# The Water Wizard

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Extracted from Adventure, 15 Nov 1927, pp. 157–174. Title illustration may be omitted.
South Seas—white magic vs. black.
THE WATER WIZARD A Complete Novelette
by
J. Allan Dunn
Author of “Yellow Head,” “The Black Banner,” etc.
VILA, which is the capital of the New Hebrides, is on the island of Efaté, which is sometimes called Vaté and sometimes Sandwich Island, even as Vila is often known as Port Vila.
There are not many more beautiful harbors than that of Vila, with its blue and green of wooded peaks and clear water, its vivid light and shade, its jeweled islands scattered on the crystal bay where the flying-fish are almost always—not playing, but planing in grim earnest to escape the rush of their hungry enemies.
The British High Commissioner shares the rule of the islands with the French High Commissioner and each has an Assistant Resident Commissioner who live on separate islets. Most of the Mission stations are located the same way, also certain small native villages. It is both fashionable and pleasant to live on an island in Vila Bay and elsewhere in the group. It is cooler, and the sea is better than a fence when the tribesmen go on a raid.
There are few uglier people in the world than the natives of the New Hebrides. They are built for strength and not for comeliness. They have club noses in which is set a ring or a strip of bone; the distended lobes of their ears reach their shoulders and are pierced for use as receptacles for most of their possessions. They have woolly hair and woolly beards. They wear a gee-string and a wide bark belt which carries cartridges that foolish traders give them for use in antiquated Tower rifles: They are cannibals and use poisoned arrows, clubs and spears, besides their muskets. They make mummies of their dead and effect collections of skulls. Their women are abject slaves.
For choice they wear a boar's tusk hung like a locket, and a freshly severed pig's tail as an ear ornament. The wizards rule them, and none is supposed to die a natural death. Death is to be revenged, and the wilder parts of the dark, mysterious bush are death-traps where a native vendetta is in perpetual progress.
They are vicious and treacherous, sullen and lazy. Their one redeeming trait is cleanliness. A village is scrupulously clean, stone-walled, swept, decorated with flowering and bright-leaved shrubs, with bamboos growing on the tops of soft coral fences. Nevertheless it is a Place of Death.
There are some more peaceful colonies of Polynesian origin but, for the most part, the natives are natural murderers and eaters of human flesh. Back in the dense bush they defy castigation, though it occasionally overtakes them. There are spots called by such well-earned names as “The Traders' Graveyard,” which should be sufficient warning to the wary.
Traveling between the islands on the steamer that, like an accommodation train, stops here and there and everywhere, you may see through glasses—the best manner of viewing—a group of herded women bathing on an open beach guarded by flat-faced warriors bearing guns and bandoleers of cartridges, ready to stall off or drive back a rush from bush neighbors. Quakes shake the group; live volcanoes spout. It is a wild, wild place, inhabited by wild, wild people. Savages in a savage, magnificent setting.
Step off the beaten track, turn your back on your own laborers, weaken a constant watchfulness and restraint and you pay the ultimate penalty. Your skull, decked with crude clay modeling in caricature of your features, will be a main exhibit in a grass-thatched kamal. Your flesh may be passed about the village from chief to still suckling infants. This is not so certain, as the white long-pig is not esteemed as kai-kai; and even black-skinned flesh is eaten with medicinal red berries, like tomatoes, lest it prove overrich and bring about indigestion.
For all this, there are worse spots to live in than Vila. It is the Little Paris of the traders and the planters who come to its one struggling street and deal at the stores, before they gather at the Café—Restaurant Français—where the food is fair, if overspiced for some palates, and one may drink thin claret, gin, whisky, grenadine or absinthe across the little tables and almost imagine himself back in God's Country. Which the New Hebrides, with all due respect for the efforts of the missionaries, is most distinctly not.
Saunders sat at the table with Haley and Stone, who were playing dominoes for the drinks. Saunders and Haley were in coffee, beyond Melé Beach, thirty-odd miles away. Stone grew corn and millet, closer in.
They had dined, and they had downed several rounds of drinks. They had discussed trade and the ridiculous situation of laws laid down by the Commissioners without means to enforce them. They had talked of their own affairs and the general plantation gossip and—below their breath, because there are two Frenchmen to one Britisher or American in Vila—they had aired their stale views concerning the dual government and the dirty deal the French gave the rest. And they fervently hoped that some one else they knew would drop in so that they could make up a game of bridge or poker.
Already they were a little sick of each other, knowing themselves so well. Always they came to Vila as an oasis that loomed bright and verdant from plantation distance, but it invariably palled after a few hours, so that they were glad to get back to work again. Taking it both ways, it worked out very well.
It was not steamer day for a week, and there seemed scant prospect of a fourth man. Stone suggested pool, and the two others ignored him. Stone played altogether too well to make it interesting.
In Tahiti there are complaisant and not unattractive ladies who help to while away a trader's leisure hours—and spend his money. In Vila the native women are neither amiable nor attractive, even if the trio had been that kind of men, which they were not. To Saunders, a woman was as a red cloth to a bull. Haley and Stone had little French and less inclination for the company of the sallow wives of the inhabitants, who dressed in the latest modes and languidly despised the Stones and the Haleys and their ilk.
Nevertheless, some of them, sipping their demi-tasses, looked up with brightening eyes and glances of distinct approval at the man who entered, bowing to some of them, murmuring a salutation in French that had once beyond a doubt been practised in Paris.
HE WAS a tall man and his immaculate white drill made him appear taller for all his breadth of shoulder. His thin unshaven face was so brown that his blue eyes appeared unnatural in their gleaming whites, and the flash of his teeth in a smile was momentarily startling. A keen face. A hawk face. A strong body. His name was Smith—James Smith. His nationality was proclaimed by the whispers among the wives of the habitants.
“C'est M'sieu l' Américain!”
Smith came over to the table where the three sat, and they greeted him almost boisterously. They hailed him as a younger brother at a boarding-school hails his elder, who comes bringing tips. Even Saunders' sour, nut-cracker face expanded in a smile.
“Smith! What good wind sent ye? How's a' wi' ye? Sit doon an' ha' a drink. It's Stone's treat.”
“It's mine,” said Smith as he sat down.
The propriétaire came bustling up with a “bon soir, M'siew Smeeth,” and he ordered the meal à la carte.
“And a claret punch. Whatever the others are drinking for them.”
He spoke in fluent French, and the propriétaire courtesied and gave him a smile that was not all vinegar.
“The grub is rotten,” said Haley. “Same old thing. Turtle steak's the best thing on it.”
“Haven't seen a turtle for a coon's age. Vila looks good to me. First time in four months.”
“How's copra?”
“Good. Averaging high. Ninety nuts on some trees. Same old bother with labor, but we worry along. Now let's cut out shop. My shop anyway. You old growlers have spilled your grievances, I suppose. What's the real news?”
He sipped his punch and smoked a cigaret after his soup, without regard of the glances of somewhat passé coquetry that were sent his way. He was easily the best-looking man in the room, the most impressive and the coolest. Vila has an average climate like that of a fernery. Or a steam laundry.
“It's all stale. Steamer's not due. What brought you here? Supplies?”
“I have come to interview the Commissioners—at their request. A complaint has been made that I am not living up to my agreement with my boys. No truth in it. I spoil the lazy bums, but I don't want to stay away and have a fine slapped on me. Bad example to the rest. No holding 'em.”
“It's a burnin' shame,” said Saunders, “the way they'll pamper the natives. You're too close in, Smith. Back in the bush we know how to handle 'em. A pack o' murderin' cannibals. All they recruit for is money enough to buy a rifle an' cartridges so they can go home an' kill a long pig.
“What was your trouble?”
“Two or three of 'em came down with what looked like dysentery. I dosed 'em pretty hard—pulled 'em through, before the rest got scared and quit. Some bush wizard got hold of them, and the result was they complained that I'd been poisoning them. I'll fix it all right, but it meant a trip to Vila. Glad I came now I've seen you chaps.”
“Humph!” grunted Haley. “One of my boys made a swipe at me with a killing-mallet. My houseboy. I nursed him through a sickness, too. Got sulky at something. The fool forgot there was a mirror on the wall. Lucky for me I looked up. I should have potted the beggar, but it 'ud leak out and raise no end of a stink. I nearly skinned him instead. He took it out on the wizard who said he'd have no trouble with the job.
“The law's a joke. They can fine you and impound you on customs to secure it, but they never back you up with the natives unless there's a wholesale murder, when they send round a floating bath-tub they call a gunboat to fire a few shells into the bush. Fat lot of good that does.”
“They hung a few of them over that Navaa affair,” said Smith.
“They ought to have hung all of 'em. You've simply got to take the law into your hands and see that your plantation is far enough away to discourage the visits of the Lord High PishPash Commissioner. How about a game of bridge?”
“Good enough. Up-stairs on the veranda?”
“There's one bit o' news,” put in Saunders. “Your especial friend Ford is a verra seeck man. They say he's bewitched.”
“What's that?”
Smith turned sharply back to the table where Saunders still sat finishing his whisky and water.
“Not a soul'll go near him except the missionaries, an' he swears he'll pull a gun on the first who puts foot on his porch as long as he can hold pistol an' pu' trigger. We've sort of tabu'd him since the Abua business. Stone there called. Ford don't know what's wrong wi' him, but he's no strength an' juist lies on his veranda wastin' away. No fever, no pain, juist fadin' to a mummy. Eh, Stone?”
“That describes him better than anything I know of,” replied Stone. “But he had energy enough to curse longer and more artistically than any one I ever ran across. He'd have punched my head if he'd had the strength. Said so. Tried to get up and do it.
“I told him I was a Johnny Newcome who'd heard he was sick and wanted to see if I could do anything for a neighbor, as he might do for me some time.
“He told me to go plumb to hades. Said I was like all the rest. All he wanted was to be left alone, and blast the eyes and heart and liver of every other white man in the islands.
“I left. He had a couple of villainous-looking houseboys hanging round, and I believe they'd have tackled me if it wasn't for my automatic. On the way to the boat-landing I saw the weirdest-looking bit of humanity you could find out of a nightmare. He was a nightmare.
“His hair was lime-bleached until it was yellow. There wasn't too much of it, and it looked like a moth-eaten duster. His face was painted with white all over except a sort of black-mask effect over the eyes. Looked like a skull. Eyes were red-rimmed and just devilish.
“Gimcracks all over his body. Red feathers stuck in braided sennit bands on his arms and legs. Skinnier than Ford back on the veranda. And scaly as a fish. Gray scales all over him.”
“Scaly?”
Smith spoke the word. His plantation was far beyond that of the others, almost in terra incognita so far as whites were concerned. He was making money out of it for all that, with a superb grove of nuts from which he expressed the copra into oil, making by-products out of the husks and fiber.
His knowledge of native lore was wide, and he spoke the dialects. Without these he could never have mastered the wild boys from Tanna and Malekula who had signed out to him for five pounds a year. As he had said, he had his occasional troubles.
“Scaly as a mullet,” affirmed Stone. “He had a peach of a boar's tusk. Double circle. And a necklace of human teeth strung like beads. Hundreds of 'em. Went three or four times round his scrawny old neck. Wore a kilt of human hair—beards, I suppose. He had a stone in front of him, and he was balancing smaller ones on top of it.
“He grinned as I passed. A grin without any teeth of his own; just the end of a withered tongue stuck out between his lips. They were scaly too. I'm hanged if he didn't give me the creeps.”
“Tubu,” said Smith. “The worst wizard on Efaté. A bloodthirsty old sorcerer. The stone was a magic stone—a netik—and he was doing a hocum-pocum rite with it. Making a spell. Funny he should be squatting there right on Ford's land. Wonder if Ford has had a run-in with him.”
“Wouldn't be surprized,” said Haley. “Ford's always raising Ned with his hands. Got fined twenty pounds for stringing one up by his thumbs and letting the ants get at him. Let's go up-stairs. Cooler.”
SMITH went first, his face thoughtful.
“What was his run-in with Ford?” Stone asked Haley.
“Ford bought a girl on Abua for six pigs and some tobacco. They're Polynesian there, and the girl wasn't bad-looking. Young, of course. Ford took her to his plantation and abused her. Smith happened to drop in. Going by in his launch and heard the yells. He said she was bruised until she looked like a rotten plum. Wealed on the back. She was. I saw her later. Ford was in a rotten temper and taking it out on her by giving her a licking with a split bamboo. Had her tied up to a post on the veranda.”
“Well?”
Haley grinned.
“Smith knocked him down and cut the girl loose. Ford wanted to fight, and he got his needings. Smith walloped him and then gave him a dose of his own medicine. Ford's a big man—was—but Smith spanked him with the split bamboo, and Ford took his meals standing and slept on his belly for a bit.
“Smith brought the girl over to my place, and I sent for Saunders. You know Scotty. He's a hardshell where women are concerned; but, when he saw that poor kid, he wanted to take his rifle and go over and shoot Ford out of hand.
“We did go over later, all three of us, and we told Ford a few things for the good of his soul—if he's got one. He was gray with pain; and if looks could have killed, we'd have lasted about one minute. Since then Ford hasn't been popular. The yarn got out. With the native boys, too, and that hurt Ford's pride, which is the only sensitive thing about the inside of him.
“Smith sent the girl over to Abua and paid the pigs and tobacco over to Ford. Otherwise her folks would have shipped her back. But I'll bet she wouldn't have reached there alive, if she'd had a knife.
“Here we are. Thank Heaven there's a breeze. Garçon!”
They were soon settled at the edge of the veranda, looking to the bay. There are no reefs about Efaté. The land goes down sheer to great depths. The waves splashed soothingly on the shingle, and the palms rustled like big fans. The inevitable drinks and smokes accompanied the game. Smith played silently, as was his wont—and lost, which was not usual. The others rallied him.
“Out of luck tonight, boys,” he said. “Gives you a chance to even up from last time. Fact is I'm bothered about Tubu and Ford.”
“For why?” inquired Saunders caustically. “They're a pair of rascals.”
“Two reasons. These bush wizards are getting to be more than a mere nuisance. They've got to be taught a lesson. Tubu's the big gun of them all. Spoil his little game in the open and you've got the rest tamed, for a while anyway, so far as we whites are concerned.
“It's a good bet he's cast a spell on Ford. Given out that Ford'll die. Told everybody, including Ford. There are five hundred natives now waiting for news of his death.”
“But that's all bunk,” said Stone. “I suppose a native will die from fright if he thinks he's bewitched, but not a white man. Not Ford.”
Haley grinned at him.
“Bunk, is it?” asked Saunders. “You tell him, Smith.”
“These wizards have got a lot of spells and incantations,” said Smith. “I suppose they believe in 'em. Handed-down ritual. Grandstand and spectacular stuff. But if a man is stubborn and won't die they have got more practical methods. They kill some with trained snakes beyond a doubt. Set the snake in the right trail at the right time. And they've got a prime knowledge of all sorts of poisons.
“Then they've got assistants among the natives who are proud to help and get immunity themselves, though I imagine the assistants are often put out of the way before they can whisper secrets. I'll bet half my crop that if Tubu has got it in for Ford he's administering poison to him some way through his houseboys.
“Ford's no fool. He'll be careful of his diet. Use canned goods and open them himself. But Tubu's a past master. He's made the announcement. Ford has got to die or he'll lose his prestige.
“He's a water wizard. I mean by that his pet scheme is to make a clay model. Named this one for Ford. He's got it in a stream somewhere near a trail where it can be seen. As the stream washes it away Ford's life is supposed to ebb with it. And Tubu hangs round and sees that Ford gets weaker. Times the dénouement.”
“This is a sweet country,” said Stone, setting down his cigar as if it had suddenly gone against his taste.
“All right as long as you treat the natives fairly well and keep a good lookout. You've got to be boss, and you've got to be careful. I kept my veranda strewn with big thumb-tacks for the first six months,” said Smith. “The boys' feet are calloused, but the tacks were sharp and long. Better than a bulldog. They stay off it now.
“Second reason is that Ford's a white man. If he won't have us around we'll have to save him without him knowing it. We can't let a white man be poisoned and look on.”
The rest were silent. Finally Saunders spoke:
“I suppose not. Mind ye, I wouldn't help him for his own sake, but it wad be a bad theeng for business; an' a good theeng if Tubu was set down. How are ye goin' to do it?”
“There's only one way,” said Smith. “All I need from you fellows is your moral support. If I go out you can clean up Tubu. I'll be through with the Commissioners tomorrow. My launch needs repairs, but that can be sent down the coast after me. I've got Liki with me, and he's a good man. Brought him from Samoa. My headman. He'll look after the launch. I'll pay a visit to Tubu. Do a little spying if I can and then beat him at his own game.”
“Going to Ford's?”
“No. Into Tubu's village. He'll be there. He's just watching Ford for a time each day for general effect, diagnosis and to gloat.”
“Going into the bush alone? Man, ye don't mean it!”
“Sure do, Saunders. Better one than many. I know their ways. They are a bit afraid of me or they'd have settled this present bother of ours themselves—or tried to—without tackling the Commissioner. I'll do a little conjuring on my own hook.”
They laid down their cards and tried to dissuade him. At least to allow them to go with him. But Smith was adamant.
“You chaps don't know bush ways as well as I do. As for arms, a Gatling gun wouldn't do me any good. If they get me it'll be from behind. But the whole secret is that they are afraid of the white man's mana. That's hard to translate. Supernatural power revealing itself in physical force. They believe the white man has a more powerful mana than they have. Even Tubu believes that, though he'd hate to admit it to himself. The best of it is that mana can manifest itself after death very nastily. If they're afraid of me alive they'll be afraid of me dead. Savvy?”
“Ford ain't worth it,” growled Haley.
“I tell you it isn't just for Ford. It's the principle of the thing. He's our breed. We've got to stay on top. And I'm sick of these bush-doctors running my affairs and yours like a strike leader. That's settled. Let's play cards. And, now that I've got that off my chest, look out, you chaps.”
They looked out—at phenomenal hands displayed and others they did not care to call. Smith won back all he had lost and as much again before they had the last round of jacks. He won three of those pots and gathered up his winnings.
“For general expenses,” he announced. “Gives you all a hand in my trip. I'm turning in. See you tomorrow before I go.”
SMITH hired two horses and made the first leg of his Quixotic journey in an Australian high-pommeled stock saddle. He took a native with him to return the nags, starting at dawn along the dusty Mele road for Undine Bay, his first stop, thirty miles distant.
Map:
THE NEW HEBRIDES ARE THE SMALL GROUP NORTH OF NEW CALEDONIA
The trail led out on to Mele Beach, a third of a mile wide and eight miles long of hard-packed powdered coral where the green beach vines trailed with their pink blossoms and the shadows were blue as strokes and washes of cobalt.
The beach was a blinding glare of whiteness, the bay shaded from amethyst to violet; with Melé Island sapphire in its midst. Out of this into the green twilight of the bush along the narrowest of paths between walls of buttressed banyans and lesser trees bound together with vines. Wild taro with leaves larger than elephant ears lofted above his hat brim as he rode. In the undergrowth ripe berries glowed. Parrots screeched and pigeons cooed. Wild pigs went trampling unseen in the jungle. Came a stretch of rustling reeds and then the bush.
At twilight when the sky was aflame and the sea one vast pool of liquid fire, he emerged upon a coffee clearing, its scarlet berries in the ordered rows looking like holly amid the glossy leaves, and drew rein at Saunders', where the latter's headman greeted him with obsequious welcome. Smith had taken warts from the man's hand when a bush-doctor failed, using caustic, and the “strong medicine,” plus the result, had made Smith's mana very strong with the native.
The next morning he plunged into the bush alone, working upward to a ridge where the long grass grew slippery as glacial ice, always waving in the wind, but making better, safer going than the moist-hot bush with its pathways leading to hidden villages and calling for momentary precautions against pitfalls, or ambushed spears and arrows, triggered by projecting boughs or innocent-appearing liana.
He made a three-mile gait of it, inured to the climate, a pith helmet above white shirt and drill riding-breeches that ended in laced boots. He traveled light save for a cartridge-belt and two Luegers tied down to his boot tops by thongs. His knapsack contained only a few things he had purchased in Vila—a conjurer's bag, together with a small supply of rice, some compressed beef tablets and hard crackers. For fruit he had the bush. Guavas in the scrub, berries and figs, bananas, great grapefruits, wild oranges. Breadfruit for baking and wild yams for vegetables.
To be seen was not a part of his program. He wanted to assure himself of Tubu's doings before his presence was known. So he went warily, listening for distant drumbeats that would wireless his approach. Here and there he saw threads of smoke. In mid-afternoon he looked down to where the lighter green of his own plantation showed by the sea's edge, four thousand feet below.
Until evening he worked his way through a thick forest, too high for the denser undergrowth. He made his solitary camp in a lave blowout cave, secure from interference. Above him were only the bare crags of the ridge, spirit-haunted, with the trade winds sighing through the defiles—tabu.
The Melanesians are not early risers. The Sun-God is their only genial deity; and, not until he has appeared or, in the rainy season, daylight is fully established, do they venture out. The night is filled with evil spirits. In their primitive state the men are warriors and the women slaves. When there is no fighting they dance or loaf. Bathing to the bushman, who must travel seaward through country beset with tribal enemies, is a luxury seldom engaged in. The use of water is limited. Along the beach after a hot night natives may seek the surf at dawn, but in the jungle they lie long abed.
This Smith knew and used to his advantage. Contrary to popular idea, the tropic dawn does not come in one wild swoop. When the sun tops ridge or trees the vivid change of color is swift, and the disk seems indeed to come up like thunder, but long before the fiery orb reaches sufficient altitude to chase the shadows from the valleys and the mists from the peaks, the world, rolling on into the zone of unseen rays, shifts through a gradual twilight. The sky grays, is softly suffused with light; the low tones of night gradually take on color; the stars pale slowly until the first beam seems to send them, shuddering; into obscurity.
Smith came out of his cave into an atmosphere that was olive-tinted, charged with the balm of sweet-scented fern and vines. A time of infinite silence with the low murmur of the sea and the soft rustle of leaves in the faintly stirring winds coming gently to the heights. Above him the mountain crests were wrapped in purple vapors which would shortly glow coral and sulfur and begin to writhe and dissipate under the influence of the sun.
He breakfasted on rice and beef extract, with some wild figs and guavas plucked the night before, finding water in a trickle of cascade. With infinite caution he descended toward the spot he had marked as Tubu's village by smoke drifts, and a low roll of drum at nightfall.
He looked for a stream, found and followed it, using the boulders as stepping-stones. This, he imagined, would lead close to the stronghold, possibly flow through it. It was the chosen medium of the Water Wizard's chef d'œuvre in sorcery. Much hinged on his finding a clay image set in the water near some ford where the action of the current would slowly wash away the stiff clay. If he did not discover it his plans would have to be changed.
Here and there he was forced to the banks to make his way through the bush. He had not brought a hatchet, fearing lest the sounds of chopping would be too resonant. Most of all he dreaded disturbing the birds.
Now and then he came across banks of clay and noted their consistency and color with satisfaction. Occasionally he waded. Once he clambered up the buttresses of a banyan and worked up to a high bough that topped the surrounding forest. From the height he marked indications of a clearing, the light green of transplanted coco-palms about half a mile away. His climb scattered some wood pigeons, which wheeled, protesting, but he had seen what he wanted and took the risk. The sun was not yet above the mountains, though, high up, some wisps of cloud floated like great flamingo-feathers as heralds of the dawn.
Now he went with still greater caution. The falls of the stream were more infrequent and for the most part he waded half-knee-deep in the swirling water. Once he passed the two ends of a bush trail, a narrow, shadowy, sinister lane walled with green. It connected with a ford; but there was no image there, and he fancied that the path was out of the boundaries of Tubu's domain.
The stream met a mass of rock, widened, pooled out and made marshes where cultivated taro was growing rankly. He was nearing the village.
The brook curved sharply, running deep so that he had to work his way along the rocky confines. There was a low fall, then riffles, the signs of another path. Once more Smith took to the bush, examining every inch of the stream.
His keen eyes found the object of his search. Below a narrow spit about the edge of which the water curled and then swept on more placidly, yet with a fair and even current, he saw something projecting from the water that was too red to be a stone, that looked like a castaway tiki-idol, its head above water that eddied about it.
HE CROUCHED, listening. The sun was gilding the tree-tops, but the brook was in green twilight. Parrots were moving, chattering, occasionally screeching; but he had not started them, and he made no move. He heard the grunting of pigs and guessed them to be domesticated since there was no noise of their progress.
Foot by foot he neared the water, waded in, stooped and examined the wizard's black-magic charm.
The image was rudely modeled but evidently meant for a white man, though its substance was red clay. The high, beaked nose determined that, and the two blue beads set in for eyes. It had been molded about a stake that was thrust deep into the bed of the brook.
The arms, roughly suggested, were almost gone, as were the legs, and the body was wasted. Two or three days more would see it almost dissolved—unless a freshet hastened destruction. Tubu would look out for that. If there were a cloud-burst he would make a swift end of Ford.
The clay had been mixed with fiber to toughen it. This Smith discovered as he gently eased out the image and carried it ashore.
He had to work swiftly, but he fancied he had time enough. The women would not come to till the crops until mid-morning. First breakfast would have to be prepared, and he did not think they were yet out of their huts.
From his knapsack he took a package of cement and another of red-ocher with small bags inside of it that held brown umber and black. He took sand from the stream and made his mixture to match the clay of the charm. A small bottle of oil, a feather and a can of plaster of Paris he set beside him while he dried off the image carefully.
In the idle hours on his plantation Smith sometimes played the amateur naturalist, gathering butterflies and moths, stuffing and skinning birds, often mounting them. One hobby was a collection of the gorgeous and strange-shaped fishes of the lagoon and the open sea. Preservation of these in formalin faded the bright colors, and Smith had adopted the plan of making plaster-casts of them and copying the brilliant hues in oils. Practise had made him an expert.
He dug a basin out of the clay with his knife and lined it with a taro leaf, filling it with plaster batter, stiffer than usual, in which he immersed one-half of the manikin and set it in a bright sun spot to dry. It set swiftly, and he oiled the other half, also the edges of the half-cast, boring shallow holes in the lower form to be sure of proper contact and pouring over the rest of the batter.
Then he waited tensely for his cast to dry. Once he heard the gabble of women and shrank back under the big leaves, ready to draw the cast out of sight if necessary. If any one came and found the image gone there would be a mighty hubbub. The voices persisted; but they came no nearer, and Smith decided that he was closer to the edge of the village than he had thought. Cautiously he crawled to investigate, making no more noise or show of movement than a snake.
Less than two hundred yards away a stout bamboo palisade was masked by the wild growth. Just beyond the stout fence the women were gossiping. He could make out the words—idle talk of a young man who thought himself a dandy, at whom they were laughing. One yawned, and then the sound of dull pounding topped their talking. They were making poe-poe from steamed taro roots. He still had considerable leeway.
The halves of his cast came away easily, leaving a perfect form. He set the image back in the stream again before he began to mix his colored cement, testing out little dabs to be sure of the proper shade when it dried. His chief trouble lay in the stake, and he had to hunt around before he found one that would pass muster as a duplicate of the one in the stream.
If he had had more time he would have used the original; but he did not know how long the cement might take to set, and there was a long day ahead of him. Ford's plantation lay between his own and Haley's, and he had to go there and return before nightfall after he had taken a look inside the village.
He poured the mixture of sand and cement into the mold and set it away in the hollow of a big tree. Every moment he had been careful about leaving no traces of his presence, using rocks whenever possible to stand and step on; and now he went about erasing little signs, disposing of all powder of plaster and cement and paint, smoothing telltale marks and deftly replacing bowed leaves.
He was ready to play and give check to Tubu; but checkmate could not be attempted before he found out what was being administered to Ford. First he decided to take a peep and see what Tubu might be up to. It was certain that as the time drew near for Ford to pass out—and no doubt the date had been set, if not announced, for fear of accident—the Water Wizard would go through certain incantations and ceremonials before his tribe. Probably he would dance the Dance of Death, which takes three days. The drums Smith had heard the night before might have been a part of that ritual. It was patent from the condition of the image that he had come none too soon.
He knew that the bamboo stockade was the back wall of the village, and that the top was unpleasantly spiked. The entrance would be led up to by a maze of paths in which the stranger would get misled, if he was not pitfalled or speared by a trap. The front wall would be of coral blocks or lava-stones. The gateway would be a heavy one of wood. By the time he reached it there would be sentries set with muskets loaded with slugs, their aim developed by long practise on certain places in the path. But he held no intention of an open visit as yet. He wanted to spy out the land.
Smith had a hard and hot job to find the place he wanted, where some tree with thick foliage might allow him to climb to a point of vantage.
The wily Tubu had encouraged the growth of bush lawyers for his outer defenses; and in places the thick vines with curving thorns like tigers' talons were as thick and nearly as impenetrable as barbed wire in the trenches. But he found a great fig with lateral boughs, and hitched and writhed his way up until he was perched where he could look through the screen of leaves into the heart of the village.
In front of him was the sing-sing ground, a plaza where the earth had been trodden flat by the stamp of thousands of dancing feet. In the center were solitary netik stones and others piled into the shape of a trilithon, after the manner of Stonehenge. Against certain of these stones a victim doomed for the cannibal feast would be dashed to death by four men holding wrists and ankles and ramming his skull against the rock with catapultic force.
Near the stones was a group of idol-drums, great trunks hollowed out with an open slit for resonance, the upper part carven into hideous heads painted black—eyeless, skull-like things with long red tongues hanging down on some of them, as if eager to lap sacrificial blood. Perched on top of every one was a black bird, like a crow, with outstretched wings, carved from wood.
Directly opposite Smith was the hamal—the temple, club-house, museum and place of initiation. It was well built with a high-pitched roof of thatch, the upper half of its façade open and showing the carven ends of rafters from which dangled strings of human and pig skulls. Great horizontal logs closed it with occasional uprights, sennit-bound and strengthening the wall. Besides the top there were two square spaces, eight logs high to the sill. No porch or platform and no steps. Fringes of palm-leaves curtained the top.
There were a number of reed huts under the shade of trees close to the wall. The place was ominously silent and deserted, and Smith began to suspect that despite all his precautions they had discovered the presence of some one. He commenced to have the crawly feeling that scores of pairs of eyes were seeking him out, even observing him, waiting for some signal to uncover his hiding-place, greeting him with tearing slugs and poisoned arrows. He could not see the gate where the sentinels should be on guard.
The morning meal was evidently over or had been foregone. There were no women or children in sight—an ominous absence. Not even a pig, though they might have sought the shade.
WHILE he watched with every sense on edge he saw movement and color in a grove of trees to the right of the hamal. More to the left, though he could not see that side so plainly. He breathed more easily.
Processions were forming. The villagers were inside the enclosure and he outside and still hidden. But the motion portended a ceremony.
Out came a double file of almost naked men, belted with bright green pandanus leaf centered with crimson-dyed fiber strips, adorned with turtle-shell cuffs, with earrings and nose-pieces that dangled from their septums, painted with splotches of red, yellow and black; green and white feathers in their mops of hair, which were bleached orange, yellow and white with lime.
The six leaders bore drumsticks, carved and splashed with bright colors. These proceeded to the drums. Twenty more took place in line. The rest and less elaborately decorated stood about in groups to witness the dance.
The women came out from the left, armleted and necklaced with shell, a narrow pandanus strip about their hips. Each carried a peeled wand in either hand, and they stood in rows, leaning on the rods, motionless, half-stupid.
The drums began to beat, hollow, booming strokes that reverberated through the dense jungle and came back in a rolling rhythm that timed the listener's pulse and seemed to proceed from the sky, the forest, the earth itself. The women began to shuffle their feet, and when the tempo was established the score of dancers commenced to chant and race around the idol-drums, leaping, bending, running at top speed, bellowing with all their lung-power.
Faster and faster they went in a mad whirl with the deep sounds urging them to frenzy, fibrin pumping into their muscles from the madness of their blood-lust until they achieved prodigious feats of agility, bounding about with flashing teeth and rolling eyes, the sun glinting from the glossy pandanus-strips and polished shell ornaments, sweat streaming down their oiled bodies, ruddling the paint.
Just as the dancers, like devils of the pit, achieved the height of their excitation while all the place was filled with the whirlpool of noise flowing from the drums, Satan himself seemed to leap like a harlequin through the opening to the right of the door, though never was trim Harlequin so dressed.
Undoubtedly Tubu had leaped to the ground from some inner shelf or platform; but he seemed as if shot from a catapult, landing, despite his age, lightly as a great cat, without breaking his stride and commencing immediately to glide over the ground with his grotesque shadow skimming now below, now ahead, behind or to one side of him, like a diabolical familiar. His whitened face with the blackened space about the eves was set in a mask of ferocity, his deep-set orbs gleaming but fixed always ahead of him.
The teeth in his necklace glittered as they shook, and little points in them broke into dazzles of light. The kilt of dead men's beards wagged. His projecting ribs had been picked out with yellow and underscored with black; he wore a headpiece of red, white and green feathers arranged on bamboos that were bound to his forehead and nodded as he danced. And his scaly body shone with the dull luster of tarnished metal.
The leaping savages tore round and round the resounding drums; the women shuffled silently; the knots of onlookers were motionless while Tubu, with wondrous litheness, skimmed and hovered in the Death Dance, now swooping down on an imaginary prey with clutching hands, now seeming to herd his quarry while his tigerish, merciless face remained unchanged.
Smith had seen all he wanted, and he inched stealthily from his perch down to the base of his tree and rounded the outer wall until he could see the gateway through the leaves. Then he broke through the bush to come out on the trail that led to the beach and by sidepaths to his own plantation with the pulsing drums, boom-booming after him.
If the drums of yesterday had marked the first act of the dance he had a day to spare. He fancied he had two, by the condition of the clay image, and that the night performance had been an ordinary sing-sing; but he wasted no time, swinging on downward until his white drill was stained with sweat, maintaining his pace until the clean sea-breeze met him, and he came out on the beach a little below his own place.
He had hardly hoped for the launch, knowing the delays of machinery repairs; but it lay at anchor off his copra wharf. Liki had not failed him.
Ten minutes for a bath and swift change into fresh clothes. Another ten for a quick meal, and Smith was off again in the chugging launch at ten knots for Ford's.
The place seemed deserted. The gate of the labor quarters was closed. A sullen houseboy met him as he walked up from the wharf to the house, stilted high on a pitch of land between terraces.
The native's forbidding attitude vanished as Smith grew close enough for the savage to see the expression of “Simiti's” face and eyes. He knew something of Simiti. He had a very strong mana. If Tubu had been present he might have found hardihood, for he was growing contemptuous of the mana powers of 'Forodi,” his master, dead or alive. Every hour testified that Tubu was the more powerful. But with Simiti he did not know.
As he mounted, Smith could look over the labor-quarters stockade into the yard. It was empty. Ford's laborers had deserted him. The houseboys waited only as assistants to Tubu.
Ford lay on a long chair of bamboo, stretched out at full length; without motion. A rifle stood against the arm of the chair, within reach of the hand and arm that languidly drooped near it. A small table held a tobacco-jar, matches, a dish or two, a glass. Flies buzzed so persistently round the sick man that it almost seemed he was already dead. The split-bamboo curtains that should have shaded him were rolled up awry; the full sun beat on him.
SMITH'S tread was light; but Ford heard him, though he did not move.
“What name,” he demanded in a weak and querulous voice, “what name you no come along here before when I call, you boy, you?”
“It isn't your boy, Ford. It's Smith.”
A convulsion ran through the long body, which raised itself, the thin, nerveless hands clutching at the rifle. Ford's face, the hue of old putty, was seamed with virulence, and hate glowed in his eyes. The weight of the rifle was too much for him, and it drooped despite his efforts.
“Smith! Blast you, I'm not dead yet,” he cried feebly. “You—you——”
He strove to lift the weapon, to aim it between his raised knees; but he shook as if with palsy, while Smith stood with folded arms, watching him with grave attention.
“Come here to torment me, eh? To gloat? I'll——”
Moisture suddenly varnished the dull skin of his face, and his eyes dulled. He gasped and sank back with a groan, the rifle slipping to the floor.
“I haven't come to gloat, Ford. I came to warn you that you are being slowly poisoned by Tubu; to pull you through and square accounts with the wizard.”
“Tubu?”
Ford grasped the arms of his chair and succeeded in hitching himself up a little, his ghastly face sunken in his shoulders, looking suspiciously at Smith as if he feared a trick or some form of jest.
Smith nodded. His manner seemed to convey assurance.
“Tubu's been here every afternoon squatting down by the beach. He's been doing the gloating. He's got a clay image of you in a stream, wasting away, just as you are with the stuff he's been dosing you with through your houseboys. I saw him dance the Death Dance for you this morning.”
“Tubu—on my place? Kicked him off it three weeks ago. Had to trim a boy for impudence—seems he was a clansman of the old ——. If I'd known I'd have potted him. Too late now. All in. Mix me a drink, Smith, if you're so friendly. I can't help myself very well. The gin is under the cushion beneath me.”
Smith picked up a glass, examined it, put it aside and poured out some liquid from a pocket flask into the cup that fitted on it.
“Take this,” he said.
He had to help Ford swallow it; but the powerful drugs that he had mixed brought back some light to the sick man's eyes, lessened the deadly pallor of his face and gave him a flash of energy.
“I've thought of the poison stuff,” said Ford. “'Didn't credit Tubu with it, though. And I've been careful. No fruit except nuts opened in front of me. Can't inject anything through a coco-husk. Canned stuff, fresh tins of crackers—slept on my liquor. Last few days—haven't eaten anything much. I don't see how they can have doped me.
“And I don't see what the —— you are interested in me about,” he added with his eyes changing back to suspicion. “Haley was here and a young cub named Stone. Now you come. I suppose you're all laughing at me. There'll be more to crow over soon. My boys have run off except the two housemen, and they're sticking around to loot as soon as I pass. They'll take my head along as the prize. Stick it up in the hamal and Tubu will Mumbo Jumbo to it.”
A flush had come into his cheeks. He was close to hysteria. Smith checked him sharply.
“Personally I'm not especially interested whether you die or not,” he said coldly and incisively, and Ford stared at the sound of his voice. “I don't give a hoot about it one way or the other. I think you're a rotter; but you're of my breed and Saunders' breed, and we are not going to let a bush wizard get away with you. A good deal for our own sakes. Let that sink in. There's no personal favor to you in this. You can go to —— in your own way, for all I care; but I don't intend to let Tubu be your introducer. I wouldn't let him poison my dog and get away with it.”
The cold, hard words acted on Ford as if Smith were dissecting him with a blade of ice. They were surcharged with indifference, destitute of either contempt or pity; and they had their calculated effect.
Ford closed his eyes fora moment. When he opened them again they were steady and held no enmity in the narrowed iris and pupil dilated by the stimulant Smith had administered.
“All right,” he said, “if that's the way you feel about it. I'm not keen to pass in my checks, and I'm too helpless to do myself any good. Couldn't put up much of a scrap now, Smith.
“I don't know but what you're right,” he went on a little wearily. “Maybe the rot has dried out of me a bit. I've had things to sour me—but that's no excuse for letting them. I've got the temper of a fiend, and drink rouses —— inside of me. That's no excuse either. I'm not making excuses. I'll say this: If you pull me through, Smith, and I know you savvy a heap about the natives—if you pull me through, I'll be —— grateful. I'm making no death-bed promises to reform,” he added with a laugh that was bitter and also a trifle wistful.
“That'll be all right, Ford. I'm not asking for any. A white man is a fool to hit hooch in this climate, especially if he's much alone. I see no reason for either one or the other, with you, unless you play it that way. Now then, you're sure about your grub not being tampered with?”
“Dead sure. I don't know what's the matter with me. There's no chills or fever—just weakness, loss of flesh and strength and appetite. Look at my arm.”
He painfully rolled up one loose sleeve of his shirt and showed the limb of a mummy, bones bound together with scanty sinews and skin.
Smith thought a moment, got the gin-bottle, poured out a little and tasted it.
“They might doctor it when you sleep,” he said.
“Sleep? I haven't slept a wink for a week. I've been living in hell, Smith. If I'd had anything to put me to sleep I'd have taken a double dose. There was a little chloral in the case left over from the last dysentery outbreak. All that did was to make me drowsy. I lie and smoke—and do a bit of thinking.”
“Smoke much?”
“So my throat's like a lime-kiln. No taste to the tobacco any more. No kick.”
“Humph!”
Smith took the jar and put some tobacco on the palm of one hand, separating the fragments. He shifted them to the table and fished a small and powerful double lens out of his pocket, examining the stuff closely while Ford looked languidly on. Finally Smith separated from the rest a few tiny bits that looked more like small stems or leaf-veins than parts of the leaf itself.
“There you are,” he said. “No great mystery. I don't know either the native or scientific name of this plant, Ford, but it's done the trick. See the tiny hairs growing on the stems?”
He placed them so that Ford could peer through the little magnifying-glass.
“No tobacco there,” he went on. “I've seen this growing, and I've found it in witch-bags and seen bunches of it hanging up in the hamals drying. Get's you quickly with your cigarets the way you've been smoking them. Through saliva and inhalation both, most likely. Slow but sure.”
“It takes all the life out of you. I'm numb half the time, as if I was paralyzed, and my heart runs down so I can't feel any pulse in my wrist. It's beating now.”
“I gave you some strong stuff, Ford. I'll leave this with you. Not more than a teaspoonful every hour. And no hooch. Go on smoking—with my tobacco. Houseboys come up here much?”
“Haven't been near me since morning.”
“Good. Let 'em see smoke blowing over the veranda. I'll move you closer to the rail. Then I've got to leave you till tomorrow some time. I don't think there's much risk. You've got another day of grace anyway, and with my medicine and my tobacco you ought to get your strength back. Try and eat something later on. Suck some of these beef tablets of mine. Have you got any chickens?”
“I couldn't touch meat. Who's going to make broth?”
“I don't want it for that.”
“There ought to be some outside if the beggars haven't stolen or starved 'em.”
“All right. I'll be back in a minute.”
Smith went into the house through the lean-to kitchen to the back compound. There he found the second houseboy asleep with an empty gin-bottle beside him. He let him lie in his drunken stupor and caught a miserable hen in a pen, killing it and burying the carcass.
Returning after a moment in the kitchen, he moved the long chair to the edge of the veranda. Looking down the path, he saw Tubu, stripped of some of his finery, emerging from the bush. The wizard hunkered down, glancing up at the veranda with an evil look. Smith said nothing but busied himself making Ford comfortable and setting things conveniently for him. At last he was ready to go and said so.
“If I don't see you again,” said Ford, “good-by.”
“You'll see me,” answered Smith. “Good-by.”
He held out his hand.
“Mean it?” asked Ford, his voice breaking a little.
“Surely.”
They shook hands, and Ford passed his free palm across his eyes as Smith turned away.
“Tubu's below,” he said. “Don't mind him unless he bothers you. Got a pistol?”
“Yes, but I'd been cleaning it and couldn't find the cartridges. I remembered later, but I was too weak to get them. They're in a drawer in the sleeping-room. Locked. Here's the key. Gun's under my pillow—should be.”
“Smith found the automatic and filled a clip, sliding a cartridge into the breech, tucking the weapon down beside Ford.
“Don't use it unless you have to,” he said. “Don't try and pot Tubu. He's my meat. I've a notion he won't stay overlong. Buck up, old scout.”
Ford's lip trembled as he watched Smith leave. At the top of the steps he turned.
“Better cuss me out a bit,” he said. “Do your best. No use tipping Tubu off we're not enemies. We're not, you know. So long.”
And he went down the steps pursued by a torrent of vituperation in Ford's voice, already a little stronger. Tubu looked up at him malignantly.
SMITH paused in front of Tubu, one hand behind him, casually. The Water Wizard had set up his magic stones again and was mumbling over them.
“Making medicine, Tubu?”
Tubu grinned. The sun shone on the necklace of teeth. Smith saw what had caused the dazzles of light on the sing-sing ground. Some of the teeth were gold, others inlaid with the metal. His eyes became like flint.
“Make it strong, Tubu,” he said, using native. “I too am making medicine.”
“For him who cursed you?” asked the wizard.
“Perhaps because he cursed me. Tubu, is the blood in your body black or red?”
Tubu looked venomous.
“Let us see.”
Smith reached out with the hand that had been behind him and lightly touched the bush-doctor on his chest in three or four places. Instantly scarlet blood appeared. Tubu looked at the phenomenom with squinting eyes. He touched the stuff dubiously.
“I see it is red, Tubu. Taste it. You have not very much of it. See that it is not spilled. Enemy or not of mine, do not try your spells on a white man. I have spoken.”
The wizard half-stupefied—Smith passed on, palming the small enema bulb and short tube he had filled with the blood of the chicken. The trick had been simple enough, and he was glad of the chance to play it. Tubu would be likely to give him an audience when he wished it.
Night found him again above the village after a stop at his own place for a real meal and a short rest. Dawn saw him replace the clay image with his cement one, throwing away the other, broken, into the deep bush. He had had to risk the action of the water meanwhile, but it had made no very appreciable difference to the success of his maneuver.
Again he found his tree, though this time he was earlier. He had brought a light rope with him. This he fastened securely from the nearest stout limb to the wall. It was not all-important that he should cover his method of arrival, but he hoped to do so. The cooking-fires were still smoldering, and one was crackling busily among the netik stones.
This last, he surmised, was a sacrificial fire which would be used in the dance. From it might later be furnished the brands for an oven and a feast.
That they would take the body of Ford after Tubu's spell was ended, he doubted. That they might have some prisoner immured in a hut, whose flesh would furnish meat for a savage barbecue in token of victory was more likely. Ford's head would undoubtedly be counted upon as a trophy and offered to the biggest of the drum-idols after its tongue had been smeared with blood.
He imagined that they were eating within the huts, men and women apart. The sentries he had to risk, but they would have their eyes beyond the gate. He tested his rope, swung off and landed on the sing-sing ground, running swiftly to the buttresses of a great banyan which was inside the enclosure and taking up his place behind the root-pillars, waiting his entrance cue, unobserved.
From the higher, more horizontal, boughs there pended strings of boar heads with the tusks removed, each string ending in a human skull. They swayed slowly in the morning breeze that rustled the leaves above.
It was no part of Smith's program to bring about any actual hostilities with Tubu. He could hardly hope to cope with the whole village in their own stronghold. If he killed any of them and got away he would be in fresh trouble with the Commissioners, who had already seemed inclined to make an example of an American who might be mistreating their wards.
And he was eager to get back to Ford. The dose he had mixed and prescribed for him—out of a better knowledge of medicine than was in the usual scope of planters and traders, who must of necessity carry their own medicine-chests and tackle anything from a decayed molar to an outbreak of dysentery—was principally composed of adrenalin. Ford needed more than a stimulant; he wanted a moral tonic; and this Smith was prepared to furnish him, believing him in receptive mood.
Though he had purposely suggested to Ford his own lack of personal interest, he was by no means minded to see a white man go to the dogs if he could check him. Ford had his strength as well as his weakness. He was a good planter, aside from his treatment of his boys.
Saunders, Haley and Stone should be back on their places before this; and Smith had despatched a brief note by Liki in the launch to Saunders, outlining the situation and asking one or more of them to visit Ford and greet him with some friendliness. The launch was then to return to Smith's landing and await him after delivery of the note, whether personally made or not. Smith knew that under Saunders' Scotch crustiness there was a deep vein of humanity. But it was possible that they had been delayed, and he feared a relapse for Ford when he was left alone. Despondency was one of the symptoms produced by Tubu's degenerating poison.
There was still no outward movement from the huts. His trick with Tubu would have lost some of its impressiveness overnight. He felt sure that Tubu had tasted the blood and also sure that the wizard had divined before this that it was only a teriki, such as he himself might compass.
Inaction chafed him, and he strolled out into the middle of the sing-sing ground, toward the growing fire and the idols, halting in the center. Unexpected at this hour of the morning meal, he had been unnoticed.
In a loud voice he called on the wizard.
“Tubu! Come out. Tubu! Simiti calls you.”
Instantly he saw startled faces appearing in the doors of huts and instantly withdrawn. How had this white man come into their village? From the sky, or through the earth?
“Tubu! Come out of the hamal. Unless you are too afraid.”
The challenge could not be passed. Tubu appeared in one of the temple openings, peering out. The paint had been washed from him in preparation for a new make-up; and now he appeared only as a wizened old man who, lacking the exaltation of his mummeries, slowly descended and came out into the sunny sing-sing ground, blinking and evidently disturbed, though he tried to present a bold front as he advanced.
“Come out, O men of Tubu,” called Smith. “Come out and listen to the words of my spirit, which is very strong within me. Come out and know that the white man's mana is powerful beyond that of Tubu. Come out and learn to be wise and to walk softly, for my spirit is angry and it is not a patient spirit.”
The women remained in hiding and in hearing. The men came slowly forward and ranged in an irregular crescent well back of Tubu, their eyes shifting as they watched the pair. It was a trial of mana. Sleep was still heavy with them on account of their full stomachs. The rituals that lashed them to frenzy had not commenced. They were merely savages with the minds of dull children. The stage was set to Smith's liking, the audience in the right mood.
“TUBU,” he said, “come closer. I am in mind to see if your blood is still red.”
He thrust a tentative finger at the wizard, who fell back involuntarily. Teriki or no teriki, he was not inclined to let his people see blood drawn from him through his skin. Smith laughed.
“Listen, you Water Wizard! Know that the time is past for you to work your spells upon white men. You and all the wizards of the bush. The spells of the white men are stronger than your spells, and I am here to prove it.”
His supreme confidence began to worry Tubu. It hypnotized the tribe. Why else should one man come into their midst unless he was backed by spirits who had brought him here, so tall and dominant in his solar topee, his white clothes, the two much-speaking guns at his belt? They shuffled uneasily.
“You have made a tiki of Forodi,” went on Smith. “A tiki of clay with blue eyes and a nose like the beak of the frigate-bird which you have named for Forodi. You have set it in the stream, and you have told the people that as the water washes it away so will the body of Forodi waste and his spirit leave him because your mana is greater than his and because he flogged a man who was impudent. Is it true, Tubu?”
The eyes of the villagers rolled toward each other, then centered on Tubu. The white man knew much. It was Tubu's move.
“It might be true, Simiti,” said Tubu hoarsely.
Without the potent spirit he distilled from the tabu ti-root and administered to himself before he took up the rôle of sorcerer, without his trappings, his mumbo-jumbo by which he convinced himself of power, he was little more than a cunning old man whose body was usually very stiff and tired.
But his prestige was on trial. After all, Forodi was a very sick man. The poison was powerful, and he did not know of any antidote. Perhaps Simiti did, but perhaps he did not know about the poison, or what it was. Simiti might well be putting up a false front.
“It is surely true,” Tubu went on more confidently, “that Forodi gets more sick day by day. Perhaps his mana is not very strong—for a white man. Who can say?”
“Who can say?” answered Smith. “We will see.”
He stooped and began piling up some clay that he loosened with the point of his knife.
“We will see.”
White men will gather and watch every move of a street fakir, gaze as some casual pedestrian happens to stop and look upward. To the savage every movement out of the usual routine smacks of jugglery. Smith had no more tricks to play. They were always dangerous.
But he had noted what the villagers, facing him, could not see—high windward clouds piling against and spilling over the high peaks. They were slate-colored; and now and then a faint flicker of lightning, fading in the sun, levined through them. It was close to the true rainy season. The chances of these heavy clouds discharging their contents in the gorges, ripped by a crag, were better than even.
He mixed the dirt with his spittle, remembering old-time lore, and fashioned a rude creature while the mob gazed fascinated, unmindful of the slowly darkening day. Save Tubu, whose eyes were the weakest among them but who as Water Wizard claimed to bring and send away the rain and was always susceptible to such tokens. He cast a backward glance and gathered heart.
“Can you make a well man of Forodi?” he asked mockingly.
“I can cure Forodi,” answered Smith, going on with his plastic work.
“Then perhaps,” said Tubu—and his tones were filled with a sneer that his clan was quick to notice, shifting their belief to his side with the easy balance of their limited reasonings—“perhaps you can stop the water from washing away the tiki of Forodi?”
Smith still played for time while the storm was doubtful and its direction uncertain. He dug a hole, buried his model and patted down the dirt. Tubu watched him uneasily. The burial struck him as significant. Simiti was making magic. He had said Forodi would be cured, therefore he could not be burying Forodi.
“Because you have done these things, Tubu, trouble may come to your village as it has come to Navaa and at Mallicolo, with great guns and much killing. You they would hang. But, because Forodi is not dead and because you are an old man with not much blood in your body and not very long to live, I, Simiti, have made a stop of these things. It is better that the tribes shall see that you are neither strong nor wise but only a foolish old man who will soon do nothing but sit in the sun and eat soft poe-poe when his last tooth has gone.”
There was a chuckle from the bystanders. Tubu's eyes glowed like hot coals, but Smith's dominated them. Also Smith's hands were resting close to the butts of his pistols. Tubu had only a knife tucked in his loin-cloth. He was certain that his first overt move would bring a bullet crashing into his skull between the eyes, so he kept still, though the chuckle was galling. He knew the downpour would strike the gorge whence the stream issued. Then the freshet would wash away what was left of the tiki of Forodi. As for Forodi himself, the Water Wizard's cunning brain had already evolved a plan.
There was a mutter of far-off thunder, a flash of lightning. The light began to fail. Then a crash and a glare. The swift tropical storm was on, breaking half a mile away, two thousand feet above. It was apparent to the watching savages that both the white man and their own wizard appropriated this storm as of their own evoking. They thought of the clay image they had all scen in the stream that presently would be a raging torrent, and their faith veered back to Tubu.
The strong trade wind did not take long to scatter the wrack of the broken clouds. The sunlight shone through them, sparkled in the wet leaves of the higher slopes. The rain had not reached the village. In the stillness that followed, the murmur of the augmented stream was plainly heard as the water came down in spate, hurrying to the sea, swiftly rising and as quickly subsiding again.
“About the tiki,” said Simiti. “You asked if I could stop it from washing away. There has been a lot of water, Tubu. Suppose you send a man to find out. Send two men, Tubu.”
Tubu glowered at him. This was a strong bluff. He was sure that the spate must have melted the image. Smith stood calmly assured. He had driven in the stake firmly enough, he fancied. If he had not there was going to be trouble.
Tubu gave a guttural order to two men near him, and they set off at a run while Smith calmly rolled and lighted a cigaret. It was not smoked through before the men were back, their mouths wide open to impart the news.
“The tiki of Forodi is there. And it has turned to stone.”
“I, Limuku, tried it with my spear. Lo, it is hard as rock!”
TUBU'S face of baffled rage was that of a disappointed demon. Excitement ran through the men behind him, seethed in the huts of the women. His prophecy had come to naught. His mana had been tested and found wanting beside that of the white man. His fingers stole toward his knife.
“Don't do that, Tubu, if you want to live,” said Smith. “It's all over now. After this, leave white men alone. Next time I shall not be so patient. Now come with me to the gate.”
He was taking no chances of Tubu, by some swift turn, rehabilitating himself by arousing race hatred. And he needed Tubu to point out which of the entrance paths was open.
“Come,” he said and tapped his fingers against a pistol holster.
Together they walked across the sing-sing grounds while in their rear the crowd began to jabber and gesticulate. If Ford lived, Tubu's downfall was complete. The bush wizards would profit by his example and leave the whites and their plantation labor alone. It would be a good job, done bloodlessly.
Tubu waved aside the bearded guards, who openly scoffed at him and were patently afraid of Simiti the White Wizard. The heavy gate opened.
“Which is the free path, Tubu?”
“Does not your mana tell you?” snarled Tubu.
“My mana tells me to ask you and then to take you down the trail with me for fear you have made a mistake. Old heads are forgetful, Tubu.”
One of the guards laughed. The reference to senility stung the wizard who snarled and turned such a baleful look on the man that he shrank away. None of the childish minds had retentive memories, but Smith felt sure that Tubu would remember the morning's work and, even when he regained the ascendency over them, would hesitate to monkey with the white man's buzz-saw.
That he would soon dominate the tribe once more was certain. His mastery of tribal superstitions that were almost as deeply implanted in its members as instinct, would ultimately insure that, perhaps before Smith reached the beach. But he felt that among those instincts he had planted an inhibition that would flourish—a deeper reverence for the mana of all white men when it came into contact with their own.
He took Tubu's greasy arm in his own grasp and, holding it behind his escort, bade him go ahead.
“I will let you go when we reach the main trail, Tubu,” he said. “But my gun will surely blow your liver into pulp if you try to play me a trick.”
Tubu growled, the low growl of a trapped beast. His scaly body quivered as he led the way. He was as surcharged with wrath with desperate casts for snatching victory out of defeat, at least for saving his face, as a cylinder head at high pressure.
When they reached the main trail and Smith twisted him around to face him, the Water Wizard's malevolence was fairly dribbling from his mouth, which could not pronounce the words that formed, but which he dared not utter. He hissed instead, for all the world like a venomous snake that has been rendered fangless.
But there was craft in his eyes at the last, Smith fancied, and he lost no time along the trail. He held a strong desire to see Ford's condition, to see whether Saunders and the others had answered his note.
He was close to the beach when drums began to boom back in the bush. There was no marked rhythm to them. No dance was in progress.
The sounds were intermittent, staccato. They were in code!
Tubu was playing his last card. He was sending a message. A message to his assistants, the houseboys at Ford's place, an order to kill.
The conviction flashed through Smith's mind, and he cursed himself for a conceited fool. With Ford dead Tubu might yet regain ascendancy. And he had left the opening though he had seen the craftiness in the wizard's glance as they parted.
He sprinted hard over the firm beach, through a jungle strip that clothed a promontory, over the beach again, with the sea sparkling to the left and the green bush waving to his right. On to the beginning of his young groves, through files of older trees, panting and sweating, reviling himself for a self-sufficient fool.
Out to the crescent of his own bay. His launch was at the wharf-end, a figure in the cockpit that stood up and waved a stalwart arm as Liki saw his master racing and, knowing necessity drove him, started the engine. The launch was moving when Smith leaped aboard, steaming from the run, his immaculate attire rumpled, diving under the hood to coax the engine to its best, staying there with oil-can and waste while Liki set the course for Ford's.
There was a white craft bobbing at the copra-pier. Saunders' launch! Smith's pulse began to slow down toward normal. The drums had stopped sending.
A shot sounded as they slowed up for the landing, and Smith shouted to Liki to put the launch straight for the beach. A heavier report rang out, followed by another, all three from the veranda.
Smith, his wind regained in the launch, burned up the path, guns ready. Liki jumped over the gunwale of the launch, stranded on the shingle, and tore after him, carrying an ax. Saunders was waiting at the head of the veranda steps, his face placid.
“What's happened?”
“There was a slight distur-r-bance, Smith. But it's all ower wi' noo. Ye're a wee late for this party, though ye seem to have been havin' some action o' your own. We were juist aboot to have a drink when the thing star-r-ted. Come in and cool off.”
Smith stepped in with a swift survey of the porch interior. Ford sat up on his cushions, his eyes bright and his face faintly flushed, nodding a welcome at him. Haley was kneeling beside the body of one of the house-boys that lay face down, arms flung wide and a hole in his back where a high-powered missile had torn through. A second body had collapsed at the foot of Ford's long chair. This man's hand still clutched a knife. His head was turned to one side—what was left of it.
A rifle leaned against the wall near the door; another was on the main table; Ford's pistol on the smaller stand beside him.
Haley looked up.
“Just in time to help clear up the mess, Smith. Stone, hurry up with that Scotch. We've got a caller.”
Smith stood with puzzled, narrowed eyes.
“I heard the drums,” he said, “and guessed what they might mean. I've been putting a spoke in Tubu's wheel; but I overlooked one bet. How long have you been here?”
“About half an hour. Found For-r-d quite per-r-ky wi' the dose you'd gi'en him. There was no one else in sight, ye ken. We felt a wee thirsty, an' as Ford seemed a bit sleepy we went inside for a drink. Of course we'd noticed the drums; but that's not so much oot of the ordinar'. Anyway whiles we were lookin' for a corkscrew Ford's two hoose-boys slip in fra' somewheres at the back an' try to butcher Ford wi' a knive an' a hatchet.
“They made the fatal meestake of not noticin' we were here. By the smell o' their breaths I'm thinkin' they'd been makin' free wi' Ford's gin back i' the bush.
“Ford fired an' missed. Haley an' Stone grab the rifles they had set inside an' did some verra fine shootin'. I had the bottle between my knees at the time, wi' the cork oot. By the time Id set it doon the incident was closed. But the bottle 's open. We'd better get rid o' the two bodies.”
“We'll set them down by the trail that Tubu uses,” said Smith. “He'll be down later to see how things worked out, and I think we've settled his hash.”
“Stone and Haley had best report to th' Commissioner,” said Saunders. “Nothin' like the first word. I'll stay a while wi' Ford gin ye want to gang back to your ain place, Smith. D'ye think there's any danger of a raid?”
“No. But I should be getting back. And, with the evidence we've got, the Commissioners will have to come clean. How are you feeling, Ford?”
“Four hundred per cent. better, thanks to you. And to the rest of you good scouts. I hope I haven't seen the last of you.”
“Not while ye've any of the peench-bottle liquor remainin',” said Saunders. “Mon, we're like to be a plague to ye. And no one's had a dreenk yet. Stone, ha' ye the glasses?”
“None for me,” said Ford. “I'm off the stuff.”
They looked at him, and he returned their gaze with a smile that held assurance.
“I'll take another nip of Smith's tonic with you instead,” he said.
Smith fixed it for him. The four men lifted their glasses, and Ford raised his.
“In that case,” said Smith, “here's to you, Ford. Best of luck and happiness.”
“Make it friendship,” Ford answered.
The others drained their glasses and reversed them. The toast was bottoms up.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
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 82 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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