds gathered him up and
carried him to his corner.

"Who wins?" Rivera demanded.

Reluctantly, the referee caught his gloved hand and held it aloft.

There were no congratulations for Rivera. He walked to his corner
unattended, where his seconds had not yet placed his stool. He leaned
backward on the ropes and looked his hatred at them, swept it on and
about him till the whole ten thousand Gringos were included. His knees
trembled under him, and he was sobbing from exhaustion. Before his eyes
the hated faces swayed back and forth in the giddiness of nausea. Then
he remembered they were the guns. The guns were his. The Revolution
could go on.

   Told in the Drooling Ward Converts to The Turtles of Tasman,
Macmillan, 1916 Me?  I'm not a drooler. I'm the assistant. I don't know
what Miss Jones or Miss Kelsey could do without me. There are fifty-five
low-grade droolers in this ward, and how could they ever all be fed if
wasn't around?  I like to feed droolers. They don't make trouble. They
can't. Something's wrong with most of their legs and arms, and they
can't talk. They're very low-grade. I can walk, and talk, and do things.
You must be careful with the droolers and not feed them too fast. Then
they choke. Miss Jones says I'm an expert. When a new nurse comes I show
her how to do it. It's funny watching a new nurse try to feed them. She
goes at it so slow and careful that supper time would be around before
she finished shoving down their breakfast. Then I show her, because I'm
an expert. Dr. Dalrymple says I am, and he ought to know. A drooler can
eat twice as fast if you know how to make him.

My name's Tom. I'm twenty-eight years old. Everybody knows me in the
institution. This is an institution, you know. It belongs to the State
of California and is run by politics. I know. I've been here a long
time. Everybody trusts me. I run errands all over the place, when I'm
not busy with the droolers. I like droolers. It makes me think how lucky
I am that I ain't a drooler.

I like it here in the Home. I don't like the outside. I know. I've been
around a bit, and run away, and adopted. Me for the Home, and for the
drooling ward best of all. I don't look like a drooler, do I?  You can
tell the difference soon as you look at me. I'm an assistant, expert
assistant. That's going some for a feeb. Feeb? Oh, that's feeble-minded.
I thought you knew. We're all feebs in here.

But I'm a high-grade feeb. Dr. Dalrymple says I'm too smart to be in the
Home, but I never let on. It's a pretty good place. And don't throw fits
like lots of the feebs. You see that house up there through the trees.
The high-grade epilecs all live in it by themselves. They're stuck up
because they ain't just ordinary feebs. They call it the club house, and
they say they're just as good as anybody outside, only they're sick. I
don't like them much. They laugh at me, when they ain't busy throwing
fits. But I don't care. I never have to be scared about falling down and
busting my head. Sometimes they run around in circles trying to find a
place to sit down quick, only they don't. Low-grade epilecs are
disgusting, and high-grade epilecs put on airs. I'm glad I ain't an
epilec. There ain't anything to them. They just talk big, that's all.

Miss Kelsey says I talk too much. But I talk sense, and that's more than
the other feebs do. Dr. Dalrymple says I have the gift of language. I
know it. You ought to hear me talk when I'm by myself, or when I've got
a drooler to listen. Sometimes I think I'd like to be a politician, only
it's too much trouble. They're all great talkers; that's how they hold
their jobs.

Nobody's crazy in this institution. They're just feeble in their minds.
Let me tell you something funny. There's about a dozen high-grade girls
that set the tables in the big dining room. Sometimes when they're done
ahead of time, they all sit down in chairs in a circle and talk. I sneak
up to the door and listen, and I nearly die to keep from laughing. Do
you want to know what they talk?  It's like this. They don't say a word
for a long time. And then one says, "Thank God I'm not feeble-minded."
And all the rest nod their heads and look pleased. And then nobody says
anything for a time. After which the next girl in the circle says,
"Thank God I'm not feeble-minded," and they nod their heads all over
again. And it goes on around the circle, and they never say anything
else. Now they're real feebs, ain't they?  I leave it to you. I'm not
that kind of a feeb, thank God.

Sometimes I don't think I'm a feeb at all. I play in the band and read
music. We're all supposed to be feebs in the band except the leader.
He's crazy. We know it, but we never talk about it except amongst
ourselves. His job is politics, too, and we don't want him to lose it. I
play the drum. They can't get along without me in this institution. I
was sick once, so I know. It's a wonder the drooling ward didn't break
down while I was in hospital.

I could get out of here if I wanted to. I'm not so feeble as some might
think. But I don't let on. I have too good a time.  Besides, everything
would run down if I went away. I'm afraid some time they'll find out I'm
not a feeb and send me out into the world to earn my own living. I know
the world, and I don't like it. The Home is fine enough for me.

You see how I grin sometimes. I can't help that. But I can put it on a
lot. I'm not bad, though. I look at myself in the glass. My mouth is
funny, I know that, and it lops down, and my teeth are bad. You can tell
a feeb anywhere by looking at his mouth and teeth. But that doesn't
prove I'm a feeb. It's just because I'm lucky that I look like one.

I know a lot. If I told you all I know, you'd be surprised. But when I
don't want to know, or when they want me to do something don't want to
do, I just let my mouth lop down and laugh and make foolish noises. I
watch the foolish noises made by the low-grades, and I can fool anybody.
And I know a lot of foolish noises. Miss Kelsey called me a fool the
other day. She was very angry, and that was where I fooled her.

Miss Kelsey asked me once why I don't write a book about feebs. I was
telling her what was the matter with little Albert. He's a drooler, you
know, and I can always tell the way he twists his left eye what's the
matter with him. So I was explaining it to Miss Kelsey, and, because she
didn't know, it made her mad. But some day, mebbe, I'll write that book.
Only it's so much trouble. Besides, I'd sooner talk.

Do you know what a micro is?  It's the kind with the little heads no
bigger than your fist. They're usually droolers, and they live a long
time. The hydros don't drool. They have the big heads, and they're
smarter. But they never grow up. They always die. I never look at one
without thinking he's going to die. Sometimes, when I'm feeling lazy, or
the nurse is mad at me, I wish I was a drooler with nothing to do and
somebody to feed me. But I guess I'd sooner talk and be what I am.

Only yesterday Doctor Dalrymple said to me, "Tom," he said, "just don't
know what I'd do without you." And he ought to know, seeing as he's had
the bossing of a thousand feebs for going on two years. Dr. Whatcomb was
before him. They get appointed, you know. It's politics. I've seen a
whole lot of doctors here in my time. I was here before any of them.
I've been in this institution twenty-five years. No, I've got no
complaints. The institution couldn't be run better.

 It's a snap to be a high-grade feeb. Just look at Doctor Dalrymple. He
has troubles. He holds his job by politics. You bet we high-graders talk
politics. We know all about it, and it's bad. An institution like this
oughtn't to be run on politics. Look at Doctor Dalrymple. He's been here
two years and learned a lot. Then politics will come along and throw him
out and send a new doctor who don't know anything about feebs.

I've been acquainted with just thousands of nurses in my time. Some of
them are nice. But they come and go. Most of the women get married.
Sometimes I think I'd like to get married. I spoke to Dr. Whatcomb about
it once, but he told me he was very sorry, because feebs ain't allowed
to get married. I've been in love. She was a nurse. won't tell you her
name. She had blue eyes, and yellow hair, and a kind voice, and she
liked me. She told me so. And she always told me to be a good boy. And I
was, too, until afterward, and then I ran away. You see, she went off
and got married, and she didn't tell me about it.

I guess being married ain't what it's cracked up to be. Dr. Anglin and
his wife used to fight. I've seen them. And once I heard her call him a
feeb. Now nobody has a right to call anybody a feeb that ain't. Dr.
Anglin got awful mad when she called him that. But he didn't last long.
Politics drove him out, and Doctor Mandeville came. He didn't have a
wife. I heard him talking one time with the engineer. The engineer and
his wife fought like cats and dogs, and that day Doctor Mandeville told
him he was damn glad he wasn't tied to no petticoats. A petticoat is a
skirt. I knew what he meant, if I was a feeb. But never let on. You hear
lots when you don't let on.

I've seen a lot in my time. Once I was adopted, and went away on the
railroad over forty miles to live with a man named Peter Bopp and his
wife. They had a ranch. Doctor Anglin said I was strong and bright, and
I said I was, too. That was because I wanted to be adopted. And Peter
Bopp said he'd give me a good home, and the lawyers fixed up the papers.

But I soon made up my mind that a ranch was no place for me. Mrs. Bopp
was scared to death of me and wouldn't  let me sleep in the house. They
fixed up the woodshed and made me sleep there. had to get up at four
o'clock and feed the horses, and milk cows, and carry the milk to the
neighbours. They called it chores, but it kept me going all day. I
chopped wood, and cleaned chicken houses, and weeded vegetables, and did
most everything on the place. I never had any fun. I hadn't no time.

Let me tell you one thing. I'd sooner feed mush and milk to feebs than
milk cows with the frost on the ground. Mrs. Bopp was scared to let me
play with her children. And I was scared, too. They used to make faces
at me when nobody was looking, and call me "Looney." Everybody called me
Looney Tom. And the other boys in the neighbourhood threw rocks at me.
You never see anything like that in the Home here. The feebs are better
behaved.

Mrs. Bopp used to pinch me and pull my hair when she thought was too
slow, and I only made foolish noises and went slower. She said I'd be
the death of her some day. I left the boards off the old well in the
pasture, and the pretty new calf fell in and got drowned. Then Peter
Bopp said he was going to give me a licking. He did, too. He took a
strap halter and went at me. It was awful. I'd never had a licking in my
life. They don't do such things in the Home, which is why I say the Home
is the place for me.

I know the law, and I knew he had no right to lick me with a strap
halter. That was being cruel, and the guardianship papers said he
mustn't be cruel. I didn't say anything. I just waited, which shows you
what kind of a feeb I am. I waited a long time, and got slower, and made
more foolish noises; but he wouldn't send me back to the Home, which was
what I wanted. But one day, it was the first of the month, Mrs. Brown
gave me three dollars, which was for her milk bill with Peter Bopp. That
was in the morning. When I brought the milk in the evening I was to
bring back the receipt. But I didn't. I just walked down to the station,
bought a ticket like any one, and rode on the train back to the Home.
That's the kind of a feeb I am.

Doctor Anglin was gone then, and Doctor Mandeville had his place. I
walked right into his office. He didn't know me. "Hello," he said, "this
ain't visiting day." "I ain't a visitor," I  said. "I'm Tom. I belong
here." Then he whistled and showed he was surprised. I told him all
about it, and showed him the marks of the strap halter, and he got
madder and madder all the time and said he'd attend to Mr. Peter Bopp's
case.

And mebbe you think some of them little droolers weren't glad to see me.

I walked right into the ward. There was a new nurse feeding little
Albert. "Hold on," I said. "That ain't the way. Don't you see how he's
twisting that left eye?  Let me show you." Mebbe she thought was a new
doctor, for she just gave me the spoon, and I guess I filled little
Albert up with the most comfortable meal he'd had since I went away.
Droolers ain't bad when you understand them. I heard Miss Jones tell
Miss Kelsey once that I had an amazing gift in handling droolers.

Some day, mebbe, I'm going to talk with Doctor Dalrymple and get him to
give me a declaration that I ain't a feeb. Then I'll get him to make me
a real assistant in the drooling ward, with forty dollars a month and my
board. And then I'll marry Miss Jones and live right on here. And if she
won't have me, I'll marry Miss Kelsey or some other nurse. There's lots
of them that want to get married. And I won't care if my wife gets mad
and calls me a feeb. What's the good?  And I guess when one's learned to
put up with droolers a wife won't be much worse.

I didn't tell you about when I ran away. I hadn't no idea of such a
thing, and it was Charley and Joe who put me up to it. They're
high-grade epilecs, you know. I'd been up to Doctor Wilson's office with
a message, and was going back to the drooling ward, when I saw Charley
and Joe hiding around the corner of the gymnasium and making motions to
me. I went over to them.

"Hello," Joe said. "How's droolers?"

"Fine," I said. "Had any fits lately?"

That made them mad, and I was going on, when Joe said, "We're running
away. Come on."

"What for?" I said.

"We're going up over the top of the mountain," Joe said.

"And find a gold mine," said Charley. "We don't have fits any more.
We're cured."

"All right," I said. And we sneaked around back of the  gymnasium and in
among the trees. Mebbe we walked along about ten minutes, when I
stopped.

"What's the matter?" said Joe.

"Wait," I said. "I got to go back."

"What for?" said Joe.

And I said, "To get little Albert."

And they said I couldn't, and got mad. But I didn't care. knew they'd
wait. You see, I've been here twenty-five years, and I know the back
trails that lead up the mountain, and Charley and Joe didn't know those
trails. That's why they wanted me to come.

So I went back and got little Albert. He can't walk, or talk, or do
anything except drool, and I had to carry him in my arms. We went on
past the last hayfield, which was as far as I'd ever gone. Then the
woods and brush got so thick, and me not finding any more trail, we
followed the cow-path down to a big creek and crawled through the fence
which showed where the Home land stopped.

We climbed up the big hill on the other side of the creek. It was all
big trees, and no brush, but it was so steep and slippery with dead
leaves we could hardly walk. By and by we came to a real bad place. It
was forty feet across, and if you slipped you'd fall a thousand feet, or
mebbe a hundred. Anyway, you wouldn't fall - just slide. I went
across first, carrying little Albert. Joe came next. But Charley got
scared right in the middle and sat down.

"I'm going to have a fit," he said.

"No, you're not," said Joe. "Because if you was you wouldn't 'a' sat
down. You take all your fits standing."

"This is a different kind of a fit," said Charley, beginning to cry.

He shook and shook, but just because he wanted to he couldn't scare up
the least kind of a fit.

Joe got mad and used awful language. But that didn't help none. So I
talked soft and kind to Charley. That's the way to handle feebs. If you
get mad, they get worse. I know. I'm that way myself. That's why I was
almost the death of Mrs. Bopp. She got mad.

It was getting along in the afternoon, and I knew we had to be on our
way, so I said to Joe:

 "Here, stop your cussing and hold Albert. I'll go back and get him."

And I did, too; but he was so scared and dizzy he crawled along on hands
and knees while I helped him. When I got him across and took Albert back
in my arms, I heard somebody laugh and looked down. And there was a man
and woman on horseback looking up at us. He had a gun on his saddle, and
it was her who was laughing.

"Who in hell's that?" said Joe, getting scared. "Somebody to catch us?"

"Shut up your cussing," I said to him. "That is the man who owns this
ranch and writes books."

"How do you do, Mr. Endicott," I said down to him.

"Hello," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"We're running away," I said.

And he said, "Good luck. But be sure and get back before dark."

"But this is a real running away," I said.

And then both he and his wife laughed.

"All right," he said. "Good luck just the same. But watch out the bears
and mountain lions don't get you when it gets dark."

Then they rode away laughing, pleasant like; but I wished he hadn't said
that about the bears and mountain lions.

After we got around the hill, I found a trail, and we went much faster.
Charley didn't have any more signs of fits, and began laughing and
talking about gold mines. The trouble was with little Albert. He was
almost as big as me. You see, all the time I'd been calling him little
Albert, he'd been growing up. He was so heavy I couldn't keep up with
Joe and Charley. I was all out of breath. So I told them they'd have to
take turns in carrying him, which they said they wouldn't. Then I said
I'd leave them and they'd get lost, and the mountain lions and bears
would eat them. Charley looked like he was going to have a fit right
there, and Joe said, "Give him to me." And after that we carried him in
turn.

We kept right on up that mountain. I don't think there was any gold
mine, but we might 'a' got to the top and found it, if we hadn't lost
the trail, and if it hadn't got dark, and if little  Albert hadn't tired
us all out carrying him. Lots of feebs are scared of the dark, and Joe
said he was going to have a fit right there. Only he didn't. I never saw
such an unlucky boy. He never could throw a fit when he wanted to. Some
of the feebs can throw fits as quick as a wink.

By and by it got real black, and we were hungry, and we didn't have no
fire. You see, they don't let feebs carry matches, and all we could do
was just shiver. And we'd never thought about being hungry. You see,
feebs always have their food ready for them, and that's why it's better
to be a feeb than earning your living in the world.

And worse than everything was the quiet. There was only one thing worse,
and it was the noises. There was all kinds of noises every once in a
while, with quiet spells in between. I reckon they were rabbits, but
they made noises in the brush like wild animals - you know, rustle
rustle, thump, bump, crackle crackle, just like that. First Charley got
a fit, a real one, and Joe threw a terrible one. don't mind fits in the
Home with everybody around. But out in the woods on a dark night is
different. You listen to me, and never go hunting gold mines with
epilecs, even if they are high-grade.

I never had such an awful night. When Joe and Charley weren't throwing
fits they were making believe, and in the darkness the shivers from the
cold which I couldn't see seemed like fits, too. And shivered so hard I
thought I was getting fits myself. And little Albert, with nothing to
eat, just drooled and drooled. I never seen him as bad as that before.
Why, he twisted that left eye of his until it ought to have dropped out.
I couldn't see it, but I could tell from the movements he made. And Joe
just lay and cussed and cussed, and Charley cried and wished he was back
in the Home.

We didn't die, and next morning we went right back the way we'd come.
And little Albert got awful heavy. Doctor Wilson was mad as could be,
and said I was the worst feeb in the institution, along with Joe and
Charley. But Miss Striker, who was a nurse in the drooling ward then,
just put her arms around me and cried, she was that happy I'd got back.
I thought right there that mebbe I'd marry her. But only a month
afterward she got married to the plumber that came  up from the city to
fix the gutter-pipes of the new hospital. And little Albert never
twisted his eye for two days, it was that tired.

Next time I run away I'm going right over that mountain. But ain't going
to take epilecs along. They ain't never cured, and when they get scared
or excited they throw fits to beat the band. But I'll take little
Albert. Somehow I can't get along without him. And anyway, I ain't going
to run away. The drooling ward's a better snap than gold mines, and I
hear there's a new nurse coming. Besides, little Albert's bigger than I
am now, and I could never carry him over a mountain. And he's growing
bigger every day. It's astonishing.

   The Water Baby I lent a weary ear to old Kohokumu's interminable
chanting of the deeds and adventures of Maui, the Promethean demigod of
Polynesia who fished up dry land from ocean depths with hooks made fast
to heaven, who lifted up the sky whereunder previously men had gone on
all fours, not having space to stand erect, and who made the sun with
its sixteen snared legs stand still and agree thereafter to traverse the
sky more slowly - the sun being evidently a trade-unionist and
believing in the six-hour day, while Maui stood for the open shop and
the twelve-hour day.

"Now this," said Kohokumu, "is from Queen Liliuokalani's own family
mele:

"`Maui became restless and fought the sun  With a noose that he laid.
And winter won the sun,  And summer was won by Maui. . . .'"

Born in the Islands myself, I know the Hawaiian myths better than this
old fisherman, although I possessed not his memorization that enabled
him to recite them endless hours.

"And you believe all this?" I demanded in the sweet Hawaiian tongue.

"It was a long time ago," he pondered. "I never saw Maui with my own
eyes. But all our old men from all the way back tell us these things, as
I, an old man, tell them to my sons and grandsons, who will tell them to
their sons and grandsons all the way ahead to come."

"You believe," I persisted, "that whopper of Maui roping the sun like a
wild steer, and that other whopper of heaving up the sky from off the
earth?"

"I am of little worth, and am not wise, O Lakana," my fisherman made
answer. "Yet have I read the Hawaiian bible the missionaries translated
to us, and there have I read that your Big Man of the Beginning made the
earth and sky and  sun and moon and stars, and all manner of animals
from horses to cockroaches and from centipedes and mosquitoes to sea
lice and jellyfish, and man and woman and everything, and all in six
days. Why, Maui didn't do anything like that much. He didn't make
anything. He just put things in order, that was all, and it took him a
long, long time to make the improvements. And anyway, it is much easier
and more reasonable to believe the little whopper than the big whopper."

And what could I reply?  He had me on the matter of reasonableness.
Besides, my head ached. And the funny thing, as admitted to myself, was
that evolution teaches in no uncertain voice that man did run on all
fours ere he came to walk upright, that astronomy states flatly that the
speed of the revolution of the earth on its axis has diminished
steadily, thus increasing the length of day, and that the seismologists
accept that all the islands of Hawaii were elevated from the ocean floor
by volcanic action.

Fortunately, I saw a bamboo pole, floating on the surface several
hundred feet away, suddenly up-end and start a very devil's dance. This
was a diversion from the profitless discussion, and Kohokumu and I
dipped our paddles and raced the little outrigger canoe to the dancing
pole. Kohokumu caught the line that was fast to the butt of the pole and
underhanded it in until a two-foot ukikiki, battling fiercely to the
end, flashed its wet silver in the sun and began beating a tattoo on the
inside bottom of the canoe. Kohokumu picked up a squirming, slimy squid,
with his teeth bit a chunk of live bait out of it, attached the bait to
the hook, and dropped line and sinker overside. The stick floated flat
on the surface of the water, and the canoe drifted slowly away. With a
survey of the crescent composed of a score of such sticks all lying
flat, Kohokumu wiped his hands on his naked sides and lifted the
wearisome and centuries-old chant of Kuali:

"`Oh, the great fishhook of Maui!   Manai-i-ka-lani - "made fast
to the heavens"!   An earth-twisted cord ties the hook,  Engulfed from
lofty Kauiki!   Its bait the red-billed Alae,  The bird to Hina sacred!
It sinks far down to Hawaii,  Struggling and in pain dying!   Caught is
the land beneath the water,  Floated up, up to the surface,  But Hina
hid a wing of the bird  And broke the land beneath the water!   Below
was the bait snatched away  And eaten at once by the fishes,  The Ulua
of the deep muddy places!'"

His aged voice was hoarse and scratchy from the drinking of too much
swipes at a funeral the night before, nothing of which contributed to
make me less irritable. My head ached. The sun glare on the water made
my eyes ache, while I was suffering more than half a touch of mal de mer
from the antic conduct of the outrigger on the blobby sea. The air was
stagnant. In the lee of Waihee, between the white beach and the reef, no
whisper of breeze eased the still sultriness. I really think was too
miserable to summon the resolution to give up the fishing and go in to
shore.

Lying back with closed eyes, I lost count of time. I even forgot that
Kohokumu was chanting till reminded of it by his ceasing. An exclamation
made me bare my eyes to the stab of the sun. He was gazing down through
the water glass.

"It's a big one," he said, passing me the device and slipping overside
feetfirst into the water.

He went under without splash and ripple, turned over, and swam down. I
followed his progress through the water glass, which is merely an oblong
box a couple of feet long, open at the top, the bottom sealed
water-tight with a sheet of ordinary glass.

Now Kohokumu was a bore, and I was squeamishly out of sorts with him for
his volubleness, but I could not help admiring him as watched him go
down. Past seventy years of age, lean as a spear, and shriveled like a
mummy, he was doing what few young athletes of my race would do or could
do. It was forty feet to bottom. There, partly exposed but mostly hidden
under the bulge of a coral lump, I could discern his objective. His keen
eyes had caught the projecting tentacle of a squid. Even as he swam, the
tentacle was lazily  withdrawn, so that there was no sign of the
creature. But the brief exposure of the portion of one tentacle had
advertised its owner as a squid of size.

The pressure at a depth of forty feet is no joke for a young man, yet it
did not seem to inconvenience this oldster. I am certain it never
crossed his mind to be inconvenienced. Unarmed, bare of body save for a
brief malo or loin cloth, he was undeterred by the formidable creature
that constituted his prey. I saw him steady himself with his right hand
on the coral lump, and thrust his left arm into the hole to the
shoulder. Half a minute elapsed, during which time he seemed to be
groping and rooting around with his left hand. Then tentacle after
tentacle, myriad-suckered and wildly waving, emerged. Laying hold of his
arm, they writhed and coiled about his flesh like so many snakes. With a
heave and a jerk appeared the entire squid, a proper devilfish or
octopus.

But the old man was in no hurry for his natural element, the air above
the water. There, forty feet beneath, wrapped about by an octopus that
measured nine feet across from tentacle tip to tentacle tip and that
could well drown the stoutest swimmer, he cooly and casually did the one
thing that gave to him his empery over the monster. He shoved his lean,
hawklike face into the very center of the slimy, squirming mass, and
with his several ancient fangs bit into the heart and the life of the
matter. This accomplished, he came upward slowly, as a swimmer should
who is changing atmospheres from the depths. Alongside the canoe, still
in the water and peeling off the grisly clinging thing, the incorrigible
old sinner burst into the pule of triumph which had been chanted by
countless squid-catching generations before him:

"`O Kanaloa of the taboo nights!   Stand upright on the solid floor!
Stand upon the floor where lies the squid!   Stand up to take the squid
of the deep sea!   Rise up, O Kanaloa!
 Stir up!  Stir up!  Let the squid awake!   Let the squid that lies flat
awake!   Let the squid that lies spread out. . . .'"

 I closed my eyes and ears, not offering to lend him a hand, secure in
the knowledge that he could climb back unaided into the unstable craft
without the slightest risk of upsetting it.

"A very fine squid," he crooned. "It is a wahine squid. shall now sing
to you the song of the cowrie shell, the red cowrie shell that we used
as a bait for the squid - "

"You were disgraceful last night at the funeral," I headed him off. "I
heard all about it. You made much noise. You sang till everybody was
deaf. You insulted the son of the widow. You drank swipes like a pig.
Swipes are not good for your extreme age. Some day you will wake up
dead. You ought to be a wreck to-day - "

"Ha!" he chuckled. "And you, who drank no swipes, who was a babe unborn
when I was already an old man, who went to bed last night with the sun
and the chickens - this day you are a wreck. Explain me that. My
ears are as thirsty to listen as was my throat thirsty last night. And
here to-day, behold, I am, as that Englishman who came here in his yacht
used to say, I am in fine form, in devilish fine form."

"I give you up," I retorted, shrugging my shoulders. "Only one thing is
clear, and that is that the devil doesn't want you. Report of your
singing has gone before you."

"No," he pondered the idea carefully. "It is not that. The devil will be
glad for my coming, for I have some very fine songs for him, and
scandals and old gossips of the high aliis that will make him scratch
his sides. So let me explain to you the secret of my birth. The Sea is
my mother. I was born in a double canoe, during a Kona gale, in the
channel of Kahoolawe. From her, the Sea, my mother, I received my
strength. Whenever I return to her arms, as for a breast clasp, as have
returned this day, I grow strong again and immediately. She, to me, is
the milk giver, the life source - "

"Shades of Antaeus!" thought I.

"Some day," old Kohokumu rambled on, "when I am really old, shall be
reported of men as drowned in the sea. This will be an idle thought of
men. In truth, I shall have returned into the arms of my mother, there
to rest under the heart of her breast until the second birth of me, when
I shall  emerge into the sun a flashing youth of splendor like Maui
himself when he was golden young."

"A queer religion," I commented.

"When I was younger I muddled my poor head over queerer religions," old
Kohokumu retorted. "But listen, O Young Wise One, to my elderly wisdom.
This I know: as I grow old I seek less for the truth from without me,
and find more of the truth from within me. Why have thought this thought
of my return to my mother and of my rebirth from my mother into the sun?
You do not know. I do not know, save that, without whisper of man's
voice or printed word, without prompting from otherwhere, this thought
has arisen from within me, from the deeps of me that are as deep as the
sea. I am not a god. I do not make things. Therefore I have not made
this thought. I do not know its father or its mother. It is of old time
before me, and therefore it is true. Man does not make truth. Man, if he
be not blind, only recognizes truth when he sees it. Is this thought
that I have thought a dream?"

"Perhaps it is you that are a dream," I laughed. "And that and sky and
sea and the iron-hard land are dreams, all dreams."

"I have often thought that," he assured me soberly. "It may well be so.
Last night I dreamed I was a lark bird, a beautiful singing lark of the
sky like the larks on the upland pastures of Haleakala. And I flew up,
up toward the sun, singing, singing, as old Kohokumu never sang. I tell
you now that I dreamed I was a lark bird singing in the sky. But may not
I, the real I, be the lark bird?  And may not the telling of it be the
dream that I, the lark bird, am dreaming now?  Who are you to tell me
aye or no?  Dare you tell me I am not a lark bird asleep and dreaming
that I am old Kohokumu?"

I shrugged my shoulders, and he continued triumphantly.

"And how do you know but what you are old Maui himself asleep and
dreaming that you are John Lakana talking with me in a canoe?  And may
you not awake, old Maui yourself, and scratch your sides and say that
you had a funny dream in which you dreamed you were a haole?"

"I don't know," I admitted. "Besides, you wouldn't believe me."

"There is much more in dreams than we know," he assured  me with great
solemnity. "Dreams go deep, all the way down, maybe to before the
beginning. May not old Maui have only dreamed he pulled Hawaii up from
the bottom of the sea?  Then would this Hawaii land be a dream, and you
and I and the squid there only parts of Maui's dream?  And the lark
bird, too?"

He sighed and let his head sink on his breast.

"And I worry my old head about the secrets undiscoverable," he resumed,
"until I grow tired and want to forget, and so I drink swipes, and go
fishing, and sing old songs, and dream I am a lark bird singing in the
sky. I like that best of all, and often I dream it when I have drunk
much swipes - "

In great dejection of mood he peered down into the lagoon through the
water glass.

"There will be no more bites for a while," he announced. "The fish
sharks are prowling around, and we shall have to wait until they are
gone. And so that the time shall not be heavy, I will sing you the
canoe-hauling song to Lono. You remember:

"`Give to me the trunk of the tree, O Lono!   Give me the tree's main
root, O Lono!   Give me the ear of the tree, O Lono! - '" "For the
love of mercy, don't sing!" I cut him short. "I've got a headache, and
your singing hurts. You may be in devilish fine form to-day, but your
throat is rotten. I'd rather you talked about dreams, or told me
whoppers."

"It is too bad that you are sick, and you so young," he conceded
cheerily. "And I shall not sing any more. I shall tell you something you
do not know and have never heard; something that is no dream and no
whopper, but is what I know to have happened. Not very long ago there
lived here, on the beach beside this very lagoon, a young boy whose name
was Keikiwai, which, as you know, means Water Baby. He was truly a water
baby. His gods were the sea and fish gods, and he was born with
knowledge of the language of fishes, which the fishes did not know until
the sharks found it out one day when they heard him talk it.

"It happened this way. The word had been brought, and  the commands, by
swift runners, that the king was making a progress around the island,
and that on the next day a luau was to be served him by the dwellers
here of Waihee. It was always a hardship, when the king made a progress,
for the few dwellers in small places to fill his many stomachs with
food. For he came always with his wife and her women, with his priests
and sorcerers, his dancers and flute players and hula singers, and
fighting men and servants, and his high chiefs with their wives, and
sorcerers and fighting men and servants.

"Sometimes, in small places like Waihee, the path of his journey was
marked afterward by leanness and famine. But a king must be fed, and it
is not good to anger a king. So, like warning in advance of disaster,
Waihee heard of his coming, and all food-getters of field and pond and
mountain and sea were busied with getting food for the feast. And
behold, everything was got, from the choicest of royal taro to
sugar-cane joints for the roasting, from opihis to limu, from fowl to
wild pig and poi-fed puppies - everything save one thing. The
fishermen failed to get lobsters.

"Now be it known that the king's favorite food was lobster. He esteemed
it above all kao-kao (food), and his runners had made special mention of
it. And there were no lobsters, and it is not good to anger a king in
the belly of him. Too many sharks had come inside the reef. That was the
trouble. A young girl and an old man had been eaten by them. And of the
young men who dared dive for lobsters, one was eaten, and one lost an
arm, and another lost one hand and one foot.

"But there was Keikiwai, the Water Baby, only eleven years old, but half
fish himself and talking the language of fishes. To his father the head
men came, begging him to send the Water Baby to get lobsters to fill the
king's belly and divert his anger.

"Now this, what happened, was known and observed. For the fishermen and
their women, and the taro growers and the bird catchers, and the head
men, and all Waihee, came down and stood back from the edge of the rock
where the Water Baby stood and looked down at the lobsters far beneath
on the bottom.

"And a shark, looking up with its cat's eyes, observed him, and sent out
the shark call of &onq;fresh meat&cnq; to assemble all the
 sharks in the lagoon. For the sharks work thus together, which is why
they are strong. And the sharks answered the call till there were forty
of them, long ones and short ones and lean ones and round ones, forty of
them by count; and they talked to one another, saying: &onq;Look at that
titbit of a child, that morsel delicious of human-flesh sweetness
without the salt of the sea in it, of which salt we have too much,
savory and good to eat, melting to delight under our hearts as our
bellies embrace it and extract from it its sweet.&cnq; "Much more they
said, saying: &onq;He has come for the lobsters. When he dives in he is
for one of us. Not like the old man we ate yesterday, tough to dryness
with age, nor like the young men whose members were too hard-muscled,
but tender, so tender that he will melt in our gullets ere our bellies
receive him. When he dives in, we will all rush for him, and the lucky
one of us will get him, and, gulp, he will be gone, one bite and one
swallow, into the belly of the luckiest one of us.&cnq;

"And Keikiwai, the Water Baby, heard the conspiracy, knowing the shark
language; and he addressed a prayer, in the shark language, to the shark
god Moku-halii, and the sharks heard and waved their tails to one
another and winked their cat's eyes in token that they understood his
talk. And then he said: &onq;I shall now dive for a lobster for the
king. And no hurt shall befall me, because the shark with the shortest
tail is my friend and will protect me.&cnq;

"And, so saying, he picked up a chunk of lava rock and tossed it into
the water, with a big splash, twenty feet to one side. The forty sharks
rushed for the splash, while he dived, and by the time they discovered
they had missed him, he had gone to the bottom and come back and climbed
out, within his hand a fat lobster, a wahine lobster, full of eggs, for
the king.

"`Ha!' said the sharks, very angry. &onq;There is among us a traitor.
The titbit of a child, the morsel of sweetness, has spoken, and has
exposed the one among us who has saved him. Let us now measure the
length of our tails!&cnq;

"Which they did, in a long row, side by side, the shorter-tailed ones
cheating and stretching to gain length on themselves, the longer-tailed
ones cheating and stretching in order
 not to be out-cheated and out-stretched. They were very angry with the
one with the shortest tail, and him they rushed upon from every side and
devoured till nothing was left of him.

"Again they listened while they waited for the Water Baby to dive in.
And again the Water Baby made his prayer in the shark language to
Moku-halii, and said: &onq;The shark with the shortest tail is my friend
and will protect me.&cnq; And again the Water Baby tossed in a chunk of
lava, this time twenty feet away off to the other side. The sharks
rushed for the splash, and in their haste ran into one another, and
splashed with their tails till the water was all foam and they could see
nothing, each thinking some other was swallowing the titbit. And the
Water Baby came up and climbed out with another fat lobster for the
king.

"And the thirty-nine sharks measured tails, devouring the one with the
shortest tail, so that there were only thirty-eight sharks. And the
Water Baby continued to do what I have said, and the sharks to do what I
have told you, while for each shark that was eaten by his brothers there
was another fat lobster laid on the rock for the king. Of course, there
was much quarreling and argument among the sharks when it came to
measuring tails; but in the end it worked out in rightness and justice,
for, when only two sharks were left, they were the two biggest of the
original forty.

"And the Water Baby again claimed the shark with the shortest tail was
his friend, fooled the two sharks with another lava chunk, and brought
up another lobster. The two sharks each claimed the other had the
shorter tail, and each fought to eat the other, and the one with the
longer tail won - "

"Hold, O Kohokumu!" I interrupted. "Remember that that shark had already
- " "I know just what you are going to say," he snatched his
recital back from me. "And you are right. It took him so long to eat the
thirty-ninth shark, for inside the thirty-ninth shark were already the
nineteen other sharks he had eaten, and inside the fortieth shark were
already the nineteen other sharks he had eaten, and he did not have the
appetite he had started with. But do not forget he was a very big shark
to begin with.

 "It took him so long to eat the other shark, and the nineteen sharks
inside the other shark, that he was still eating when darkness fell and
the people of Waihee went away home with all the lobsters for the king.
And didn't they find the last shark on the beach next morning dead and
burst wide open with all he had eaten?"

Kohokumu fetched a full stop and held my eyes with his own shrewd ones.

"Hold, O Lakana!" he checked the speech that rushed to my tongue. "I
know what next you would say. You would say that with my own eyes I did
not see this, and therefore that I do not know what have been telling
you. But I do know, and I can prove it. My father's father knew the
grandson of the Water Baby's father's uncle. Also, there, on the rocky
point to which I point my finger now, is where the Water Baby stood and
dived. I have dived for lobsters there myself. It is a great place for
lobsters. Also, and often, have I seen sharks there. And there, on the
bottom, as I should know, for I have seen and counted them, are the
thirty-nine lava rocks thrown in by the Water Baby as I have described."

"But - " I began.

"Ha!" he baffled me. "Look!  While we have talked the fish have begun
again to bite."

He pointed to three of the bamboo poles erect and devil-dancing in token
that fish were hooked and struggling on the lines beneath. As he bent to
his paddle, he muttered, for my benefit:

"Of course I know. The thirty-nine lava rocks are still there. You can
count them any day for yourself. Of course I know, and I know for a
fact."

   The Red One Converts to The Red One, Macmillan, 1918 There it was!
The abrupt liberation of sound, as he timed it with his watch, Bassett
likened to the trump of an archangel. Walls of cities, he meditated,
might well fall down before so vast and compelling a summons. For the
thousandth time vainly he tried to analyze the tone-quality of that
enormous peal that dominated the land far into the strongholds of the
surrounding tribes. The mountain gorge which was its source rang to the
rising tide of it until it brimmed over and flooded earth and sky and
air. With the wantonness of a sick man's fancy, he likened it to the
mighty cry of some Titan of the Elder World vexed with misery or wrath.
Higher and higher it arose, challenging and demanding in such profounds
of volume that it seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow confines of
the solar system. There was in it, too, the clamor of protest in that
there were no ears to hear and comprehend its utterance.

- Such the sick man's fancy. Still he strove to analyze the sound.
Sonorous as thunder was it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a
thrummed taut cord of silver - no; it was none of these, nor a
blend of these. There were no words nor semblances in his vocabulary and
experience with which to describe the totality of that sound.

Time passed. Minutes merged into quarters of hours, and quarters of
hours into half hours, and still the sound persisted, ever changing from
its initial vocal impulse yet never receiving fresh impulse -
fading, dimming, dying as enormously as it had sprung into being. It
became a confusion of troubled mutterings and babblings and colossal
whisperings. Slowly it withdrew, sob by sob, into whatever great bosom
had birthed it, until it whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and as
equally seductive whispers of delight, striving still to be heard, to
convey some cosmic secret, some understanding of infinite import and
value. It dwindled to a ghost of sound that had lost its menace and
promise, and became a thing that pulsed on in the sick man's
consciousness for minutes after it  had ceased. When he could hear it no
longer, Bassett glanced at his watch. An hour had elapsed ere that
archangel's trump had subsided into tonal nothingness.

Was this, then, his dark tower? - Bassett pondered, remembering
his Browning and gazing at his skeleton-like and fever-wasted hands. And
the fancy made him smile - of Childe Roland bearing a slug-horn to
his lips with an arm as feeble as his was. Was it months, or years, he
asked himself, since he first heard that mysterious call on the beach at
Ringmanu? To save himself he could not tell. The long sickness had been
most long. In conscious count of time he knew of months, many of them;
but he had no way of estimating the long intervals of delirium and
stupor. And how fared Captain Bateman of the blackbirder <emph
rend='italic'>Nari? he wondered; and had Captain Bateman's drunken mate
died of delirium tremens yet?

From which vain speculations, Bassett turned idly to review all that had
occurred since that day on the beach of Ringmanu when he first heard the
sound and plunged into the jungle after it. Sagawa had protested. He
could see him yet, his queer little monkeyish face eloquent with fear,
his back burdened with specimen cases, in his hands Bassett's butterfly
net and naturalist's shotgun, as he quavered in Beche de mer English:
"Me fella too much fright along bush. Bad fella boy too much stop'm
along bush."

Bassett smiled sadly at the recollection. The little New Hanover boy had
been frightened, but had proved faithful, following him without
hesitancy into the bush in the quest after the source of the wonderful
sound. No fire-hollowed tree-trunk, that, throbbing war through the
jungle depths, had been Bassett's conclusion. Erroneous had been his
next conclusion, namely, that the source or cause could not be more
distant than an hour's walk and that he would easily be back by
mid-afternoon to be picked up by the Nari's whaleboat.

"That big fella noise no good, all the same devil-devil," Sagawa had
adjudged. And Sagawa had been right. Had he not had his head hacked off
within the day?  Bassett shuddered. Without doubt Sagawa had been eaten
as well by the bad fella boys too much that stopped along the bush. He
could see him, as he had last seen him, stripped of the shotgun and  all
the naturalist's gear of his master, lying on the narrow trail where he
had been decapitated barely the moment before. Yes, within a minute the
thing had happened. Within a minute, looking back, Bassett had seen him
trudging patiently along under his burdens. Then Bassett's own trouble
had come upon him. He looked at the cruelly healed stumps of the first
and second fingers of his left hand, then rubbed them softly into the
indentation in the back of his skull. Quick as had been the flash of the
long-handled tomahawk, he had been quick enough to duck away his head
and partially to deflect the stroke with his up-flung hand. Two fingers
and a nasty scalp-wound had been the price he paid for his life. With
one barrel of his ten-gauge shotgun he had blown the life out of the
bushman who had so nearly got him; with the other barrel he had peppered
the bushmen bending over Sagawa, and had the pleasure of knowing that
the major portion of the charge had gone into the one who leaped away
with Sagawa's head. Everything had occurred in a flash. Only himself,
the slain bushman, and what remained of Sagawa, were in the narrow,
wild-pig run of a path. From the dark jungle on either side came no
rustle of movement or sound of life. And he had suffered distinct and
dreadful shock. For the first time in his life he had killed a human
being, and he knew nausea as he contemplated the mess of his handiwork.

Then had begun the chase. He retreated up the pig-run before his
hunters, who were between him and the beach. How many there were, he
could not guess. There might have been one, or a hundred, for aught he
saw of them. That some of them took to the trees and traveled along
through the jungle roof he was certain; but at the most he never
glimpsed more than an occasional flitting of shadows. No bow-strings
twanged that he could hear; but every little while, whence discharged he
knew not, tiny arrows whispered past him or struck tree-boles and
fluttered to the ground beside him. They were bone-tipped and
feather-shafted, and the feathers, torn from the breasts of
humming-birds, iridesced like jewels.

Once - and now, after the long lapse of time, he chuckled
gleefully at the recollection - he had detected a shadow above him
that came to instant rest as he turned his gaze upward. He could make
out nothing, but, deciding to chance it, had  fired at it a heavy charge
of number five shot. Squalling like an infuriated cat, the shadow
crashed down through tree-ferns and orchids and thudded upon the earth
at his feet, and, still squalling its rage and pain, had sunk its human
teeth into the ankle of his stout tramping boot. He, on the other hand,
was not idle, and with his free foot had done what reduced the squalling
to silence. So inured to savagery had Bassett since become, that he
chuckled again with the glee of the recollection.

What a night had followed!  Small wonder that he had accumulated such a
virulence and variety of fevers, he thought, as he recalled that
sleepless night of torment, when the throb of his wounds was as nothing
compared with the myriad stings of the mosquitoes. There had been no
escaping them, and he had not dared to light a fire. They had literally
pumped his body full of poison, so that, with the coming of day, eyes
swollen almost shut, he had stumbled blindly on, not caring much when
his head should be hacked off and his carcass started on the way of
Sagawa's to the cooking fire. Twenty-four hours had made a wreck of him
- of mind as well as body. He had scarcely retained his wits at
all, so maddened was he by the tremendous inoculation of poison he had
received. Several times he fired his shotgun with effect into the
shadows that dogged him. Stinging day insects and gnats added to his
torment, while his bloody wounds attracted hosts of loathsome flies that
clung sluggishly to his flesh and had to be brushed off and crushed off.

Once, in that day, he heard again the wonderful sound, seemingly more
distant, but rising imperiously above the nearer war-drums in the bush.
Right there was where he had made his mistake. Thinking that he had
passed beyond it and that, therefore, it was between him and the beach
of Ringmanu, he had worked back toward it when in reality he was
penetrating deeper and deeper into the mysterious heart of the
unexplored island. That night, crawling in among the twisted roots of a
banyan tree, he had slept from exhaustion while the mosquitoes had had
their will of him.

Followed days and nights that were vague as nightmares in his memory.
One clear vision he remembered was of suddenly finding himself in the
midst of a bush village and watching  the old men and children fleeing
into the jungle. All had fled but one. From close at hand and above him,
a whimpering as of some animal in pain and terror had startled him. And
looking up he had seen her - a girl, or young woman, rather,
suspended by one arm in the cooking sun. Perhaps for days she had so
hung. Her swollen, protruding tongue spoke as much. Still alive, she
gazed at him with eyes of terror. Past help, he decided, as he noted the
swellings of her legs which advertised that the joints had been crushed
and the great bones broken. He resolved to shoot her, and there the
vision terminated. He could not remember whether he had or not, any more
than could he remember how he chanced to be in that village or how he
succeeded in getting away from it.

Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in Bassett's mind as he reviewed
that period of his terrible wanderings. He remembered invading another
village of a dozen houses and driving all before him with his shotgun
save for one old man, too feeble to flee, who spat at him and whined and
snarled as he dug open a ground-oven and from amid the hot stones
dragged forth a roasted pig that steamed its essence deliciously through
its green-leaf wrappings. It was at this place that a wantonness of
savagery had seized upon him. Having feasted, ready to depart with a
hind quarter of the pig in his hand, he deliberately fired the grass
thatch of a house with his burning glass.

But seared deepest of all in Bassett's brain, was the dank and noisome
jungle. It actually stank with evil, and it was always twilight. Rarely
did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its matted roof a hundred feet
overhead. And beneath that roof was an a    rial ooze of vegetation,
a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent life-forms that rooted in
death and lived on death. And through all this he drifted, ever pursued
by the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, themselves ghosts of evil
that dared not face him in battle but that knew, soon or late, that they
would feed on him. Bassett remembered that at the time, in lucid
moments, he had likened himself to a wounded bull pursued by plains'
coyotes too cowardly to battle with him for the meat of him, yet certain
of the inevitable end of him when they would be full gorged. As the
bull's  horns and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes, so his shotgun
kept off these Solomon Islanders, these twilight shades of bushmen of
the island of Guadalcanal.

Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, as if cloven by the sword of
God in the hand of God, the jungle terminated. The edge of it,
perpendicular and as black as the infamy of it, was a hundred feet up
and down. And, beginning at the edge of it, grew the grass -
sweet, soft, tender, pasture grass that would have delighted the eyes
and beasts of any husbandman and that extended, on and on, for leagues
and leagues of velvet verdure, to the backbone of the great island, the
towering mountain range flung up by some ancient earth-cataclysm,
serrated and gullied but not yet erased by the erosive tropic rains. But
the grass!  He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his face in it,
smelled it, and broken down in a fit of involuntary weeping.

And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had pealed forth - if by
peal, he had often thought since, an adequate description could be given
of the enunciation of so vast a sound so melting sweet. Sweet it was as
no sound ever heard. Vast it was, of so mighty a resonance that it might
have proceeded from some brazen-throated monster. And yet it called to
him across that leagues-wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his
long-suffering, pain-wracked spirit.

He remembered how he lay there in the grass, wet-cheeked but no longer
sobbing, listening to the sound and wondering that he had been able to
hear it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air pressures and air
currents, he reflected, had made it possible for the sound to carry so
far. Such conditions might not happen again in a thousand days or ten
thousand days; but the one day it had happened had been the day he
landed from the Nari for several hours' collecting. Especially had he
been in quest of the famed jungle butterfly, a foot across from wing-tip
to wing-tip, as velvet-dusky of lack of color as was the gloom of the
roof, of such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted only to the jungle
roof and could be brought down only by a dose of shot. It was for this
purpose that Sagawa had carried the twenty-gauge shotgun.

Two days and nights he had spent crawling across that belt  of grass
land. He had suffered much, but pursuit had ceased at the jungle-edge.
And he would have died of thirst had not a heavy thunderstorm revived
him on the second day.

And then had come Balatta. In the first shade, where the savannah
yielded to the dense mountain jungle, he had collapsed to die. At first
she had squealed with delight at sight of his helplessness, and was for
beating his brain out with a stout forest branch. Perhaps it was his
very utter helplessness that had appealed to her, and perhaps it was her
human curiosity that made her refrain. At any rate, she had refrained,
for he opened his eyes again under the impending blow, and saw her
studying him intently. What especially struck her about him were his
blue eyes and white skin. Coolly she had squatted on her hams, spat on
his arm, and with her finger-tips scrubbed away the dirt of days and
nights of muck and jungle that sullied the pristine whiteness of his
skin.

And everything about her had struck him especially, although there was
nothing conventional about her at all. He laughed weakly at the
recollection, for she had been as innocent of garb as Eve before the
fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean at the same time, asymmetrically
limbed, string-muscled as if with lengths of cordage, dirt-caked from
infancy save for casual showers, she was as unbeautiful a prototype of
woman as he, with a scientist's eye, had ever gazed upon. Her breasts
advertised at the one time her maturity and youth; and, if by nothing
else, her sex was advertised by the one article of finery with which she
was adorned, namely a pig's tail, thrust through a hole in her left
ear-lobe. So lately had the tail been severed, that its raw end still
oozed blood that dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-droppings.
And her face!  A twisted and wizened complex of apish features,
perforated by upturned, sky-open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth that
sagged from a huge upper-lip and faded precipitately into a retreating
chin, and by peering querulous eyes that blinked as blink the eyes of
denizens of monkey-cages.

Not even the water she brought him in a forest-leaf, and the ancient and
half-putrid chunk of roast pig, could redeem in the slightest the
grotesque hideousness of her. When he had eaten weakly for a space, he
closed his eyes in order not to see her, although again and again she
poked them open to  peer at the blue of them. Then had come the sound.
Nearer, much nearer, he knew it to be; and he knew equally well, despite
the weary way he had come, that it was still many hours distant. The
effect of it on her had been startling. She cringed under it, with
averted face, moaning and chattering with fear. But after it had lived
its full life of an hour, he closed his eyes and fell asleep with
Balatta brushing the flies from him.

When he awoke it was night, and she was gone. But he was aware of
renewed strength, and, by then too thoroughly inoculated by the mosquito
poison to suffer further inflammation, he closed his eyes and slept an
unbroken stretch till sun-up. A little later Balatta had returned,
bringing with her a half dozen women who, unbeautiful as they were, were
patently not so unbeautiful as she. She evidenced by her conduct that
she considered him her find, her property, and the pride she took in
showing him off would have been ludicrous had his situation not been so
desperate.

Later, after what had been to him a terrible journey of miles, when he
collapsed in front of the devil-devil house in the shadow of the
breadfruit tree, she had shown very lively ideas on the matter of
retaining possession of him. Ngurn, whom Bassett was to know afterward
as the devil-devil doctor, priest, or medicine man of the village, had
wanted his head. Others of the grinning and chattering monkey-men, all
as stark of clothes and bestial of appearance as Balatta, had wanted his
body for the roasting oven. At that time he had not understood their
language, if by language might be dignified the uncouth sounds they made
to represent ideas. But Bassett had thoroughly understood the matter of
debate, especially when the men pressed and prodded and felt of the
flesh of him as if he were so much commodity in a butcher's stall.

Balatta had been losing the debate rapidly, when the accident happened.
One of the men, curiously examining Bassett's shotgun, managed to cock
and pull a trigger. The recoil of the butt into the pit of the man's
stomach had not been the most sanguinary result, for the charge of shot,
at a distance of a yard, had blown the head of one of the debaters into
nothingness.

 Even Balatta joined the others in flight, and, ere they returned, his
senses already reeling from the oncoming fever-attack, Bassett had
regained possession of the gun. Whereupon, although his teeth chattered
with the ague and his swimming eyes could scarcely see, he held onto his
fading consciousness until he could intimidate the bushmen with the
simple magics of compass, watch, burning glass, and matches. At the
last, with due emphasis of solemnity and awfulness, he had killed a
young pig with his shotgun and promptly fainted.

Bassett flexed his arm-muscles in quest of what possible strength might
reside in such weakness, and dragged himself slowly and totteringly to
his feet. He was shockingly emaciated; yet, during the various
convalescences of the many months of his long sickness, he had never
regained quite the same degree of strength as this time. What he feared
was another relapse such as he had already frequently experienced.
Without drugs, without even quinine, he had managed so far to live
through a combination of the most pernicious and most malignant of
malarial and black-water fevers. But could he continue to endure?  Such
was his everlasting query. For, like the genuine scientist he was, he
would not be content to die until he had solved the secret of the sound.

Supported by a staff, he staggered the few steps to the devil-devil
house where death and Ngurn reigned in gloom. Almost as infamously dark
and evil-stinking as the jungle was the devil-devil house - in
Bassett's opinion. Yet therein was usually to be found his favorite
crony and gossip, Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a discussion, the
while he sat in the ashes of death and in a slow smoke shrewdly revolved
curing human heads suspended from the rafters. For, through the months'
interval of consciousness of his long sickness, Bassett had mastered the
psychological simplicities and lingual difficulties of the language of
the tribe of Ngurn and Balatta, and Gngngn - the latter the
addle-headed young chief who was ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered
intrigue had it, was the son of Ngurn.

"Will the Red One speak to-day?" Bassett asked, by this time so
accustomed to the old man's gruesome occupation as to take even an
interest in the progress of the smoke-curing.

 With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined the particular head he was at
work upon.

"It will be ten days before I can say &onq;finish,&cnq;" he said. "Never
has any man fixed heads like these."

Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fellow's reluctance to talk with him
of the Red One. It had always been so. Never, by any chance, had Ngurn
or any other member of the weird tribe divulged the slightest hint of
any physical characteristic of the Red One. Physical the Red One must
be, to emit the wonderful sound, and though it was called the Red One,
Bassett could not be sure that red represented the color of it. Red
enough were the deeds and powers of it, from what abstract clews he had
gleaned. Not alone, had Ngurn informed him, was the Red One more bestial
powerful than the neighbor tribal gods, ever a-thirst for the red blood
of living human sacrifices, but the neighbor gods themselves were
sacrificed and tormented before him. He was the god of a dozen allied
villages similar to this one, which was the central and commanding
village of the federation. By virtue of the Red One many alien villages
had been devastated and even wiped out, the prisoners sacrificed to the
Red One. This was true to-day, and it extended back into old history
carried down by word of mouth through the generations. When he, Ngurn,
had been a young man, the tribes beyond the grass lands had made a war
raid. In the counter raid, Ngurn and his fighting folk had made many
prisoners. Of children alone over five score living had been bled white
before the Red One, and many, many more men and women.

The Thunderer, was another of Ngurn's names for the mysterious deity.
Also at times was he called The Loud Shouter, The God-Voiced, The
Bird-Throated, The One with the Throat Sweet as the Throat of the
Honey-Bird, The Sun Singer, and The Star-Born.

Why The Star-Born?  In vain Bassett interrogated Ngurn. According to
that old devil-devil doctor, the Red One had always been, just where he
was at present, forever singing and thundering his will over men. But
Ngurn's father, wrapped in decaying grass-matting and hanging even then
over their heads among the smoky rafters of the devil-devil house, had
held otherwise. That departed wise one had believed that the  Red One
came from out of the starry night, else why - so his argument had
run - had the old and forgotten ones passed his name down as the
Star-Born?  Bassett could not but recognize something cogent in such
argument. But Ngurn affirmed the long years of his long life, wherein he
had gazed upon many starry nights, yet never had he found a star on
grass land or in jungle depth - and he had looked for them. True,
he had beheld shooting stars (this in reply to Bassett's contention);
but likewise had he beheld the phosphorescence of fungoid growths and
rotten meat and fireflies on dark nights, and the flames of wood-fires
and of blazing candle-nuts; yet what were flame and blaze and glow when
they had flamed, and blazed and glowed?  Answer: memories, memories
only, of things which had ceased to be, like memories of matings
accomplished, of feasts forgotten, of desires that were the ghosts of
desires, flaring, flaming, burning, yet unrealized in achievement of
easement and satisfaction. Where was the appetite of yesterday? the
roasted flesh of the wild pig the hunter's arrow failed to slay? the
maid, unwed and dead, ere the young man knew her?

A memory was not a star, was Ngurn's contention. How could a memory be a
star?  Further, after all his long life he still observed the starry
night-sky unaltered. Never had he noted the absence of a single star
from its accustomed place. Besides, stars were fire, and the Red One was
not fire - which last involuntary betrayal told Bassett nothing.

"Will the Red One speak to-morrow?" he queried.

Ngurn shrugged his shoulders as who should say.

"And the day after? - and the day after that?" Bassett persisted.

"I would like to have the curing of your head," Ngurn changed the
subject. "It is different from any other head. No devil-devil has a head
like it. Besides, I would cure it well. I would take months and months.
The moons would come and the moons would go, and the smoke would be very
slow, and I should myself gather the materials for the curing smoke. The
skin would not wrinkle. It would be as smooth as your skin now."

He stood up, and from the dim rafters grimed with the smoking of
countless heads, where day was no more than a  gloom, took down a
matting-wrapped parcel and began to open it.

"It is a head like yours," he said, "but it is poorly cured."

Bassett had pricked up his ears at the suggestion that it was a white
man's head; for he had long since come to accept that these
jungle-dwellers, in the midmost center of the great island, had never
had intercourse with white men. Certainly he had found them without the
almost universal Beche de mer English of the west South Pacific. Nor had
they knowledge of tobacco, nor of gunpowder. Their few precious knives,
made from lengths of hoop-iron, and their few and more precious
tomahawks, made from cheap trade hatchets, he had surmised they had
captured in war from the bushmen of the jungle beyond the grass lands,
and that they, in turn, had similarly gained them from the salt water
men who fringed the coral beaches of the shore and had contact with the
occasional white men.

"The folk in the out beyond do not know how to cure heads," old Ngurn
explained, as he drew forth from the filthy matting and placed in
Bassett's hands an indubitable white man's head.

Ancient it was beyond question; white it was as the blond hair attested.
He could have sworn it once belonged to an Englishman, and to an
Englishman of long before by token of the heavy gold circlets still
threaded in the withered ear-lobes.

"Now your head . . ." the devil-devil doctor began on his favorite
topic.

"I'll tell you what," Bassett interrupted, struck by a new idea. "When I
die I'll let you have my head to cure, if, first, you take me to look
upon the Red One."

"I will have your head anyway when you are dead," Ngurn rejected the
proposition. He added, with the brutal frankness of the savage:
"Besides, you have not long to live. You are almost a dead man now. You
will grow less strong. In not many months I shall have you here turning
and turning in the smoke. It is pleasant, through the long afternoons,
to turn the head of one you have known as well as I know you. And I
shall talk to you and tell you the many secrets you want to know. Which
will not matter, for you will be dead."

 "Ngurn," Bassett threatened in sudden anger. "You know the Baby Thunder
in the Iron that is mine." (This was in reference to his all-potent and
all-awful shotgun.) "I can kill you any time, and then you will not get
my head."

"Just the same, will Gngngn, or some one else of my folk get it," Ngurn
complacently assured him. "And just the same will it turn and turn here
in the devil-devil house in the smoke. The quicker you slay me with your
Baby Thunder, the quicker will your head turn in the smoke."

And Bassett knew he was beaten in the discussion.

What was the Red One? - Bassett asked himself a thousand times in
the succeeding week, while he seemed to grow stronger. What was the
source of the wonderful sound?  What was this Sun Singer, this Star-Born
One, this mysterious deity, as bestial-conducted as the black and
kinky-headed and monkey-like human beasts who worshiped it, and whose
silver-sweet, bull-mouthed singing and commanding he had heard at the
taboo distance for so long?

Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable curing of his head when
he was dead. Gngngn, imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic,
too much under the sway of Ngurn, to be considered. Remained Balatta,
who, from the time she found him and poked his blue eyes open to
recrudescence of her grotesque, female hideousness, had continued his
adorer. Woman she was, and he had long known that the only way to win
from her treason to her tribe was through the woman's heart of her.

Bassett was a fastidious man. He had never recovered from the initial
horror caused by Balatta's female awfulness. Back in England, even at
best, the charm of woman, to him, had never been robust. Yet now,
resolutely, as only a man can do who is capable of martyring himself for
the cause of science, he proceeded to violate all the fineness and
delicacy of his nature by making love to the unthinkably disgusting
bushwoman.

He shuddered, but with averted face hid his grimaces and swallowed his
gorge as he put his arm around her dirt-crusted shoulders and felt the
contact of her rancid-oily and kinky hair with his neck and chin. But he
nearly screamed when she succumbed to that caress so at the very first
of the courtship  and mowed and gibbered and squealed little, queer,
pig-like gurgly noises of delight. It was too much. And the next he did
in the singular courtship was to take her down to the stream and give
her a vigorous scrubbing.

From then on he devoted himself to her like a true swain as frequently
and for as long at a time as his will could override his repugnance. But
marriage, which she ardently suggested, with due observance of tribal
custom, he balked at. Fortunately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe.
Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile. This
had been ordained at his birth. Gngngn was denied ever the touch of
woman. Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only by
the death of the offending female. It had happened once, since Bassett's
arrival, when a girl of nine, running in play, stumbled and fell against
the sacred chief. And the girl-child was seen no more. In whispers,
Balatta told Bassett that she had been three days and nights in dying
before the Red One. As for Balatta, the breadfruit was taboo to her. For
which Bassett was thankful. The taboo might have been water.

For himself, he fabricated a special taboo. Only could he marry, he
explained, when the Southern Cross rode highest in the sky. Knowing his
astronomy, he thus gained a reprieve of nearly nine months; and he was
confident that within that time he would either be dead or escaped to
the coast with full knowledge of the Red One and of the source of the
Red One's wonderful voice. At first he had fancied the Red One to be
some colossal statue, like Memnon, rendered vocal under certain
temperature conditions of sunlight. But when, after a war raid, a batch
of prisoners was brought in and the sacrifice made at night, in the
midst of rain, when the sun could play no part, the Red One had been
more vocal than usual, Bassett discarded that hypothesis.

In company with Balatta, sometimes with men and parties of women, the
freedom of the jungle was his for three quadrants of the compass. But
the fourth quadrant, which contained the Red One's abiding place, was
taboo. He made more thorough love to Balatta - also saw to it that
she scrubbed herself more frequently. Eternal female she was, capable of
any treason for the sake of love. And, though the  sight of her was
provocative of nausea and the contact of her provocative of despair,
although he could not escape her awfulness in his dream-haunted
nightmares of her, he nevertheless was aware of the cosmic verity of sex
that animated her and that made her own life of less value than the
happiness of her lover with whom she hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta?
Where was the intrinsic difference?  The soft and tender product of
ultra-civilization, or her bestial prototype of a hundred thousand years
before her? - there was no difference.

Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist afterward. In the jungle-heart
of Guadalcanal he put the affair to the test, as in the laboratory he
would have put to the test any chemical reaction. He increased his
feigned ardor for the bushwoman, at the same time increasing the
imperiousness of his will of desire over her to be led to look upon the
Red One face to face. It was the old story, he recognized, that the
woman must pay, and it occurred when the two of them, one day, were
catching the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, an inch long,
half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with salmon-golden roe, that frequented
the fresh water and that were esteemed, raw and whole, fresh or putrid,
a perfect delicacy. Prone in the muck of the decaying jungle-floor,
Balatta threw herself, clutching his ankles with her hands, kissing his
feet and making slubbery noises that chilled his backbone up and down
again. She begged him to kill her rather than exact this ultimate
love-payment. She told him of the penalty of breaking the taboo of the
Red One - a week of torture, living, the details of which she
yammered out from her face in the mire until he realized that he was yet
a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human was capable of
wreaking on the human.

Yet did Bassett insist on having his man's will satisfied, at the
woman's risk, that he might solve the mystery of the Red One's singing,
though she should die long and horribly and screaming. And Balatta,
being mere woman, yielded. She led him into the forbidden quadrant. An
abrupt mountain, shouldering in from the north to meet a similar
intrusion from the south, tormented the stream in which they had fished
into a deep and gloomy gorge. After a mile along the gorge, the  way
plunged sharply upward until they crossed a saddle of raw limestone
which attracted his geologist's eye. Still climbing, although he paused
often from sheer physical weakness, they scaled forest-clad heights
until they emerged on a naked mesa or tableland. Bassett recognized the
stuff of its composition as black volcanic sand, and knew that a pocket
magnet could have captured a full load of the sharply angular grains he
trod upon.

And then, holding Balatta by the hand and leading her onward, he came to
it - a tremendous pit, obviously artificial, in the heart of the
plateau. Old history, the South Seas Sailing Directions, scores of
remembered data and connotations swift and furious, surged through his
brain. It was Mendana who had discovered the islands and named them
Solomon's, believing that he had found that monarch's fabled mines. They
had laughed at the old navigator's child-like credulity; and yet here
stood himself, Bassett, on the rim of an excavation for all the world
like the diamond pits of South Africa.

But no diamond this that he gazed down upon. Rather was it a pearl, with
the depth of iridescence of a pearl; but of a size all pearls of earth
and time welded into one, could not have totaled; and of a color
undreamed of any pearl, or of anything else, for that matter, for it was
the color of the Red One. And the Red One himself Bassett knew it to be
on the instant. A perfect sphere, fully two hundred feet in diameter,
the top of it was a hundred feet below the level of the rim. He likened
the color quality of it to lacquer. Indeed, he took it to be some sort
of lacquer, applied by man, but a lacquer too marvelously clever to have
been manufactured by the bush-folk. Brighter than bright cherry-red, its
richness of color was as if it were red builded upon red. It glowed and
iridesced in the sunlight as if gleaming up from underlay under underlay
of red.

In vain Balatta strove to dissuade him from descending. She threw
herself in the dirt; but, when he continued down the trail that spiraled
the pit-wall, she followed, cringing and whimpering her terror. That the
red sphere had been dug out as a precious thing, was patent. Considering
the paucity of members of the federated twelve villages and their
primitive  tools and methods, Bassett knew that the toil of a myriad
generations could scarcely have made that enormous excavation.

He found the pit bottom carpeted with human bones, among which, battered
and defaced, lay village gods of wood and stone. Some, covered with
obscene totemic figures and designs, were carved from solid tree trunks
forty or fifty feet in length. He noted the absence of the shark and
turtle gods, so common among the shore villages, and was amazed at the
constant recurrence of the helmet motive. What did these jungle savages
of the dark heart of Guadalcanal know of helmets? Had Mendana's
men-at-arms worn helmets and penetrated here centuries before?  And if
not, then whence had the bush-folk caught the motive?

Advancing over the litter of gods and bones, Balatta whimpering at his
heels, Bassett entered the shadow of the Red One and passed on under its
gigantic overhang until he touched it with his finger-tips. No lacquer
that. Nor was the surface smooth as it should have been in the case of
lacquer. On the contrary, it was corrugated and pitted, with here and
there patches that showed signs of heat and fusing. Also, the substance
of it was metal, though unlike any metal or combination of metals he had
ever known. As for the color itself, he decided it to be no application.
It was the intrinsic color of the metal itself.

He moved his finger-tips, which up to that had merely rested, along the
surface, and felt the whole gigantic sphere quicken and live and
respond. It was incredible!  So light a touch on so vast a mass!  Yet
did it quiver under the finger-tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that
became whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound - but of
sound so different; so elusive thin that it was shimmeringly sibilant;
so mellow that it was maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which
last was just what Bassett decided would be like a peal from some bell
of the gods reaching earthward from across space.

He looked to Balatta with swift questioning; but the voice of the Red
One he had evoked had flung her face-downward and moaning among the
bones. He returned to contemplation of the prodigy. Hollow it was, and
of no metal known  on earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named by
the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only from the stars could it have
come, and no thing of chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and
mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness that it certainly
possessed, could not be the result of mere fortuitousness. A child of
intelligences, remote and unguessable, working corporally in metals, it
indubitably was. He stared at it in amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire
of hypotheses to account for this far-journeyer who had adventured the
night of space, threaded the stars, and now rose before him and above
him, exhumed by patient anthro-pophagi, pitted and lacquered by its
fiery bath in two atmospheres.

But was the color a lacquer of heat upon some familiar metal?  Or was it
an intrinsic quality of the metal itself?  He thrust in the blade-point
of his pocket-knife to test the constitution of the stuff. Instantly the
entire sphere burst into a mighty whispering, sharp with protest, almost
twanging goldenly if a whisper could possibly be considered to twang,
rising higher, sinking deeper, the two extremes of the registry of sound
threatening to complete the circle and coalesce into the bull-mouthed
thundering he had so often heard beyond the taboo distance.

Forgetful of safety, of his own life itself, entranced by the wonder of
the unthinkable and unguessable thing, he raised his knife to strike
heavily from a long stroke, but was prevented by Balatta. She upreared
on her own knees in an agony of terror, clasping his knees and
supplicating him to desist. In the intensity of her desire to impress
him, she put her forearm between her teeth and sank them to the bone.

He scarcely observed her act, although he yielded automatically to his
gentler instincts and withheld the knife-hack. To him, human life had
dwarfed to microscopic proportions before this colossal portent of
higher life from within the distances of the sidereal universe. As had
she been a dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman to her feet and
compelled her to start with him on an encirclement of the base. Part way
around, he encountered horrors. Even, among the others, did he recognize
the sun-shriveled remnant of the nine-years girl who had accidentally
broken Chief Gngngn's personality  taboo. And, among what was left of
these that had passed, he encountered what was left of one who had not
yet passed. Truly had the bush-folk named themselves into the name of
the Red One, seeing in him their own image which they strove to placate
and please with such red offerings.

Farther around, always treading the bones and images of humans and gods
that constituted the floor of this ancient charnel house of sacrifice,
he came upon the device by which the Red One was made to send his call
singing thunderingly across the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the far
beach of Ringmanu. Simple and primitive was it as was the Red One's
consummate artifice. A great king-post, half a hundred feet in length,
seasoned by centuries of superstitious care, carven into dynasties of
gods, each superimposed, each helmeted, each seated in the open mouth of
a crocodile, was slung by ropes, twisted of climbing vegetable
parasites, from the apex of a tripod of three great forest trunks,
themselves carved into grinning and grotesque adumbrations of man's
modern concepts of art and god. From the striker king-post, were
suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and
direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven
end-onward against the mighty, red-iridescent sphere.

Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned religiously for himself
and the twelve tribes under him. Bassett laughed aloud, almost with
madness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger, winged with
intelligence across space, to fall into a bushman stronghold and be
worshiped by ape-like, man-eating and head-hunting savages. It was as if
God's Word had fallen into the muck mire of the abyss underlying the
bottom of hell; as if Jehovah's Commandments had been presented on
carved stone to the monkeys of the monkey cage at the Zoo; as if the
Sermon on the Mount had been preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics.

 * * *

The slow weeks passed. The nights, by election, Bassett spent on the
ashen floor of the devil-devil house, beneath the ever-swinging,
slow-curing heads. His reason for this was that it was taboo to the
lesser sex of woman, and, therefore, a  refuge for him from Balatta, who
grew more persecutingly and perilously loverly as the Southern Cross
rode higher in the sky and marked the imminence of her nuptials. His
days Bassett spent in a hammock swung under the shade of the great
breadfruit tree before the devil-devil house. There were breaks in this
program, when, in the comas of his devastating fever-attacks, he lay for
days and nights in the house of heads. Ever he struggled to combat the
fever, to live, to continue to live, to grow strong and stronger against
the day when he would be strong enough to dare the grass-lands and the
belted jungle beyond, and win to the beach, and to some
labor-recruiting, black-birding ketch or schooner, and on to
civilization and the men of civilization, to whom he could give news of
the message from other worlds that lay, darkly worshiped by beast-men,
in the black heart of Guadalcanal's mid-most center.

On other nights, lying late under the breadfruit tree, Bassett spent
long hours watching the slow setting of the western stars beyond the
black wall of jungle where it had been thrust back by the clearing for
the village. Possessed of more than a cursory knowledge of astronomy, he
took a sick man's pleasure in speculating as to the dwellers on the
unseen worlds of those incredibly remote suns, to haunt whose houses of
light, life came forth, a shy visitant, from the rayless crypts of
matter. He could no more apprehend limits to time than bounds to space.
No subversive radium speculations had shaken his steady scientific faith
in the conservation of energy and the indestructibility of matter.
Always and forever must there have been stars. And surely, in that
cosmic ferment, all must be comparatively alike, comparatively of the
same substance, or substances, save for the freaks of the ferment. All
must obey, or compose, the same laws that ran without infraction through
the entire experience of man. Therefore, he argued and agreed, must
worlds and life be appanages to all the suns as they were appanages to
the particular sun of his own solar system.

Even as he lay here, under the breadfruit tree, an intelligence that
stared across the starry gulfs, so must all the universe be exposed to
the ceaseless scrutiny of innumerable eyes, like his, though grantedly
different, with behind them, by the  same token, intelligences that
questioned and sought the meaning and the construction of the whole. So
reasoning, he felt his soul go forth in kinship with that august
company, that multitude whose gaze was forever upon the arras of
infinity.

Who were they, what were they, those far distant and superior ones who
had bridged the sky with their gigantic, red-iridescent, heaven-singing
message?  Surely, and long since, had they, too, trod the path on which
man had so recently, by the calendar of the cosmos, set his feet. And to
be able to send such a message across the pit of space, surely they had
reached those heights to which man, in tears and travail and bloody
sweat, in darkness and confusion of many counsels, was so slowly
struggling. And what were they on their heights?  Had they won
Brotherhood?  Or had they learned that the law of love imposed the
penalty of weakness and decay?  Was strife, life? Was the rule of all
the universe the pitiless rule of natural selection?  And, and most
immediately and poignantly, were their far conclusions, their long-won
wisdoms, shut even then in the huge, metallic heart of the Red One,
waiting for the first earth-man to read?  Of one thing he was certain:
No drop of red dew shaken from the lion-mane of some sun in torment, was
the sounding sphere. It was of design, not chance, and it contained the
speech and wisdom of the stars.

What engines and elements and mastered forces, what lore and mysteries
and destiny-controls, might be there!  Undoubtedly, since so much could
be inclosed in so little a thing as the foundation stone of public
building, this enormous sphere should contain vast histories, profounds
of research achieved beyond man's wildest guesses, laws and formulae
that, easily mastered, would make man's life on earth, individual and
collective, spring up from its present mire to inconceivable heights of
purity and power. It was Time's greatest gift to blindfold, insatiable,
and sky-aspiring man. And to him, Bassett, had been vouchsafed the
lordly fortune to be the first to receive this message from man's
interstellar kin!

No white man, much less no outland man of the other bush-tribes, had
gazed upon the Red One and lived. Such the law expounded by Ngurn to
Bassett. There was such a thing  as blood brotherhood, Bassett, in
return, had often argued in the past. But Ngurn had stated solemnly no.
Even the blood brotherhood was outside the favor of the Red One. Only a
man born within the tribe could look upon the Red One and live. But now,
his guilty secret known only to Balatta, whose fear of immolation before
the Red One fast-sealed her lips, the situation was different. What he
had to do was to recover from the abominable fevers that weakened him
and gain to civilization. Then would he lead an expedition back, and,
although the entire population of Guadalcanal be destroyed, extract from
the heart of the Red One the message of the world from other worlds.

But Bassett's relapses grew more frequent, his brief convalescences less
and less vigorous, his periods of coma longer, until he came to know,
beyond the last promptings of the optimism inherent in so tremendous a
constitution as his own, that he would never live to cross the grass
lands, perforate the perilous coast jungle, and reach the sea. He faded
as the Southern Cross rose higher in the sky, till even Balatta knew
that he would be dead ere the nuptial date determined by his taboo.
Ngurn made pilgrimage personally and gathered the smoke materials for
the curing of Bassett's head, and to him made proud announcement and
exhibition of the artistic perfectness of his intention when Bassett
should be dead. As for himself, Bassett was not shocked. Too long and
too deeply had life ebbed down in him to bite him with fear of its
impending extinction. He continued to persist, alternating periods of
unconsciousness with periods of semi-consciousness, dreamy and unreal,
in which he idly wondered whether he had ever truly beheld the Red One
or whether it was a nightmare fancy of delirium.

Came the day when all mists and cobwebs dissolved, when he found his
brain clear as a bell, and took just appraisement of his body's
weakness. Neither hand nor foot could he lift. So little control of his
body did he have, that he was scarcely aware of possessing one. Lightly
indeed his flesh sat upon his soul, and his soul, in its briefness of
clarity, knew by its very clarity, that the black of cessation was near.
He knew the end was close; knew that in all truth he had with his eyes
beheld the Red One, the messenger between the worlds; knew that  he
would never live to carry that message to the world - that
message, for aught to the contrary, which might already have waited
man's hearing in the heart of Guadalcanal for ten thousand years. And
Bassett stirred with resolve, calling Ngurn to him, out under the shade
of the breadfruit tree, and with the old devil-devil doctor discussing
the terms and arrangements of his last life effort, his final adventure
in the quick of the flesh.

"I know the law, O Ngurn," he concluded the matter. "Whoso is not of the
folk may not look upon the Red One and live. I shall not live anyway.
Your young men shall carry me before the face of the Red One, and I
shall look upon him, and hear his voice, and thereupon die, under your
hand, O Ngurn. Thus will the three things be satisfied: the law, my
desire, and your quicker possession of my head for which all your
preparations wait."

To which Ngurn consented, adding:

"It is better so. A sick man who cannot get well is foolish to live on
for so little a while. Also, is it better for the living that he should
go. You have been much in the way of late. Not but what it was good for
me to talk to such a wise one. But for moons of days we have held little
talk. Instead, you have taken up room in the house of heads, making
noises like a dying pig, or talking much and loudly in your own language
which I do not understand. This has been a confusion to me, for I like
to think on the great things of the light and dark as I turn the heads
in the smoke. Your much noise has thus been a disturbance to the
long-learning and hatching of the final wisdom that will be mine before
I die. As for you, upon whom the dark has already brooded, it is well
that you die now. And I promise you, in the long days to come when I
turn your head in the smoke, no man of the tribe shall come in to
disturb us. And I will tell you many secrets, for I am an old man and
very wise, and I shall be adding wisdom to wisdom as turn your head in
the smoke."

So a litter was made, and, borne on the shoulders of half a dozen of the
men, Bassett departed on the last little adventure that was to cap the
total adventure, for him, of living. With a body of which he was
scarcely aware, for even the pain had been exhausted out of it, and with
a bright clear brain that  accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of sheer
lucidness of thought, he lay back on the lurching litter and watched the
fading of the passing world, beholding for the last time the breadfruit
tree before the devil-devil house, the dim day beneath the matted jungle
roof, the gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, the saddle of
raw limestone, and the mesa of black, volcanic sand.

Down the spiral path of the pit they bore him, encircling the sheening,
glowing Red One that seemed ever imminent to iridesce from color and
light into sweet singing and thunder. And over bones and logs of
immolated men and gods they bore him, past the horrors of other
immolated ones that yet lived, to the three-king-post tripod and the
huge king-post striker.

Here Bassett, helped by Ngurn and Balatta, weakly sat up, swaying weakly
from the hips, and with clear, unfaltering, all-seeing eyes gazed upon
the Red One.

"Once, O Ngurn," he said, not taking his eyes from the sheening,
vibrating surface whereon and wherein all the shades of cherry-red
played unceasingly, ever a-quiver to change into sound, to become silken
rustlings, silvery whisperings, golden thrummings of cords, velvet
pipings of elfland, mellow-distances of thunderings.

"I wait," Ngurn prompted after a long pause, the long-handled tomahawk
unassumingly ready in his hand.

"Once, O Ngurn," Bassett repeated, "let the Red One speak so that I may
see it speak as well as hear it. Then strike, thus, when raise my hand;
for, when I raise my hand, I shall drop my head forward and make place
for the stroke at the base of my neck. But, O Ngurn, I, who am about to
pass out of the light of day forever, would like to pass with the
wonder-voice of the Red One singing greatly in my ears."

"And I promise you that never will a head be so well cured as yours,"
Ngurn assured him, at the same time signaling the tribesmen to man the
propelling ropes suspended from the king-post striker. "Your head shall
be my greatest piece of work in the curing of heads."

Bassett smiled quietly to the old one's conceit, as the great carved
log, drawn back through two-score feet of space, was released. The next
moment he was lost in ecstasy at the  abrupt and thunderous liberation
of sound. But such thunder!  Mellow it was with preciousness of all
sounding metals. Archangels spoke in it; it was magnificently beautiful
before all other sounds; it was invested with the intelligence of
supermen of planets of other suns; it was the voice of God, seducing and
commanding to be heard. And - the everlasting miracle of that
interstellar metal!  Bassett, with his own eyes, saw color and colors
transform into sound till the whole visible surface of the vast sphere
was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous with what he could not tell was
color or was sound. In that moment the interstices of matter were his,
and the interfusings and intermating transfusings of matter and force.

Time passed. At the last Bassett was brought back from his ecstasy by an
impatient movement of Ngurn. He had quite forgotten the old devil-devil
one. A quick flash of fancy brought a husky chuckle into Bassett's
throat. His shotgun lay beside him in the litter. All he had to do,
muzzle to head, was press the trigger and blow his head into
nothingness.

But why cheat him? was Bassett's next thought. Head-hunting, cannibal
beast of a human that was as much ape as human, nevertheless Old Ngurn
had, according to his lights, played squarer than square. Ngurn was in
himself a fore-runner of ethics and contract, of consideration, and
gentleness in man. No, Bassett decided; it would be a ghastly pity and
an act of dishonor to cheat the old fellow at the last. His head was
Ngurn's, and Ngurn's head to cure it would be.

And Bassett, raising his hand in signal, bending forward his head as
agreed so as to expose cleanly the articulation to his taut spinal cord,
forgot Balatta, who was merely a woman, a woman merely and only and
undesired. He knew, without seeing, when the razor-edged hatchet rose in
the air behind him. And for that instant, ere the end, there fell upon
Bassett the shadow of the Unknown, a sense of impending marvel of the
rending of walls before the imaginable. Almost, when he knew the blow
had started and just ere the edge of steel bit the flesh and nerves, it
seemed that he gazed upon the serene face of the Medusa, Truth -
And, simultaneous with the bite of the steel on the onrush of the dark,
in a flashing instant of fancy, he saw the vision of his head turning
slowly, always turning, in the devil-devil house beside the breadfruit
tree.