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Where the Pavement Ends

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Title: Where the Pavement Ends

Author: John Russell


        
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Language: English

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WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS

by

JOHN RUSSELL

Author of
In Dark Places, Etc.


[Illustration:

_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._

_Where the Pavement Ends._

A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]


  "The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it,
  But in another country, as he said,
  Bore a bright golden flow'r...."

  COMUS







[Illustration]

Publishers
Grosset & Dunlap
New York

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1919, by John Russell

_Published, October, 1919
Second Printing, September, 1921
Third Printing, March, 1922
Fourth Printing, November, 1922
Fifth Printing, April, 1923
Sixth Printing, August, 1923_

English Edition Published May 1921
London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd.

Printed in the United States of America




_To_

CARL BRANDT




CONTENTS


  THE FOURTH MAN                                                       9

  THE LOST GOD                                                        33

  THE PASSION VINE                                                    59

  THE PRICE OF THE HEAD                                               91

  THE SLANTED BEAM                                                   106

  THE RED MARK                                                       121

  EAST OF EASTWARD                                                   162

  JETSAM                                                             183

  THE ADVERSARY                                                      206

  MEANING--CHASE YOURSELF                                            221

  THE WICKS OF MACASSAR                                              239

  DOUBLOON GOLD                                                      253

  THE PRACTICING OF CHRISTOPHER                                      284

  AMOK                                                               308




THE FOURTH MAN


The raft might have been taken for a swath of cut sedge or a drifting
tangle of roots as it slid out of the shadowy river mouth at dawn and
dipped into the first ground swell. But while the sky brightened and the
breeze came fresh offshore it picked a way among shoals and swampy
islets with purpose and direction, and when at last the sun leaped up
and cleared his bright eye of the morning mist it had passed the wide
entrance to the bay and stood to open sea.

It was a curious craft for such a venture, of a type that survives here
and there in the obscure corners of the world. The coracle maker would
have scorned it. The first navigating pithecanthrope built nearly as
well with his log and bush. A mat of pandanus leaves served for its sail
and a paddle of niaouli wood for its helm. But it had a single point of
real seaworthiness. Its twin floats, paired as a catamaran, were woven
of reed bundles and bamboo sticks upon triple rows of bladders. It was
light as a bladder itself, elastic, fit to ride any weather. One other
quality this raft possessed which recommended it beyond all comfort and
all safety to its present crew. It was very nearly invisible. They had
only to unstep its mast and lie flat in the cup of its soggy platform
and they could not be spied half a mile away.

Four men occupied the raft. Three of them were white. Their bodies had
been scored with brambles and blackened with dried blood, and on wrist
and ankle they bore the dark and wrinkled stain of the gyves. The hair
upon them was long and matted. They wore only the rags of blue canvas
uniforms. But they were whites, members of the superior race--members of
a highly superior race according to those philosophers who rate the
criminal aberration as a form of genius.

The fourth was the man who had built the raft and was now sailing it.
There was nothing superior about him. His skin was a layer of soot. His
prognathous jaw carried out the angle of a low forehead. No line of
beauty redeemed his lean limbs and knobby joints. Nature had set upon
him her plainest stamp of inferiority, and his only attempts to relieve
it were the twist of bark about his middle and the prong of pig ivory
through the cartilage of his nose. Altogether a very ordinary specimen
of one of the lowest branches of the human family--the Canaques of New
Caledonia.

       *       *       *       *       *

The three whites sat together well forward, and so they had sat in
silence for hours. But at sunrise, as if some spell had been raised by
the clang of that great copper gong in the east, they stirred and
breathed deep of the salt air and looked at one another with hope in
their haggard faces, and then back toward the land which was now no more
than a gray-green smudge behind them.... "Friends," said the eldest,
whose temples were bound with a scrap of crimson scarf, "Friends--the
thing is done."

With a gesture like conjuring he produced from the breast of his
tattered blouse three cigarettes, fresh and round, and offered them.

"Nippers!" cried the one at his right. "True nippers--name of a little
good man! And here? Doctor, I always said you were a marvel. See if they
be not new from the box!"

Dr. Dubosc smiled. Those who had known him in very different
circumstances about the boulevards, the lobbies, the clubs, would have
known him again and in spite of all disfigurement by that smile. And
here, at the bottom of the earth, it had set him still apart in the
prisons, the cobalt mines, the chain gangs of a community not much given
to mirth. Many a crowded lecture hall at Montpellier had seen him touch
some intellectual firework with just such a twinkle behind his bristly
gray brows, with just such a thin curl of lip.

"By way of celebration," he explained. "Consider. There are seventy-five
evasions from Nouméa every six months, of which not more than one
succeeds. I had the figures myself from Dr. Pierre at the infirmary. He
is not much of a physician, but a very honest fellow. Could anybody win
on that percentage without dissipating? I ask you."

"Therefore you prepared for this?"

"It is now three weeks since I bribed the night guard to get these same
nippers."

The other regarded him with admiration. Sentiment came readily upon this
beardless face, tender and languid, but overdrawn, with eyes too large
and soft and oval too long. It was one of those faces familiar enough to
the police which might serve as model for an angel were it not
associated with some revolting piece of deviltry. Fenayrou himself had
been condemned "to perpetuity" as an incorrigible.

"Is not our doctor a wonder?" he inquired as he handed a cigarette along
to the third white man. "He thinks of everything. You should be ashamed
to grumble. See--we are free, after all. Free!"

The third was a gross, pock-marked man with hairless lids known
sometimes as Niniche, Trois Huit, Le Tordeur, but chiefly among copains
as Perroquet--a name derived perhaps from his beaked nose, or from some
perception of his jailbird character. He was a garroter by profession,
accustomed to rely upon his fists only for the exchange of amenities.
Dubosc might indulge a fancy and Fenayrou seek to carry it as a pose,
but The Parrot remained a gentleman of strictly serious turn. There is
perhaps a tribute to the practical spirit of penal administration in the
fact that while Dubosc was the most dangerous of these three and
Fenayrou the most depraved, Perroquet was the one with the official
reputation, whose escape would be signaled first among the "Wanted." He
accepted the cigarette because he was glad to get it, but he said
nothing until Dubosc passed a tin box of matches and the first gulp of
picadura filled his lungs....

"Wait till you've got your two feet on a pave, my boy. That will be the
time to talk of freedom. What? Suppose there came a storm."

"It is not the season of storms," observed Dubosc.

But The Parrot's word had given them a check. Such spirits as these, to
whom the land had been a horror, would be slow to feel the terror of the
sea. Back there they had left the festering limbo of a convict colony,
oblivion. Out here they had reached the rosy threshold of the big round
world again. They were men raised from the dead, charged with all the
furious appetites of lost years, with the savor of life strong and sweet
on their lips. And yet they paused and looked about in quickened
perception, with the clutch at the throat that takes the landsman on big
waters. The spaces were so wide and empty. The voices in their ears were
so strange and murmurous. There was a threat in each wave that came from
the depths, a sinister vibration. None of them knew the sea. None knew
its ways, what tricks it might play, what traps it might spread--more
deadly than those of the jungle.

The raft was running now before a brisk chop with alternate spring and
wallow, while the froth bubbled in over the prow and ran down among
them as they sat. "Where is that cursed ship that was to meet us here?"
demanded Fenayrou.

"It will meet us right enough." Dubosc spoke carelessly, though behind
the blown wisp of his cigarette he had been searching the outer horizon
with keen glance. "This is the day, as agreed. We will be picked up off
the mouth of the river."

"You say," growled Perroquet. "But where is any river now? Or any mouth?
Sacred name! this wind will blow us to China if we keep on."

"We dare not lie in any closer. There is a government launch at Torrien.
Also the traders go armed hereabouts, ready for chaps like us. And don't
imagine that the native trackers have given us up. They are likely to be
following still in their proas."

"So far!"

Fenayrou laughed, for The Parrot's dread of their savage enemies had a
morbid tinge.

"Take care, Perroquet. They will eat you yet."

"Is it true?" demanded the other, appealing to Dubosc. "I have heard it
is even permitted these devils to keep all runaways they can
capture--Name of God!--to fatten on."

"An idle tale," smiled Dubosc. "They prefer the reward. But one hears of
convicts being badly mauled. There was a forester who made a break from
Baie du Sud and came back lacking an arm. Certainly these people have
not lost the habit of cannibalism."

"Piecemeal," chuckled Fenayrou. "They will only sample you, Perroquet.
Let them make a stew of your brains. You would miss nothing."

But The Parrot swore.

"Name of a name--what brutes!" he said, and by a gesture recalled the
presence of that fourth man who was of their party and yet so completely
separated from them that they had almost forgotten him.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Canaque was steering the raft. He sat crouched at the stern, his
body glistening like varnished ebony with spray. He held the steering
paddle, immobile as an image, his eyes fixed upon the course ahead.

There was no trace whatever of expression on his face, no hint of what
he thought or felt or whether he thought or felt anything. He seemed not
even aware of their regard, and each one of them experienced somehow
that twinge of uneasiness with which the white always confronts his
brother of color--this enigma brown or yellow or black he is fated never
wholly to understand or to fathom....

"It occurs to me," said Fenayrou, in a pause, "that our friend here who
looks like a shiny boot is able to steer us God knows where. Perhaps to
claim the reward."

"Reassure yourself," answered Dubosc. "He steers by my order. Besides,
it is a simple creature--an infant, truly, incapable of any but the most
primitive reasoning."

"Is he incapable of treachery?"

"Of any that would deceive us. Also, he is bound by his duty. I made my
bargain with his chief, up the river, and this one is sent to deliver us
on board our ship. It is the only interest he has in us."

"And he will do it?"

"He will do it. Such is the nature of the native."

"I am glad you feel so," returned Fenayrou, adjusting himself indolently
among the drier reeds and nursing the last of his cigarette. "For my
part I wouldn't trust a figurehead like that for two sous. Mazette! What
a monkey face!"

"Brute!" repeated Perroquet, and this man, sprung from some vile
river-front slum of Argenteuil, whose home had been the dock pilings,
the grog shop, and the jail, even this man viewed the black Canaque
from an immeasurable distance with the look of hatred and contempt....

Under the heat of the day the two younger convicts lapsed presently into
dozing. But Dubosc did not doze. His tormented soul peered out behind
its mask as he stood to sweep the sky line again under shaded hand. His
theory had been so precise, the fact was so different. He had counted
absolutely on meeting the ship--some small schooner, one of those
flitting, half-piratical traders of the copra islands that can be hired
like cabs in a dark street for any questionable enterprise. Now there
was no ship, and here was no crossroads where one might sit and wait.
Such a craft as the catamaran could not be made to lie to.

The doctor foresaw ugly complications for which he had not prepared and
whereof he must bear the burden. The escape had been his own conception,
directed by him from the start. He had picked his companions
deliberately from the whole forced labor squad, Perroquet for his great
strength, Fenayrou as a ready echo. He had made it plain since their
first dash from the mine, during their skirmish with the military
guards, their subsequent wanderings in the brush with bloodhounds and
trackers on the trail--through every crisis--that he alone should be the
leader.

For the others, they had understood well enough which of their number
was the chief beneficiary. Those mysterious friends on the outside that
were reaching half around the world to further their release had never
heard of such individuals as Fenayrou and The Parrot. Dubosc was the man
who had pulled the wires: that brilliant physician whose conviction for
murder had followed so sensationally, so scandalously, upon his sweep of
academic and social honors. There would be clacking tongues in many a
Parisian salon, and white faces in some, when news should come of his
escape. Ah, yes, for example, they knew the highflyer of the band, and
they submitted--so long as he led them to victory. They submitted, while
reserving a depth of jealousy, the inevitable remnant of caste
persisting still in this democracy of stripes and shame.

By the middle of the afternoon the doctor had taken certain necessary
measures.

"Ho," said Fenayrou sleepily. "Behold our colors at the masthead. What
is that for, comrade?"

The sail had been lowered and in its place streamed the scrap of crimson
scarf that had served Dubosc as a turban.

"To help them sight us when the ship comes."

"What wisdom!" cried Fenayrou. "Always he thinks of everything, our
doctor: everything--"

He stopped with the phrase on his lips and his hand outstretched toward
the center of the platform. Here, in a damp depression among the reeds,
had lain the wicker-covered bottle of green glass in which they carried
their water. It was gone.

"Where is that flask?" he demanded. "The sun has grilled me like a
bone."

"You will have to grill some more," said Dubosc grimly. "This crew is
put on rations."

Fenayrou stared at him wide-eyed, and from the shadow of a folded mat
The Parrot thrust his purpled face. "What do you sing me there? Where is
that water?"

"I have it," said Dubosc.

They saw, in fact, that he held the flask between his knees, along with
their single packet of food in its wrapping of cocoanut husk.

"I want a drink," challenged Perroquet.

"Reflect a little. We must guard our supplies like reasonable men. One
does not know how long we may be floating here."...

Fell a silence among them, heavy and strained, in which they heard only
the squeaking of frail basketwork as their raft labored in the wash.
Slow as was their progress, they were being pushed steadily outward and
onward, and the last cliffs of New Caledonia were no longer even a
smudge in the west, but only a hazy line. And still they had seen no
moving thing upon the great round breast of the sea that gleamed in its
corselet of brass plates under a brazen sun. "So that is the way you
talk now?" began The Parrot, half choking. "You do not know how long?
But you were sure enough when we started."

"I am still sure," returned Dubosc. "The ship will come. Only she cannot
stay for us in one spot. She will be cruising to and fro until she
intercepts us. We must wait."

"Ah, good! We must wait. And in the meantime, what? Fry here in the
sacred heat with our tongues hanging out while you deal us drop by
drop--hein?"

"Perhaps."

"But no!" The garroter clenched his hands. "Blood of God, there is no
man big enough to feed me with a spoon!"

Fenayrou's chuckle came pat, as it had more than once, and Dubosc
shrugged.

"You laugh!" cried Perroquet, turning in fury. "But how about this
lascar of a captain that lets us put to sea unprovided? What? He thinks
of everything, does he? He thinks of everything!... Sacred farceur--let
me hear you laugh again!"

Somehow Fenayrou was not so minded.

"And now he bids us be reasonable," concluded The Parrot. "Tell that to
the devils in hell. You and your cigarettes, too. Bah--comedian!"

"It is true," muttered Fenayrou, frowning. "A bad piece of work for a
captain of runaways."

But the doctor faced mutiny with his thin smile.

"All this alters nothing. Unless we would die very speedily, we must
guard our water."

"By whose fault?"

"Mine," acknowledged the doctor. "I admit it. What then? We can't turn
back. Here we are. Here we must stay. We can only do our best with what
we have."

"I want a drink," repeated The Parrot, whose throat was afire since he
had been denied.

"You can claim your share, of course. But take warning of one thing.
After it is gone do not think to sponge on us--on Fenayrou and me."

"He would be capable of it, the pig!" exclaimed Fenayrou, to whom this
thrust had been directed. "I know him. See here, my old, the doctor is
right. Fair for one, fair for all."

"I want a drink."

Dubosc removed the wooden plug from the flask.

"Very well," he said quietly.

With the delicacy that lent something of legerdemain to all his
gestures, he took out a small canvas wallet, the crude equivalent of the
professional black bag, from which he drew a thimble. Meticulously he
poured a brimming measure, and Fenayrou gave a shout at the grumbler's
fallen jaw as he accepted that tiny cup between his big fingers. Dubosc
served Fenayrou and himself with the same amount before he recorked the
bottle.

"In this manner we should have enough to last us three days--maybe
more--with equal shares among the three of us."...

Such was his summing of the demonstration, and it passed without
comment, as a matter of course in the premises, that he should count as
he did--ignoring that other who sat alone at the stern of the raft, the
black Canaque, the fourth man.

Perroquet had been outmaneuvered, but he listened sullenly while for
the hundredth time Dubosc recited his easy and definite plan for their
rescue, as arranged with his secret correspondents.

"That sounds very well," observed The Parrot, at last. "But what if
these jokers only mock themselves of you? What if they have counted it
good riddance to let you rot here? And us? Sacred name, that would be a
famous jest! To let us wait for a ship and they have no ship!"

"Perhaps the doctor knows better than we how sure a source he counts
upon," suggested Fenayrou slyly.

"That is so," said Dubosc, with great good humor. "My faith, it would
not be well for them to fail me. Figure to yourselves that there is a
safety vault in Paris full of papers to be opened at my death. Certain
friends of mine could hardly afford to have some little confessions
published that would be found there.... Such a tale as this, for
instance--"

And to amuse them he told an indecent anecdote of high life, true or
fictitious, it mattered nothing, so he could make Fenayrou's eyes
glitter and The Parrot growl in wonder. Therein lay his means of
ascendancy over such men, the knack of eloquence and vision. Harried,
worn, oppressed by fears that he could sense so much more sharply than
they, he must expend himself now in vulgar marvels to distract these
ruder minds. He succeeded so far that when the wind fell at sunset they
were almost cheerful, ready to believe that the morning would bring
relief. They dined on dry biscuit and another thimbleful of water apiece
and took watch by amiable agreement. And through that long, clear night
of stars, whenever the one of the three who lay awake between his
comrades chanced to look aft, he could see the vague blot of another
figure--the naked Canaque, who slumbered there apart....

It was an evil dawning. Fenayrou, on the morning trick, was aroused by
a foot as hard as a hoof, and started up at Perroquet's wrathful face,
with the doctor's graver glance behind.

"Idler! Good-for-nothing! Will you wake at least before I smash your
ribs? Name of God, here is a way to stand watch!"

"Keep off!" cried Penayrou wildly. "Keep off. Don't touch me!"

"Eh, and why not, fool? Do you know that the ship could have missed us?
A ship could have passed us a dozen times while you slept!"

"Bourrique!"

"Vache!"

They spat the insults of the prison while Perroquet knotted his great
fist over the other, who crouched away catlike, his mobile mouth twisted
to a snarl. Dubosc stood aside in watchful calculation until against the
angry red sunrise in which they floated there flashed the naked red
gleam of steel. Then he stepped between.

"Enough. Fenayrou, put up that knife."

"The dog kicked me!"

"You were at fault," said Dubosc sternly. "Perroquet!"

"Are we all to die that he may sleep?" stormed The Parrot.

"The harm is done. Listen now, both of you. Things are bad enough
already. We may need all our energies. Look about."

       *       *       *       *       *

They looked and saw the far, round horizon and the empty desert of the
sea and their own long shadows that slipped slowly before them over its
smooth, slow heaving, and nothing else. The land had sunk away from them
in the night--some one of the chance currents that sweep among the
islands had drawn them none could say where or how far. The trap had
been sprung. "Good God, how lonely it is!" breathed Fenayrou in a hush.

No more was said. They dropped their quarrel. Silently they shared their
rations as before, made shift to eat something with their few drops of
water, and sat down to pit themselves one against another in the vital
struggle that each could feel was coming--a sort of tacit test of
endurance.

A calm had fallen, as it does between trades in this flawed belt, an
absolute calm. The air hung weighted. The sea showed no faintest
crinkle, only the maddening, unresting heave and fall in polished
undulations on which the lances of the sun broke and drove in under
their eyelids as white-hot splinters; a savage sun that kindled upon
them with the power of a burning glass, that sucked the moisture from
poor human bits of jelly and sent them crawling to the shelter of their
mats and brought them out again, gasping, to shrivel anew. The water,
the world of water, seemed sleek and thick as oil. They came to loathe
it and the rotting smell of it, and when the doctor made them dip
themselves overside they found little comfort. It was warm, sluggish,
slimed. But a curious thing resulted....

While they clung along the edge of the raft they all faced inboard, and
there sat the black Canaque. He did not join them. He did not glance at
them. He sat hunkered on his heels in the way of the native, with arms
hugging his knees. He stayed in his place at the stern, motionless under
that shattering sun, gazing out into vacancy. Whenever they raised their
eyes they saw him. He was the only thing to see.

"Here is one who appears to enjoy himself quite well," remarked Dubosc.

"I was thinking so myself," said Fenayrou.

"The animal!" rumbled Perroquet.

They observed him, and for the first time with direct interest, with
thought of him as a fellow being--with the beginning of envy.

"He does not seem to suffer."

"What is going on in his brain? What does he dream of there? One would
say he despises us."

"The beast!"

"Perhaps he is waiting for us to die," suggested Fenayrou with a harsh
chuckle. "Perhaps he is waiting for the reward. He would not starve on
the way home, at least. And he could deliver us--piecemeal."

They studied him.

"How does he do it, doctor? Has he no feeling?"

"I have been wondering," said Dubosc. "It may be that his fibers are
tougher--his nerves."

"Yet we have had water and he none."

"But look at his skin, fresh and moist."

"And his belly, fat as a football!"

The Parrot hauled himself aboard.

"Don't tell me this black beast knows thirst!" he cried with a strange
excitement. "Is there any way he could steal our supplies?"

"Certainly not."

"Then, name of a dog, what if he has supplies of his own hidden about?"

The same monstrous notion struck them all, and the others swarmed to
help. They knocked the black aside. They searched the platform where he
had sat, burrowing among the rushes, seeking some secret cache, another
bottle or a gourd. They found nothing.

"We were mistaken," said Dubosc.

But Perroquet had a different expression for disappointment. He turned
on the Canaque and caught him by the kinky mop of the hair and proceeded
to give him what is known as gruel in the cobalt mines. This was a
little specialty of The Parrot's. He paused only when he himself was
breathless and exhausted and threw the limp, unresisting body from him.

"There, lump of dirt! That will teach you. Maybe you're not so chipper
now, my boy--hein? Not quite so satisfied with your luck. Pig! That will
make you feel."...

It was a ludicrous, a wanton, a witless thing. But the others said
nothing. The learned Dubosc made no protest. Fenayrou had none of his
usual jests at the garroter's stupidity. They looked on as at the
satisfaction of a common grudge. The white trampled the black with or
without cause, and that was natural. And the black crept away into his
place with his hurts and his wrongs and made no sign and struck no blow.
And that was natural too.

The sun declined into a blazing furnace whereof the gates stood wide,
and they prayed to hasten it and cursed because it hung enchanted. But
when it was gone their blistered bodies still held the heat like things
incandescent. The night closed down over them like a purple bowl, glazed
and impermeable. They would have divided the watches again, though none
of them thought of sleep, but Fenayrou made a discovery.

"Idiots!" he rasped. "Why should we look and look? A whole navy of ships
cannot help us now. If we are becalmed, why so are they!"

The Parrot was singularly put out.

"Is this true?" he asked Dubosc.

"Yes, we must hope for a breeze first."

"Then, name of God, why didn't you tell us so? Why did you keep on
playing out the farce?"

He pondered it for a time. "See here," he said. "You are wise, eh? You
are very wise. You know things we do not and you keep them to yourself."
He leaned forward to peer into the doctor's face. "Very good. But if you
think you're going to use that cursed smartness to get the best of us in
any way--see here, my zig, I pull your gullet out like the string of an
orange.... Like that. What?"

Fenayrou gave a nervous giggle and Dubosc shrugged, but it was perhaps
about this time that he began to regret his intervention in the knife
play.

For there was no breeze and there was no ship.

By the third morning each had sunk within himself, away from the rest.
The doctor was lost in a profound depression, Perroquet in dark
suspicion, and Fenayrou in bodily suffering, which he supported ill.
Only two effective ties still bound their confederacy. One was the flask
which Dubosc had slung at his side by a strip of the wickerwork. Every
move he made with it, every drop he poured, was followed by burning
eyes. And he knew and he had no advantage of them in knowing that the
will to live was working its relentless formula aboard that raft. Under
his careful saving there still remained nearly half of their original
store.

The other bond, as it had come to be by strange mutation, was the
presence of the black Canaque.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was no forgetting the fourth man now, no overlooking of him. He
loomed upon their consciousness, more formidable, more mysterious, more
exasperating with every hour. Their own powers were ebbing. The naked
savage had yet to give the slightest sign of complaint or weakness.

During the night he had stretched himself out on the platform as before,
and after a time he had slept. Through the hours of darkness and silence
while each of the whites wrestled with despair, this black man had slept
as placidly as a child, with easy, regular breathing. Since then he had
resumed his place aft. And so he remained, unchanged, a fixed fact and a
growing wonder.

The brutal rage of Perroquet, in which he had vented his distorted hate
of the native, had been followed by superstitious doubts.

"Doctor," he said at last, in awed huskiness, "is this a man or a
fiend?"

"It is a man."

"A miracle," put in Fenayrou.

But the doctor lifted a finger in a way his pupils would have
remembered.

"It is a man," he repeated, "and a very poor and wretched example of a
man. You will find no lower type anywhere. Observe his cranial angle,
the high ears, the heavy bones of his skull. He is scarcely above the
ape. There are educated apes more intelligent."

"Ah? Then what?"

"He has a secret," said the doctor.

That was a word to transfix them.

"A secret! But we see him--every move he makes, every instant. What
chance for a secret?"

The doctor rather forgot his audience, betrayed by chagrin and
bitterness.

"How pitiful!" he mused. "Here are we three--children of the century,
products of civilization--I fancy none would deny that, at least. And
here is this man who belongs before the Stone Age. In a set trial of
fitness, of wits, of resource, is he to win? Pitiful!"

"What kind of secret?" demanded Perroquet fuming.

"I cannot say," admitted Dubosc, with a baffled gesture. "Possibly some
method of breathing, some peculiar posture that operates to cheat the
sensations of the body. Such things are known among primitive
peoples--known and carefully guarded--like the properties of certain
drugs, the uses of hypnotism and complex natural laws. Then, again, it
may be psychologic--a mental attitude persistently held. Who knows?....

"To ask him? Useless. He will not tell. Why should he? We scorn him. We
give him no share with us. We abuse him. He simply falls back on his
own expedients. He simply remains inscrutable--as he has always been and
will always be. He never tells those innermost secrets. They are the
means by which he has survived from the depth of time, by which he may
yet survive when all our wisdom is dust."

"I know several very excellent ways of learning secrets," said Fenayrou
as he passed his dry tongue over his lips. "Shall I begin?"

Dubosc came back with a start and looked at him.

"It would be useless. He could stand any torture you could invent. No,
that is not the way."

"Listen to mine," said Perroquet, with sudden violence. "Me, I am
wearied of the gab. You say he is a man? Very well. If he is a man, he
must have blood in his veins. That would be, anyway, good to drink."

"No," returned Dubosc. "It would be hot. Also it would be salt. For
food--perhaps. But we do not need food."

"Kill the animal, then, and throw him over!"

"We gain nothing."

"Well, sacred name, what do you want?"

"To beat him!" cried the doctor, curiously agitated. "To beat him at the
game--that's what I want! For our own sakes, for our racial pride, we
must, we must. To outlast him, to prove ourselves his masters. By better
brain, by better organization and control. Watch him, watch him,
friends--that we may ensnare him, that we may detect and defeat him in
the end!"

But the doctor was miles beyond them.

"Watch?" growled The Parrot. "I believe you, old windbag. It is all one
watch. I sleep no more and leave any man alone with that bottle."

To this the issue finally sharpened. Such craving among such men could
not be stayed much longer by driblets. They watched. They watched the
Canaque. They watched each other. And they watched the falling level in
their flask--until the tension gave.

Another dawn upon the same dead calm, rising like a conflagration
through the puddled air, cloudless, hopeless! Another day of blinding,
slow-drawn agony to meet. And Dubosc announced that their allowance must
be cut to half a thimbleful.

There remained perhaps a quarter of a liter--a miserable reprieve of
bare life among the three of them, but one good swallow for a yearning
throat.

At sight of the bottle, at the tinkle of its limpid content, so cool and
silvery green inside the glass, Fenayrou's nerve snapped....

"More!" he begged, with pleading hands. "I die. More!"

When the doctor refused him he groveled among the reeds, then rose
suddenly to his knees and tossed his arms abroad with a hoarse cry:

"A ship! A ship!"

The others span about. They saw the thin unbroken ring of this greater
and more terrible prison to which they had exchanged: and that was all
they saw, though they stared and stared. They turned back to Fenayrou
and found him in the act of tilting the bottle. A cunning slash of his
knife had loosed it from its sling at the doctor's side.... Even now he
was sucking at the mouth, spilling the precious liquid--

With one sweep Perroquet caught up their paddle and flattened him,
crushed him.

Springing across the prostrate man, Dubosc snatched the flask upright
and put the width of the raft between himself and the big garroter who
stood wide-legged, his bloodshot eyes alight, rumbling in his chest.

"There is no ship," said The Parrot. "There will be no ship. We are
done. Because of you and your rotten promises that brought us
here--doctor, liar, ass!"

Dubosc stood firm.

"Come a step nearer and I break bottle and all over your head."

They stood regarding each other, and Perroquet's brows gathered in a
slow effort of thought.

"Consider," urged Dubosc with his quaint touch of pedantry. "Why should
you and I fight? We are rational men. We can see this trouble through
and win yet. Such weather cannot last forever. Besides, here are only
two of us to divide the water now."

"That is true," nodded The Parrot. "That is true, isn't it? Fenayrou
kindly leaves us his share. An inheritance--what? A famous idea. I'll
take mine now."

Dubosc probed him keenly.

"My share, at once, if you please," insisted Perroquet, with heavy
docility. "Afterward, we shall see. Afterward."

The doctor smiled his grim and wan little smile.

"So be it."

Without relinquishing the flask he brought out his canvas wallet once
more--that wallet which replaced the professional black bag--and rolled
out the thimble by some swift sleight of his flexible fingers while he
held Perroquet's glance with his own.

"I will measure it for you."

He poured the thimbleful and handed it over quickly, and when Perroquet
had tossed it off he filled again and again.

"Four--five," he counted. "That is enough."

But The Parrot's big grip closed quietly around his wrist at the last
offering and pinioned him and held him helpless.

"No, it is not enough. Now I will take the rest. Ha, wise man! Have I
fooled you at last?"

There was no chance to struggle, and Dubosc did not try, only stayed
smiling up at him, waiting.

Perroquet took the bottle.

"The best man wins," he remarked. "Eh, my zig? A bright notion--of
yours. The--best--"

His lips moved, but no sound issued. A look of the most intense surprise
spread upon his round face. He stood swaying a moment, and collapsed
like a huge hinged toy when the string is cut.

Dubosc stooped and caught the bottle again, looking down at his big
adversary, who sprawled in brief convulsion and lay still, a bluish scum
oozing between his teeth....

"Yes, the best man wins," repeated the doctor, and laughed as he in turn
raised the flask for a draft.

"The best wins!" echoed a voice in his ear.

Fenayrou, writhing up and striking like a wounded snake, drove the knife
home between his shoulders.

The bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the platform, and there,
while each strove vainly to reach it, it poured out its treasure in a
tiny stream that trickled away and was lost.

       *       *       *       *       *

It may have been minutes or hours later--for time has no count in
emptiness--when next a sound proceeded from that frail slip of a raft,
hung like a mote between sea and sky. It was a phrase of song, a
wandering strain in half tones and fluted accidentals, not unmelodious.
The black Canaque was singing. He sang without emotion or effort, quite
casually and softly to himself. So he might sing by his forest hut to
ease some hour of idleness. Clasping his knees and gazing out into
space, untroubled, unmoved, enigmatic to the end, he sang--he sang.

And, after all, the ship came.

She came in a manner befitting the sauciest little tops'l schooner
between Nukahiva and the Pelews--as her owner often averred and none
but the envious denied--in a manner worthy, too, of that able Captain
Jean Guibert, the merriest little scamp that ever cleaned a pearl bank
or snapped a cargo of labor from a scowling coast. Before the first
whiff out of the west came the _Petite Suzanne_, curtsying and skipping
along with a flash of white frill by her forefoot, and brought up
startled and stood shaking her skirts and keeping herself quite daintily
to windward.

"And 'ere they are sure enough, by dam!" said the polyglot Captain Jean
in the language of commerce and profanity. "Zose passengers for us, hey?
They been here all the time, not ten mile off--I bet you, Marteau. Ain't
it 'ell? What you zink, my gar?"

His second, a tall and excessively bony individual of gloomy outlook,
handed back the glasses.

"More bad luck. I never approved of this job. And now--see?--we have had
our voyage for nothing. What misfortune!"

"Marteau, if that good Saint Pierre gives you some day a gold 'arp still
you would holler bad luck--bad job!" retorted Captain Jean. "Do I 'ire
you to stand zere and cry about ze luck? Get a boat over, and quicker
zan zat!"

M. Marteau aroused himself sufficiently to take command of the boat's
crew that presently dropped away to investigate....

"It is even as I thought," he called up from the quarter when he
returned with his report. "I told you how it would be, Captain Jean."

"Hey?" cried the captain, bouncing at the rail. "Have you got zose
passengers yet, _enfant de salaud_?"

"I have not," said Marteau in the tone of lugubrious triumph. There was
nothing in the world that could have pleased him quite so much as this
chance to prove Captain Jean the loser on a venture. "We are too late.
Bad luck, bad luck--that calm. What misfortune! They are all dead!"

"Will you mind your business?" shouted the skipper.

"But still, the gentlemen are dead--"

"What is zat to me? All ze better, they will cost nozing to feed."

"But how--"

"Hogsheads, my gar," said Captain Jean paternally. "Zose hogsheads in
the afterhold. Fill them nicely with brine, and zere we are!" And,
having drawn all possible satisfaction from the other's amazement, he
sprang the nub of his joke with a grin. "Ze gentlemen's passage is all
paid, Marteau. Before we left Sydney, Marteau. I contrac' to bring back
three escape' convicts, and so by 'ell I do--in pickle! And now if
you'll kindly get zose passengers aboard like I said an' bozzer less
about ze goddam luck, I be much oblige'. Also, zere is no green on my
eye, Marteau, and you can dam' well smoke it!"

Marteau recovered himself with difficulty in time to recall another
trifling detail. "There is a fourth man on board that raft, Captain
Jean. He is a Canaque--still alive. What shall we do with him?"

"A Canaque?" snapped Captain Jean. "A Canaque! I had no word in my
contrac' about any Canaque.... Leave him zere.... He is only a dam'
nigger. He'll do well enough where he is."

And Captain Jean was right, perfectly right, for while the _Petite
Suzanne_ was taking aboard her grisly cargo the wind freshened from the
west, and just about the time she was shaping away for Australia the
"dam' nigger" spread his own sail of pandanus leaves and twirled his own
helm of niaouli wood and headed the catamaran eastward, back toward New
Caledonia.

Feeling somewhat dry after his exertion, he plucked at random from the
platform a hollow reed with a sharp end and, stretching himself at full
length in his accustomed place at the stern, he thrust the reed down
into one of the bladders underneath and drank his fill of sweet
water....

He had a dozen such storage bladders remaining, built into the floats at
intervals above the water line--quite enough to last him safely home
again.

[Illustration:

_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._

_Where the Pavement Ends._

A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]




THE LOST GOD


Prophets have cried out in print, no man regarding, and saints have been
known to write their autobiographies, and even angels are credited now
and then with revealing most curious matters in language quite plain and
ungrammatical. But I have seen the diary of an authentic god who once
went to and fro on the earth and in the waters underneath.

His record is the Book of Jim Albro, and he made it at Barange Bay,
which is Papua, which is the end of the back of beyond and a bit farther
yet; the great, dark, and smiling land that no white man has ever yet
gripped as a conqueror, where anything can happen that you would care to
believe and many things that you never would. He neglected to copyright
it himself. The chances of his returning to claim it are apparently
remote. And Jeckol says that fiction is stranger than truth anyhow, and
pays better. So I shall feel quite safe in making free of that
remarkable work, just as Jim Albro set it down with a leaden bullet on
some strips of bark and left it for those who came after to find....

In his very blackest hour Jim Albro must have known that somebody would
come after him, some time. Somebody always did come after him, no matter
how far and to what desperate chance his trail might lead. He was that
kind. All his days he never lacked the friend to hunt him up and to pack
him home when he was helpless, to pay his bills or to bail him out at
need. One of those irresistible rascals born to a soft place near the
world's heart, whose worst follies serve only to endear them, whose
wildest errors are accepted as the manifestation of an engaging caprice,
while they go on serenely drawing blank checks against destiny!

It is odd that he should have had to settle up in the end unaided, cut
off from all help, completely isolated--and yet with the savor of
popular admiration still rising about him, amid the continued applause
of a multitude....

"A chap like Albro can't simply drop out of sight, like you or me
might," said Cap'n Bartlet, thoughtfully. "He's filled too much space
and pulled through too many scrapes. He's had his way too often with men
and devils--and women too."

We were strung along the rail on the after-deck of the little _Aurora
Bird_, as she began to grope her passage through the barrier reef, a
silent lot. Talk had been cheap enough on the long stretch up the Coral
Sea, when every possible theory of Albro's fate, and the fate of his
three white shipmates and their native crew, had been thrashed to
weariness. But now suspense held us all by the throat, for we were come
at last to Barange, the falling-off place.

And something else held us--I could call it a spell and not be so far
wrong. The lazy airs offshore bore down to us the scent that is like
nothing else in the world, of rotting jungle and teeming soil; of
poisonous, lush green, and rare, sleepy blossoms, heavy with death and
ardent with a fierce vitality. This is the breath of Papua, stirring
warm on her lips, that none who has known between loathing and desire
can ever forget. Many men have known it, traders, pearlers, recruiters,
gold hunters, and eagerly have sought to know more and have died
seeking. There she lies, the last enigma, guarding her secrets still
behind her savage coasts and the fringe of her untracked forests--the
black sphinx of the seas, lovely, vast, and cruel.

We had been watching the widening gap of the bay off our quarter, the
palm-tufted threads of beach, the sullen hills aquiver in the heat haze
and the nameless dim mountains beyond. For an hour or more the only
sounds had been Bartlet's gruff orders to the Kanaka at the wheel, the
gentle crush of foam overside, the musical cry of the leadsman and the
tap-tap of reef points and creak of tackle as our sails slatted and
filled again. Each one of us was intent for some sign of the disaster.
Each one of us had a question pressing on his tongue--pretty much the
same question, I judge--but nobody cared to voice it until the cap'n
spoke. He had had, we knew, rather a special interest in Albro....
"Throw him how you like, he'd land on his feet," he said.

"Aye," confirmed Peters, the lank trader from Samarai. "Or if so be he
couldn't stand, why the crowd would fairly fight for the privilege of
proppin' him up and buying him the last drink in the house."

"You think he's alive?" piped Harris then.

"I think he's alive," said Bartlet, without turning his shaggy gray
head. "He weren't made to finish hugger-mugger in no such hell hole. I'm
backing the luck of Jim Albro, that always had his way."

"Like as not," said Peters, and span the cylinder of his big Webley
revolver and chuckled a little; "like as not we'll find him sittin' on a
stump all so lofty with the niggers squatted round in rows, addressin'
of the congregation."

You will note--and a queer thing too--that this happened before we had
learned the first sure detail of the affair at Barange Bay.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was now the 20th of April. On the 2nd of November preceding, the
pearling schooner _Timothy S._ had cleared from Cooktown on her lawful
occasions for Joannet Harbor in the Louisiades. She had never reached
Joannet. A month later she had been spoken by a Sydney steamer up among
the Bismarck Group, where she had no ostensible business to be. And
early in March some cannibal gossip of the West Coast, friendly or only
boastful, had passed word to some missionary of a British schooner cut
off at Barange. That was strictly all. It remained for certain friends
and backers at Cooktown, with or without lawful occasion, to link up the
vaguely rumored outrage with the actual and private destination of the
_Timothy S._, and to send our search party go-look-see.

But Jeckol snorted.... You could hardly blame him, at that. Among the
five of us he was the only man who had never crossed Jim Albro at one
point or another in the career of that eccentric luminary. And, besides,
it was Jeckol's business to snort. You must have read his clever bits in
the "Bulletin"--those little running paragraphs that snap and fume like
a pack of Chinese crackers? He had been loafing about Bananaland on
vacation just before we started, and of course he got wind and wished
himself along. Trust a pressman to know the necessary people and a
chance for copy.

"I've heard a deal of talk of this Albro since we weighed anchor," he
said. "What's all about him? He wasn't commanding the _Timothy S._?"

"No," drawled Peters. "No--he didn't command. Mullhall was skipper."

"Did he launch the scheme then? Was he the discoverer of this wonderful
virgin shell bed they were going to strip?"

"No," returned Peters. "No--you couldn't say he had any regular standin'
in the expedition.... He shipped as a sort of supercargo--didn't he,
Cap'n Bartlet?"

"Cabin boy, more likely," said Bartlet in his slow way. "Or bos'n's
mate--or even midshipmite."

Jeckol eyed us all around, but nobody smiled.

"You're getting at me," he said. "Never mind. Only I'm going to write
the yarn, you know. You'd much better help me pick the right hero.
What's your famous Albro like?"

"The takingest chap that ever stood in shoe leather," cried young Harris
with a rush. "Absolutely. I never saw him only twice, but I remember
just how he looked and what he said. The first time he was
drunk--but--but that was all right. He sang 'Mad Bess of Bedlam' to make
your hair curl. And one night in Brisbane when he took on the
Castlereagh Slasher for two rounds--"

"Six foot of mad Irishman," said Peters, "and about three inches of
dreamy Spaniard atop of that--to put a head on the mixture, you might
say. Blue-black wavy beard and an eye like a blue glass marble--"

"With the sunlight shining through!" Harris shot in.

"James O'Shaughnessy Albro." Peters lingered upon the name. "As to his
luck, Cap'n Bartlet may be right, but I wouldn't call it so. He was born
too late. He should ha' been a conquistador--d'y' call 'em?--and gone
swaggerin' up and down in the old time holdin' pepper rajahs to ransom
and carvin' out kingdoms. Whereas he was only Jim and anything you like
between a navvy and a millionaire.

"Nobody knows what he'd done back home--prob'ly he got to bulgin' over
too many boundaries and needed room. He blew into the Endeavor River one
season with a tradin' schooner of his own--curly maple saloon, satin
divans, silver-mounted gun racks--by Joe, you'd ha' thought he was goin'
to trade with cherryubims for golden harps in the isles of paradise. And
so he very nearly did, too, what with the dare-devil chances he took,
till he lost craft and all on a race back from Thursday Island."

"Wrecked?" asked Jeckol.

"Just gambled. Old man Tyler could lay his _Hawfinch_ half a point
nearer the wind than a chap has a right to expect from an archbishop.
Jimmie paid over at the dock head and went weavin' his way up Charlotte
Street a beggar, turned into a political barney they were havin' there,
and made them a roarin' speech on somethin'--temperance prob'ly. And, by
Joe, if they didn't elect him a divisional councilor the next day!"

"I've heard of that," proffered Harris with a grin. "Wasn't it the same
winter he did a quick dash to the tin mines for his health? It seems
there was a beauteous and wealthy widow. He couldn't have loved her half
so well had he not loved her pretty under-housemaid more. So he started
for Mount Romeo!... My word, he'd turn the worst scrape into a romance,
that fellow! They say he made a big winning at Romeo--just to console
himself."

"He made a dozen winnings. And I've helped him to a job as warehouse
clerk at Samarai when he wore no shirt under his coat, and gunny bags
for trousies. That's what the cap'n here means by his luck, I fancy,
because you couldn't keep him down. Capitalist, miner, politician,
stevedore--it was all one to Jimmie. Look how he brought up the
_Creswick_ that nobody else would touch when she went ashore on
Turn-again Island, cleared two thou' off her by the nerviest kind of
work and dropped it all on the next Melbourne Cup. Little he cared. He
was havin' his own way with life--as you say, Cap'n Bartlet."

But Jeckol frowned and pursed his thin lips.

"He never saw the game that was too big for him," said Harris, "nor held
back his smile nor his fist."

"Darlinghurst jail is full of the same sort," observed Jeckol dryly.

"You ask what he was like?" Cap'n Bartlet swung around beside the wheel.
"I'll tell you. I'm married to a girl that was pretty chief with Jim
Albro once. There's no living man dare stand and say a word agen my
wife--the finest in Queensland, sir--but I knew all the talk when I
married her. And yet you see me here."

"Ah? With an entirely friendly purpose?" queried Jeckol, peering at him.
"Or to make sure he won't come back?"

I saw the color flood to Bartlet's rugged cheek and ebb again.

"In friendship," he answered simply.

Jeckol made a gesture like a salute, with a hint of mockery perhaps, but
he said no more. And we others said rather less. Bartlet brought the
schooner smartly about on her heel and laid her square through the gap
and we turned again to that sinister bay, opening before us like the
painted depth of a stage set, whereon we were now to discover and
reconstruct our obscure tragedy.

We drew a quick curtain on it. Scarcely had we come abreast the near
headland when one of the brown, breech-clouted sailors leaped up forward
with a yell, and each startled eye swept past his darting finger to the
wreck of the _Timothy S._ There could be no manner of doubt--a green
hull with a black water line, bedded low and on her side, hatches awash,
just behind a shallow jag of the shore well away to leeward. We needed
no glasses to pick her name or to see that nothing remained of life or
value about the battered shell. She lay in her last berth, in the final
stage of naval decay, stripped to the shreds of rigging, her masts
broken short and bare as bleached bones; and from her whitened rail rose
up a flight of boobies that cried like shrill, mournful ghosts and
vanished....

"Aye--that's the end of their pearlin' cruise," said Peters grimly.
"That's Mullhall's craft, sure enough. The southwest gales would drive
her there. She must ha' been anchored just about where we're passin'
now, and I shouldn't wonder."

"On the shell bank?" sniffed Jeckol, leaning to squint down into the
sparkling blue.

"Fair under our keel, I'd say."

At a signal the leadsman had flown his pigeon again, though we were well
past all reefs.

"Eleven fathom!" Harris echoed the cry. "That's diving! I heard it was a
deep-water bed. D'you suppose they were at it when the niggers jumped
'em?"

"I figger they were," said Peters. "See that scrubby bit of island?--the
point's not a hundred yards away. A dozen canoes could mass up there and
never be noticed. By Joe, it's plain as paint. The ship snugged down for
business--the diver below, like as not--pumps and tackle goin'--all
hands busy on board and the watch calculatin' profits to three decimals
behind the windlass. Aye, there's your treasure hunter, every time! Then
perhaps a slant of wind settin' around that point to give the raid a
runnin' start--and--"

"Him finish," concluded Harris briefly. "All over in ten minutes. They'd
hardly know what hit 'em. A black cloud--that's all. A black cloud."

And Peters was right--it was all too plain. None of us but had heard
tales enough, and stark history enough, of these blood-stained barriers
that hedge the true unknown continent. To our waiting minds his few
phrases threw a sharp picture of the careless ship, the stalking death,
and the swift horror that must have followed. There lay the wreck and
there the empty bay. The rest we could fill in for ourselves, or just
about.

"Then what are we doing here?" asked Jeckol at last.

Peters was already dealing out rifles and ammunition by the deck house,
and Bartlet, looking drawn and old, did not seem to hear, but Harris
jerked an answer over his shoulder with the flippancy of emotion. "Oh,
you can't tell--we might find some smoked heads to bring away."...

       *       *       *       *       *

A few minutes later the cap'n was giving his last instructions, while we
of the shore party dropped to our places in the big whaleboat.

"You're not to follow us in whatever happens--mind that. If you sight
more'n three canoes at a time, knock out the shackles and run for open
sea. I'm leaving you Obadiah--he's a goodish shot--and four of the best
boys."

The young mate nodded. He hated not coming with us, but Bartlet knew.
This was Papua, where wise men take no chance and fools seldom live long
enough to take a second.

We took none ourselves as we rowed slowly shoreward and sheered off
out of spear throw, watching the wall of jungle. There is no beach
inside Barange, only the mangrove roots that writhe down to the water's
edge like tangled pythons through the oozy bank of salt marsh. It was
very still and very clear in the afternoon sunlight, though the heat
pouring out over us seemed the exhalation of a great steam bath, choked
with stewing vegetation. Now and then our crew of clean-limbed Tonga
boys rested on their oars, with timid, limpid gaze turned askance. We
heard their quick breathing and the drip from the oar blades--nothing
else. At such times we floated in a mirage where each leaf and frond and
webbed liana with its mirrored image had an unnatural brilliance and
precision, like a labored canvas or a view seen through a stereoscope.

       *       *       *       *       *

And there stole upon us again the oppressive solicitation of the land,
subtle and perilous. Behind the beauty and wonder of it, beyond those
bright shores and the first low foot-hills of the range--what? Nobody
knows, that is the charm and the lure. Peoples, religions, empires
untouched since the birth of time--fabulous wealth, mountains of gold,
cliffs of ruby, "cataracts of adamant," any marvel that fantasy still
dares to dream in a prosaic century. They may be; no man has ever drawn
the map to deny them. They must be: why else should the sphinx smile?...

"I suppose a hundred woolly-heads are spying on us now," whispered
Jeckol suddenly. "Why don't they do something?" He fiddled nervously
with his rifle and sniffed. "What a place! This air is deadly--rotten
with fever. Faugh! It's animal. It's like--it's like a tiger's throat!"

I blinked at the little chap and with the same glance was aware of
Peters standing up in the bow. The trader was just lighting a
short-fused stick of dynamite from his cigar. Before I could cry murder
he had lobbed it in and shot the bush.

It struck with the smash of all calamity in that utter quiet. The trees
sprang toward us and the roar rolled back from angry rocks. Like a
multi-colored dust of the explosion burst a myriad of screaming birds,
lories, parakeets, kingfishers, flashing motes of green and blue and
scarlet in the sunshine. But they dwindled and passed. The echoes died.
The smoke drifted away and the green wall closed up without a scar; the
silence engulfed us once more, floating there, futile invaders who
assaulted its immense riddle with a squib....

"They don't seem to care much," giggled Jeckol.

But Bartlet raised a finger.

Far away in the wood something stirred. It drew nearer, with long
pauses, pressing on and at last charging recklessly through the
undergrowth. We had the spot covered from half a dozen rifles as there
broke out at the verge a creature that leaped and clung among the
creepers.

"Mahrster!" it cried, imploring. "Mahrster!"

A man--though more like a naked, starving ape with his knobby joints and
the bones in a rack under his black skin--and shaken now by the ecstasy
of terror! Not at us. He faced the guns without wincing. His beady eyes
kept coasting behind him the way he had come as if he looked to see a
dreadful hand reach from the thicket and pluck him back. The jungle, the
land, was what he feared--

"Mahrster," he gasped, "you take'm me that fella boat along you! One
fella ship-boy me--good fella too much!"

"What name?" challenged Peters. "What fella ship?"

From the chattered reply we caught a startling word.

"By Joe--he's one of their boys! Give way, cap'n."...

We edged in until Peters could yank the quaking bundle aboard and pulled
again to safety from the mangrove shadow while the fugitive stammered
his story in broken _bêche de mer_.

It was true: we had found a survivor from the lost _Timothy S._ Kakwe,
he called himself, and he had come to Barange "long time before
altogether." Two months, at least, we judged. In the attack on the
schooner he had escaped by swimming. Himself a Papuan, of a different
tribe and region, he had taken to the tree tops after the fashion of his
own people, the painted monkey folk of Princess Marianne Straits--a
facility to which he owed his life, it appeared, for he had since lived
on fruits and nuts among the cockatoos, undiscovered.

This much we gathered from his gabble before Peters caught him up.

"But the others--them white fella?"

"All finish," said Kakwe bluntly.

"How?" cried Peters.

"No savee, me. Too much fright--walk along salt water--get to hell along
beach, along tree. Me fright like hell!"

       *       *       *       *       *

His account tallied with our own theory of the massacre, but he had seen
no bodies brought ashore, could not identify the murderers, could not
say where the native village lay or how to reach it, would not guide any
one into that bush on any consideration. For the rest--this was a "good
fella place" to get away from quickly.

"Ah," said Jeckol, sympathizing. "And that's a true word."

So indeed it seemed, and it is odd to think how close we were to giving
up then. Aye, we were that close. We drifted out toward the anchorage
and looked helplessly around us. The place was so huge, so baffling.
Hopeless to search further among empty swamps and forests, to grope at
large in this hushed wilderness, to coerce a jungle. The cruisers that
have bombarded these same coasts on many a punitive expedition have
learned how hopeless--against Papua, who keeps her secrets.

We must have been halfway back to the _Aurora Bird_ when Bartlet,
sitting thoughtful in the stern, made the sign that brought us up all
sharp.

"He's lying," he said quietly.

Jeckol's nerves jumped in protest.

"Eh--what? The black? He's only scared half to death. You wouldn't blame
him for wanting to get out of this trap, would you? I do myself."

"He couldn't have lived overhead the whole nest o' them all this time
without learning something," declared Bartlet.

"Why should he lie?"

But Peters had risen to snatch around that weazened face, blank as a
mummy's--his own was alight. "By Joe, and a timely reminder. When you've
got to ask why a Papuan nigger should lie you've gone pretty wide! As
for scare--what d'y' suppose he must ha' seen to scare him so?"

Here he bent our monkey man over a thwart and introduced him
affectionately to the Webley....

"You fella Kakwe," he said, "my survivin' jewel--I forgot your breed. I
should ha' begun by bang'm black head b'long you. Now don't stop to
gammon. Whatever you're holdin' back you _show_--savee? S'pose you no
show'm straight, me finish 'long you close up altogether!"

And Kakwe showed. Dominated by superior wickedness, with all the black
man's docility under the instant threat, he collapsed quite simply at
the touch of steel, and he showed--the nook where a tiny, hidden creek
flowed down among the mangroves, the winding course that led by the
swamp's edge through dank and darksome channels to a trodden mud bank
and Barange village itself, tucked away there like a huddle of giant
hives in a back lot. This time we paused for no maneuvering. Even Jeckol
grabbed a boat hook and we pushed through, eager to strike on a definite
lead at last--

Though we might have saved our energy, for the wild had its surprise in
waiting. The village was silent, deserted, tenantless.

We landed at the square, to call it so, a rude clearing on which the few
houses faced, those sprawling, spacious communal dwellings--palaces
among huts--that sometimes amaze the explorer along the West Coast.
None opposed us. Nothing moved, not so much as a curl of smoke. An
insect hummed in the sun like a bullet, and I take no shame to say I
ducked. But that was all. And when the groveling Kakwe led us to a wide
platform that ran breast high across the front of the largest house we
stood with rifles propped and quickened pulses, staring stupidly at the
thing we had come this far to find....

Only a box, lying on the middle of the platform, under the shadow of the
lofty thatch--a small, brass-bound chest such as sailormen love and
ships carry everywhere! "Loot!" snorted Jeckol. "Well--?"

But Cap'n Bartlet had laid hold of another trove, a coil of ringed
rubber tubing, neatly disposed about the chest. "What's there?"

"A diver's air pipe," stated the cap'n.

"What about it?"

"It's been cut--top and bottom."

       *       *       *       *       *

We crowded for a look, and I saw his tanned fist tremble ever so
slightly.

"A diver's pipe," he repeated. "A diver, d'you see? They had a diver,
and--according to your notions, Peters--" He drew a slow breath.
"What--what if that there diver _did_ happen to be overboard at the
minute the rush came?"

And then came the voice of Peters, cool and drawling: "Some one's left a
message on the box."

As we span around he turned it over atilt, so that all might see the
bold letters, scarred in lead, of that laconic legend--all but Bartlet,
who fumbled for his spectacles. "Writ with a Snider bullet, I take it,"
continued the trader. "One of them soft-nosed kind as supplied to
heathen parts for a blessin' of civilization."

"Read it, can't you?" begged the cap'n.

And this was the notice Jeckol read:


  The Crew of the Schooner _Timothy S._ of Cooktown
  that tried a cast with fortune and turned
  a deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19--

  J. MULLHALL, _master_       BAMBA, KOHO
  B. SMYTHE, _mate_       KAKWE, JACK-JACK
  HENRY NEW          MENOMI, FRANK

   _Hic finis fandi_


Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with
deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he
observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that
'hic' language."

"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained
Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't
complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"

Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he
inquired, "that the niggers run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books--?"

He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the
box--a packet of thin bark strips covered with coarse markings and bound
with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in
his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....

And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro.
Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail
of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl
and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung
in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's
earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still
unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figures of our Tonga
boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the
master's next whim; the massed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked
houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners;
the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among
lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the
heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of
Papua!

     _Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and
     I came up a professional god. But I wish I could find which son of
     a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the
     altar._

This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived.
Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some
are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early
hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous
adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here
was the man "with an eye like a blue glass marble," that "never held his
fist or his smile." No other could have written it after the events he
had survived.

Just as Peters inferred to have been the case, the attack on the
_Timothy S._ caught the whole crew of pearl hunters unready. They had
seen no natives at Barange, they kept no lookout, and when Albro stepped
off the ladder that morning of January 22 he left his shipmates
contentedly employed on deck. He never saw any of them again, or--what
might have been a different matter--any part of them. He went down to
the shell bed, and while he was there the black raiders made their sweep
of the schooner.

It is likely the savages took the diving lines for an extra mooring--it
is certain they knew nothing whatever about the apparatus--and Albro's
first warning was the cutting of that air pipe, when he found his
pressure gone and water trickling through the inlet valve. Fortunately,
he was just preparing to ascend and had tightened his outlet to inflate
the suit. Fortunately, too, his helmet was furnished with an adjustable
inlet and he was able hastily to close both valves.

He tugged at his life line, but it drew loose in his hand. He turned
over on his side to look upward, but he could see nothing--only the
vague blue twilight through which the slack coils of his severed air
pipe came sagging. Then he knew that he had been cut off, and the
hideous fear that lies in wait for every diver, amid the perils and
loneliness of the sea bottom seized upon him. He might have popped to
the surface by throwing off his forty-pound weights, but he was aware
that no chance accident could have served him so, and his impulse was to
get away, from schooner and all, to shore. Under water he had some few
minutes to live, perhaps four or five, as long as the inclosed air
should last him. Frantically he began to struggle toward the beach,
yielding to a moment's panic that was to cost him dear.... While trying
blindly to slash free the useless pipe he lost his diver's knife.

       *       *       *       *       *

The rotten coral burst and sank under footing. Clogging weeds enwreathed
and held him back with evil embrace. A tridacna spread its jaws before
his steps so that he nearly plunged into the deadly springtrap of the
deep. But he kept on up the slope; his keen spirit rallied and bore him
through, and he came surging from the waves at last on a point of rocks
outside the bay where he could cling and open the emergency cock in the
helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered
his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness
took him and he slipped and pitched forward heavily, and with a great
clang of armor the god fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.

     _Broke left arm getting ashore. Walking the beach when I met the
     niggers. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected._

These are the words with which Jim Albro chooses to make his note of a
scene that can scarcely have had its parallel in human experience. With
two dozen words, no more. You figure him there, I hope, that muffled
colossus with his huge copper helm flashing red and his monstrous
cyclopean eye agleam, striding along the strip of white beach against
the hostile green hills of Papua. You see him break, an incredible
apparition of power and majesty, upon the view of the dusky cannibal
folk and stand towering over their stricken ranks, triumphant--a glimpse
as through the flick of a shutter that passes and leaves the beholder
dazzled and unsatisfied! But the whole record is only a series of such
glimpses, some focused with startling lucidity, some clouded and
confused, and all too brief.

One other bit remains to fix the picture--an inimitable splash of color,
flung at the end of a perplexing page....

     _I picked out the chief devil-devil doctor, and raised him to
     honor. Old Gum-eye. Friend of mine._

Mark the spirit of the man. Whole chapters could supply no clearer
tribute to his resilience and entire adequacy. Unerringly he took the
right course to enforce the rôle thus amazingly thrust upon him and to
establish his godhead. Already he had caught up the situation, had put
its shock behind him. The inscription on the box remains his only
reference to the loss of the schooner and her crew. And while this might
seem to argue a certain lack of sensibility, I cannot feel it was so
with Albro. His was a nature essentially episodic, prompt to the play of
circumstance. The thing was done and past crying over; the blacks had
acted by their lights, and he had very swiftly to act by his. They had
given him his cue. How well he filled the part we can guess. By evening
he had been installed in some kind of temple or devil house as an
accredited deity to the Barange tribes....

       *       *       *       *       *

Here ends the first part of the Book, so far as its unnumbered and
fugitive entries can be arranged--the first part and the only part quite
comprehensible, before the haze of distress and anxiety has dimmed our
image of that strange god, whose mortality was all too real. He began
its composition that same night, picking up the Snider cartridge and the
bark strips while still he had some measure of liberty. Perhaps he
foresaw that he would want to leave the record. Perhaps he merely sought
distraction, and he had need of it.

Squatting above his own altar, he prepared his own epistle. Around his
sanctuary slept a guard of devil doctors, priests, sorcerers--he uses
all three terms. No sleep for Albro. But while he wrestled there alone
through long hours he found the pluck to jot those early notes by the
flare of a guttering torch, beguiling the pain of his broken arm and the
new terror that was now rapidly closing upon him.

Like a glint of lightning from a cloud comes the following spurted item,
written the next day:

     _Forty hours of this. Am growing weaker. My arm--[word scratched
     out]. Had to give up trying to start the glass in my helmet. Can't
     budge it...._

Soon afterward occurs another passage in the same startling altered key:

     _Tried to get away this [morning], but the priests too suspicious.
     I wanted to try smashing the glass on a rock. Likely would have
     burst my ear drums anyway--_

And further:

     _If I could get hold of a knife for three minutes. Bamboo stick
     [part illegible here]--can't tear vulcan canvas. No use...._

When Peters read those lines aloud and looked up he confronted a sickly
ring of auditors.

"Good God!" breathed Bartlet. "_He couldn't get out!_"

The knowledge of Albro's actual plight crashed upon us all in just that
phrase, and I leave you to gauge its impact. We had had no hint of it.
Here was the diary before us. We were only waiting to learn the present
address of the diarist. Indeed our whole attitude toward the singular
discovery we were making had been quite cheerful, even exultant, like
that of children who follow the tribulations of some favorite hero,
secure of the happy solution.

"Couldn't get _out_?" squeaked Jeckol. "How do you mean--he couldn't?"

"He was locked up in that blasted diving dress!"

"Locked up?"...

"Sewed up--sacked up," said Peters heavily. "Did you ever see
the damn' stuff? He calls it canvas, which it ain't, but tanned
twill--two-ply--with rubber between. He can't tear his way out with a
stick, he says. And small wonder. Talk about strait-jackets!"

"But--but why doesn't he take off the helmet?"

Peters stared unseeing at the packet in his hand, and his face was
saturnine.

"By Joe, what a mess!" he murmured. "What a beau-ti-ful mess! Look
here--d'y' know a diver's outfit? First he wears a solid
breastplate--see?--that sets about his shoulders. Then the helmet fits
on that with segmental neck rings and screws hard down with a quarter
turn to a catch. Aye, there's a catch to snap it home.... And where is
that catch? Why at the _back_! No diver was ever intended to take off
his own helmet!"

We could only blink at him dumbly.

"Albro couldn't reach it. Of course if he should manage to rip away the
cloth from the eyelets he'd be all right--he'd simply shift the whole
upper works. But them eyelets, now, they lock down all around through a
vulcanized collar. He couldn't reach more'n two of them either."

"There's the glass--"

Peters offered the diary.

"What does he say himself? There's only one removable glass to a helmet
and that's in front--an inch thick and screws tight in a gun-metal
socket. It's guarded with a gridiron of bars--same as the two side
glasses. He wants to break it, but he can't. He wants to unscrew it, but
he can't. He wants to cut himself loose, but he has no knife. Do you see
him--by Joe!--do you see him twistin' and writhin' and fightin' for his
life in there--_with one good arm_?"

"Why--" cried Jeckol, in sudden appalled perception. "He couldn't even
eat. He's starving inside that suit!"

"Starving?" echoed Bartlet, from colorless lips. "God--if that was all!
He's dying of thirst by inches!"...

I do not know how it struck Jeckol, but it seemed to me as if a
blackness came in upon the sun.

"Go on," urged Bartlet. "Go on!"

But it was not so easy to go on. Peters found whole pages of the Book
impossible to decipher. At places it lapsed to a mere jumble of
sprawling characters. Again the soft lead was hopelessly blurred over,
where the pages had been often thumbed, or perhaps crumbled and thrown
aside. He shuffled them hastily and we hung upon his search.

     _... uneasy god. They got me tied up now to keep me safe [words
     missing] joke, to pass out here like a rat under a bell jar. Not
     me. I don't mean to...._

Curious. When Peters resumed the thread, when he read that eloquent
line, those of us who had known Jim Albro nodded solemnly, one to
another, as if sharing a profound and secret thrill. For this was the
man's real triumph--and we felt it then, regardless of the outcome--that
alone, beyond any conceivable aid for the first time in his life,
speechless, helpless, at the end of all those amiable arts which had
given him his way so often with men and devils, and women, too, Jim
Albro was still the Jim Albro "that you couldn't keep down."

His body was consuming and shriveling with its own heat. He had to
scheme for each scant breath he drew, spreading the dress and collapsing
it at short intervals to renew the foul air. He had to view the tempting
tribute laid out before the altar: juicy mangoes and figs and sugar
cane, wild berries and young drinking coconuts freshly opened, with the
new, cool milk frothing up at the brim. He had to receive the homage of
a people, and to count by the wheeling sun how many hours of torment
were left him. Worse than all, he had to withstand the pitiless irony of
it, the derisive grin of fate that drives men mad. He did these things,
and he would not yield. He did not mean to. And lest you should think
the phrase a mere flourish--observe the testimony of the Book....

       *       *       *       *       *

The tribes flocked in that second day to do him honor. There was a great
gathering in the square. Some vivid pantomime was displayed before the
high seat. Some unusual rites were enacted before the temple, when the
bamboo pipes and drums were going and the doctors wore their vermilion
mop wigs and masks of ceremony and chains of naked dancers were stamping
and circling to the chant. Jim Albro watched and noted it all behind his
solid inch of plate glass; not passively, not indifferently, but with
close attention and the very liveliest interest. Aye, this god took an
interest in the welfare of his people!

Heaven knows what he saw in the Papuans of Barange. By all accounts they
are a plum-black race of rather superior ferocity--six feet is their
medium stature and their favorite dish a human ear, nicely broiled. So
the old traders report, and never an explorer has improved the
description. It required some one who could sit down among them without
losing his head--quite literally--to learn more. Albro filled the bill.
He had nothing to do but to sit. And while he sat he busied himself with
the thoughts that have made the strangest, and blindest, reading in the
diary.

     _A prime lot of raw material. Why [do?] people always lie about
     niggers? Unspoiled [part illegible] the makings. Their orators told
     me in dumb show [words missing] behind the hills [lines
     missing].... Wonderful!_

Wonderful, he says. Wonderful what? Chances, perhaps. Opportunities.
Possibilities. Certainly nobody else ever had such as lay before Jim
Albro if he could have won free to take them, as a conqueror, as a god.
Was he dreaming even then of empire? Had he had a glimpse into the
meaning of Papua that struck fire to his roving and restless soul? Had
he fallen enamored of the sphinx, and had she drawn the veil for him? It
may be. The fact stands that, fevered and tortured as he was, burning
with thirst and pain, he discovered something capable of rousing that
cry from him. We hear the cry, and that is all we hear--nearly.

     ... _suppose I should take a hand at this dumb show myself. I could
     do it. I know I could. Am going to trust old Gum-eye. And
     afterward_....

Peters looked up from the last page.

"Well?" said Jeckol impatiently.

"That's the end," announced Peters.

I cannot say what the breathless group of us had been expecting.
Possibly the first-hand memoir of a miracle would have satisfied us, or
the harrowing confessions and last wishes of the moribund. But so
natural and unfanciful a thing as a full stop to the tension left us
stupefied. We felt aggrieved, too, as if the author should have
postponed his business long enough to let us know whether he was dead or
not.

"It can't be!" cried Jeckol, all abroad. "How could it end there? What
happened to him? Where is he?"

Peters swung his gaze around the vacant clearing and the impenetrable
palisade of the forest.

"This was written three months ago, remember," he said.

"But he had a plan," insisted Jeckol. "He surely had a plan. He says he
was going to do something. He'd found a friend he could trust. What
next?"

"That friend must ha' failed him."

Cap'n Bartlet shook himself like one awaking. "No friend would have
failed him," he said deliberately. "And--you're forgetting that ship boy
again."

       *       *       *       *       *

Once more, with a rattled oath, Peters pounced on the unfortunate Kakwe,
quailing beside him. Once more he brought to bear the persuasion he best
knew how to use; and once more the black boy submitted, wholly, and
showed. He had nothing to tell. He could throw no light on events. But
he had seen from the trees where the "white fella mahrster him diver"
forgathered with all the fiends of the pit, whereat he was "too much
fright," and he showed us this time up the platform of the identical
wide-thatched house by which we had been standing. We crept in through
the low entrance and across a floor of sagging bamboo mats and found
ourselves before a curtain of pandanus that hung midway. We were long
past astonishment, but Jeckol, arresting a gesture, dropped his hand.

"I daren't," he whimpered.

It was Bartlet who put the curtain aside. And there, in the twilight of
the place, we saw the god as he had appeared in his recent earthly
phase. His great copper head gleamed at the back of a shallow niche,
made fast against the wall. The muffled, stiff clumsiness of his diving
dress revealed a heroic figure, still disposed in the attitude of a
sitting Buddha, with the leaden-soled diving shoes thrust out by either
knee. His single huge eye glared down at us balefully from over the
altar as we stood, overwhelmed in the presence. "And so he did--pass
out," said Jeckol.

Something had caught the quick eye of Peters. Horrified, we saw him step
forward and lay a vigorous and sacrilegious hold on that high divinity,
saw the shape start and tremble as with life, saw it shake and flutter
like a bundle of rags in the wind, and flap--emptily....

"Yes," said Peters. "He's passed out, right enough. Leastways from here.
Passed out, and on. And quite easy too. Look at these slits--would you?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The diving suit had been laid open like a stripped pelt with long cuts
of a keen blade, one down the middle of the back, one across the
shoulders, and others connected along the inside of each limb to the
wrists and ankles.

"Gone!"

"Gone," confirmed Peters. "Whether the niggers dug him from it piece by
piece like the kernel from a nut or whether that friend of his helped
him to shed complete--you can take your choice. In either case he's
gone--and gone this time to stay."

"There's no--no blood!" gasped Jeckol. "Anyhow!"

Cap'n Bartlet had removed his hat to polish his shiny forehead with the
colorful kerchief, and he was looking out of the door over the tops of
the trees to the far blue and nameless mountains of Papua, with an eye
at peace.

"You could always bank on the luck of James O'Shaughnessy Albro," he
said simply. "I knew he was alive."

But Jeckol was still reeling.

"I shan't write this yarn," he assured us earnestly.

"It's too--it's too--and besides, there's no end to it."...

"_Hic finis fandi_," suggested Peters.




THE PASSION VINE


It is difficult to find an excuse for Miss Matilda. She was a
missionary's daughter, committed to the sacred cause of respectability
in a far land. Motauri was a gentleman of sorts and a scholar after his
own fashion, a high chief and a descendant of kings; but he was also a
native and a pagan. Strictly, it should have been nothing to Miss
Matilda that Motauri looked most distractingly like a young woodland
god, with a skin the exact shade of new heather honey, the ringlets of a
faun, the features of a Roman cameo and the build of a Greek athlete.

Being a chief in the flower valley of Wailoa meant that Motauri owned a
stated number of cocoanut-trees and never had to do anything except to
swim and to laugh, to chase the rainbow-fish a fathom deep and to play
divinely on the nose-flute. But being as handsome as Motauri meant that
many a maiden heart must sigh after him and flutter in strange, wild
rhythm under the compelling of his gentle glance. This was all very well
so long as the maidens were among his own people. It took a different
aspect when he turned the said glance on Miss Matilda, who was white and
slim and wore mitts to keep her hands from tanning and did crewelwork in
the veranda of her father's house behind the splendid screen of the
passion-vine....

Now falling in love with a man of color is distinctly one of the things
that are not done--that scarcely endure to be spoken of. We have it on
the very highest authority that the East has a stubborn habit of never
being the West. Where two eligible persons of opposite sex are
concerned the stark geographic, not to say ethnologic fact comes grimly
into play, and never these twain shall meet: or anyway the world agrees
they never ought.

Yet Miss Matilda had been meeting Motauri. Perhaps the passion-vine was
to blame. The passion-vine is too exuberant to be altogether
respectable. One cannot live in an atmosphere of passion-vine--and that
embraces all the heady scent and vivid tint and soft luxuriance of the
islands where life goes as sweetly as a song; the warm caress of the
trade-wind, the diamond dance of spray; the throbbing organ-pipe of the
reef, the bridal-veiling of mountain streams, the flaunting of palm and
plantain, the twinkling signal of fireflies at dusk--one cannot live
with all this and confine one's emotions to a conventional pattern of
gray and blue worsted yarns. At least one has trouble in so doing while
the thrill and spring of youth remain.

They remained with Miss Matilda, though guarded by natural discretion.
Nothing could have been cooler than the gleam of her starched gingham,
as she moved sedately down the mountain path to chapel of a Sunday
morning. Nothing more demure than the droop of her lashes under the rim
of the severe, Quakerish bonnet, as she smote the wheezy old melodeon
for the dusky choir. In that flawless face, a little faded, a little
wearied, you would have sought vainly for any hint of hard repression,
for any ravaging of secret revolt--unless, like Hull Gregson, the
trader, you had made a despairing study of it and had kept its image
before your hot eyes throughout long, sleepless nights; unless, more
particularly, like Motauri, you had been privileged to see it by the
moonlight that sifts through the rifts of the passion-vine. Then,
perhaps....

Certainly her excellent father would have been the last unprompted and
of his own motion, to develop any such suspicion. Pastor Spener had
learned to fight shy of so many suspicions, so many discomfortable
questions. And this was well. Otherwise he might have been led to wonder
occasionally at his own presence and his own work; at the whole imposed
and artificial shadow of a bleak civilization upon these sunny isles,
these last remnants of an earthly paradise.

He seldom permitted himself to wonder about anything except the singular
inadequacy of mission support and the rising cost per head of making
converts, and keeping them. But there were times when he chanced to
consider, perhaps, some drunken derelict outsprawled by a hospitable
breadfruit, or again some lovely sea-born creature of his flock,
stumbling past in all the naive absurdity of Mother Hubbard and
brogans--these were moments that brought doubt to the good pastor;
moments when he glimpsed the unanswered problem of commingled races, of
white exile and brown host, of lonely invader and docile subject.

"We have our little trials--" he said, and smoothed them rather
fretfully, and as speedily as might be, from his pink, bald brow and
laid them with the well-ordered weft of ungrayed hair atop.

For had he not also his mission, his infant class, his home, his books,
his reports?--a whole solid and established institution from which to
draw the protective formulae of respectability. Even in the lands of the
passion-vine, the Pastor Speners will inevitably gather such formulae
about them as a snail secretes its shell....

"Undeniably," he said, abstractedly, "we have our perplexities. Guidance
is not always forthcoming in these matters. Would you take the little
money we have put by--you remember we were going to purchase a new oil
lamp for the chapel--would you take that money to buy yellow ribbons for
Jeremiah's Loo?"

"Why does Jeremiah's Loo need ribbons?" asked Miss Matilda.

"She is going to marry that tramp shell-buyer from Papeete. At least she
consents to a ceremony, if she can have the ribbons. A wild girl. I've
never had much hold over her.... It would be in some sort a bribe, I
admit--"

Father and daughter were seated in the arbored veranda at the daily
solemn rite of tea. For many years Pastor Spener had been used to hold
forth on sins and vanities at this hour before twilight. For many years
the meek partner of his joys and sorrows had assisted there, dispensing
the scant manna of dry toast and tapping the prim bulk of the
tea-urn--that sure rock of respectability the world around. And since
she had passed to the tiny cemetery on the hillside, it had not been
easy to alter the patriarchal custom; not easy always to remember that
the place across from him was now filled by another, a younger, and in
the ways of the world and the flesh, a wholly innocent auditor.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ordinarily Miss Matilda did little to remind him. Ordinarily she
listened with the same meek deference. But Miss Matilda's state of mind
for some time past had been very far from ordinary; it chanced that on
this particular afternoon the private, the very private, affairs of Miss
Matilda had brought her to a condition altogether extraordinary--almost
reckless.

"You don't know the man," she suggested, "or anything about him."

He blinked.

"I don't--no. Nothing good."

"Still you are willing to marry them."

Now this was a clear departure, and a daring one, but considering all
things perhaps not strange.

For the last thirty minutes, since the pastor's return from the village
below, Miss Matilda had been conscious of a tension in the domestic air.
Up to his mention of Jeremiah's Loo an oppressive silence had brooded,
and from his manner of eyeing her over his teacup there was reason to
fear that something more troublous than yellow ribbons had ruffled his
pink serenity. If Miss Matilda had been the trembling kind she would
have trembled now at her own temerity--the result of indefinable
impulse. And yet when his answer came it was no rebuke, rather it was
eager, with an unwonted touch of embarrassment.

"What would you have me do, my dear?" he said. "I can't pass judgment on
these people. Our society is limited--largely primitive. How many months
is it since you saw another white woman here in Wailoa, for instance?
They wish to wed--that's enough."

"The man is white and the girl is a native, and you would marry them so
readily?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Matilda put the query with perfect outward calm. The Reverend
Spener himself was the one to clatter his cup.

"What would you have?" he repeated. "I marry them; yes. I will marry any
that ask--barring known criminals--and only too thankful to lend
religious sanction. Because--don't you see?--they are bound to marry
anyhow. Matilda--" He brought up short and regarded her with sharpened
concern, very curious for a man who was commonly so sure of himself. "My
dear daughter, I don't believe I've ever explained this point to you
before. It's not--er--it's a subject rather awkward to discuss. But
since we've reached it, there is a need why I should intrude briefly
upon your delicacy.... A very definite need."

If she gave a quick movement, it was only to set the tea-cozy in place.
If there came a flush athwart her pale cheek, it might have been a
chance ray of the deep western sun, filtering through the trellis.

"Yes?" she said.

"I am quite clear about these marriages. Quite clear. I cannot say I
advocate them, but in any such community as ours they have always been
inevitable. The missionary merely provides the service of the church, as
in duty bound. Who shall deny that he does the Lord's work toward
unifying the island type?" He blinked nervously, balked at his own lead
and started again.

"As to any stigma that may attach to such a union--really, you know,
it's not as if our natives had the least negroid taint. They are
Caucasians. Yes, my dear, that is scientifically true. The Polynesian
people are an early migration of the great Caucasian race. Besides
which, they are very fair to look upon--undeniably--very fair indeed."

She sat transfixed, but the most amazing part was to come....

"Consider, moreover," he pleaded--actually it was as if he
pleaded--"considered the position of the resident white in these
isles, far from the restraints and manifold affairs of his own world.
Life is apt to become very dreary, very monotonous for him. Ah,
yes, Matilda, you could scarce imagine, but it palls--it palls. He
requires--er--diversion, as it were, companionship, a personal share in
such charm and--er--sensuous appeal as flourish so richly on all sides
of him. Have you ever thought of the question in that light? You
haven't, of course, my dear. But consider the temptation."

He ended by retreating hastily behind his teacup, quite unnecessarily,
as it proved. Miss Matilda was in no condition just then to deploy the
expected maidenly emotions. "Consider!" Had she not? Had she been
thinking of anything else these past feverish weeks? What other exile
could have taught any secrets of monotony or dreariness to the daughter
of a lone missionary?

Chapel, school, home and chapel again, and in this round each daily move
foreseen and prescribed. An hour for getting up and an hour for lying
down; an hour for eating and an hour for praying; for turning a page and
for threading a needle. No escape from the small formal proprieties in
which her father had molded their lives. No friend, no neighbor, no
acquaintance except native pupils and servants. No stimulus except the
moral discourse of a reverend tyrant. No interests except the same petty
worries and the same money needs....

From where she sat in the veranda she could see no single object to
break the deadly sameness of it. There were the same sticks of
unsuitable furniture in the same immutable order, the same rugs at the
same angles; the same dishes, the same books, the same pictures on the
walls--"The Prodigal's Return," chromolithograph, in a South Pacific
isle! And all this not merely happening so, as it might very well happen
elsewhere. Here it was laboriously achieved, a triumph of formulated
rectitude, transplanted bodily for a reproof and an example to the heart
of the riotous tropics....

"Why did you say there was need to explain to me, father?" she managed
to ask at last.

But the pastor had had time to reform his lines.

"I spoke somewhat at large," he said, with a wave. "My specific purpose
was to define an attitude which perhaps you may have mistaken--to warn
you against undue intolerance, my dear. You see, as a matter of fact, I
had a talk to-day on this same head--quite a helpful talk--with Captain
Gregson."

For all her preoccupation with her own problems the name caught her with
new astonishment.

"Gregson! The trader?"

"Captain," he repeated, significantly. "Captain Gregson."

"You talked with him?" she exclaimed. "But he--but you--I've heard you
say--"

Thereupon Pastor Spener took the upper hand decisively, like one who has
come off well in an anxious skirmish over difficult ground.

"Never mind what you have heard, my dear. Many things have been said of
him--idle chatter of the beaches. He has been sadly misjudged. Captain
Gregson is a very remarkable man, besides being the wealthiest in the
islands--undeniably, quite the wealthiest.... He intends joining our
church."

Miss Matilda rose from the table and moved away to the open side of the
veranda, looking off to seaward. Tall, erect, with her hands resting on
the high rail, she made a decorous and restful figure against the sunset
sky. But those hands, so casual seeming, were driving their nails into
the wood. For within the maiden breast of Miss Matilda, behind that
obtrusive composure, there seethed a tumult of question, alarm,
bewilderment....

This startling dissertation of her father's--she could not begin to
think what it meant. Was it possible, in spite of all assurance, was it
possible that he knew, had heard or guessed--about Motauri? And if he
had, was it conceivable that he should speak so--to state, as it might
be, the very terms of her guilt, an actual plea for that unnameable
temptation to which she had been drifting? It was mad. She could no
longer be sure of anything, of her safety, her purpose, her father,
herself--truly, of herself. And Gregson! An evil presentiment had
pierced her at his mention of the gross, dark, enigmatic trader, whose
intent regard she had felt fixed upon her so often--whenever she met him
on the village path or passed his broad-eaved house by the beach. What
did it mean?

Through a gap in the passion-vine she gazed out and over the whole side
of the mountain into the wide glory of the sunset. There was nothing to
interrupt that full outward sweep, nothing between her and the horizon.

The parsonage at Wailoa could never have been placed or built by any one
of the Reverend Spener's level temperament. He had never found anything
but a grievance in the fact that he should have to dwell so far aloft
from routine affairs in a spot of the wildest and most romantic beauty.
The village itself lay hidden below and to the left, at the mouth of the
valley, whence the smoke of its hearths rose as incense. Half-way up the
winding track stood his little chapel in a grove of limes. And here on a
higher terrace of the basalt cliff, like an eyrie--or, perhaps more
fittingly, a swallow's nest--was perched the pastor's home. The lush
growth of an untamed jungle massed up to its step; beetling heights
menaced it from behind; and always, at all seasons, a rushing mountain
torrent in the ravine beside made its flimsy walls to thrill, disturbing
its peace with musical clamor.

That stream should have been indicted for trespass and disorder by the
worthy pastor's way of thinking. Somehow all the unruly and wayward
elements of his charge seemed to find expression in those singing
waters, which were not to be dammed or turned aside. From the
veranda-rail one might lean and toss anything--a passion-flower--into
the current and follow it as it danced away down the broken slide, lost
here and there amid mists and milky pools and the shadowing tangle of
lianas snatched at last through a chute and over a sheer outfall, to
reappear some minutes later as a spark in the fret of the surf far
below.

       *       *       *       *       *

Standing there at the verge of the world, Miss Matilda watched the day's
end. For a time the bright gates stayed open at the end of an unrolled,
flaming carpet across the sea, then slowly drew in, implacably swung to,
while the belated spirit sprang hurrying forward--too late. With an
almost audible brazen clang they closed, and Miss Matilda drew back,
chilled, as the veranda shook to a heavy footfall....

"Ah, Captain Gregson--step up, sir!" Her father's voice was unctuous
with welcome as he hastened to meet the ponderous bulk that loomed
through the dusk. "Happily met, sir. You are just in time to join us at
prayers. I believe you must know my daughter--Matilda?"

It was strange to hear the pastor use such a tone with such a visitor,
and stranger still to see the assurance with which Captain Gregson
entered the parsonage, where he had never until now set foot.

"Evening, Pastor. Just a moment. That path--pretty tough on a chap who's
used--ship's deck as much as I have, d'y' see? Very kind, I'm sure. Very
kind and neighborly. And this--Miss Matilda, if I may say so bold....
Very proud to know you, ma'am. Proud and happy."

He made her his bow, plying a broad straw hat and a billowy handkerchief
of tussore silk. She found herself answering him. And presently--most
singular thing of all--he had properly ensconced himself by the tall
astral lamp like one of the family circle, balancing a Testament on his
knee and reading his verse in turn with surprising facility....

Captain Hull Gregson was one of those men apparently preserved in lard,
whose shiny, tanned skin seems as impervious as Spanish leather alike to
age and to rude usage. But if his years were indeterminate, his eyes
were as old as blue pebbles. By those eyes, as by his slow, forceful
speech and rare gesture, as by a certain ruthless jut of jaw, was
revealed the exploiter, the conquering white that has taken the South
Pacific for an ordained possession.

He had led a varied and more or less picturesque career up and down the
warm seas. He had been a copra buyer through black Melanesia in the open
days; had owned his ships and sailed them after labor in the Archipelago
with a price on his head and his life in his hand. And now, rich in
phosphate shares and plantation partnerships, a sort of comfortable
island squire, he had retired to peaceful Wailoa at last as a quiet
corner where business was play and the hot roll dropped on time from the
breadfruit-tree. So much was said of him, and it was not considered
the part either of wisdom or of island etiquette to say much more--nor
was much else required to set him in his place. Certainly he might have
seemed somewhat out of it now. The type does not pervade the parlors of
the missionaries as a rule.

But Captain Gregson turned it off very well. Once he had recovered his
breath, and a purplish haze had cleared from his face, he comported
himself easily, even impressively, neither belittling nor forcing the
social event, the while that Pastor Spener beamed encouragement and
smoothed a complacent brow....

"It's like I told you to-day, Pastor. The notion came to me like
that--I've been a bad neighbor. There's so few of us marooned here,
like. I said to myself--where's the use of being strangers, hey? Why not
get neighborly with those good folks and help along that good work of
faith and righteousness. Why not, hey--?"

He spoke with an effect of heartiness that delighted the Reverend
Spener, and that fell on the ear of the Reverend Spener's daughter as
hollow as a drum.

"Why not, indeed?" echoed the pastor.

"So many places you find a kind of feud betwixt the commercial people
and the mission people," continued Captain Gregson. "Where's the sense
of it? I believe in you, Pastor, and your work and your church. Yes, and
I feel the need of the church myself, and a chance to visit a fine
respectable home like this.... Why shouldn't I have it?"

Miss Matilda carefully avoided looking toward him, where he sat wedged
between the fragile bamboo what-not and the lacquer tabouret, well
knowing that she must cross his smoldering gaze and shunning it.

"And perhaps, by the same token, perhaps you might need me too and not
know it," he continued. "I've a notion I might be of some service to the
cause, d'y see?"

"Undeniably, Captain," said the pastor, eagerly. "A man so
influential--so experienced as yourself--"

"Could help, hey? It's what I think myself. I could. Why even now I'll
lay I could tell you matters--things going on right under your nose, so
to speak--that you'd hardly dream yourself."

"Among my people?" asked the pastor, wrinkling.

"Aye. Right among your own people--at least some of the wild ones that
you want to be most careful of. They're a devilish bold, sly lot for all
their pretty ways--these brown islanders--an astonishing bold lot. You'd
hardly believe that now, would you--?" His voice dragged fatly. "Would
you--Miss Matilda?"

Taken aback, she could not speak, could scarcely parry the attack with
a vague murmur. She feared him. She feared that slow, glowering and
dangerous man, whose every word came freighted with obscure and sinister
meaning. The instinct dimly aroused by her glimpses of him had leapt to
vivid conviction. She knew that he was staring across the room; staring
avidly at the fresh whiteness of her there, the precise, slim lines of
her dress, the curve of her neck, the gleam of her low-parted hair. And
it seemed as if he were towering toward her, reaching for her with hot
and pudgy hands--

But he had merely risen to take his leave.

"Well, I won't be lingering, Pastor," he said. "Not this time. You stop
by my shack to-morrow, and we'll talk further. Maybe I might have some
facts that would interest you. What I really came for to-night was to
bring a bit of news."

"News?" blinked the pastor.

"You should go below and look to your chapel," chuckled Gregson. "I
minded what you said about new lamps being wanted, d'y' see? And so I
made bold to hang two fine brass lights in the porch there myself--as a
gift-offering."

"For us! For the church--?"

"Aye. It's a small thing. But I've noticed myself lately how those lamps
were needed." He paused. "That's a plaguey dark place for lurking and
loitering--that chapel porch."

       *       *       *       *       *

He was gone; the Reverend Spener had returned from escorting him to the
step and was still formulating praise and gratitude; but Miss Matilda
had not stirred.

"Matilda--! I'm speaking to you. I say--we've been less than just to
Captain Gregson, don't you think? Really, a most hearty, true gentleman.
Did I tell you he's settled the difficulty with Jeremiah's Loo offhand?
Oh, quite. One word from him, and they're asking for a church wedding
now. And there are other things I might tell you as well--"

She turned to look full at her father.

"There is one thing I wish you might tell me. What did you bring that
man here for?"

The pastor went a pinker shade.

"I didn't bring him. He came of his own motion. He desired most
earnestly to come."

"You gave him permission?"

"I did; after he had explained--after he showed me--Matilda.... The
short of it is, we've wronged Captain Gregson. You have heard that he
used to live with a native girl on Napuka?"

"Everybody has heard it."

"Well," said the pastor, solemnly, "he was married to that girl. I've
seen the certificate--quite regular--signed by the Moravian missionary.
There were no children, and also--and also my dear, he is now free. He
received word by yesterday's schooner of the death of--er--Mrs. Gregson.
You see?"

"Ah--!" breathed Miss Matilda, who did indeed begin to see.

He laid a hand on her arm and gave way at last to a paternal quaver.
"Matilda, my child--for you are still a child in many things--I have
taken anxious thought for you of late. Very anxious thought. You must
trust me, my dear. Trust me to do the best for your welfare--and
happiness too--as always. Good night!"...

He left her a dry kiss and a fervent blessing and they parted; the
pastor to write a particularly hopeful mission report, and this child of
his--who was, by the way, twenty-nine years old--to keep a last tryst
with a lawless and forbidden love. She knew it must be the last. For the
previous one, two nights before, had been held in the porch of the
chapel--in that same dark porch so benevolently, so deceitfully
endowed by Captain Hull Gregson....

[Illustration:

_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._

_Where the Pavement Ends._

A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]

Her own room opened directly on the veranda. She paused only long enough
to snatch up a shawl, as she passed through to the far side of the
house. Here she could be safe from hostile ears where the mountain
torrent ran thundering; safe from prying eyes in the velvet shadows of
the passion-vine.

She parted the leaves and harkened. A soft, thin trilling came up to her
from the edge of the guava jungle in the ravine, a mere silver thread of
melody against the stream's broad clamor. And then as she leaned farther
out, so that her face showed for a moment like a pale blossom in the
trellis, Motauri came. He came drifting through the moonlight with a
wreath of green about his head, a flower chain over his broad, bare
shoulders, clad only in a kilted white _pareu_--the very spirit of youth
and strength and joyous, untrammeled freedom, stepped down from the days
when Faunus himself walked abroad.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Hokoolele!" he called gently, and smiled up toward her, the most
splendid figure of a man her eyes had ever beheld. "Star" was his name
for her, though indeed she was a very wan and shrinking one, and so to
lend her courage he sang the crooning native love-song that runs
somewhat like this:

  _"Bosom, here is love for you,
    O bosom, cool as night!
  How you refresh me as with dew,
    Your coolness gives delight!

  "Rain is cold upon the hill
    And water in the pool;
  But, oh, my heart is yearning still
    For you, O bosom cool!"_

"There is a night thistle blooming up the ravine," he said, "that looks
just like the candle-tree you lighted in the church last month. Do you
remember, Hokoolele? When I peeped through the window and you were
afraid the folk would see me? Ho-ho! Afraid the '_Klistian_' folk would
see their bad brother outside? But this is much prettier.... Come and
see if you can light the thistle."

She kept close to the shadow.

"Are you going to be afraid again?" he asked. "There is no one on the
whole mountain to-night. They are all down by the chapel staring at the
new lamps and parading themselves along the path. Two great big
fireflies by the path! You should see how they shine through the
trees."...

He seated himself on the veranda steps and laughed up over the shoulder
at her--laughter like a boy's or like a pagan god's.

It was that had tinged and made so live and subtle the fascination he
exercised upon her; his unspoiled innocence, his utter, wild simplicity
that struck back to the ultimate sources. She could never have felt so
toward any of the mission converts, with their woolen shirts and their
shoes of ceremony, their hymns and glib, half-comprehended texts; with
the fumbling thumb-marks of civilization on their souls. Motauri had
never submitted to the first term of the formula. Motauri followed the
old first cult of sea and sun, of whispering tree and budding flower. He
was the man from the beginning of things, from before Eden; and she who
carried in her starved heart the hunger of the first woman--she loved
him.

She sank to her knees on the veranda edge above him there and leaned
forward with clasped hands to see the soft glow in his deep-lashed eyes,
the glint of his even teeth; to catch the sweet breath of jasmine that
always clung about him.

"Motauri--" she said, in the liquid tongue that was as easy to her as
her own, "I am afraid. Oh, I am--I am afraid!"

"What should you fear? I have promised nothing shall hurt you. The
jungle is my friend."

"It is not that. I fear my father, Motauri--and--and that man--Gregson."

She could see his smile fade in the moonlight. "The trader?" he said.
"Very many fear him. But he is only a cheat and an oppressor of poor
people with things to sell and to buy. What has the trader to do with
you?"

"He knows--I am sure he knows about us," she breathed. "He knows. Even
now he may be watching--!"

Hurriedly she told him of the day's strange development, of her father's
sudden friendship with the powerful white man and Gregson's crafty,
malicious hints.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I do not know what he means to do, but for you and for me this is the
end, Motauri," she said, wistfully. "I dare not see you any more--I
would not dare. It is not permitted, and I am frightened to think what
might happen to you. You must go away quickly." Her timid fingers rested
on his close, wavy locks, all crisped and scented with the juice of the
wild orange. "It is finished, Motauri," she sighed. "This is the end."

But Motauri's mouth had set, his boyish brows had coiled and firmed, and
his glance was bright. He drew closer to her with a lithe movement.

"This is the end?" he echoed. "Then I know how. White star of the
night--listen to me now, for I have seen how it must end. Yes--I have
known this would come....

"Here in Wailoa you behold me one apart, because I do not seek to do as
the white men, or kneel in their temple, or make empty outcry to their
gods. Here is not my rightful home. But around the coast two hours'
journey, is the little bay of Huapu where dwell some of my people who
have never given up their own customs, and there I am truly a high
chief, for my fathers used to rule over all the bays. Sweet are the
young cocoanuts of Huapu, and the mangoes and the wild plantains of the
hillside--sweet and mellow. There in the woods the moss grows deep and
soft for a couch, and for shelter are the broad leaves--for hearth the
great prostrate tree trunk that holds fire always in its heart. Like
mine--white star--like mine!

"Once I would not have ventured, Hokoolele. Once I looked at you from
afar, dreaming only of you as one who had dropped from the sky--so
different from my kind. But you are my life and the light of my life,
and I have touched you and found you real--strange and beautiful, but
real--

  _"Bosom, here is love for you,
    O bosom, cool as night!"_

He caught her hands in both of his.

"Come with me now, for always. I will take you away to the groves of
Huapu. There we will laugh and dance and sing all the day through, and I
will bring you water in a fern-leaf and weave you flower chains and
climb to pluck you the rarest fruits, and build a nest to keep you safe.
There you shall never be sad any more, or wearied, or lonely--or afraid.
Because I will be with you always, always--Hokoolele! Come with me
to-night!"...

Then the maiden soul of Miss Matilda was torn like a slender, upright
palm in the tropic hurricane, for a lover's arm was about her waist and
a lover's importunate breath against her cheek, and these things were
happening to her for the first time in her life.

"No--no, Motauri!" She struggled inexpertly, fluttering at his touch,
bathed in one swift flush. "My father--!" she gasped.

"What does it matter? Your father shall marry us any way he
pleases--afterward. But we will live in Huapu forever!"

And with a sudden dizzied weakening she saw that this was true and that
she had treasured the knowledge for this very moment. Her father would
marry them. He would marry them as he married Jeremiah's Loo and the
shell-buyer--"and only too thankful." Curious that the conventional fact
should have pleaded with the night's spiced fragrance, with the bland
weight of the island zephyr on her eyelids, with the vibrant contact of
young flesh and the answering madness in her veins. Curious, too, that
her dread and loathing of the man Gregson should have urged her the same
way. But so they did, reason fusing with desire like spray with wind,
and all conspiring to loose her from the firm hold of habit and
training.

       *       *       *       *       *

"We can go now--this minute," Motauri was whispering. "There are boats
to be had below on the beach. We can reach Huapu before morning. None
shall see us go."

"You forget the path--the people--" She could hardly frame the words
with her lips.

"And Gregson's lights on the chapel--!"

But Motauri laughed low for love and pride.

"I do not use a path. Am I a village-dweller to need steps to my feet?
The mountain is path enough for me. That way!... Straight down to the
shore."

"By the ravine?" she cried stricken. "Impossible! It has never been
done. No one can climb down there. It is death!"

"It is life!" With the word he swept her up like a wisp of a thing in
his strong arms. "And also I am not 'no one,' but your captor,
Hokoolele. I have caught my star from the sky. See--thus is it done!"...

       *       *       *       *       *

Such was the elopement of Miss Matilda, when she left her father's house
and her father's faith in very much the same manner as her remote
maternal ancestor went about the same sort of affair somewhere back in
the Stone Age. And in truth Miss Matilda was living the Stone Age for
the half hour it took Motauri to get them both down the untracked
mountain side. How they managed she never afterward knew. Not that she
slept, or fainted, or indulged in any twentieth century tantrum. But it
was all too tense to hold.

Of that descent she retained chiefly a memory of the stream and its
voices, now low and urgent, now babbling and chuckling in her ear. At
times they groped through its luminous mists, again waded from stone to
stone in the current or lowered themselves by its brink among the
tangled roots. It hurried them, hid them, showed them the way, set the
high pulse for their hearts and the pace for their purpose like an
exultant accomplice. Nor did Miss Matilda shrink from its ardor.

Once embarked, she had no further fear. Unguessed forces awoke in her.
With the hands that had never handled anything rougher than crewelwork
she chose her grip along the tough ladder of looped lianas. As
confidently as a creature of the wild she sprang across a gulf, or threw
herself to the cliff, or slipped to the man's waiting clasp on the next
lower ledge. Massed shadows, shifting patches of moonlight, the
glimpsed abyss and silvered sea far down--these held no terrors. Sharp
danger and quick recovery, sliding moss and rasping rock, the clutch of
thorn and creeper--all the rude intricacies of wet earth and teeming
jungle seemed things accepted and accessory. She was tinglingly alive,
gloriously alert. This was her wonderful night, the great adventure that
somehow fulfilled a profound expectancy of her being.

Only at the chute she could not hope to aid. Motauri meant to find a
certain slanted fault beyond the last break that offered like a shelf.
If they could reach that, they might clamber under the very spout of the
hissing outfall, drenched but comparatively safe, for the rest was no
more than a scrubby staircase that bore away leftward to the gentler
slopes of the valley and the beach below. He told her his plan, then
swung her up again and took the whole task to himself, easing inch by
inch down the narrow channel. The water boiled and raved about his
knees; she could see the streak of its solid flood ahead, where it
straightened for a last rush, where the least misstep must dash them
down the glistening runaway into space.

But she would not look ahead. She looked at the dim, adorable face so
near her own, at the carven lip, the quivering, arched nostril, the
fine, proud carriage and dauntless glance of her godling. The flash of
their eyes met sidelong. With a deep-drawn sigh of content she
surrendered herself to him, drew her arms about his neck until she was
pillowed on his smooth shoulder....

"Strange there should be no boats at this end," said Motauri.

They paused by the outskirts of the village and peered toward its
clustered, ruddy firelights flickering out upon the shore. There was no
one abroad on that empty, nebulous expanse, but they could hear stir
and laughter among the huts and the shrill wailing of a child.

"It is still too early," he murmured, and led her back to the cover of a
thicket.

Miss Matilda was aware of a slackening from the keen excitement and
zested peril of their escape. She had a vague feeling that the boat
should have been ready to waft them miraculously over star-lit seas.

"How are you going to get one?" she asked.

"Any of these people would lend me a dugout, but I thought merely to
take the first at hand."

"I see none."

"No--they are gone. Perhaps the men are fishing on the reef to-night....
But that would be strange too," he added, perplexed.

Somehow the delay, the uncertainty, began to weigh upon her like an
affront. She missed their wild communion, the high, buoying sense of
romance and emprise and impossibilities trampled under foot. She missed
the single complicity of the stream and its turbulent heartening. Here
were voices too, but these were harsh and displeasing, common human
voices. An odor of cookery and unclean hearths stole greasily down the
air. The fretful child began screaming again and went suddenly silent at
a brusque clap. Somebody fell to quarreling in a muttered monotone.

"What are you going to do?" she demanded.

"It will be better if I go search."

"You will not leave me--!"

"Only for a time. I must find someone who has a boat and borrow it. If
there are no others, the trader will lend me his."

"Gregson--?"

"He cannot know what I want of it."

"Motauri--" she cried, appalled, "keep away from that man!"

"I have used his boat before," he soothed. "It will be all right. And we
must--we must have a boat. Remember where we are."...

She had caught his wrist unwittingly, but now she released it. They
stood so for a moment. She was remembering.

"Very well," she said, subdued.

"You will be safe here," he assured her. "Stay close in the brush.
Nobody passes this last house. And when I come I will sing a little,
very quietly, to let you know. Good-bye, Hokoolele--!"

"Good-bye," she said, with a catch at her throat and a strange
foreboding.

Abruptly he had vanished....

How long Miss Matilda crouched in her thicket by the beach of Wailoa she
could not have told. It seemed an eternity. The night clouded down, even
the stars were veiled. An on-shore breeze whined forlornly across the
sands. Her fever had passed. She was damp, bedraggled, bruised and
aching, soiled with mud. The wind sought her out, cut through her limp
garments.... She waited, shivering.

She was very much alone. She felt helpless beyond anything she had ever
experienced, as if the props of life were fallen away. And so they were,
for those she had known she had thrust behind and Motauri's magic no
longer sustained her. Worse than all was the pressure gathering in her
mind, a tide of doubt that she had to deny, like the rising fill in a
lock. She dared not let herself think. Still no Motauri.

Benumbed, exhausted, sunk in hebetude, she waited until she could wait
no more, until intolerable suspense drove her blindly. She crept through
the bush and so came suddenly to the edge of a clearing by a native
hut--to see what it was written she should see at that particular
moment....

Before the door burned a blink of fire that revealed the dwelling and
its tattered alcove of sewn leaves, as if the scene had been set with
footlights. It was a very simple little domestic scene. On a fibre mat
sprawled a woman. She might have been young, but she was old in the
native way, flabby, coarse-grained, with sagging wrinkles, with
lusterless hair streaming about her face. A ragged, sleeveless wrapper
rendered her precarious service, bulging with flesh. At her side
squatted a youngster, an imp of seven it might be, who noisily chewed a
stick of sugarcane and spat wide the pith. The woman kept one hand free
to admonish him--by his beady eye he required it--and to tend a
simmering pot. With the other, tranquilly, she nursed a naked babe.

There was no reticence about that firelight, no possible illusion--and
certainly no romance. In grim fidelity it threw up each bald detail, the
cheerful dirt and squalor, the easy poverty, the clutter--the plain,
animal, every-day facts of a savage home. It touched the bronze skins
with splashes of copper, shone in the woman's vacant, bovine stare and
gleamed along the generous swell of her breast. And just there it made a
wholly candid display of the central figure in this pantomime--the brown
babe. Not so brown as he would be some day, indeed quite softly tinted,
but unmistakably Polynesian. A most elemental mite of humanity. A most
eloquent interpreter of primordial delights. A fat little rascal, with a
bobbing fuzzy poll and squirming limbs. And hungry--so very frankly, so
very boisterously hungry--!

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Matilda went away from that place.

She had a confused idea of flight, but her feet were rebellious, and
before she had taken twenty steps she was lost. Without direction,
groping in the darkness, even then by some intuition she kept to the
trees and the undergrowth for hiding. That was her only effective
impulse--to hide. She could not go on. Under heaven there was no going
back. People were awake all about her in the huts. More people would be
strolling and skylarking along the chapel path, supposing she could have
found it. She had the sole, miserable craving that the earth might open
to receive her.

And thus it was chance alone that guided her course through the fringe
of the village, through garden and sand strip, and that brought her
finally, all unseen, to the wall of a large house, to a post, to a
slatted gallery aglow inside with lamps, and to her second discovery....

"Curse your black soul!" a voice was saying, with heavy, slow brutality,
"when I tell you to drink--you drink! D'y' hear?"

"No can do, Mahrster," came the faltering response, in the broken _bêche
de mer_ that is the token of the white man's domination in the islands.
"That fella rum taboo 'long me altogether."

"What do I care for your taboo? _Drink!_"

Fell an interval of silence.

"Drink again--drink hearty!"

Captain Hull Gregson sat leaning forward by the side of his living-room
table, shoving down the length of it a glass that brimmed and sparkled
redly. On his knee, in a fist like a ham, he balanced a black bottle.
His jutted jaw took a line with the outthrust arm, with the lowering
brow, as if the whole implacable force and will of the man were so
projected.

And at the end, facing him, stood Motauri--a different, a sadly
different Motauri. A Motauri not in the least the joyous woodland faun
in his attitude now. His proud crest was lowered, stripped of its
wreath; his magnificent muscles drooped. He stood humbly, with chest
collapsed, on shuffling feet, as became an inferior. He drew the back of
his hand across his lips and eyed the white man furtively....

"That's better," grunted Gregson, and leaned back to set the bottle on
the table amid a litter of odds and ends, books, papers, a revolver, a
tarred tiller-rope with a roseknot. "Perhaps that'll loosen your
tongue. First time I ever seen your breed hold off the stuff. But then,
you're one of these independent lads, ain't you? Old chief stock, you
call yourself. Plenty wild Kanaka, you.... Plenty bold, bad fella
you--hey?"

"No, Mahrster," said Motauri, deprecating.

Gregson regarded him with a hard smile.

"And now you're going to tell me why you tried to sneak a boat at this
hour o' night."

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"You've said that a dozen times, and it's no better. It don't pass. Go
fish? Go soak your black head! What are you up to, hey? Come now--tell."

Motauri made no answer, and the other controlled himself. Behind his
dark mask the big trader was under the empire of some powerful emotion.
His hands clenched and opened again, trembling a little. His face shone
like wet leather. But it was in a tone oddly detached, musing, that he
went on.

"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide
anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy
thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it
was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd--" A
purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass
with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that
it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.

"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.

"You lie--blast you--it was!"

"No, Mahrster."

"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long
missionary--that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"

He crouched like a beast, ferine--all the obscure and diabolic passion
of him ready to spring.

"No, Mahrster."

Gregson glared at him steadily.

"What did you want of that boat?"

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.

"The trouble with me--" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own
eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he
inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They
can't. Why--what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe--leastways
brown. And she--_she_--

"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near
her--touch her--play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around
her--to--to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms--!" The words
came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've
sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might
crawl where her little feet could walk on me....

"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such
things? What have you got to do with heaven? Could _you_ see anything in
that blind-like look sideways--and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you
know what level eyebrows and a fullish underlip mean--hey? Do you? A
lip like a drop of blood--

"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's
something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never
give up--never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by
my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it--to-night or
ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you
talk?"

It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the
rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding
across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the
eaves-dropper--whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose
desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and
betrayed her--Miss Matilda....

"You--!" said Gregson. "You--!"

He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread
fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored
breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman
collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and
Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly
paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and
poured himself a drink and tossed it off.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his
collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great
hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"

His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he
coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face
was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he
stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter
took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as
quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.

"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"

He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch,
her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.

"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No--you're
none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow--and you'll crawl on your knees
to have me. And that father of yours--that sniveling old
hypocrite--he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....

"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and
nights of perdition, wanting you--you sweet, cold, white saint you--and
a devil after all!

"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid
to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me--a common
trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the
hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to
touch! And what are you now--that's been out in the night--?"

He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his
soul like scum on a dark pool.

"With a nigger!" he screamed.

All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the
face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to
repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the rest was
fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side
to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the
cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred
toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty
effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant--long enough
to grab the revolver.

"_Nigger_--I said!"

But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping,
pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his
heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....

       *       *       *       *       *

"Hokoolele! Hokoolele--! Up and make haste!"

Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.

"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has
seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"

"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.

"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will
know anything, about us--"

She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....

"Please go--"

"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you
were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."

"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.

"Hokoolele--what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me
now!"

"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"

He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.

"You mean you do not want me any more?"

"No--!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the
brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that
can stir wild blood to frenzy--by love and shame, by drink, by battle
and triumph--then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the
heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive
lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her
up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that
sinister place by force....

She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her
father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.

"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"

He came through the window of her room.

"Gracious me!--have you been sleeping out there?"

She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for
it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping--with what dreams!

But his next words showed her the truth.

"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave.
Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just
come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had
some kind of a stroke, it seems--very sudden--all alone at the time. I
shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are
so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped--!"

He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she
too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed
threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine,
and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her
life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine,
and nobody would ever know--unless Motauri--

Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer
through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.

  _"Bosom, here is love for you,
    O bosom, cool as night!"_

But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was
never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having
achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream
and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by
way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts.
But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains
before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in
a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.




THE PRICE OF THE HEAD


The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name,
which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer
intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and
a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain
friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue
of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must
show some trait by which the friend can catch and hold. How, then,
explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett
by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.

There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his
fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it
wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the
road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese
half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because
the brandy was very bad.

On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long
lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not
smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that
sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other
part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some
chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song
and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so he persisted.
That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in
alcohol....

Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people
are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much
an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient
little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a
complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red
cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring
suspended from his nose.

Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service
of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco
and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would
be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles,
where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was
the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.

It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the
virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility
can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the
black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence
the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when
Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, the Chinese half-caste. "Better you
come catch this fella mahster b'long you. He fella plenty too much
drunk, galow."

Karaki left the shade of the copra shed where he had been waiting an
hour or more and came forward to receive the sagging bulk that was
thrust out of doors. He took it scientifically by wrist and armpit and
swung toward the beach. Moy Jack stood on his threshold watching with
cynic interest.

"Hy, you," he said; "what name you make so much bobeley 'long that fella
mahster? S'pose you bling me all them fella pearl; me pay you one dam
fella good trade--my word!"

It annoyed Moy Jack that he had to provide the white man with a daily
drunk in exchange for the little seed pearls with which Pellett was
always flush. He knew where those pearls came from. Karaki did forbidden
diving in the lagoon to get them. Moy Jack made a good thing of the
traffic, but he could have made a much better thing by trading directly
with Karaki for a few sticks of tobacco.

"What name you give that fella mahster all them fella pearl?" demanded
Moy Jack offensively. "He plenty too much no good, galow. Close up he
die altogether."

Karaki did not reply. He looked at Moy Jack once, and the half-caste
trailed off into mutterings. For an instant there showed a strange light
in Karaki's dull eyes, like the flat, green flicker of a turning shark
glimpsed ten fathoms down....

Karaki bore his charge down the beach to the little thatched shelter of
pandanus leaves that was all his home. Tenderly he eased Pellett to a
mat, pillowed his head, bathed him with cool water, brushed the filth
from his hair and whiskers. Pellett's whiskers were true whiskers, the
kind that sprout like the barbels of a catfish, and they were a glorious
coppery, sun-gilt red. Karaki combed them out with a sandalwood comb.
Later he sat by with a fan and kept the flies from the bloated face of
the drunkard.

It was a little past midday when something brought him scurrying into
the open. For weeks he had been studying every weather sign. He knew
that the change was due when the southeast trade begins to harden
through this flawed belt of calms and cross winds. And now, as he
watched, the sharp shadows began to blur along the sands and a film
crept over the face of the sun.

All Fufuti was asleep. The house boys snored in the back veranda. Under
his netting the agent dreamed happily of big copra shipments and
bonuses. Moy Jack dozed among his bottles. Nobody would have been mad
enough to stir abroad in the noon hour of repose: nobody but Karaki, the
untamed black, who cared nothing for custom nor yet for dreams. The
light pad of his steps was lost in the surf drone on the barrier reefs.
He flitted to and fro like a wrath. And while Fufuti slept he applied
himself to a job for which he had never been hired....

Karaki had long ago ascertained two vital facts: where the key to the
trade room was kept and where the rifles and ammunition were hidden. He
opened the trade room and selected three bolts of turkey red cloth, a
few knives, two cases of tobacco, and a fine small ax. There was much
else he might have taken as well. But Karaki was a man of simple tastes,
and efficient.

With the ax he next forced the rifle chest and removed therefrom one
Winchester and a big box of cartridges. With the ax again he broke into
the boat sheds. Finally with the ax he smashed the bottoms out of the
whaleboat and the two cutters so they would be of no use to any one for
many days to come. It was really a very handy little ax, a true
tomahawk, ground to a shaving edge. Karaki took a workman's pleasure in
its keen, deep strokes. It was almost his chief prize.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the beach lay a big proa, a stout outrigger canoe; of the kind
Karaki's own people used at Bougainville, so high of prow and stern as
to be nearly crescent-shaped. The northwest monsoon of last season had
washed it ashore at Fufuti, and Karaki had repaired it, by the agent's
own order. This proa he now launched in the lagoon, and aboard of it he
stored his loot.

Of supplies he had to make a hasty selection. He took a bag of rice and
another of sweet potatoes. He took as many coconuts as he could carry in
a net in three trips. He took a cask of water and a box of biscuit.

And here happened an odd thing.

In his search for the biscuit he came upon the agent's private store of
liquor, a dozen bottles of rare Irish whisky. He glanced at them and
passed them by. He knew what the stuff was, and he was a savage, a black
man. But he passed it by. When Moy Jack heard of that later he
remembered what he had seen in Karaki's eyes and ventured the surprising
prediction that Karaki would never be taken alive.

When all was ready Karaki went back to his thatch and aroused
Christopher Alexander Pellett.

"Hy, mahster, you come 'long me."

Mr. Pellett sat up and looked at him. That is to say, he looked. Whether
he saw anything or not belongs among the obscurer questions of
psychopathy.

"Too late," said Mr. Pellett profoundly. "This shop is closed. Copy boy!
Give all those damned loafers good night. I'm--I'm goin'--bed!"

Whereupon he fell flat on his back.

"Wake up, mahster," insisted Karaki, shaking him. "You too much strong
fella sleep. Hy-ah, mahster! Rum! You like'm rum? You catch'm rum any
amount--my word! Plenty rum, mahster!"

But even this magic call, which never failed to rouse Pellett from his
couch in the mornings, fell now on deaf ears. Pellett had had his
skinful, and the fitness of things decreed that he should soak the clock
around.

Karaki knelt beside him, pried him up until he could get a shoulder
under his middle, and lifted him like a loose bag of meal. Pellett
weighed one hundred and fifty pounds; Karaki not much more than a
hundred. Yet in some deft coolie fashion of his own the little black man
packed his burden, with the feet dragging behind, clear down to the
beach. Moreover, he managed to get it aboard the proa. Pellett was half
drowned and the proa half swamped. But Karaki managed.

No man saw their departure. Fufuti still dreamed on. Long before the
agent awoke to wrath and ruin their queer crescent craft had slipped
from the lagoon and faded away on the wings of the trade.

That first day Karaki had all he could do to keep the proa running
straight before the wind. Big smoky seas came piling up out of the
southeast and would have piled aboard if he had given them the least
chance. He was only a heathen who did not know a compass from a degree
of latitude. But his forefathers used to people these waters on
cockleshell voyages that make the venture of Columbus look like a ride
in a ferry-boat. Karaki bailed with a tin pan and sailed with a mat and
steered with a paddle: but he proceeded.

       *       *       *       *       *

Along about sunrise Mr. Pellett stirred in the bilge and raised a
peagreen face. He took one bewildered glance overside at the seething
waste and collapsed with a groan. After a decent interval he tried
again, but this was an illusion that would not pass, and he twisted
around to Karaki sitting crouched and all aglisten with spray in the
stern.

"Rum!" he demanded.

Karaki shook his head, and a haunted look crept into Pellett's eyes.

"Take--take away all that stuff," he begged pathetically, pointing at
the ocean....

Thereafter for two days he was very, very sick, and he learned how a
small boat in any kind of a sea can move forty-seven different ways
within one and the same minute. This is no trifling bit of knowledge, as
those who have acquired it can tell. It was nearly fatal to Pellett.

On the third day he awoke with a mouth and a stomach of fumed leather
and a great weakness, but otherwise in command of his few faculties. The
gale had fallen and Karaki was quietly preparing fresh coconuts. Pellett
quaffed two before he thought to miss the brandy with which his
breakfast draft was always laced. But when he remembered the milk choked
in his throat.

"Me like'm rum."

"No got'm rum."

Pellett looked forward and aft, to windward and to lee. There was a
great deal of horizon in sight, but nothing else. For the first time he
was aware of a strangeness in events.

"What name you come so far?" he asked.

"We catch'm one big fella wind," explained Karaki.

Pellett was in no condition to question his statement nor to observe
from the careful stocking of the proa that they had not been blown to
sea on a casual fishing trip. Pellett had other things to think of. Some
of the things were pink and others purple and others were striped like
the rainbow in most surprising designs, and all were highly novel and
interesting. They came thronging out of the vasty deep to entertain
Christopher Alexander Pellett. Which they did.

You cannot cut off alcohol from a man who has been continuously pickled
for two years without results more or less picturesque. These were days
when the proa went shouting across the empty southern seas to madrigal
and choric song. Tied hand and foot and lashed under a thwart, Pellett
raved in the numbers of his innocent youth. It would have been singular
hearing had there been any to hear, but there was only Karaki, who did
not care for the lesser Cavalier poets and on whom whole pages of
"Atalanta in Calydon" were quite wasted. Now and then he threw a
dipper-ful of sea water over the white man, or spread a mat to keep the
sun from him, or fed him coconut milk by force. Karaki was a poor
audience, but an excellent nurse. Also, he combed Pellett's whiskers
twice every day.

They ran into calms. But the trade picked them up again more gently, so
that Karaki ventured to make westing, and they fled under skies as
bright as polished brass.

  _My heart is within me
    As an ash in the fire;
  Whosoever hath seen me
    Without lute, without lyre,
  Shall sing of me grievous things,
        even things that were ill
        to desire--_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett, whose face began to show a
little more like flesh and a little less like rotten kelp....

Whenever a fair chance offered Karaki landed on the lee of some one of
the tiny islets with which the Santa Cruz region is peppered and would
make shift to cook rice and potatoes in the tin dipper. This was risky,
for one day the islet proved to be inhabited. Two white men in a cutter
came out to stop them. Karaki could not hide his resemblance to a
runaway nigger, and he did not try to. But when the cutter approached
within fifty yards he suddenly announced himself as a runaway nigger
with a gun. He left the cutter sinking and one of the men dead.

"There's a bullet hole alongside me here," said Pellett from under the
thwart. "You'd better plug it."

Karaki plugged it and released his passenger, who sat up and began
stretching himself with a certain naive curiosity of his own body.

"So you're real," observed Pellett, staring hard at Karaki. "By George,
you _are_, and that's comfort."

He was right. Karaki was very real.

"What side you take'm this fella canoe?"

"Balbi," said Karaki, using the native word for Bougainville.

Pellett whistled. An eight-hundred-mile evasion in an open boat was a
considerable undertaking. It enlisted his respect. Moreover, he had just
had emphatic proof of the efficiency of this little black man.

"Balbi all some home b'long you?"

"Yes."

"All right, commodore," said Pellett. "Lead on. I don't know why you
shipped me for supercargo, but I'll see you through."

       *       *       *       *       *

Strangely--or perhaps not so strangely--the whole Fufuti interval of his
history had been fading from his brain while the poison was ebbing from
his tissues. The Christopher Alexander Pellett that emerged was one from
earlier years: pretty much of a wreck, it was true, and a feckless,
indolent, paltry creature at best, but ordinarily human and rather more
than ordinarily intelligent.

He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet
potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in
the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours
together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this
pair--simple savage and convalescent drunkard--but there was never any
question as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third
week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate
nothing for a whole day.

"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut
and kept none for yourself."

"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.

Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours
while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her
outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow
was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back
into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company
for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had
now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.

But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them
and laid them one by one.

       *       *       *       *       *

When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of
their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a
shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of
Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the
heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of
thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate
drop of moisture on the point of a knife.

On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green
wall that built up slowly across the west.

Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain
triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons,
some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them
anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without
instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki,
however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over
his shoulder into the east.

The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a
restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki
must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped
the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts
and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small
outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very
lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the first
rush of the hurricane caught them.

Karaki himself was reduced to a rattle of bones in a dried skin, and
Pellett could scarce lift a hand. But Karaki fought for Pellett among
the waves that leaped up like sheets of fire on the reef. Why or how
they got through neither could have said. Perhaps because it was written
that after drink, illness, madness, and starvation the white man should
be saved by the black man again and a last time from ravening waters.
When they came ashore on the islet they were both nearly flayed, but
they were alive, and Karaki still gripped Pellett's shirt....

For a week they stayed while Pellett fattened on unlimited coconut and
Karaki tinkered the proa. It had landed in a water-logged tangle, but
Karaki's treasures were safe. He got his bearings from a passing native
fisherman, and then he knew that _all_ his treasures were safe. His home
island lay across Bougainville Strait, the stretch of water just
beyond....

"Balbi over there?" asked Pellett.

"Yes," said Karaki.

"And a mighty good thing too," cried Pellett heartily. "This is the
limit of British authority, old boy. Big fella mahster b'long Beretani
stop'm here, no can go that side."

Karaki was quite aware of it. If he feared one thing in the world, he
feared the Fiji High Court and its Resident Commissioner for the
Southern Solomons, who did sure justice upon all who transgressed in its
jurisdiction. Once beyond the Strait he might still be liable for the
stolen goods and the broken contract. But never--this was the
point--never could he be punished for anything he might choose to do
over there in Bougainville.

So Karaki was content.

And so was Christopher Alexander Pellett. His body had been wrung and
swept and scoured, and he had downed his devils. Sweet air and sunshine
were on his lips and in his heart. His bones were sweet in him. As his
vigor returned he swam the lagoon or helped Karaki at the proa. He would
spend hours hugging the warm sand or rejoicing in the delicate tracery
of some tiny sea shell, singing softly to himself while the ground swell
hushed along the beach, savoring life as he never had done.

"Oh, this is good--good!" he said.

Karaki puzzled him. Not that he vexed himself, for a smiling wonder at
everything, almost childlike, filled him these days. But he thought of
this taciturn savage, how he had capped thankless service with rarest
sacrifice.

And now that he could consider soberly, the why of it eluded him. Why?
Affection? Friendship? It must be so, and he warmed toward the silent
little man with the sunken eyes and the expressionless face from which
he could never raise a wink.

"Hy, you, Karaki, what name you no laugh all same me? What? You too much
fright 'long that fella stuff you steal? Forget it, you old black scamp.
If they ever trouble you, I'll square them somehow. By George, I'll say
I stole it myself!"

Karaki only grunted and sat down to clean his Winchester with a bit of
rag and some drops of oil he had crushed from a dried coconut.

"No, that don't reach him either," murmured Pellett, baffled. "I'd like
to know what's going on under that topknot of yours, old chap. You're
like Kipling's cat, that walks by himself. God knows I'm not ungrateful.
I wish I could show you--"

He sprang up.

"Karaki! Me one big fella friend 'long you: savee? You one big fella
friend 'long me: savee? We two dam big fella friend, my word!... What?"

"Yes," said Karaki. No other response. He looked at Pellett and he
looked away toward Bougainville. "Yes," he said, "my word," and went on
cleaning his gun--the black islander, inscrutable, incomprehensible, an
enigma always, and to the end.

       *       *       *       *       *

The end came two days later at Bougainville.

Under a gorgeous dawn they came into a bay that opened before their prow
as with jeweled arms of welcome. The land lay lapped in bright garments
like a sleeper half awakened, all flushed and smiling, sensuous
intimate, thrilling with life, breathing warm scents--

These were some of the foolish phrases Pellett babbled to himself as he
leaped ashore and ran up on a rocky point to see and to feel and to draw
all the charm of the place to himself.

Meanwhile Karaki, that simple and efficient little man, was proceeding
methodically about his own affairs. He landed his bolts of cloth, his
tobacco, his knives, and the other loot. He landed his box of cartridges
and his rifle and his fine tomahawk. The goods were somewhat damaged by
sea water, but the weapons had been carefully cleaned and polished....

Pellett was declaiming poetry aloud to the alluring solitude when he was
aware of a gentle footfall and turned, surprised to find Karaki standing
just behind him with the rifle at his hip and the ax in his hand.

"Well," said Pellett cheerfully, "what d'you want, old chappie?"

"Me like," said Karaki, while there gleamed in his eyes the strange
light that Moy Jack had glimpsed there, like the flicker of a turning
shark; "me like'm too much one fella head b'long you!"

"What? Head! Whose--my head?"

"Yes," said Karaki simply.

That was the way of it. That was all the mystery. The savage had fallen
enamored of the head of the beachcomber, and Christopher Alexander
Pellett had been betrayed by his fatal red whiskers. In Karaki's country
a white man's head, well smoked, is a thing to be desired above wealth,
above lands and chiefships, fame, and the love of women. In all
Karaki's country was no head like the head of Pellett. Therefore Karaki
had served to win it with the patience and single faith of a Jacob. For
this he had schemed and waited, committed theft and murder, expended
sweat and cunning, starved and denied himself, nursed, watched, tended,
fed, and saved his man that he might bring the head alive and on the
hoof--so to speak--to the spot where he could remove it at leisure and
enjoy the fruits of his labor in safety.

       *       *       *       *       *

Pellett saw all this at a flash, understood it so far as any white could
understand: the whole elemental and stupendous simplicity of it. And
standing there in his new strength and sanity under the fair promise of
the morning, he gave a laugh that pealed across the waters and started
the sea birds from their cliffs, the deep-throated laugh of a man who
fathoms and accepts the last great jest....

For finally, by corrected list, the possessions of Christopher Alexander
Pellett were these: his name, still intact; the ruins of some rusty
ducks; his precious red whiskers--and a soul which had been neatly
recovered, renewed, refurbished, reanimated, and restored to him by his
good friend Karaki.

  _"Thou shouldst die as he dies,
    For whom none sheddeth tears;
  Filling thine eyes
    And fulfilling thine ears
  With the brilliance ... the bloom
      and the beauty...."_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett over the waters of the bay,
and then whirled, throwing wide his arms:

"Shoot, damn you! It's cheap at the price!"




THE SLANTED BEAM


All the world meets beneath the towering spire of Shway Dagohn, which
pins back the clouds and throws a shadow between India and the China
Sea. All paths in the East tend toward that great pagoda with its mighty
shaft of gold. Around the sweep of its pedestal, among its terraced
mazes, is one of the common crossroads where men as various as their
skins and their faiths come to mingle; to worship or to wonder: seeking
each in his own fashion whatever clue to the meaning of things he can
take from that vast finger which carries the eye and the soul up and up
and points forever to the heart of mystery.

So it was natural enough, as it was also inevitable and ordained since
the beginning of time, that Cloots should have met the headman of
Apyodaw at last in one of the tiny shrines clustering under the Temple
of the Slanted Beam on Thehngoottara Hill....

The shrine in no way differed from the many lesser chapels and _zaydees_
that lined the ramp and the inner and outer platforms. Together they
might have seemed a jumble of booths thrown up there to attract the
unhurrying, sweet-voiced, hip-swinging natives who drifted and gossiped
like holiday makers at a fair.

But those booths were built of enduring stone with a serene and flawless
symmetry. And the wares they offered were the philosophies of an old,
old religion. And the folk themselves in their thighbound silks of
softened maroon and olive and citrine and cutch, with the pink fillets
about their brows and their open and twinkling brown faces, were a very
ancient folk indeed, who knew what they knew and did as they did a
small matter of thirty centuries ago.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment
of color and contrast.

The pagoda and its whole base, dominating the city, swam in a level
flood of late sunset. Every surface had taken an almost intolerable
richness and warmth, from the far, jeweled spike of the _htee_ four
hundred feet above, down through fire-gilt and smoldering saffron to the
pigeon-blood ruby of the monastery roofs below. Even the shadows gave
off a purplish haze. But here, inside this plain, windowless cell of
white-washed wall and gray pavement, the visitor passed with the swift
relief of a diver's plunge to cool and quiet, and the pervading peace of
the Excellent Law.

At the end facing the doorway was the sole furnishing--a deep niche and
altar where sat the Buddha in perpetual contemplation.

Some forgotten devotee, toiling wearily like the rest of us up the
ladder of existence, had once earned the right to skip a step or two by
the gift of this life-size image. Some forgotten artist had acquired
merit by faithfully carving and lacquering it on teak, with the left
hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the
knee--with the calm and passionless regard which somehow, no matter what
the medium, no matter what conventions interpose, is always so surely
portrayed. But that had been long and long ago. Decay had eaten through
those painted and gilded robes. The soot of many years had tanned those
sacred lineaments to an obscure and homely human tint.

Along the near edge of the altar lay a shallow trough for the better
disposal of such offerings as the shrine might receive: fresh flowers
and flakes of popped and colored rice, incense sticks of which the
vapor rose in a slow, unwavering veil, and a row of paper flags to
record the prayers of the pious.

Midway there burned a single taper, a point of light that dimly
illumined the holy spot and revealed to Cloots, as he entered, its only
other occupant.

On a bamboo mat knelt a young girl, fairly on her knees, as the Rule
allows for such frail creatures. Her black hair was drawn sleek as a
bird's wing. At her breast she held a new lotus blossom, no softer nor
more delicate than the fingers that offered it. Her little feet were
carefully tucked within the silken _tamehn_. Her head was bowed. And the
gleaming curve of her body, all her lithe vigor, was subdued, was
humbled, to the act of ecstatic supplication before the Excellent One.

Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative
observer of all these details. They were familiar to him. He understood
them, so far as any perceptive, far-wandering white is likely to
understand. They ministered to him.

He approved the flaring sunset and he approved this discreet
retreat--the hushed and perfumed air of worship no less than the stir
and brilliance outside. He could interpret the sigh of imploring lips
and the trouble of a fluttered little breast before the altar as keenly
as the murmur and laughter of the barefoot crowds and the distant music
of numberless pagoda chimes. He enjoyed the more intimate delights of
exotic life as well as its bright outward cheek. Particularly, having
just renewed his contact with an engaging and responsive native people,
he enjoyed this opportunity with a native girl--decidedly engaging and
responsive probably.

No mere brutal, casual sensualist was Cloots. He found it good to be
alive. He found it very good to be back in a country where he was master
of the idiom and the customs. He found it exceeding good to be
contemplating the skillful conquest of such a pilgrim, so earnest, so
adorable, and so appropriately concerned. The lady, he gathered, was
praying for a husband....

He smiled, and when he turned his glance it encountered the eyes of the
headman of Apyodaw, who had entered noiselessly at his side and who now
stood between him and the entrance.

"I knew I should find thee, Shway Cloots."

It said something for Cloots that he did not cease smiling all at once,
that he gave no outward sign, and that he was able to answer quite soon
and quite steadily in the same dialect.

"Hast been looking for me, Moung Poh Sin?"

"I did not have to look, Shway. It was written."

"Hast been waiting for me, then?"

"It was written I would have to wait."

"Was it also written that I had become any safe or easy game to track
into a corner?" demanded Cloots.

"I did not track thee."

"Half an hour ago I left the docks, newly landed from Moulmein. No man
could have given thee word of my return. No man knew if ever I should
return."

"I knew."

"By that I mark thee a liar and a fool, Moung Poh Sin, for I knew it not
myself. I see now thou hast been watching and spying for me. By the
harbor, or by the pagoda here, belike. A long vigil.... But it can
profit nothing. What could it profit thee? I am not the kind to be
followed and hunted down."

"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I
came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their
order."

"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"

"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "at big-bell time, I am to
slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...

Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been
surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely
he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes
in this inclosed space. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to
run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket
so that the buttons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he
inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly.
"Stand away from that door, dog! Remove--stand off!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.

       *       *       *       *       *

Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of
white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by
Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a
specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint
and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or
again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources
and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which
may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart
of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.

This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has
proved at times extremely discomposing.

Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of
Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched
laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to
be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the
narrow-edged coat; his sturdy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_
lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green
jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And
he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part
Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of
dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he
would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the
fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat
hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was
just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing
clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known
him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn
himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions,
beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate,
injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or
doubt.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought
process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those
elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing
assurance. It made him cautious.

"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the
business."

"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."

"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."

"It is not money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My
heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the
paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with
laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or
swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_,
the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that
treasure now?"

"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show
himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"

"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth
between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling
maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he
could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like
Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the
shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his
breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in
pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had
found Mah Soung....

But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he
had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender
yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were
lifted to the sacred image.

A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that
now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures
a bit too far off white man's ground.

He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her
water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured
invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the
Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and
Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken
forever.

She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They
had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was
not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and
chill.

"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how
my child died--"

Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.

"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid
for twice."

"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with the _nats_ and
such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in
due course."

"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest
market rate, at least--But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee,
Moung Poh Sin."

But Moung Poh Sin did not move.

"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous,
simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks
when all will be paid."

And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be
solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to
leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost
that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had
been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and
painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past
was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little
heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a
superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized
capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....

He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of
the figure by the doorway--and he did some rapid calculating.

Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark,
Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake
and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed
mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air.
Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze
and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants,
bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and
sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was
drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would
fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda,
"the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir
itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous
battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.

       *       *       *       *       *

Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated
limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would
have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half
of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as
conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the
various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this
ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so
strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid
under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a
delicious interpretation.

If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of
this, the time had come to make it good.

He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little
farther to the right....

"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these
matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known
where I have been since I went away?"

"No, Shway."

"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan,
the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted
leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have
done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show
my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a
minstrel's harp?"

"Yes, Shway."

"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and
tore the head from its body?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that
door and of me--and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient
and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered.
But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege
of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these
threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy
information, not to have learned whence I came--and whether I would be
likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.

"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine
is surely forfeit, as I told thee--here by the Slanted Beam when the sun
sets. What will be will be. It is written."

Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The
shot burst with a racketing smash against the eardrums. To any on the
platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But
within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then
dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and
that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible
result.

At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and
expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in
the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading
daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....

"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun,"
explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without
the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."

       *       *       *       *       *

Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe,
picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see
the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of
it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of
steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.

Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.

"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will
be swinging out the striker of the big bell."

All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet
and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the
topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy
glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....

Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed
and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he
had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the
end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the
white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and
the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned
operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands,
steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing
shot.

From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast
booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic
stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at
last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted
knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do
what he was there to do.

"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....

Outside it had gone quite dark.

Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to
gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern
port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on
many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare
simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the
death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with
precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against
a wondering throng.

"How long has he been dead?" asked the assistant inspector.

"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's
still warm."

"Instantaneous?"

"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say,
with this _dah_." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to
its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling
about it."

"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.

"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the
frozen Buddhist hell by taking a life?"

"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd
call orthodox in the hills."

"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the
hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system
rather older."

"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than
any system."

"But still--to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"

"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."

Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.

"You knew this chap?"

"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising
about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the
people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer--you know the type.
Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."

       *       *       *       *       *

The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots--that was quite
sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down
certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light
was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained
by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation
brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the
glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.

But the doctor's question was quietly put.

"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"

"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I
could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people.
There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs.
And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."

"No theory yet?"

"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse,
a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."

"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"

       *       *       *       *       *

The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind
the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There
it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward
in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and
passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition--a life-size image,
whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful
features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary
image....

At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a
trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And
then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back
into the niche for a support and that this--this was a substitute.

"Dead!" he breathed.

The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.

"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!...
Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe
much in deviations from the normal--in aberrations from the positive,
eh?--even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any
court--west of Suez, I mean--I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead
when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as
certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead
the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of
existence, _a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap
there on the floor_!"

"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended
animation, now--or what?"

"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical
science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at
that."

They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.

"'There are more things 'twixt'--" began the doctor.

"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.

"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...

He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast
beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have
been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes
where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the
heart--three times.




THE RED MARK


Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a
proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press
twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for
five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But
the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his
capabilities--as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.

M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you
comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We
are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the
populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are
artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even
landholders and concessionaires--enjoying the high privilege of forced
labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very
philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the
government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find
no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the
position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us
from Balade to Nouméa, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of
Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate
and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and
invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight
thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have
been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have been set aside in a sort of
infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us,
perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by
the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have
to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.

He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or
profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from choice. It is his
capability! It is the thing he likes to do.

Me, I am even with him. I am even with him against all time. Should it
be my fate to pass through his hands some day, should he stand to
perform his last dreadful offices for me, still am I even with him. I
would grin from under the slide itself and I would say to him--"M. de
Nou, I am even with you!" But I would not tell him how. I would turn
silent from those haunted yellow eyes, half-understanding and ravening
at me, and I would die content to leave him to his damnation. No, I
would not tell!... Only I am telling you, truly, so that perhaps this
tale may reach some of our friends who have escaped from New Caledonia
into the world again. They will remember, and they will rejoice to hear
how I evened the score on M. de Nou. Listen:

It was soon after my release from the Collective--when I was considered
to be properly chastened by residence in the cells--that I had the
ill-luck to meet this individual.

You can see for yourself I was never built for rude labor. But I have a
certain deftness of my fingers and perhaps also--well, a certain
polish--what?... Monsieur agrees? Too kind! Your servant, Monsieur....
Anyway, it was quite natural I should find employment with Maître
Sergeo, he who keeps the barber shop in the Rue des Fleurs.

Maître Sergeo is a worthy man, a libéré, which means he was formerly a
life convict himself, you understand, though since restored to certain
rights within the colony limits. Requiring an assistant at his lathery
trade he applied to the penitentiary on Ile de Nou.

"Here is a brisk fellow," said the sub-commandant, leading me out like a
horse at a fair. "Number 7897. Docile and clever. Condemned for eight
years. Having served his Collective with a clear record. If you are ever
dull about your place he will sing you the latest operas. He has all the
polite accomplishments."

"A duke in trouble," suggested Maître Sergeo, regarding me with his
sober twinkle. "What romance!... Perhaps he is the Red Mark himself!"

Strange he should have said that. Strange, too, that I should have heard
the term then and there for the first time in my life. Afterwards I
found it common enough, a kind of by-word among people who affect to
share the inner mysteries of police and crime. And later still I had
good reason to remember it.

Meanwhile the sub-commandant was encouraging no unofficial illusions on
my account.

"I said nothing about a duke," he returned. "But this is a superior
type. He has been a student in his day and even has taken prizes."

"I hope he has not the habit of taking them from the till," said Maître
Sergeo, like a prudent patron. "What was his little affair?"

The sub-commandant consulted my ticket.

"An argument with a knife, it appears. A favorable case. Only his enemy
was so ill-conditioned as to die."

"I shall employ him," decided Maître Sergeo. "A man who is handy with a
knife should also qualify with a razor."

That is how I came, as Bibi-Ri always said, to be scraping throats
instead of cutting them. Myself, I considered the jest rather poor
taste and Bibi-Ri a good deal of a chattering monkey. But what would
you? Nobody could be angry with that mad fellow. He was privileged.

Also, as it happened, Bibi-Ri himself was my single client on this
particular afternoon of which I speak. I recall it with an authentic
clearness: one of those days made in paradise for a reproach upon us
poor wretches in purgatory: the air sweet and mellow, spiced with tropic
blossoms: the sky a blue ravishment: the sunlight tawny in the street
outside as if seen through a glass of rich wine.

It was very quiet and peaceful. From the Place des Cocotiers not far
away one heard the band discoursing. Those convict musicians were
playing _Perle d'Italie_, as I bring to mind: a faded but graceful
melody. One could be almost happy at moments like this, forgetting the
shameful canvas uniform and the mockery of one's freedom on a leash. I
even hummed the tune as I listened and kept the measure with stropping
my blade.

I waited for Bibi-Ri. By an amiable conceit he never failed each day to
get his chin new razored--though in truth it resembled nothing so much
as a small onion: as I often told him.

"That is no reason why you should peel it, sacred farceur!" he would
sputter. "Please to notice I have only the one skin to my face!"

But this day he was late. I missed the merry rascal. His hour went by
and still he did not come. And then, of a sudden, I spied him.

He was passing among the market stalls on the opposite pave:
unmistakable, his quick, spare figure in the jacket tight-buttoned to
the chin as he always wore it and the convict's straw hat pulled low on
his brow. Bibi-Ri in fact. But he never even glanced to my side. At the
pace of a rent collector he hurried by and disappeared.... This is
singular, I thought. What game has he started now?

Presently he came hurrying back again, and this trip I discovered he was
following a girl. But yes! A market girl. Only a slip of a thing--I
could not see her well--a dainty piece she seemed, supple as a kitten,
who threaded her way with a basket on her arm. I caught a flash of bare
ankle white as milk, the sheen of her hair, smooth like a raven's wing:
and she was gone, with Bibi-Ri at her skirts.

Three times I saw them so, through the drifting chaffering throng.

"The rogue!" I murmured. "He has found a better amusement than getting
himself flayed by me. Evidently!"

At the very word came a swift clatter of sandals and who should burst
into the shop upon me but that same Bibi-Ri. I had a finger lifted to
accuse him, but I stopped at sight of his face.

"Dumail!" he cried. "Hide me!"

My faith, he took one's breath away.

"Hide me and say nothing!" he implored.

Well, then I thought he was simply up to some of his jokes again. You
understand there is no actual hiding in a penal settlement, where we all
live in the eye of the police. Nevertheless I obeyed, planted him in my
chair, flung a cloth about his neck and slapped on a great mask of
lather.

I had him well settled under the razor when a shadow edged across the
doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, Bibi-Ri made a jump to rise.

"Animal!" I protested. "Will you take care!"

But I saw him staring with a strange fear.

Just outside by the threshold stood a man, an amazingly tall man,
looking in at us. The sunlight descended on him there like the flood of
a proscenium and he himself might have seemed a player in some stage
burlesque. Yes, one might have smiled at first glimpse of him: a
travesty of fashion in his long black redingote and varnished high hat
of ancient form which added the touch of caricature to his height. One
might have smiled, I say ... but the smile would have frozen next
instant as a ripple freezes on a street puddle.

His face was a moist and shining white, the white of a corpse under the
icy spray of the Morgue. He was old, of reverend years, though still
straight and strong as a poplar. And with that mouth of painted passion
and a great nose curved like a saber and the glittering tiger eyes in
the skull of him--I leave you to imagine any one more appalling.

Close behind him came another: a bandy-legged, squat fellow like a
little black spider, in attendance.

Even then, before knowing, I shrank from them both. They resembled the
bizarre and evil figures of the Guignol that used to haunt my dreams in
childhood. Truly. And the tall one was Polichinelle, the image of a
gratuitous and uncomprehended wickedness.

"Well done, hireling," he observed, in the voice of a crow. "Well done
indeed! You are something of a craftsman too. A good beginning. And a
good subject, who is ripe to have the head shaved from his shoulders, I
should think.... Pray continue," he said. "Cut again and cut deeper!"

Thereupon I became aware he was addressing me, and with the most
pointed, the most sinister interest: and next I found myself still
holding the razor over Bibi-Ri's cheek where he had taken an ugly gash.
That big devil smiled and chuckled in intimate fashion at my red blade.
His eyes shone like topaz. Stupidly I followed their gaze. When I looked
up again ... the two outside were gone.

"Name of God!" I cried. "Who are those?"

Bibi-Ri had fallen back in his chair.

"The vultures!"

Well, I understood fast enough that I had made acquaintance of the
terrible M. de Nou. The other would be his aide and familiar, a former
Polish anarchist--I had heard--whom even the society of convicts
rejected and who bore the fit name: Bombiste. These were the dreaded
servants of the guillotine. But now they had passed I was bold as the
best: I could mock myself.

"Imbeciles!" I laughed. "To be scared by an old bogey like that! The
executioner? So be it. We can curse him and let him go.... Though in
truth he has a sickly notion of an afternoon call,

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