# Adventure (magazine)/Volume 53/Number 5/The Three Traders

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The barometer was jumpy and the air surcharged with electric fluid. It crackled in their hair, in the frizzy mops of the houseboys. ...For four nights the great drums had boomed up in the bush, not dance-drums, nor code-drums, but deep bellowings of the biggest logs, the devil-devil drums that meant mischief. ...
A Complete Novelette
by J. Allan Dunn
THE THREE TRADERS
Author of “Thieves' Honor,” “Black Ivory,” etc.
HERE were three traders on Jijilap. One was the Scotchman, Duncan MacIntosh, a capable man but a dour one, whose wrath flamed when they insulted his clan—as they often did—by addressing him as Mackintosh, or even McIntosh; showing thereby their ignorance and disregard of Gaelic customs. MacIntosh was inclined to drink too much trade gin for the good of his liver, but his head was adamant to alcoholic attack. He was long and lean when he first came to the South Pacific and years of tropic sun had reduced him to what was little better than a working skeleton. It had not so affected Henry Harrison from Sydney.
Unlike MacIntosh, Harrison abused his own patronymic. He cheerily styled himself 'Ennery 'Arrison and considered that he was speaking the king's English. Not that, being Australian, he cared much about the king, merely a person who, in Harrison's opinion “'ad been born with a golden crown in 'is mouth, the lucky stiff,” and was really no whit better than himself, who had several gold crowns in his own mouth, born of youthful carelessness, parental indulgence, cheap candy and chalky teeth.
'Ennery was strong for the “Hempire.” He was not as efficient in many ways as MacIntosh but the natives would do more for him. He was an amiable drunkard and a fine pool-player before he went into trading for the Starlight Soap Company. But even if he could have imported a pool table to Jijilap the cockroaches would have eaten the cloth inside a week.
Harrison had the complexion of a new brick, a paunch that nothing could diminish, blue eyes that twinkled and a yellowish, sun-bleached mustache of which he was inordinately proud, though it would have suited the makeup of a trooper in a crack cavalry regiment better than 'Ennery's round moon of a face.
MacIntosh worked for another company their stations several miles apart. There was lots of copra available on Jijilap, which was natively ruled over by three chiefs, who were brothers, and who divided the island into three sections, each starting at the tiptop of the volcanic mountain crest, that still emitted vapor and sometimes growled in its sleep as if with indigestion, down through grassy uplands, thick bush, across beach and lagoon to the outer reef; three great slices of island pie.
A pie full enough of plums for all of them; fish from the reef, lagoon and beach; coconuts and fruit from the lowlands, besides the products of the cultivated fields; wild pig from the grasslands and crags; birds from the forest, whose plumage was used for adornment, and the bodies of the wood pigeons for food. A goodly heritage divided between them by Matesei, the king, on his deathbed.
Vetesi and Puhoteke, second and third sons respectively, were well satisfied; but Kaiti, the eldest son, who had dreamed that all the kingdom should be his, was discontented, and the more he brooded over the matter, the more his injury grew. He had a wife, Minea, the daughter of the high chief of the island of Kasilak, who fostered his dissatisfaction and embittered it for the sake of her son.
With clever words she sowed the seed of ambition in the minds of Kaiti's followers, watering it with the suggestion of greater possessions and the pick of the women of Puhoteke and Vetesi, telling them that Kaiti was the rightful ruler and that they were Kaiti's men. But it was only seed that had not yet germinated and, so far, there was no hatred between the three clans, save in the hearts of Kaiti and Minea, his wife.
Even on Jijilap blood was thicker than water and kinship still prevailed. Only Kaiti grew more and more sour as the ferment of thwarted aspirations worked within him and Minea kneaded the mass subtly. Kaiti drank more and more kawa and toddy made from the inflorescence of the coco-palm and the liquor slowly changed the chemistry of his spirit to gall.
Since he could not arouse enthusiasm among his followers to rise and massacre their kin, he spent the hours brewing hatred against all the world and the three white men in particular, restrained from murdering the latter because he was afraid of their superior mana or supernatural power; and of their guns.
MacIntosh was in the territory of Puhoteke, Harrison in that of Vetesi. The third white man had his place on the beach, in the land of Kaiti. There was no open enmity among the three brothers. Their people visited with each other and feasts were held together in full friendship, gifts interchanged and there was intermarriage, with no lines drawn for trespass. Puhoteke and Vetesi were friendly to the whites, who brought them trade of tobacco, salmon, cloth and other matters in exchange for coconuts, candle and ivory nuts, and labor at copra time.
Sometimes Kaiti traded with them also, first with one and then with the other, trying to establish ill-feeling between the two, since he could cause either one to show more profit than the other, if Kaiti favored him. Also he tried to get more in trade by playing one against the other; these schemes being the schemes of Minea, his wife, who was a clever, handsome, jealous, ambitious, vindictive and unscrupulous female.
THE third white man was also a trader, but he worked for no firm and he did not bother about copra or any kinds of nuts, about sharks' fins or bêche-de-mer or turtle shell. The natives knew him for a Merikani—American—said that his nose was shaped like a canoe and marveled at his everlasting energy. MacIntosh and Harrison generally referred to him as the “Yank.”
They did not exactly dislike him but there was a certain racial antipathy between them that had started about the year 1775 and had never entirely died down. The World War had done something to restore matters, but MacIntosh, who was fifty-four, had been too old to recruit and Harrison, who had an irregular heart, had not been permitted to. Whereas Jim Clinton had done his bit and had a couple of decorations stowed away somewhere that he never showed and never looked at. The war was over and he had gone back to the South Seas, determined, at thirty, to make his pile quickly in the pearl-shell lottery.
He was leaner, longer and browner than MacIntosh and his eyes were gray. He was as hard as nails and he kept himself in shape, living on Jijilap only during the diving season, leaving it, when the rains started, for Suva, where he lived simply and took in the moving pictures, the restaurants, the band concerts and the radio programs. MacIntosh and Harrison stayed on their jobs; the Scot, because he could save money; the Australian, because he was always in debt to the Starlight people since the price of squareface had advanced and his salary had not. His employers were not philanthropists, any more than MacIntosh's.
A certain amount of friction was kept alive on sundry occasions when Clinton hoisted on the pole that stood outside his shack the Stars and Stripes. On these occasions, MacIntosh flaunted the scarlet cross of Saint Andrew on its white ground and Harrison the blue ensign with its one big star and five smaller ones of the Australian Commonwealth.
On their own national holidays they flew the Union Jack and Clinton came back with the American ensign once again. On the whole, they were several grades above friendly enemies. At fairly regular intervals they visited with each other, grogged together, smoked together and wished each other good luck. Clinton knew they called him Yank, and realized there was an assumption of superiority therein that did not bother him. For they were both working on salary and a slim, a very slim, commission and he was getting along very nicely with his pearl shell.
Not pearls. They were too much like angels' visits, few and far between, but first-class, black-edged pearl shell, top quality, heavy weight, without wormholes. Shell in great demand for buttons, for the handles of fancy cutlery, for inlay work in Oriental lacquer and European papier-mâché, and for various forms of ornamentation and cheaper jewelry.
He was the working partner under a lease that he would have had trouble in getting for himself, being an American, from the Australian Commonwealth, that, since the war, reckoned Jijilap as its lawful possession, and to whom the three chiefs were only titular owners. The sleeping partner had made the original discovery, garnered the shell within the twelve-fathom depth and gone back to Sydney where he married a wife who disapproved severely of any husband of hers—she was a widow—going away overnight, much less sojourning in the South Seas which she mentally peopled with lascivious and much too attractive sirens, whose coppery skin was likely to be much too lavishly displayed. She disapproved strongly of Clinton despite the fact that he was annually giving them an increasing income that bade fair to become in time a tidy fortune.
The sleeping partner put up the lease, his discovery of the shell and the necessary capital. And Clinton, who was not called a Yank without reason, put in his brains and labor on a sliding scale that gave him fifty per cent. up to a certain yield, and, after that, an increasing amount as the net profits grew larger. Since the original lessee considered the field on Jijilap fairly well exhausted, he had signed the sublease contract thinking he had all the best of it.
Clinton imported six men from the Tuamotus, members of the fearless but friendly tribes of those Dangerous Isles. He brought three diving-suits, two for the pick of his men, one for himself. And, finding banks of the fine shell at a depth where even modern diving was close to its limit, he utilized the ingenuity of Yankeedom and devised many contrivances.
Sometimes he went under himself and made survey of the ledges, later on placing dynamite where whole sections could be displaced without much loss of shell, to be later brought up by dredges and tongs. Every season his schooner was well filled with the precious freight which he sold sometimes in Singapore and sometimes in Suva.
His blasting kept his section of the lagoon fishless and, for this, he paid tribute to Kaiti, to compensate him for loss of natural revenue. Otherwise he was independent of him, too much so for the greed of the chief who did not recognize the fact that he was, after, all, only a chief by courtesy of the commonwealth.
So the remote isle of Jijilap on the Fourth of July in the year nineteen hundred and twenty-odd, with the Stars and Stripes snapping in the trade and, further along the coast, the banners of MacIntosh and Harrison paradoxically celebrating—or perhaps defying—the birth of American Independence.
Clinton made it a holiday but they did not. In his bush capital Kaiti grouched and drank kawa, which affects bodily but not mental coordination, and listened to the counsel of Minea, his wife, who told him that he was a fool not to make all the white men pay him tribute instead of demanding labor, and to make Kalinitoni pay double what he did now. Otherwise, to make trouble
“You say it is your island,” she pressed him. “Did you not say so when you came to my father for me? Perhaps you lied to me. Or you have drowned your manhood in kawa.”
Then, as Kaiti glowered at her with eyes reddened by indulgence in the potent stuff, she called to a girl to make a fresh supply. After all, the kawa made him more responsive and she was careful not to cross him, knowing that when he broke loose he was more fiend than man. Besides, the liquor kept him chained. It paralysed his limbs while he could still listen to her insinuating talk. She was a very clever woman, Minea, with far more brains that Kaiti, who had the mind of a child, the brawn of a Samson and the disposition of a spoiled, a badly spoiled, and mischievous boy.
Also Minea had her own private hatreds—against Mesi, the head wife of Puhoteke, who had borne him five male, children and was always displaying them or talking about them—against Tuni, the favorite of Vetesi who was much better looking and younger than Minea, and knew it.
“If it is your island,” she said, “why do you let them fly those war cloths? Lo, there are three white men and each has a different cloth. It is true that Arisoni and Makinitosi sometimes fly the same one, but it is different from that of Kalinitoni, who yesterday refused me twenty sticks of tobacco. Set those two against the one, Kaiti, and, if there be any left, kill him. For, if you make them fight with each other, then the men of your brothers will fight also for them and perhaps your brothers may be killed.
“At least they will be weakened. Are you not the oldest of them all? Is not my son and your son to rule here, and not the misshapen children of that lazy Mesi—” this was a double lie—“and the sons of Tuni, who pretends that she is with child so that Vetesi will give her yet more gifts. Does not——?”
“Your tongue clacks like the wind in the palms,” said Kaiti. “Be silent. Bring me the fresh bowl of kawa and begone.”
She went, but she saw his reddened eyes regarding the cloth with the white stars on the blue ground and the red bars against the white, rippling audaciously; and there was a smile on her face as she left the terrace.
AFTER Clinton had set the flag flying he took his swim while Upolu, his Paumotuan jack-of-all-trades, cooked breakfast. He stroked out to the anchored raft from which he dredged and hauled out on it, much like a seal, basking in the early sunlight and watching the flag flapping; whistling Yankee Doodle half unconsciously and shifting into a more modern rendition of the theme in a voice that was somewhat nasal but still musical.
“I'm a Yankee-Doodle dandy
I'm a Yankee-Doodle boy.”
His thoughts clicked off in retrospect. George Cohan with his eccentric dance and his eccentric hair—really born on the Fourth of July—then later shows he had seen, a vision of Broadway glittering with colored lights and packed, sidewalk to sidewalk, with footfolk and motorfolk, herded by autocratic traffic cops. It all seemed a long way and a long, long time from Jijilap.
The last of the mist was trailing from the crags. Soon there would be only the wisp of vapor from the somnolent crater. A flock of sooty terns slid croaking from the forest, flapping out to sea. The sun, high enough now to bathe the beach in golden glow, had dissolved the gloomy shadows of the woods and the island was draped in a mantle of emerald and jade. The pigeons crooned and the green and vermilion parakeets squawked and screamed. Back of him the reef boiled and hissed on the flood tide and every little while the overflow sent a long wave seething gently shoreward, lifting the big raft.
“It sure is beautiful,” said Clinton aloud, “but I'd swap it all for five minutes in a taxicab on Fifth Avenue. If the luck holds, I'll be there this time next year and we'll celebrate. Prohibition or no prohibition!
“I'll clean my guns and overhaul my tackle this morning,” he told himself, “and, as soon as the sun gets off the lagoon, we'll go and try that pool Upolu talks so much about. I'll have the boys row me over to Harrison's after supper. Even if it is the Fourth of July. Mac'll be there and I'll get him to give us Cutty Sark. That 'll put him in a good humor and 'Ennery can tell me all about the time he won the snooker-pool championship of Sydney, or whatever it was. We'll smoke the pipe of peace, bury the hatchet and forget Lexington and Bunker Hill. Come home by moonlight. Regular Hands-Across-the-Sea program. I'm hanged if I'm not as lonesome as a lost purp in a snowstorm.
“Gee, I'd give a ton of shell to go on a snowshoe hike. Snow! I've forgotten what it looks like.”
Upolu appeared and called, and he slid into the water to stalk out, lean and muscular, to breakfast.
The shadow of the mountain crept down its flanks and out across the glassy surface of the lagoon. There was plenty of daylight, or twilight. Back of the crags the sun was blazing, slowly gathering to itself the glory of sunset. The booming of the mountain pigeons came from the forest; the sooty terns came flapping back. From the bush streaks of pale-blue smoke rose like slender columns skyward, for the sea-wind had gone and the landwind not yet risen.
Scarlet footed boatswain birds, white as snow, sank like flakes among the palms and breadfruits, croaking fretfully. The chattering parrakeets discussed the day. Shoals of fish darted away beneath the hull of the dingey as they paddled leisurely for Upolu's pool of abundance. They had taken part of their supper with them, and a flat stone on which to make fire and broil the catch, native fashion.
Upolu spoke in soft tones as they made for the shallows and at last softly lowered the anchor two fathoms, to rest on the edge of the swiftly shelving sides of the pool as the boat swung head on to the current.
Upolu produced his treasures, hooks that were self-baiting, beautifully made of two pieces of lustrous shell, united with sennit so fashioned that they twisted like a hurt minnow as they were raised and lowered near the bottom. The fish bit avidly, pink and silver groupers and blue-backed sea salmon, a burnished treasury that gleamed in the twilight while the faint phosphorescence streaked from the taut lines as they hauled them in.
Upolu turned chef and they ate luxuriously before they started smoking. Back of the mountain the sky had turned to olive, grading through aquamarine to primrose, slowly fading. Soon the stars would come out with a rush. The boat was deep with their catch.
“We'll be getting along,” said Clinton. “Going to Harrison's tonight.”
There was a gleam of teeth. The Paumotuans had friends also. There would be singing, dancing on the beach.
“Maiti, Kalinitoni,” said Upolu, steward, chef, foreman and boatsteerer. “Maiti no. It is well.”
Then he clucked a warning. A canoe was coming out of a creek in the mangroves half a mile away; a double-outrigger with the paddlers seated abreast, twenty of them. The beautifully shaped craft had a high prow and stern in which pearl inlay winked faintly as it came on fast. It was Kaiti's own canoe and he sat on a little platform by the stern.
“I wonder what the old cadger wants now,” said Clinton and quietly hitched his automatic toward the front.
He had been carrying it with him of late. Kaiti had been getting a little out of hand in his demands. His followers were amiable enough, but Kaiti's was beginning to ask for gifts as if they were his by right. Clinton did not intend to see it that way.
There were spears in the canoe, but that was usual when a chief made a trip. And there was a musket between Kaiti's knees, an old Springfield, fifty-eight caliber, changed from its Civil War percussion lock to flint, the nipple removed and a vent opened up for priming, flashpan and spring added; remade for trading and decorative purposes, more authoritative than harmful, a badge of authority, Kaiti's scepter and his father's before him.
THE canoe came up with a back wash of the paddles, stopped alongside. Clinton had checked the inhaul of his anchor and showed no surprise.
“I want tabaki, samani,” grunted Kaiti.
He was half drunk. The odor of palm toddy tainted the sweet air of the evening.
“Store closed up, Kaiti. You too late anyway. This day no walk along work. Besides you've had all that's coming to you, you old pirate. Plenty too much you catch long time,” he added in beach vernacular.
Kaiti scowled, reached out and picked up one of the pearl hooks, muttering in Jijilap, too swiftly for Clinton, with his limited vocabulary, to follow. He asked Upolu to translate.
“He say that belong along him. He say you stealum all shell belong along him. He say you give big fellow pay along that shell. You no pay he make too much trouble along of you.”
Kaiti was in a nasty humor. Minea had turned counsel into nagging and he was minded to show her that he could handle things his own way. Already he had been to Harrison's demanding salmon and tobacco, from MacIntosh he had asked gin. Twin curt refusals had got under his chocolate-hued hide. Clinton was an interloper. His mind worked like a child's, incapable of planning a move ahead. He was ugly, dangerous.
Clinton's eyes narrowed. He was not worried. His gun was a Luger, chosen for its long-range possibilities, and he had no question of his being able to put the canoe out of commission if it was necessary. He was not looking for trouble, but a clean-up of the profitable shell. And he had no quarrel with the tribesmen.
It would be simpler to demonstrate a problem in geometry to Kaiti than to make him recognize the fact that his island belonged to the Australian Commonwealth. No commissioner had formally taken over Jijilap, no cruiser had ever visited it, it had known no reprisals for outbreak. Kaiti's father had been friendly with the whites, proud of having them on his island, appreciating the trade goods.
“Let me look along that hook,” he said and took it from Kaiti before the latter's drink-dulled, low-grade brain understood the move, his pride rather prompting him to believe that the trader's soft tone meant that he was willing to discuss the matter.
Then his face grew black with a rush of angry blood as Clinton dropped it into his pocket. To have relinquished it would have meant loss of prestige with Kaiti's men and with his own.
The lagoon was beginning to reflect the afterglow. Rosy vapor seemed to be rising from its depths. Bream commenced to leap, their broad sides flashing.
“That shell, mine. That puloa—hook—mine,” growled Kaiti, his big fist clenched about his musket. “You catch plenty big fellow fish. You give me half.” He used the native word, illustrating it with a swift stroke down and one across the imaginary line.
“Those my fish, Kaiti. Suppose you want one, all right.”
A bream slid out of the glowing water, curved in the air, taking the fly it had fancied, broadside to the right. Clinton pulled his gun and fired. It was not a hard target as it hung for a moment in midleap, as if suspended, but the effect of the shot was startling. The fish flopped on the surface, struggling to swim downwards, its bladder pierced, its back broken.
Upolu reached out a blade and brought it in, handing it to one of men in Kaiti's canoe. Impressed but furious, Kaiti ordered it flung overboard. He snarled an order and the canoe swung ahead, the quick, strong paddles sending it forward at full speed. It made a wide curve and swept on toward the mangroves, into them, vanished.
“Too much he mad, I think,” said Upolu, commencing to haul in the anchor. “Now we go along Arrisoni, boss?”
Clinton nodded, wondering if he had not been more showy than diplomatic.
“He'll have to stay mad then,” he said. “I'm not going to stand for blackmail.”
KAITI was, to all intents and purposes, mad. Just that. Beyond the little reason he possessed. He had been made to look small in the eyes of his paddlers, he had been insulted in the worst fashion. His dignity had been flouted.
To offer a high chief overripe fruit, a fish that was not, save for the slight prick of the barbless hook inside its mouth, as perfect as when it swam; even to present a dead bird with ruffled feathers, was an offence not to be condoned, as criminal as crossing the royal shadow or breaking a royal tabu. It was unwitting on the part of Clinton.
His men guessed at the trouble, but dismissed it, elated at the return of the hook, the good shot of Clinton. It was a small thing, but it was the last straw upon the camel that carried the dignity of Kaiti. For one of his own the penalty was death—and not a swift one. Only by death could it be forgotten or condoned.
The breaking water, the leaping bream, the quick shot and the crash of the dying fish—only those had held his hand, restrained his voice from ordering instant battle. His big frame shook with rage. He knew his paddlers, avoiding his gaze, were wondering what ailed their chief. He ground his teeth in a fury as the canoe grounded and he leaped ashore to the trail that led to his village.
Makinitosi, Arrisoni and then Kalinitoni, all had refused him tribute. All had treated him, a chief, as if he were dirt.
He would show them. He would spit upon their war cloths and he would kill them and drink the broth of their hearts, seated upon three coconuts, to avoid evil. But he would not tell Minea. She would scold, the story would pass among the women, among the tribes. Kaiti had been made to look small, had been offered unfit food.
“He who speaks of this thing,” he said to his followers, “feeds sharks. But the head of this white man I will hang upon the ridge-pole of my house. And on either side shall be the heads of Arrisoni and Makinitosi. I have spoken.
The men rolled their eyeballs in the gloom and trailed him mutely up the narrow path where the dense bush rose like a wall on either side, wondering if this was be war and how the brothers of Kaiti, who were friendly to Arrisoni and Makinitosi, would take it.
It was cool on the mountain height. The fresh air and the climb sobered Kaiti somewhat, but did not abate the smart to his pride. There was only one salve for that. He must strike. Yet, in the swirling fog of desire for revenge that gathered in his mind, he saw one clear vision. The white man, unafraid, pocketing the hook, then the gleaming fish, the flash and bark of the gun that came from nowhere, the dying bream, all in the winking of an eye.
“Aie! They shoot swift and straight, those white men!”
And he had but a musket, without much powder. And it would not hit a tree at twenty paces.
He swilled kawa that night until his wives lifted him, helpless, and put him on his mats.
MacINTOSH never recited Burns—he pronounced it with at least three R's rolling in the midst of the revered name—until he was mellow with Hollands and, as this was not a holiday with him, he was quite sober when he arrived at Harrison's, far soberer than Harrison, who invariably commenced his potations at suppertime and was well into a bottle when the other arrived.
“I see,” said the Scot, “that the Yank is fleein' his gaudy banner. 'Tis na doot the bir-r-thday o' Lincoln, or Washington or Br-r-r-yan. I ne'er saw sic' a countree for celebrations. They'll be havin' a day set apar-r-t for Volstead, the next theeng ye ken.”
“O'o in —— is Volstead? I never 'eard of 'im.”
“None ye wad respec', Henr-r-y. A puir misguided mor-r-tal that Noah wad never ha' let aboar-r-d the Ar-r-k. A fir-r-st cousin to Pussyfoot Johnson, I'm thinkin'. Ye'll have heard o' him? If they had their ain way, my lad, the warld wad be a dry an' dreary place. I wish that Bur-r-r-ns could ha' met this Volstead. He'd ha' written a piece aboot him.”
“Did he ever run for President?” asked Harrison, affecting to remember the name, refusing MacIntosh superior information on any subject.
“'Tis likely, on the Prohibition ticket. I dinna ken the Yank voted for him. Ah-h-h!”
He achieved a combination of Hollands, a young coconut containing a pint of cool, sweet liquid, and a dash of bitters.
“I'll be able to spare ye but one case, Henr-r-y,” he said as he wiped off the ragged ends of his grizzled mustache by the simple process of drawing the hairs into his mouth by an almost prehensile lower lip. “My last shipment was shor-r-t six cases. I r-r-efused Kaiti any this mor-rnin'. He wanted a case an' came doon to a bottle, but I wad gie him none.
“He told me he was thir-r-sty an' I told him he c'ud refresh himsel' wi' some o' the water he soaked his copr-r-a in the last time he br-r-ought me some, the sweendler. I ken he got my meanin'. I had a bottle wi' aboot twa guid dreenks left in it on the table an' he spotted it. I made a point o' drinkin' it a' mysel'. He didna like it, but I'm no carin', for I'm fair sick o' his cadgin'. He's been tryin' to set you an' me at loggerheids to force the trade up for his own advantage an' I dinna care to be fashed wi' him langer.”
Harrison chuckled.
“'E came 'ere between three and four o'clock, looking for terbaccy and salmon. 'E didn't say anything to me about booze. I've turned him down before. Let 'im stick to 'is kawa and palm toddy. 'E did me a dirty trick by promising me twenty 'ands to split nuts an' then, wanting to double the price at the larst minnit, when 'e knew I 'ad to 'ave 'em to keep me try-pot goin'. Blarst 'im! An' then 'e 'as the blightin' cheek to arsk me for a case of salmon an' a 'undred sticks of terbaccy. Didn't want to take no. I told 'im to get to —— orf my veranda—an' to stay orf. 'E didn't 'arf like it. I'll bet 'e went round to the Yank's. That's 'is territory, annyw'y.”
“He's a sour ——, youn' Kaiti. No like his feyther. You didna ken him, Henr-r-y. Vetesi takes after him. I'm no so sure o' Puhoteke. An' I've an idea 'tis Minea is the worst of the lot an' Tuni the best.”
“She's a cute little trick,” agreed Harrison. “I can 'ear the Yank's launch c'min'. 'E aint such a bad sort, but they didn't ought to allow Yanks any concessions on islands belongin' to the Hempire. If they want to go pearlin' or gettin' copra, let 'em do it on their own territory.”
“They've no' much. Save Hawaii an' that's a wee north for aught but sugar cane.”
“They've got Guam, they've got Tutuila, Tau and Rosel in Samoa and they've got the whole bloomin' Philippines. But 'e 'as to come buttin' in 'ere.”
“He's wor-r-kin' under an Australian concession.”
“What's the hodds? 'E's liftin' the shell, ain't 'e? 'E's gettin' the big end of the profits, ain't 'e? 'E ain't done much crowin' 'imself but most of them Yanks make me sick, tellin' 'ow they won the war. Yah! Like a man sent in the larst bloomin' ten minnits of a Rugby game an' runnin' fresh through a stale field that's been scrappin' all afternoon. 'Is wind is good an' 'e ain't scrum-drunk an' tired out. So 'e canters through an' makes the touchdown. 'Ooray for the 'ero! W'ot?”
“Your remar-r-k has a cer-r-tain amount of reason but it's no verya judeecious. Forby, we had oor backs against the wa', at that, an', if you'll no allow they won it, you'll be har-r-d put to it to deny we were close to losin' it.”
“Harrison grunted.
“If you're siding with a —— Yank agen' me—” he began.
“We're three white men wi' a common ancestry an' its fit we should a' stand together in case of trouble wi' Kaiti.”
“Trouble wi' Kaiti? 'Ow?”
“I've been here langer than you, Henr-r-y. Kaiti wants to run the whole island an' Minea has got br-rains. I'm sorry we baith had to tur-r-n him doon i' the ane day. If he c'ud per-r-suade Puhoteke an' Vetesi to make common cause wi' him against us, we'd be sair put to't.”
“Why should either of them tie in with 'im? They'd lose by it an' gain nothing.”
“Because Puhoteke is a fool, for ane thing. An' you dinna want to for-r-get that maist o' the raids on white traders ha' been because o' the thought o' their stores. Kaiti's always wanted to get a' he c'ud for nothin'. Noo we've refused him he'll git to thinkin' he'll take what he wants. Or Minea will think for him. Though she's sma' use for either o' the brothers. There's the launch, wi' the American flag flauntin' at the ster-r-n.”
Clinton presented fresh fish for the commissaries of the two traders and explained that he had been celebrating his holiday in the sport of angling. Incidentally he told of his affair with Kaiti. Harrison guffawed but MacIntosh looked grave.
“The three o' us ha' made him lose face the same day,” he said. “There'll be trouble, o' sorts, br-r-ewin'.”
“Let 'er brew,” said Harrison. “I never trouble trouble till trouble troubles me. 'Ave a drink, Clinton? I see your flag's hup. What's the hoccasion? 'Ere's to it, anyw'y.”
“Just an anniversary,” Clinton answered diplomatically. “We have lots of 'em.”
Where the ignorance of his British neighbors remained bliss it was sheer folly to make them wise.
“We 'ave one or two,” said Harrison. “One on the ninth of this month. I'm arskin' you two over to supper—'ow about it?”
MacIntosh supplied the question that Clinton had in mind.
“What happened on the ninth of July?” he asked. “No' that I'm lookin' askance at a geeft supper. I'll be on hand.”
“What 'appened? The ninth of July, hin the year Nineteen 'Undred, is the date of the Colonial Draft Bill, mykin' New South Wyles, Victoria South Haustrylia, Queensland, Tasmania, hand Western Haustrylia a Commonweath; that's hall.”
AS THE evening passed Harrison became first boastful, then boisterous over his skill at pool, lamenting the fact there was no table on which he could exhibit. And then MacIntosh, through the spiritual medium of Mr. Hollands, became the impersonator of R-r-r-ober-r-r-t Bur-r-r-ns.
At eleven o'clock, grasping the hand, alternately, first of Clinton and then of Harrison so as not to make a trio out of Burns' immortal 'twa', he half sang and half declaimed:
“We twa hae paidl'd i' the bur-r-n,
F-r-r-e mor-r-ning sun till dine;
But seas between us br-raid ha' r-r-r-oar-red
Sin auld lang syne.”
At half past, when Clinton left, the Scot was declaiming with fervor:
“O, wer-re we as young as we ance hae been,
We sud hae been gallopin' down on yon green,
And linking it ower the lily-whit lea,
But wer-re na my hear-r-rt light I wad dee.”
“On the twenty-feeth o' Januar-ry, the bir-r-thday o' the immor-rtal Bur-r-rns, I'll brew ye baith a Willie Waught, aye an' mak' ye a haggis, gin ye'll soop wi' me.”
“'Aggis? 'Ow'll you make 'aggis with no sheep on the hisland. 'Ow'll you get your sheepshead?” demanded Harrison argumentatively.
MacIntosh surveyed him with a full measure of scorn.
“A MacIntosh was never-r yet unable to pr-rovide for-r his guests. Mon, I'll mak' h-hic-haggis, gin I hae to use your ain heid. I'm thinkin' there's slight differ-r-rence.”
Clinton made his exit.
In the launch he knew that the threatened spat had been averted. Over the waters came the sounds of amity, however misappropriate the words. It was the sentiment that counted, though the suggestion of Harrison running over a sidehill and picking daisies in company with MacIntosh struck Clinton as humorous. He had had just enough liquor to accentuate the ridiculous and stimulate imagination. He could visualize the two, one thin, the other stout, both in kilts, flitting about the daisied slope; as the song grew fainter in the distance:
"“We twa hae run about the br-raes
And pu'd the gowans fine;
But we've wandered mony a wear-r-ry foot,
Sin auld lang syne.”
IT WAS late afternoon in the village of Kaiti. The moist heat was sweltering, for the place was closely hemmed in by the thick and matted bush and little or no wind crept into it. It was practically deserted save for the snapping, snarling dogs and razor-backed, slate-colored pigs, rooting in the offal and filth with their long, upturned snouts.
Most of the men had spent the hot day in the little houses they had built in their garden clearings, tabu for the women. A few of them had cleared a little bush, cut a little timber, worked on a few garden fences, a few had gone hunting or fishing.
The women had labored hard, tilling, planting and cultivating. Now they were digging and gathering vegetables and fruit, collecting firewood, beginning to drift back to the village in groups of two, three and four. They were all heavily burdened with their yams, their firewood and whatnot in netted bags that hung on their backs from loops slung over the tops of their heads. Sometimes children were atop the load or carried in smaller bags shaped like hammocks. Some rode astride their mothers' shoulders or straddled their hips.
A few men began to appear on the platform of the big clubhouse with its floor raised on high stilts from the ground, a clumsy, irregular ladder of poles leading to a sort of porch over which the roof pole was extended, thatch-grass pendent in long fringes from it, long strips of bark cloth, painted with totem signs, hanging down. The men yawned and stretched themselves, taking no notice of the women. A young buck-dandy, shining with oily red paint, his black frizzy hair beautifully combed, a necklace of beads dangling, bands of perforated shell on his upper arms and below the knees, into which he had tucked colored leaves of the dracena shrub; a belt of bark tight-corseted, painfully indrawn about his empty stomach, a new clout of barkcloth for perineal band; proclaimed to all the village that he was courting a girl.
Probably the girl herself saw him. No one else paid any attention to him. The men on the clubhouse balcony hunkered, scratching their hair with short sticks, saying nothing, not noticing the women any more than they did the grubbing pigs and slinking dogs.
The light was fading, the sun already below the top tangle of the forest, through the gaps of which came shafts of hot and angry red fight. Now more men showed, coming in idly, their toilet bags on their arms from which they extracted betel-nut and lime. A few carried pigeons or kangaroo rats. Two brought in a wild pig on a pole.
The most curious thing of all was the way in which they came on to the scene and moved about it, exactly like extras in some savage drama, who could not be entrusted with lines and who had been instructed only to keep moving. Few words were spoken at all, few glances interchanged and yet there was something in the atmosphere that charged it with purpose—something out of the ordinary, sinister.
The women passed to their household duties. They cooked for the men, but they did not eat with them. All the bachelors, and a great many of the married men ate on the clubhouse platform, others on the porches of their own houses while the women and girls, after the food was cooked, devoured it squatting on the ground or inside their homes from earthen plates and boiling pots, using shell and bamboo knives, coconut spoons, pronged forks of bone.
And every woman, as she came into the village, as she made her fire and baked the yams or stewed the meat, turned furtive looks toward the piles on which the club house was supported. There was something living under there, lost in the shadows, a dark mass from which there issued the stink of human sweat, the sweat of fear as much as of natural exudation.
There were twenty men there, jammed into a bamboo cage so that movement was almost impossible. They were packed as close as apples in a shipment barrel, wedged in since they were seized at dawn by order of Kaiti. All day the flies and the mosquitos had stung and bitten them, the dogs sniffed and snarled at them and the heat sapped them of vitality. They had not been fed, been given no water, and all the time the hope of living had slowly leached out of them and the growing fear of a horrible death had gnawed at their manhood. They knew that above their heads Kaiti was devising the method of their passing, if they were found guilty; that the wizard was at his incantations and would smell out the culprits at top moonheight.
There was only one among them who should really suffer for having broken the command of Kaiti. He had told his wife what had happened between the chief and Kalinitoni the white man. Rather, she had got it out of him, little by little, sensing he was keeping some thing from her. So the story had gone through the tribe like the savor of a succulent morsel in the cooking pots. It would not stop there; it would spread through the island; there would be laughing in the villages of Vetesi and Puhoteke; Kaiti would be mocked. Nothing, not even the wizard Puriti, could stop the arrow of gossip, any more than one might stay a shooting star.
The guilty one kept his own counsel, the others perforce accepted their fate. There was no use talking about it. Some one would be killed, perhaps all of them. There would be no more laughing and talking, no more smacking of lips over good food, no more lust or zest of life. Whoever the wizard pointed out would be dispatched to the uttermost darkness.
They were numb with pressure, faint, relaxed. Only the constriction of their quarters kept them erect. The man who had talked still cursed the folly that had made him yield to a woman's nagging, but he did it in silence, automatically as the petition of a prayer-wheel, the curse fluttering in his shallow brain.
Maybe the wizard Puriti would smell him out. He was afraid of the wizard, a man who talked with the dead, who did magic things with stones, who could kill a man by merely telling him he was going to die. But he was going to hope for the best. Perhaps Puriti would want to use the occasion to kill some one else against whom he had a grudge. Such things had been done, for Toteo knew times when the guilty had been passed over. If only he had smashed in his wife's head when she kept him awake with her worrying questions—as he had been minded to—instead of answering her.
It must not be surmised because Kaiti had a brain that could never have ranked beyond third grade, that he was a fool. Such things are matters of comparison. Even Minea was not really smarter than he was. He let her get away with things because he was too lazy to oppose her. He let her more or less drug him with kawa because he liked the effect of the fermented ginger-root.
But now he was stirred from all lethargy by a constant spur. He had lost face, he was a subject of jest and he knew that the chief who is laughed at is neither respected or feared. In the present situation he began to see his chance to get rid of the white men and hold supremacy of the island for himself. He had been insulted by all three of them and he would turn that to advantage by the assumption that a slight upon him was a slight upon all the tribesmen.
The first thing was to punish those who had gossiped, to devise something that would redound to his own credit, set the tribes talking so that if the wretched incident of the damaged fish or the refused trade goods and liquor ever came up it would be eclipsed by the vengeance of Kaiti. If it came to fighting, his prestige as a warrior made him the true leader. He was fat, but he was strong. He might be a great eater, but he was also a mighty fighter. He sent for Puriti the wizard.
Wizardry is a fine art. As practised by savage sorcerers it is a business that is roughly divided into three branches—religion, medicine and politics. Priesthood and healing ever go together where men are primitive. Kaiti was superstitious and it seemed as if Puriti was able to do things with ghosts to help him, but Kaiti was not much afraid of him. He knew he had his bag of tricks, knew how some of them were worked.
To have a great wizard was a great attribute to an overlord and in this he outranked his brothers who had tahunas of only mediocre accomplishments. Puriti could dress up his ceremonials wonderfully and he was quick-witted. But Kaiti never forgot that he, and not Puriti, was the real ruler of the tribe. Puriti was only mortal, like himself and he was not infallible. Minea was cleverer in many ways though she did not have the ancient knowledge, the art of mummery, the apparatus, handed down in the sorcerer's cult.
PURITI looked the part. He had a lean and hungry look and his face was the face of a bronze devil. Few ever saw him in daylight or without his trappings. When he came in to Kaiti he jangled with human teeth and knuckle bones, his body was harlequined with paint and save for his ornaments, and a G string of bark cloth, he was naked.
His familiar was with him, a cur that he had dyed so that one side of it was black and the other yellow, trimming its ears and staining its teeth as scarlet as his own with betel-nut. He had taught it all sorts of tricks with infinite patience and he vowed that it held the spirit of Tai greatest of all sorcerers.
It sat on its haunches beside him like a goblin at the end of the clubhouse where a wickerwork fetish stood, a hideous fantasy tricked out with feathers and fur, with sharks' teeth and a long nose tube of wicker that made it seem a combination of sea and land and sky, part cassowary, part squid, part kangaroo, which may have been the intent. On either side were mummies, the skins of dead men drawn over clay models, clay caricatures of their faces sculptured over dried heads where the hair was retained, the eye sockets filled with scrolls of rolled palmleaf, neatly coiled, hands and feet of phalanging roots, like mandrakes. Between these stood racks filled with skulls.
In the ordinary course of village life Puriti was a practitioner in sickness and witchcraft, he gave love spells and he told fortunes. He discovered stolen things. He took charge of deaths, which always came from evil influences, and fixed the responsibilities. He was ballet-master of the mystic dances. He had many neophytes of his own and he presided over the ceremonials whereby boys entered manhood. And for all of these things he collected his perquisites and fees.
But where Haiti's person was concerned, his safety, his dignity; Puriti was the politician pure and simple. The diplomat. The grand vizier, his own interests subordinate to those of Kaiti. He knew, of course, for what he was wanted, but he was not sure of all that was in Haiti's mind.
He had small doubt of discovering the guilty man. The actual means he would employ were based upon detective principles. He had his spies and stool pigeons and he was depending a good deal upon Minea. Like the French crime investigators Puriti believed in seeking the woman in the case. He knew how to handle women. They believed that he could cause them to bear male or female children, cripples or stillborn, as he pleased; that he was arbiter over their souls before life and after death; that, if he willed it they might see their dead babies again after their own death.
Once he found out who was guilty, or who Kaiti wanted found guilty, he would go ahead with the ceremonial, with the tricks in which he delighted, while the people gasped in awe at his wisdom and power.
Kaiti's face was like a thundercloud. His stomach was sour and his head ached but he was not drinking. He did not intend to drink again until the white men's liquor was his. Then——
The two sat in silence for a while, Kaiti chewing betel-nut and lime paste, spitting copiously into a calabash whose contents would be carefully guarded and destroyed lest some one possess himself of them and bewitch the chief. Even Puriti could not prevent such a spell.
“What is in your mind concerning this matter, Puriti?”
The wizard felt his way, watching Kaiti's face.
“It is better to punish one or two than to destroy twenty who are good paddlers and fighters. This comes in my mind.
“The twenty all deny this thing though they believe they will be thrown to the sharks. Such was the threat of Kaiti.”
“I have changed my mind about the sharks. I have a better thought. One would not be missed where twenty would. It is true. Perhaps only the one knows who is guilty.”
“The others would not tell if they knew. The fool talked with his wife. All gossip comes from the women. Let Minea talk with the wives of these men as I shall instruct her. Let them be brought in one at a time. She will ask them who has started this idle talk about the king.”
This was sheer flattery, but Kaiti's eyes gleamed and Puriti lowered his own lids to hide the light in his own. Kaiti meant to use this affair for the fulfilment of his ambition. It marched with Puriti's. The greater the might of Kaiti, the greater his own, the fatter his fees.
“You think the women will tell?”
“I think that nineteen of them will give the same name and that the twentieth will give another—or none at all. For Minea will tell them that if the truth is not told they will all surely die. They and their men. Men like to live, but they do not fear death as women do. They will tell or, if they do not, Tai will smell them out.”
The goblin hound whined, hearing its name. Kaiti looked at it half fearfully. If Tai could find out why question the women? But he did not ask that. He could never come quite to the point of testing Puriti. He might be able to talk with ghosts.
“So be it,” he said. “I will speak with Minea.”
“Let her tell each woman that if she speaks of the matter to another her tongue will be fed to the pigs. As for the woman who gives no name or gives one different from the rest—which she may do, having spite against some other—she is not to be held but to go free with the rest. The drums will sound at moonrise. When the moon is over the village we will find the ones who have flouted the king's wish.”
“So be it. You are wise about women, Puriti.”
“I have many wives.”
“So have I. Sometimes I think too many.”
Kaiti sat glowering. Puriti wrapped his lean arms about his bony knees and hugged his thought. If Kaiti made away with Minea he would not mind it. She was too clever. If Kaiti's mood was worked upon he might smell out Minea some day when the chief was sick from overeating. Without Kaiti's private sanction it would be too risky. Even as Kaiti the warrior, was a little afraid of Puriti the thinker, so the sorcerer was a little afraid of the fighter and his moods of anger. A man's skin was so little a thing to hold his blood; so easily pierced, so hardly mended.
IT GREW cooler as it became dark. The cooking fires burned low, but others were appearing, many under the houses and some on the platforms, to keep at bay the mosquitos. The tribesfolk began to sit around these in groups, still comparatively silent compared to the usual chattering, the chanting of songs and the inevitable beating of individual drums. There was a good deal of smoking, sharing the smoke-filled cavity of a bamboo pipe that was charged with coarse native tobacco made into a cartridge with a leaf wrapper. One sucked out the air and let the pipe fill with fumes, a little of which he inhaled, passing the tube around until it had to be recharged.
There was expectancy in the air. All waited to see the moon show from behind the jagged peaks to the east. There was glow there already, the planet would be high when it topped the range.
Aside from the first passion of lovers, the suckling time of children, the half superstitious regard for babes who died before they were able to talk and walk, there was little true affection among them, none that was not completely offset by the prospect of Puriti's dramatic spectacle, the excitement of their own participation in it, the smelling out of a victim and the spilling of human blood. Friendship ceased with clan protection in time of mutual danger. The immediate family of the victim would mourn long and loudly, but wailing was a mechanical action that took place upon all kinds of occasions: Birth, marriage, death.
They were all creatures of the moment, reactionaries to primitive instincts. Kaiti and Puriti dominated them because of their ambitions, their pride of race, the fact that their ancestors had been chiefs for many generations and had actually lived on better food. Minea, too, was chiefly bred.
A brush charged with silver seemed suddenly swept across the top of the forest with its dense undergrowth and great half-smothered trees. The moon wheeled up revealing the outlines of the houses more plainly, the circles of nearly naked, crouching savages, the groves of gigantic palms about the village borders and in the central open space.
It revealed the hard-trodden level of the sing-sing ground where a dim fire burned between great hollowed-log fetishes in front of a mammoth banyan tree whose buttressed boughs showed cavernous, with here and there the moving glint of a torch between the columns that upheld the big branches and sent down roots to anchor.
Here were the dressing-rooms, the green room, the wings of Puriti and his assistants. One of these came out to a drum, carved into the semblance of an elongated face with a tongue hanging out of the grotesque mouth and a black bird with outstretched wings perched upon the top of the skull. He swung a mallet against the cylinder with all his might.
Wham-m-m! The sound was dull at first, close to. There was a long slit, a soundhole in the log. With the succeeding strokes, the high vibrations renewed by the powerful blows before the first series had subsided, the concussions seemed to explode in mighty booms, like the firing of a big gun. The drummer seemed to warm up, to attune his instrument until it trembled, sensitively vibrant. Then he began to send in code.
In the village they listened to the announcement while their pulses beat in rhythm, so that they were creatures of the drum, without volition, timed to its beats, swayed by its momentum, controlled by its messages.
Boom-boom-boom! BOOM! BOOM-boom-boom-boom! BOOM! BOOM!
The savage phonetics, the wild wireless of the tribes, pounded on. It began with the clan call, told briefly of the nature of the entertainment and its purpose and extended a hearty invitation to Puhoteke and Vetesi. It suggested that the occasion concerned all of them, as Kaiti was minded to have it considered. He meant to have a talk with his brothers afterwards, to heat the iron and strike while it was pliable.
The women would not come at nightfall, nor would the warriors, if it had not been moonlight, for fear of evil spirits lurking in the narrow bush trails to seize them. Few of them would try to return that night and, as the island was fraternally owned and there was no real friction between the three divisions, this could be done without danger of a raid.
So the villages of Vetesi and Puhoteke read the message and, as it ended, roared back their acceptance. Clinton heard the drums and so did MacIntosh and Harrison, the two last together on Harrison's veranda. All three knew it for code-sending though none of them could read it. In the light of recent events, they wondered whether or not it should be considered ominous. They could distinguish it from the monotonous tom-tom of the dance tympans, from the raucous bellow of the devil-devil drums that proclaimed war.
The twenty prisoners heard it in their cage, the sweat drying on them with the night air that was not low enough in temperature to discourage black clouds of mosquitos that attacked them. There was no smudge fire for them. Overhead they could hear the shuffling feet of their fellows who presently would see them go through their ordeal. Now their vitality was low from the exhaustion of the pressure and lack of food. They were ready to die, to welcome any sort of delivery from the cage.
None was allowed near them, their women least of all. Nineteen of these, knowing that they had given the true name of the gossip, were hopeful of escape from trouble. The twentieth, half deceived by Minea's imperturbability, made yet more dull her childish brain by chewing a narcotic root. She went with the rest of the village to the sing-sing ground when the moon stood over the village palms, taking a little comfort from her seeming immunity.
To have taken her prisoner would have belittled Puriti's ceremonies. She did not realize that she was watched by the nineteen who considered her hostage for the safety of their own men. The condition of a widow was not a pleasant one and they were not minded to enter upon it unnecessarily.
The voice of the drums changed after the messages had been acknowledged. As the moon lifted they seemed to attain a fiercer, more insistent note, droning at times and then blaring like great organ pipes.
The villagers moved toward the sing-sing ground, men and women smeared according to their individual fancies with red, yellow and black paint, with lime mixed with pig-fat, tricked out with feathers, with armlets and anklets, with necklaces and disks of pearl distending their earlobes, with strips of bone thrust through the septa of their flat noses.
The men carried their spears and some of them took skulls from their personal racks in the clubhouse. The women had peeled wands, carved and painted. There was to be a preliminary dance in which all would join before Puriti took the stage. Each dressed for the part much as a boy might deck himself with odds and ends for playing pirates or Indians. This was play to the tribesmen, the killing that would come at the end of it merely incidental, unless—and their mouths watered at this thought—unless the victims were to furnish their own funeral meats, and long-pig be baked in the ovens. The last was doubtful, no orders had been given to fire the pits.
Through the corridors of the bush there came in single file Vetesi and his warriors, Puhoteke and his men, the files converging as they threaded the maze of trails—Melanesians all, of medium stature, their skins plum-black where the paint showed them, their hair bleached fawn and ocher, ornaments jingling and twinkling under the moon. Their bodies were powerful, but their faces asymmetrical, primitive types.
Between the root pillars of the banyan Puriti crouched, knees drawn up, his hands clasped about them. His costume was not yet donned and he squatted motionless, unmindful of the thrumming of the great tympani, the people coming into the enclosure. Such matters were handled by his subordinates. He waited his cue, star performer of the evening.
TIME had rolled back its scroll twice ten thousand years. It was the Stone Age.
The moon, serene, that had seen so many things, smiled with its dead face, soaring high above the sing-sing ground, where the soil was beaten flat, hard as cement by generations of dancing feet. The place was walled in by the bush, held back but ever moving, growing in all directions save where the tribesmen hacked and burned it; giant trees fought by strangling vines, thorny underbrush, a fury of vegetation. Only the great banyan stood out from the forest. The firelight blazed high and the shining bodies of the dancers, dripping with sweat from the flames and their exertions, reflected the crimson blaze and were touched by the moon rays as with a calcium.
The men pranced to the thunder of the drums where Kaiti sat throned on a carved log. They advanced in rushes of mock war, shaking their spears and shouting. They killed imaginary enemies and gloated over them, showing their heads on the lance-points, the white skulls bobbing. They formed in a phalanx, bent double, knees high, as they stepped, chanting, exploding in a final roar of triumph and upflung arms.
All the time the women shuffled, shuffled to the tempo, leaning on the peeled wands. Their faces bereft of visible emotion, mere masks of stupidity; their gaze, fixed, held in the hypnosis of rhythm.
With the warriors it was different. Their emotions were roused and lusts loosed, lusts of fight, of murder, of blood, summoned by the drums. Quicken that rhythm a little and the men would wheel and rush to seize the women. Quicken it yet more and they would go wholly mad, their little reason breaking like glass vibrating at too high a pitch.
Now they were more brutes than men. Manlike beasts, hairless apes, excited to cruelties that jungle law would never brook.
Now and then the women broke into the chant with two whining measures given flatly, automatically. Then came the bass of the men, howled with full strength of their lungs as they brandished their spears and held their trunks curiously stiff on the prancing legs—going like pistons. The bull-roaring bellow of the drums; the shrill note of panpipes.
Suddenly silence!
The neophytes of Puriti came out, masked like birds, with long cloaks of grass set in rows, like thatch, on barkcloth. They cleared the enclosure before the log-fetishes of the dancers, gave instructions here and there, marshaled the women in a crescent and made them hunker down on one side, the men on the other.
Kaiti, still as a statue on his long throne, his musket-scepter in his hand, now leaned forward a little and spoke briefly to Vetesi and Puhoteke, seated to right and left of him. His heavily jowled face was bestial, his eyes glowed in the firelight like carbuncles.
Though the pounding of the drums had ceased, the air seemed still full of humming vibrations. The women were coming slowly out of their semi-trance. Among them were the twenty who were the wives of the paddlers. These last were hustled on, roughed by their escort, stood up in a faltering line when they stared straight forward, their faces twitching, striving for control over their numbed limbs. Anything but an upright, immobile position might provoke the wrath of Kaiti.
After the little confusion of their entrance, silence held again that, after all the clamor of the drums, was more impressive. As it lasted even Kaiti became uneasy. He set down his musket and fingered nervously a javelin of hard wood, heavy almost as iron. The butt was carved and barbs had been filed at the point with pumice friction. The tip itself was of obsidian. It was a beautifully balanced thing, a king's weapon, and the polished shaft had been soaked in hot blood scores and scores of times.
There came a flutter of sound, the swift patter of hands upon conjurers' drums, shaped like golf-bags, of light wood hollowed by hand and fire, funneling-in slightly from both ends toward the middle, the mouth covered with lizardskin, with a handle that was part of the main drum. Panpipes and flutes shrilled a minor strain, over and over again, weaving through the sound-fabric of the fluttering drums. The big drums had left the air palpitating, stirred in a maelstrom.
This music seemed to come from nowhere and from everywhere at once. It murmured in the trees, from ground level and from the high branches, it made the blood creep and jump, the eyes to strain into the shadows that moon and fires could not dissolve, black, mysterious patches that looked as if they might be the gaping mouths of pits, entrances to the underworld.
Then, in a space that had been blank a pulsebeat before, an eerie creature appeared. It looked a good deal like the fetish-god in the clubhouse come to life. Beyond doubt, many thought it was. There was the squat shape of wicker covered with cassowary feathers, with wallaby fur topped by the head and the tubular snout, or tentacle. The wizard's arms were bound with flexible wings, extended as he skimmed silently here and there, soundless, to the plaint of the crepitating drums and the shrilling reeds.
The eyes were disks of shell fastened into the wicker frame of the mask, the nacre curiously lifelike, holes bored in the center through which Puriti surveyed possible victims. Lifelike too, the pliant trunk that seemed to be smelling out the guilty.
The figure disappeared at last between two drum-logs to the left of Kaiti and his brothers. Almost immediately Puriti made entrance to the right, panting a little from the dance and the quick change, for which he had been underdressed. Now, as when he had talked with Kaiti, he was practically naked, harlequined with paint, strung with teeth of sharks and dogs and men, with knuckle-bones; a girdle of old men's beards about his middle. His face was the face of a devil. No mask could have discounted that fiendish countenance. He carried a small bag of netting and the dog-goblin Tao trailed behind him. He stalked down the line of prisoners twice, his malevolent eyes peering into theirs.
“Who,” he cried in a shrill voice, “who has spread abroad slanders concerning Kaiti? Who has dared to lie about Kaiti? All men deny it yet the words were spoken of man.”
When he paused the dog, watching his master narrowly, its ears cocked, considering every intonation, threw up its head and let out an ululating howl. A shudder went through the onlookers. Tao had spoken.
“It is easy to smell out a liar,” went on Puriti, “for in his mouth is corruption. Let us find this man that Kaiti may decide his punishment.”
He stooped and seemed to talk to the dog who listened and gave two barks before he trotted to one end of the line of men, staring down at it with eyeballs that projected, with slack jaws, each giving a deep sign of relief when Tao, after one look into each face, one back at Puriti, passed on.
Opposite the eleventh man the dog came to a direct halt, sat down on its haunches and uttered the long-drawn howl. What signal he may have caught from the wizard was not noticeable.
“Is this the man, O Tao?”
The howl was repeated.
“So, Tikipo, what have you to say in the matter?”
Tikipo knew that no word of his could avert his doom. He read that in the sneering eyes of Puriti.
“I have spoken no lies about Kaiti,” he said stoutly.
Puriti grinned at him. Tikipo was to die for telling the truth, but that was not to be acknowledged.
“The dog dislikes me,” said Tikipo. “He stole meat from my house and, not knowing it was Puriti's dog, I threw burning wood at him.”
“Is that true, O Tao?” asked Puriti solemnly and all the audience looked at the fantastic hound which turned its back on Tikipo and, yawning, walked away. There were nervous laughs at this yet none doubted that Tao lived again in the dog.
“So. We will make another trial,” said the wizard.
He passed to each man round objects that he took from his bag, passing swiftly along the file, dropping one after another into their outstretched palms.
They were tuti nuts, candlenuts, almost as hard as ivory, but they had been painted red and the twenty paddlers were under his spell, the spell of their own position from which they were not yet definitely delivered, for it was likely as not, to their thinking, that Kaiti would order them all killed and eaten. They listened and obeyed as men do in hypnosis.
“Let us see how strong you are,” said the mocking voice of the wizard. “He who is guilty will not be able to crush what he holds in his hand for his spirit is already made weak by the spirit of Tao, which has spoken. Hold out your hands at arm's length. Squeeze!”
HE COULD see, and Kaiti could see with his brothers, and those closest could also see, the sudden, strenuous efforts that made the muscles swell in the forearms of the paddlers, muscles made big and stronger than the ordinary by their calling. Beads of sweat, wrung hardly from those overwrought bodies, stood out on their faces as they strove to crush the nuts. Strove and turned gray with despair.
One man's eyes lighted for a moment. Tikipo. The thing had crumpled in his palm. Its contents suddenly oozed out between his fingers and Puriti laughed while Tikipo looked with dismay at the white stuff with which the wizard had filled the nut he had palmed off on Tikipo after he had extracted its contents and before he cemented the edges of the shell again. There were no other nuts so filled. He laughed again and the dog barked and Tikipo knew he was trapped.
“Lo,” said Puriti, “the liar strove the hardest, as I knew he would, and his guilt is plain.”
He caught Tikipo's arm and thrust it upwards with the white mess smeared all over his palm. A great exhalation went up from the crowd.
“Take him,” said Puriti “and hold him before the chief.”
He did not call Kaiti king before his brothers. He guessed what was afoot, the destruction of the white men, and he was glad, for once Arisoni had laughed at him and Makinatosi had ordered him off the place one time when he found him talking with his laborers. Kalinitoni was the chief offender against Kaiti.
“Now,” said Puriti, “Tao has told me that the wife of this man has gossiped—therefore is she the more guilty since Tikipo spoke but to her and it was she who has spread the lies. Let Tao speak to us.”
He called to the dog with some quick gesture that made it stand up on its hind legs, manwise, proof of the metempsychosis to all present.
“Speak, Tao,” demanded the wizard. “Was it Tutila who spread these lies?”
The woman named, wife of one of the paddlers, gasped. The dog sat back on its haunches, forepaws hanging but made no sound. One after another Puriti named the wives until he came to the name of Tikipo's wife. The dog howled and leaped into the air. Puriti called it, covered its muzzle for a moment with his palm, in which was a scrap of the woman's intimate garment, taken from her house.
“Go—smell her out,” he ordered and the brute raced towards the shrinking women, snuffing at them as they cowered, barking at last in front of Matiti, wife of Tikipo.
The ordeal was ended, the punishment about to begin. Both were taken before Kaiti who rose from his seat, his javelin in his hand. He gave a brusk command and the men held Tikipo and the woman, Matiti, while another forced open their jaws with a hardwood wedge and still another cut out their tongues and flung the reeking morsels to Tao who leaped and caught them in midair, bolting them avidly.
“So is Tao fed, upon the tongues of those who speak falsely,” said Puriti.
Now the man, maimed and tottering, was left standing alone. There was a sound of indrawn breath, a craning, a sigh of satisfied brutality as Kaiti drew back his arm, the javelin poised in his clutch and then, with all the force of his mighty arm, hurled it.
“Eyah!”
It was a mighty stroke. The smooth tip entered. The barb, set backwards, bit into the flesh as the shaft passed on—through—and the spear fell clear to the ground beyond the toppling body of the paddler.
Then a thing happened that only the mind of a fiend could have conceived. A stout length of wood was brought, two feet long, tapering like a marlinspike, a long lanyard of sennit reeved through an eye in the thick end. The woman's wrist was bound to the lanyard and the spike was thrust through the wound made by the spear, enlarging it to a passage through which Matiti's left arm was hauled, emerging smeared with the smoking gore of her mate, who still breathed, crimson froth filling his tongueless mouth. Her wrists were lashed together, the living embraced the dying.
“Set them on the platform of their house,” said Kaiti. “And let the house be tabu."
IT WAS the evening of the ninth of July, the anniversary of the dating of the Colonial Draft Bill, the inception of the Commonwealth of Australia. MacIntosh and Clinton were the guests of Harrison. So far the affair had not been a success. There were many reasons for that.
The night was hot, muggy, exhausting. The land wind had failed to materialize at sunset. The barometer was jumpy and the air surcharged with electric fluid. It crackled in their hair, in the frizzy mops of the houseboys. It upset their physical equilibrium and emphasized the uneasy feeling of danger that was shared by all of them, engendered by four practically sleepless nights.
For four nights the great drums had boomed up in the bush, not dance-drums, nor code-drums, but deep bellowings of the biggest logs, the devil-devil drums that meant mischief. Nor had these waited for moonrise, but had throbbed from first darkness until an hour or so before dawn. They meant dances indeed, but only those calculated to work up tribesmen into a frenzy of bloodlust, they meant propitiatory sacrifices and blood-rites before the war-idols and the evil spirits so that warriors might adventure at nightfall and know the demons were on their side, lulled by the prospect of later votive offerings.
Vetesi had sent a messenger to Harrison, warning him of the threat of Kaiti to wipe out the white men. He had said that Kaiti had wanted him to join in the raid, but that he had refused because he was friendly to Harrison and also—though he did not specify this—because Tuni, his wife, had advised him against this thing.
Moreover, Puhoteke had come in person to MacIntosh and, in veiled but meaning talk, had said much the same thing. The canny Scot had sent him away with gifts. Clinton had not been warned. So far Harrison and MacIntosh had not brought up the subject.
Racial traits held them back from being the first to show alarm, but the thing brooded. Since twilight all of them had listened for the drums and silence had not been reassuring.
The dinner had been almost spoiled by the frightened cook. There was no chanting from the quarters where the boys of all three were gathered. Clinton had Only a few helpers—divers and cleaners of shell—and he had brought all of them along. MacIntosh had fetched a boatload and the rest had come over of their own accord in canoes, proof of their fearfulness.
Harrison was pretty well ginned-up when his guests arrived and he had proffered drinks freely and hospitably ever since. There was a bottle for each man, and a houseboy brought young coconuts as they were needed. Clinton's bottle was barely touched. MacIntosh indulged sparingly—for him—and the host himself drank intermittently and gloomily. There was no ice; the coconuts were none too cool. The stimulation from each swallow of liquor brought a reaction that was too much like a swift touch of fever to be pleasant, and induced perspiration, which was copious enough without urge. Their whites were patched with sweat.
After the meal, out on the broad veranda, MacIntosh and Harrison peeled coats and shirts to their singlets and lay back in long deck-chairs, smoking, drowsy for a while after the heavy food and the toasts they had drunk. Clinton was touched with the same sleepiness of digestion but something warned him of the necessity of keeping awake. He had taken off his coat before dinner. Somehow or other the decidedly undress costume of the others annoyed him unreasonably.
MacIntosh, long and skinny, scratched himself. Harrison, with his singlet open, showed a hairy chest, with bright blue silk suspenders that he called “braces,” embroidered in wild roses, tugged at his mustache. Some girl had worked them for him, he had told them more than once. Clinton believed that a falsehood; that Harrison had bought them for himself. Blue—baby-blue and pink roses—for Harrison! The sight of them irritated Clinton almost beyond control and he refilled his pipe, trying to soothe his nerves. He had never known he possessed any, but now they were jumpy. Tobacco lacked solace; it burned his tongue, the pipe was foul. The best thing was to clear out, go home, but that would be deliberately rude and, even if he didn't like Harrison, he had accepted his invitation. Besides——
He caught himself listening for the drums. There was only the sound of the surf crashing on the reef, muffled by the heavy air. It was the rotten weather that put them all out of sorts.
The veranda was screened against mosquitos, but careless houseboys, holding doors open, had allowed in some of the pests, and there were a lot of fat green houseflies who made persistent sallies, buzzing and biting. Harrison, slapping at one, began to tell again, for the fiftieth time, the story of his winning of the pool championship, with infinite details.
“So I chalked my cue an' took my time about it.”
MacIntosh lay with his eyes looking up at the porch ceiling, motionless as if Harrison's windy yarn was a lullaby. Clinton watched a hairy, fat fly swing down and light in the middle of a sticky flypaper where several of his fellows had already given up the struggle against the stuff that held them fast in its viscid leashes, wings, legs, bodies. The fly had been bothering him and he saw its doom with a grim satisfaction. He imagined Harrison in some such mess and his sense of humor returned at the imaginary picture, chasing away his grievances, much of his irritation. He grinned, and Harrison, coming to the end of his story, took it for friendly endorsement and grinned back.
“Reg'lar scorcher, ain't it. Brewin' up for something or other, I'm betting. Eh, Mac? ——, it's 'ot! Too 'ot to play cards, too 'ot to run the bloomin' phonygraph. Too 'ot to drink.”
He swatted viciously at a fly and missed it, bawled for a houseboy.
“You bring more those paper-catchum-fly,” he ordered. “Savvy? Plenty bring.”
The boy went away, Harrison laughing as he disappeared.
“I—he savvies all right. You know what —— fools they are. First day I broke 'em out of stock, the flies 'ad been drivin' me balmy. I 'ad 'im lay 'em out. 'E got all stuck up with 'em. Both 'ands. 'E tried to git one orf with 'is teeth an' it got glued to 'is map. Came out to me, fallin' over everything. Thought 'e was bewitched for fair. They're the only things that'll keep the flies down. Yankee invention, too, Clinton. Give you credit. You can't chase the beggars out. Come up through the cracks in the floor, I wouldn't wonder.”
“Got many of them?” asked Clinton. “The papers I mean, not the flies. I wish I had some at my place.”
“You can. I've got plenty. Ordered a dozen an' some —— fool clerk sent me a gross. Charged me for 'em, too. Personal account. If it 'ad been anything I wanted special 'ed 'ave left it out altogether.”
Clinton noticed the houseboy as he brought back the package of fly papers and unpeeled two of them. His skin, usually sooty black, had lightened beyond imagination. It was actually gray, the pigmentary cells had undergone some actual change, like a chameleon's. It stood for fear. Of what? A storm—or the drums—Kaiti?
Clinton did not have much respect for Kaiti, but he realised that, unintentionally, he had made him lose face, had offended him more than Mac or his host. Kaiti and his tribesmen could make things very unpleasant to say the least of it. The three of them, with their guns, might hold off a rush, kill enough of them to turn it into a retreat. But an attack en masse would be no joke. The Commonwealth of Australia might own the island but Kaiti did not know that; the three whites were, after all, only there on tolerance, through friendship with the natives, plus the natives' fear of the white man's superiority—his guns, the quality of his mana, his spirit.
They couldn't fight the whole island. Fighting at all would mean at least the halting of business. One could not, for instance dive for shell and rot it out along a beach that backed up to an impenetrable wall of jungle used as an ambush by the tribesmen who alone knew the secrets of the trails.
Brains must fix up the trouble. If he had got them into it it was up to him to get them out, to use his wits. Idly he watched the fat fly giving up the struggle as Harrison jawed on:
“A chap told me the flies in the trenches was orful, 'orrible. Worse than bullets, 'e said. Way 'e told it, you c'ud fairly see it. Buzzin'. Day an' night, so they wished winter 'ud come back. Spoilin' the grub. Buzzin' in the dugouts so you cudn't sleep. Stingin' an' drawin' blood. Bold as 'ornets. Lightin' on the dead men before they were cold. Clouds of 'em. 'Ummin' an' feedin'. Layin' eggs!”
There it was, the war again. And neither of them had been in it. Clinton had, and he wanted no second-hand descriptions. Besides, he knew what that topic of conversation would lead to. Harrison would boast of the Australians and their prowess and Mac would brag of the doings of the 'Ladies out of Hell.' Fair enough, if it didn't lead up to disparagement of the Americans, the inevitable introduction of the phrase “too proud to fight.” the suggestion that America had carpetbag the misfortunes of Europe, prospered on the spoils of war.
Clinton felt he couldn't stand anything of this sort tonight. Sooner or later Mac always got sarcastic about prohibition and profiteering. There was a lot of it that rankled under Clinton's hide; he resented criticism from outsiders. He knew the two regarded him more or less as an interloper, that, if he had been after copra instead of pearl shell, their friendship, such as it was, would be turned to open enmity.
They figured him as an intruder upon British territory though they had never actually said so. But, after all, he was exploiting the shell that an Australian partner had uncovered. Pearls and pearl shell were like gold—where you found them. Nothing to do with national boundaries.
But he wasn't going to get into a row. No sense in that. Only it was a farce, the three of them pretending to like each other's company. It was just the inevitable chumming of white men in the savage islands.
“If it 'adn't been for Wilson and 'is Fourteen Points,” said Harrison, “we'd 'ave chased the —— krauts clean to Berlin. As it is they don't know they're licked. Why——”
Clinton fought down the emotion that urged him to slap Harrison's face, to challenge him to a fight, to lick the stuffing out of him. It wasn't just Wilson; they were running down America again and——
Boo-oo-oool! Boo-oo-ooo! Boo-o-o-o-oo!
THE night was instantly hideous with the discordant, mocking blare that seemed to rip the hot air apart, to penetrate their skulls and strike their very brains with harsh notes like hammers. It was more than just sound, somehow; there was a savage, compelling challenge there that stripped the peel of civilization from them and made them primitive, hairy, naked men with stone axes in their fists, standing on the brink of a windblown cliff where their women and children were lodged in caves; waiting for the assault of their tribal enemies who so insolently announced their coming. The three white men looked at each other, clear-eyed, linked in the emergency that was going to be thrust upon them. Blood-brothers in peril.
“Conch shells,” said MacIntosh. “They'll no use those if they dinna mean business! 'T is Kaiti. Two hundred warriors back of him. Twa to one against his comin' here first. I'm thinkin' he'll be visitin' you, Clinton, maist likely.”
“They'll not find much. I buried my shell yesterday. And most of my stores. I had a hunch something might come off when those drums started, five nights ago. My men felt the same way and they've had experience in these islands. They're good men—come from the Tuamotus—they'll fight.”
“That's more than some of my lot 'll do,” said Harrison. “They'll funk it. So will Mac's outfit. Scared stiff already. That beggar Puriti, Kaiti's wizard, 'as got them goin'. They know this bush crowd are cannibals an' the idea of bein' stuffed an' baked in the ovens don't appeal to 'em. You say you've buried your stuff, Clinton. Just the same they'll burn your shacks. 'Ear them conches go again? They're way up the mountain yet. You say so an' we'll go over to your place an' give 'em a 'andsome reception when they show. What price that, Mac?”
MacIntosh nodded and got up.
“We'll hae to teach them a lesson,” he said. “Micht as weel do it there as here.”
Clinton shook his head. They meant it. Gin-drinking Harrison and canny MacIntosh stood ready to take the chance of leaving their own places unprotected to save his shacks. He warmed suddenly to them.
“Good men,” he said, “but I haven't got much to lose. If they came here to Mac's place and found it unprotected they'd burn up your groves as well as loot the stores. Coco-palms take seven years to get to bearing. You can build a new shack overnight. They won't get my shell. I buried it after dark, below tide-reach. Nothing to show the place.
“You are the nearest to me, Harrison. They'll come on here next. It's my fault. I pulled a grandstand stunt on Kaiti and a worse one when I offered him that damaged fish. Ignorance of law and custom's is no excuse wherever you may be. I've got you into this and I wish I could get you out. It's not going to do any good to fight, the way I look at it. You can't kill them all off and you're bound to leave them sore if you win the scrap. If you lose, there's no argument. I don't begin to know as much about islanders as you fellows, of course.”
He turned to MacIntosh. The Scot nodded again.
“Ye're largely richt. We got Kaiti sore by refusin' him what he asked for, but he'd ha' got ower that. Mebbe he'd ha' got ower your offerin' him the feesh an' takin' back the shell-hook, but I'm no sure. Ye ken he lost face on't. An o' his men talked aboot it tae his wife an' she spread the gossip. I got this frae Puhoteke. Kaiti, an' that —— Puriti, wi' his headwife Minea, who's the worst o' the three, killed the man an' his wife. Just hoo, Puhoteke wouldna' say, but ye'll ken it was no a quick death. Then he tries to get Puhoteke an' Vetesi to join wi' him in killin' us three an' loootin' our stores.
“Just why they wouldna join him I'll no pretend to elucidate. But I'll guess at it. Island politics. Kaiti wants to be king. As it is Vetesi an' Puhoteki ha' an equal share. Wi'out doubt they ken his intentions. In fact I'm sure they do, forby I've talked wi' them about it, an' so has Harrison.”
The Australian assented.
“Tuni, that's Vetesi's top wife, told me.”
“So. If they wad help Kaiti to get rid o' Harrison an' mysel', who are friendly wi' Puhoteke an' Vetesi, it wad be that much easier for Kaiti to get rid o' his brithers later on. They can see that. So can their wives. But ye'll tak' note that, whiles they said they were not wi' Kaiti and warned us there micht be trouble, they didna say they' would tak' sides wi' us against Kaiti.
“If we sh'ud kill Kaiti or any number o' his men, I hae my doots, an verra strong anes, whether the friendship o' Vetesi an' Puhoteke wad be able to protect us from raids even if they wanted tae. Ye ken the whole isle's related an' bluid's thicker 'n water.”
“'E's right,” said Harrison. “You never can tell when they'll round on you. That's the whole 'istory of the islands. You can pal up with a chief for a year or two an', all of a sudden, something 'll 'appen that 'e'll blame on you—or 'is wizard will—an' then, if you don't step lively, there's another prize 'ead in the clubhouse. Mine ud make a fine exhibit, on account of my gold teeth.
“I've seen Puriti lookin' at them a dozen times. 'E'd like to string 'em round 'is neck, 'e would. Mac's right. Lick Kaiti an' you'd 'ave to lick the lot of 'em sooner or later. A row now 'll spill the beans, if there's any killin' to amount to anything. And I reckon there will be before the night's over. Just the samey, you can't knuckle under to Kaiti an' 'and 'im everything 'e asks for on a gold plate.”
“I didn't think it wad materialize as soon as it has,” said MacIntosh. “Usually they'll beat drums for twa weeks, but those conches mean business. They blaw them to keep the kelpies an' demons off the trails. We meant to warn ye, tonight, Clinton. We talked it ower an' decided we'd ask ye to stay wi' ane o' us till the thing's worked oot. As it is, they've happened to catch the three o' us in ane place, thanks to Harrison an' the Ninth o' July. It's here they'll be comin' next but they'll no be here for a few hoors. We'll ha' time to prepare for them. I brought plenty of ammuneetion wi' me in case we might need it. We've guns enough an' if Harrison's got any dynamite, we can fix up some short-fuse bombs an' mak it verra interestin', verra interestin' indeed.”
“I'll get the dynamite an' we'll over'aul the guns,” said Harrison. “What about the boys, Mac? Clinton, you say your's can fight. 'Ow about shooting?' If they can't aim a gun it's no use chuckin' away ammunition. We may need it all before we're through, this time an' the next.”
“We'll bring the boys in,” said MacIntosh. “They'd slaughter them i' the quarters. But I'd na bring them richt awa. 'Twil just scare them the more. We'll hear them comin'. They be booin' wi' the conches, frichtenin' the bush demons an' hopin' to frichten us at the same time.”
There was a flicker of lightning, a ragged levin of fire that licked about the ramparts of a great mass of cloud it partly revealed, out of whose bulk came a low muttering of thunder.
“If the storm comes i' time it' may stop the raid” said MacIntosh. “But that'll hae to come sooner or later. There'd be na sense in tryin' to deal wi' Kaiti. He'd just think we were afraid o' him.”
They went into consultation of war. Harrison's house was two storied, built against the slope of the mountain, one big room on the ground floor with a porch outside, unscreened, which was the floor for the veranda above. On the second floor the earth had been excavated for foundations and there were several rooms.
Stairs from the upper veranda, practically a living-room, led down at either end to a flat terrace and garden. The rooms were well shuttered.
Assault would in all probability be made simultaneously from below, where the porch roof, that was also the veranda roof, would shelter attackers from a downfire of the white men's weapons; and up the two flights of outside steps. They would sound their conches until they gathered in the palm grove and then they would come with a rush that would have to be stopped. Dynamite at too close quarters would wreck the house, but they had to chance that. There was the danger of fire, and buckets were filled against that risk which MacIntosh did not seem to think much of.
“It's us they'll be wantin'” he said. “Wi' oor bodies as pairfect as possible. 'Gin they get us they'll mak' a feast o' us. They conseeder the hear-r-rt o' a white man a verra str-r-rengthenin' thing, to say naught o' other selective por-r-rtions o' his anatomy. An' there's oor heids for their mur-r-ral decor-r-ations. Harrison's bonny teeth. They'll na want to r-reesk spoilin' their spoils wi' fire.”
He spoke with a grim sort of jesting. The excitement of the situation had affected the burring of his R's just as liquor did. But Clinton's viewpoint of these two suddenly clarified. He had been irritated with them all evening, had always despised them a little when they talked of the war in which they had been non-combatants. Now he knew that they must have been out of it for no will of their own. Soon they were to face a savage horde of maneaters with such tremendous odds that it did not seem possible they could win through. Much of the affair could be blamed to him and they made nothing of it as they discussed the best defense and coolly went about preparations.
He was well aware that he was an outsider so far as Puhoteke and MacIntosh, Vetesi and Harrison were concerned. Neither of the chiefs cared anything about him, had anything to do with him. He was out of their jurisdiction and they had had no dealing together. They did not consider him any protection against Kaiti's schemes for their downfall. They might be well contented enough to let him be killed and looted, and he saw that Kaiti would recognize this, would know why his brothers had not joined in with him.
It was not impossible to imagine a peace made with Kaiti in which Clinton would be the scapegoat. These two white men, Saxon and Celt, of his own race, would never consider such a contingent. He was one of them, and they held no rancor because he had been the primary cause of Kaiti's declaration of war told by the conches they no longer heard. Doubtless the raiders had gone to his place where, as he had said, they could do no damage that could not be replaced with comparative ease.
The lightning was now showing more frequently, but the glares, like the great wall of cloud they revealed, seemed still far off, without much strength of illumination on the island. And there was no wind, might not be any until after the thunder storm had broken. Then, perhaps with rain, a gale might relieve the sweltering conditions.
Harrison came from downstairs, a few sticks of low explosive in his hands, a disgusted look on his face.
“I was afraid I was low,” he said. “I ordered enough, to come this larst trip. Told 'em I wanted it special for planting an' widenin' up the reef gap. Do they send it? They don't. Send me a gross of —— packets of flypaper but no dynamite. Five sticks of low grade is all we've got.”
He cut the greasy rolls in half, short-fused them, capped them, split the fuses and inserted matchheads. There were cartridges on the table and now they overhauled their rifles.
Three of the Tuamotu divers were fair shots and they planned to bring them on the veranda. If possible the rush must be stopped before they made the head of the steps or battered in the door below. There was only a limit to the time in which they could fire. And an empty gun was an indifferent weapon against the clubs wielded by savages. The gravity of the situation was not to be underestimated.
A houseboy came in with his face twitching with the news he brought. A crimson flare in the sky to the south, that they could not see from the veranda. Clinton's shacks burning, what trade he had left unhidden being looted.
“It means they're just that many miles away,” he said with a shrug. “Can't get here for three hours, anyway.”
“But they'll come,” said MacIntosh. “The nicht's young yet.”
IT WAS not a pleasant vigil after all had been done that seemed necessary. The news of the fire had spread to the quarters and the men were brought into the protection of the house. Outside they could put up but a feeble defense against the blood-mad bushmen, fresh from the firing and loot of Clinton's place, wild with finding themselves balked of murder. The white men must protect them, except for the last assault, the last desperate rally that might be staged. The odds were not a thing to be discussed, even thought about.
Harrison ordered more gin brought in, but MacIntosh refused.
“I've been drunk a few times i' my life,” he said, “but should I gang oot this trip I'll prefer to go sober. You'll shoot better for not takin' too much, Henry.”
“You may be right, Duncan, my lad, but, if we pull through, I'm going on one —— orful bender. 'Ow about you, Jim? Or will you 'ave a little snifter now. What's the idea of bein' so serious?”
“I was wondering,” said Clinton, “if there was no other way out of this but shooting and bloodshed. At the best we'll only turn 'em back and, in the long run, we'll be lucky to get away to sea and leave your plantations.”
“Looks like it,” admitted MacIntosh. “What would ye suggest? You come from a nation o' inventors. Ye've Edison an For-rd. Necessity is the mither o' invention, they say. Yankee Jim, noo's the time to prove American genius.”
It was not said sneeringly. There were no sneers between them now, but a common understanding, welded on the forge of trouble.
Clinton sat smoking, idly watching a fly that had lighted on the border of the sticky paper. Five feet were clear, the sixth had got caught in the viscous stuff with which the paper was smeared. It tugged and buzzed, but the sticky mess held it too firmly. At last it lifted a foreleg in the effort, lost balance, set the foot down beside the other, tried to free that, fell over enough to entangle a gauzy wing.
They were pretty well trapped themselves, he reflected. The only sure safety would be in flight, abandoning everything. None of them was of the stuff to do that lightly, and there was no wind for Harrison's schooner. The floodtide was running. They could not get away if they wanted to. The fly collapsed, held more securely than in a spider's web. Its struggles had only sealed its fate.
“There is ane way ye micht get the best o' Kaiti,” said MacIntosh, “and only ane. And I dinna see a chance o' accomplishin' that. Aside frae oor refusin' him what he asked—and it's no the first time he's been refused, for every time ye gie him aught he wants more—the trouble has come aboot because Jim Clinton made him lose face i' front o' his paddlers.
“Now, if something could be done to him in front o' his whole tribe, or more o' them than he could punish, ye ken, something that would mak' him rideeculous; why that 'ud settle it. Laugh at a leader an' he's a leader no langer. If it could be fixed to include Puriti, we'd have no more tr-rouble wi' Kaiti or his outfit. Puhoteke an' Vetsi get alang well enough wi' each other and us. Aye, i' Kaiti could be laughed oot o' court, so to speak.”
“As it is the bloomin' joke's on us,” said Harrison.
“I'm not so sure. I've got an idea,” said Clinton. “I think it 'll work. If it doesn't we're no worse off than before. It's bound to have some effect, if the storm doesn't break. If the storm does come hard enough it may stop the raid anyway, as Mac says. But we'll try this dodge. Listen.”
They listened, half incredulous at first then with increasing attention. Finally Mac slapped his bony knee and Harrison guffawed out loud.
“Jim, ye're a Yankee genius,” said the Scot. “Ye've got a guid heid on ye.”
The sound of conchs booed faintly in the distance.
“We'll 'ave to 'urry,” said Harrison. “I think the storm 'll 'ang over for a bit. Ow 'll we tackle it, Jim?”
“You take one flight of steps and Mac the other while I get to work downstairs. Let's go.”
THEY turned out all the lights as the conchs came closer, then ceased; and sat in the darkness, their weapons set handy, knowing the tribesmen were gathering in the coconut groves, getting ready for a rush. The heavy cloud wall had come in closer, as the intermittent lightning showed. Thunder muttered and growled, but the mass of vapor seemed a barrier holding back the storm that presently must break through.
The heat was terrific, but they did not mind it. It conduced to the efficiency of Clinton's scheme to make a laughing stock of Kaiti and turn his attack into failure.
It was a nerve-tingling job, waiting for the assault to materialize. It seemed for a while as if the attack must have been abandoned, and all the time the lightning flared faster and more vividly, the thunder sounded like great guns battering at the black citadel. A moaning sound seemed mingled with the pounding of the reef, but there was no wind.
Breath was hard to manage, as if they had been in a vacuum. Every little while the trembling lightning flashes would winkingly reveal the scene, weirdly tinted, as if they gazed at it through purple glass or as if it was a stage setting under purple calciums. The weird light held just long enough for the eyes barely to adjust themselves and begin to take in details, before all was black again, impenetrable.
Harrison was the first to see them, breaking out from the palms just as a flash came.
“'Ere they come,” he whispered. “If your scheme don't work, Jim, we've got to stop 'em before they get to the 'ead of the stairs.”
“It 'll work. Better take stations.”
Clinton was suddenly confident, cool, certain of his plan. The next flash showed the savages running towards the house, bounding along, their painted faces fiendish in the brief glare, their weapons shaken as, from brazen throats, there suddenly issued a blood curdling yell, calculated to stop the very heartbeats of the men they supposed were sleeping, unawares.
Kaiti was at the head of one bunch that made for the right hand stairway. Puriti led for the left. Others rushed for the space below the veranda. They bore with them logs for battering rams.
Kaiti leaped for the steps, his men close behind him. His feet landed in something that slid slickly under him, that clung to his soles. He lost his balance, fell asprawl, his followers in a momentary confusion that rapidly increased to panic. Kaiti's hands were glued now to squares of stuff that he could not shake off. There was one of them on his face, clinging there, flapping a little as if alive, persistent as a vampire bat. More on the side of his body where he had slipped. He pawed to get rid of them and accumulated more. It was some white man's magic.
All about him his men were struggling, sliding, shouting in alarm at this silent attack that had materialised with such appalling swiftness. Their weapons were thick with the glue, their fingers stuck together, it was in their hair, their eyes clinging, hampering, blinding.
On the other stairs the same calamity had come to pass. Under the veranda, men squirmed in confusion, catching at each other, dropping the battering logs, patched all over their arms when they sought to retrieve them, pulling each, other down, mad with the knowledge that some frightful sorcery had laid hands upon them.
A livid gash of flame appeared in the very center of the storm cloud that now seemed just beyond the reef. A shattering blast of thunder seemed to pour through the gap with a sulfurous taint on the wind that rushed into and passed the breach. Simultaneously came the roar of broken vapor-vacuums, a second fierce glare of levin as the gale leaped to the land, bowing the palms and rushing up the mountain.
It did more than that. In the glow of the lightning it set all the loose ends of the flypapers fluttering where they were not cemented to the bodies of Kaiti, Puriti and all the warriors, now changed into frightened children, what few wits they had utterly flown, knowing only they were bewitched by these things that had suddenly flown at them, magic things that were sapping them of all the strength and courage.
They were bewitched! Puriti with the rest. And Kaiti. Doubtless there was poison in the glue.
They bolted headlong. Men fell and were trampled upon, scaled with the awful things, rolled in them. Wherever one man clutched at another or strove to beat off these demons—surely they were demons—they found themselves in greater distress.
Again the lightning came and the thunder crashed and the wind blew, fluttering the papers. The terrible gods of the white men had risen in their wrath. Puriti and Kaiti led the flight, if it could be dignified by such a name, towards the grove, flypapers sticking to every part of their anatomy while their men came flopping and flapping and floundering behind them.
The three traders stood in their grandstand, shaken with laughter as the electric fluid flamed and showed the ignominious defeat and flight. They rocked with mirth and were powerless. If weapons had been needed they could not have used them. Clinton had a fleeting idea to fire a volley above their heads and then realized it was far better as it was.
There had been no personal sign from the white men at all, only the enveloping flypapers strewn thickly on the steps and under the porch, thanks to the gross of packages shipped in error. Then the timely bursting of the storm, the coming of the wind; all supernatural; all plainly the work of the gods.
THERE was no laughter in Kaiti's broken ranks, but when they reached the village the spectacle they would present at daybreak would be sufficiently ludicrous. The women would have to scrape off the sticky mixture and all that had adhered to it. It would take days to get it out of their hair. Kaiti nor Puriti could never reinvest themselves with dignity. They were utterly finished.
Now the rain came, crashing down, flooding the trails up which the crestfallen tribesmen made their way amid the fury of the storm that thrashed the great boughs of the forest and broke them off and flung them at the miserable creatures that crawled like ants in a flood, discredited, defeated.
The rain clattered on the roof of Harrison's house, but the three traders did not heed it.
As dawn slowly sifted in through the slanting lines of rain they stood in a triangle with arms folded, the right hand of Clinton clasping the left hand of Harrison and his left the right of MacIntosh; who were similarly interlinked in mystic fashion that the houseboys, staring through the doors, knew for magic ritual.
They saw the white men lift their folded arms together then lower them with a sudden jerk to the rhythm of the strange chant they sung, in words that beach English did not furnish. Surely it was a great charm that they practised. What a fool Puriti had been, Kaiti had been, to think they could prevail against wizards like these.
“Now,” said MacIntosh, “ance more and a' together-r-r.
“Should auld acquaintance be for-r-got,
An' never-r br-rought to min'?
We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
For the days o'auld lang syne.”
“Ye ken,” he said when the charm was ended and he filled the glasses, “I'm the auldest o' the three o' us which gies me the richt to speak fir-r-st. Lang syne oor forebear-r-rs were a' leevin' on the same bonny isle, forebye there's par-r-ts o' it far-r super-rior-r to ithers. But let that gang. We're o' ane kin yet. Let's dreenk to the race.”
They drank.
“One good drink deserves another,” said Harrison. “'Ere's to Jim Clinton, Yankee, inventor and genius. Jim I'm proud of you. Next Fourth of July, I'm 'anged if I don't fly the Stars and Stripes from my flagpole. And the ninth, too, to celebrate what 'appened to night.”
“I'm wi ye in that,” said MacIntosh. “Noo, Jim, 'tis your turn.”
“To the three of us,” said Clinton. “The three traders of Jijilap.”
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1930.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 83 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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