# Joan of the Island/Chapter 23
### CHAPTER XXIII LOVE AT DAWN

RUNNING down the beach were a number of blacks.
Keith sprang across the sand to the low scrub beyond, and not until they were concealed behind it did he release Joan. It seemed that they had reached cover without being observed, while they had the natives in plain sight.
"It must be the men off the schooner," said Keith. "They're running their boat down to the water. Goodness only knows what has happened on this island during the last hour or two, though!"
"I'm afraid the bungalow is in ruins, anyway," Joan added sorrowfully. "See, they are not all going off in the boat!"
"No. There'll be two loads of them," replied Keith.
Then there fell a strange silence between them as they watched. The second load of blacks included the last of Moniz's ruffians. Cries came across the water from the schooner. Some dispute, evidently attended by violence, was in progress. Though those on Tao Tao never knew it, Baloo was mak​ing a brief bid for authority until his interest in all earthly matters suddenly ceased, at the hands of Isa.
Keith was now watching in an agony of apprehension which he dared not put into words.
"God!" he muttered fervently at last, as the schooner's fluttering sails bellied and she stood out to sea. "I felt sure they were going to—" His voice trailed off as he met the girl's glance.
"Going to do what?" Joan asked.
"Going to have a picnic on our ketch to finish with," said Keith. "If the brutes had smashed her up that would have been the last straw. But they're too excited about something. Probably now that Moniz is dead they're hurrying to his place. They know there's a store of gin to loot there. Joan, we're going right up to the bungalow now. Keep your eyes very wide open, and shoot if a nigger even bats an eyelash at you, because they'll be all up in the air after last night's performance. I hope your brother is safe, dear, but I'm awfully afraid they got him."
They walked on the beach as far as the path leading up to the bungalow, without seeing anything of the blacks.
"Keep close to me," Keith urged as he stalked boldly ahead by the side of the trees. He stopped abruptly half way between the beach and the house.
"What name!" he called loudly, addressing a ​head that had vanished among some bushes a dozen yards away. There was no response, and after calling again Keith twice discharged his revolver into the bushes before going further up the path.
There was no sign of life near as they crossed the compound, but it needed no second glance to see that the blacks had played havoc with the contents of the building. Chairs, boxes and clothes were strewn over the veranda, and a great deal of the furniture had been smashed with that abandon of which only savages can be capable.
Joan touched a broken candle stick with her foot. It was one which had stood on Keith's bureau. A bit of candle out of it lay near. She picked it up dumbly and handed it to the man at her side. Slowly then she walked up the steps and entered the house, stepping over the debris. It was heartbreaking from a woman's point of view to see the place that she had called home for four years reduced to such wreckage.
"It may have been foolish, but somehow—somehow I half expected to find Chester here," Joan said sadly.
Making a megaphone of his hands, Keith shouted at the top of his lungs from the veranda for the girl's brother, but no response came.
"See if you can muster some of the blacks with the gong," Joan suggested.
Keith was about to do so, and had the gong stick ​in his hand, when a black at the edge of the compound attracted his attention. It was Peter Pan, and Keith beckoned him.
"Big Marster Trent he plenty too much sick," the man announced.
"Where is he?" asked Joan quickly.
Peter Pan pointed away to the east.
"Come on," said Keith to the girl; and they left their desolated home, Peter Pan leading the way. For a hundred yards he walked through the groves and then struck off into a patch of rough ground which remained in its virgin state. There, just within a fringe of bushes, lay the planter. For a moment the girl feared he was dead, and fell on her knees by his side, but to her joy he moved his lips.
"Water!" he murmured.
Keith picked the man up in his arms gently.
"Let's get back to the house," he said. "We can't do anything here."
Chester was no light weight, but the sailor never faltered under his burden until he had deposited the planter on what remained of his bed. There was a large abrasion on the side of his head, where a heavy blow had been struck, and his hair was matted. After holding a glass of water to her brother's lips and having the satisfaction of seeing him drink a little, Joan bathed the wound. Soon after the patient opened his eyes. After looking at them both ​he smiled faintly in spite of his pain and weakness.
"What's happened?" he asked in a whisper.
"One or two things," replied Keith evasively. "You lie still, old son. You're a sick man."
"Am I?" Chester said wearily; and a few moments later he fell asleep.
Going into the kitchen Joan was astonished to find Maromi standing bewildered among the wreckage.
"You clear up here plenty soon," she said.
The black rolled his eyes, as though wondering whether order could ever be created out of such chaos, but he began by setting the kitchen table on its legs; and then, settling down to his task, the house boy made strange noises, which he doubtless understood to be singing. Clearly, so far as he was concerned, it was a matter for rejoicing that the family had come home again.
With the assistance of Peter Pan, Keith straightened the furniture, threw into a pile all the things that were hopelessly broken, and, after a full hour's work, made the place look less like a ruin. One of the first things he did was to see whether the store had been ransacked, and to his great surprise he found the place intact. It was a large cupboard, forming the division between the kitchen and the living room, and in the darkness the blacks had evidently failed to grasp the topography of the place. Incidentally the fact that it had not been sacked was circumstantial evidence that Maromi had ​taken no part in the wrecking of the bungalow, for of all the black crew on the island, he was the only man who knew where the stores were kept.
During this time Keith and the girl kept a constant eye among the trees beyond the compound, but no further demonstration was made by the blacks. Peter Pan was closely cross-examined as to what part the plantation labourers had taken in the affair, and he told of the manner in which Taleile had been murdered. As far as Keith could make out from the house boy's story, the plantation hands had run riot almost to a man, as soon as the attack started. Maromi, however, had remained loyal, and had even endeavoured to enter the bungalow in the darkness but gave up the attempt after being shot at several times.
When Chester awoke he had a splitting headache and complained of severe bruises on his side and leg, but no bones were broken. He explained briefly that when he and Joan reached the edge of the compound he was struck on the head and became unconscious. He had an indistinct recollection of crawling away afterwards through a world that seemed to be filled with shooting stars, and that was all he remembered.
"See if you can get the gang back on their job, Keith," he said. "If we don't take a grip on them now there may be the devil to pay soon. They're all probably hiding, scared of what's coming to them."
​Keith sounded the great gong noisily. For at least a mile in either direction it broke the silence. Under ordinary circumstances that would have fetched the men at a jog trot to the clearing near their sleeping hut, which was visible from the veranda. But not a solitary figure appeared.
"There's no doubt they're around, somewhere," Keith said to Joan.
"Let Peter Pan go and talk to them," the girl suggested.
The sailor turned to the black, who was squatting on the steps.
"You go tell um niggers to round up plenty quick," Keith said. "Tell um big Marster Trent he angry along of um and if they don't start work one time he tell gunboat to blow um up, my word!"
Peter Pan grimaced, nodded and ambled away, delighted at the distinction of having been chosen to bear such a pleasing message. Keith and the girl remained on the veranda, troubled but hopeful. This was the last card they could play. If it failed nothing remained but to clear out on the Kestrel to seek reinforcements, for if the blacks were still to maintain a belligerent state the position of the white residents of Tao Tao would be impossible.
Presently, however, two or three natives skulked on to the parade ground, and others, doubtful of the consequences of disobedience, followed suit. When they had all assembled Keith stalked among them.
​He glared round, a revolver in each hand, filled with righteous indignation. His knowledge of beche de mer was fully equal to that of Chester, and by long experience he knew how to mingle with it biting, stinging words such as penetrate into the skull of a South Sea islander. It was well that Joan could not hear all that he said, for he used the language a ship's officer would employ to a crowd of island greenhorns afloat. He made no appeal to their loyalty, for that would have been a waste of words. It was fear that he was instilling into them—fear of the determined white man, fear of the white man's lash, fear of the white man's power of revenge that could come with an ear-splitting shriek and explosion from a war-ship. There were men there who had tasted the terror of a bombardment as a form of punishment for murder, and those who had not tasted it had heard it described, the story losing nothing in the telling. The blacks listened with expressionless faces. It was not their way to display emotion. But they were afraid, so far as it was possible for their natures to feel fear. At least they were willing to assume the appearance of being obedient if by so doing they could avoid death, and Keith knew them well enough to be aware that was all he could hope for. Then, as a salutary measure, he informed them that they would each be deprived of half of one year's pay. He made a "boss boy" of Utanga, a native who had on occasion acted as ​temporary overseer, and dismissed the awed crowd with instructions to settle down to work immediately.
"Good man!" said Chester when he heard what had been done. "One way and another, things seem to be petering out on Tao Tao, and at the present moment I don't think I'd recommend my bitterest enemy to buy the place as a going concern, but I will be up and doing soon, and maybe it will be possible to pull things together again."
"You've got to sit tight and get your head mended, before you even remember you're a planter," said Keith good-naturedly.
There were still a hundred things to be done about the house, and Keith attacked the work vehemently, but he was abstracted through it all, and although when Joan offered him a helping hand, he accepted her assistance smilingly enough, it seemed to her that he tried to avoid speech with her. This was not the man to whom she had clung during those precious moments on the beach but a few hours before, she thought. There he had been tempestuous, overwhelming. He had hurt her as he crushed her to him, and she had loved him the more for it. His present behaviour puzzled and wounded her. With a woman's natural longing to share the knowledge of her love with some one, Joan would have flown to Chester, had she not begun to doubt the return of her passion.
Could it be that he had acted purely on the ​impulse—that it had been but the semblance of love, which he had allowed to show itself for a moment and then regretted? She was coiling her hair in two ropes, and studied her face closely in the glass. Scant though her toilet had been, perforce, Joan knew she was beautiful, and never had the knowledge given her greater joy than it did now. But she was sorely puzzled. If he had been a bashful type of person, that might have accounted for it somewhat, but nothing was further removed from Keith than bashfulness. He was strong in every sense of the word, determined without being inconsiderate, and unusually outspoken. A veil seemed to have been let down between them, and both Keith and the girl were conscious of it.
Soon after noon the sky became overcast. Dark clouds rolled up, and the sailor shook his head gravely as he looked out.
"Troubles never come singly," he said to Joan, "and this is the season of the year when there's liable to be a brute of a storm. I believe we're in for something special in the way of weather."
As he spoke there came a blinding flash which seemed to blaze its path round the walls of the house, and instantly it was followed by a crashing, tearing, rolling peal which sounded as though the very earth were being split asunder.
Maromi incontinently cast himself on his stomach in the kitchen, and continued to howl long after the ​slender building had ceased to rattle and vibrate, for to him it was the voice of a god, angry and vindictive. Maromi's people had always known that when the sky god spoke as fiercely as that it was the coming of death, as a punishment, and so he knew, before the charred bodies of three black labourers were found afterwards, that the god had taken toll among those who had attacked the bungalow.
"That was terribly near," Joan said, unconsciously drawing closer to Keith as though for protection.
"It struck the niggers' hut," he exclaimed, pointing. "Look! The flames are already starting!"