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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of South Sea Tales, by Jack London
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: South Sea Tales
+
+Author: Jack London
+
+Release Date: February, 1998 [EBook #1208]
+Posting Date: November 8, 2009
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOUTH SEA TALES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Theresa Armao
+
+
+
+
+
+SOUTH SEA TALES
+
+By Jack London
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+The House of Mapuhi
+
+The Whale Tooth
+
+Mauki
+
+"Yah! Yah! Yah!"
+
+The Heathen
+
+The Terrible Solomons
+
+The Inevitable White Man
+
+The Seed of McCoy
+
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF MAPUHI
+
+Despite the heavy clumsiness of her lines, the Aorai handled easily in
+the light breeze, and her captain ran her well in before he hove to just
+outside the suck of the surf. The atoll of Hikueru lay low on the water,
+a circle of pounded coral sand a hundred yards wide, twenty miles in
+circumference, and from three to five feet above high-water mark. On the
+bottom of the huge and glassy lagoon was much pearl shell, and from the
+deck of the schooner, across the slender ring of the atoll, the divers
+could be seen at work. But the lagoon had no entrance for even a trading
+schooner. With a favoring breeze cutters could win in through the
+tortuous and shallow channel, but the schooners lay off and on outside
+and sent in their small boats.
+
+The Aorai swung out a boat smartly, into which sprang half a dozen
+brown-skinned sailors clad only in scarlet loincloths. They took the
+oars, while in the stern sheets, at the steering sweep, stood a young
+man garbed in the tropic white that marks the European. The golden
+strain of Polynesia betrayed itself in the sun-gilt of his fair skin
+and cast up golden sheens and lights through the glimmering blue of his
+eyes. Raoul he was, Alexandre Raoul, youngest son of Marie Raoul,
+the wealthy quarter-caste, who owned and managed half a dozen trading
+schooners similar to the Aorai. Across an eddy just outside the
+entrance, and in and through and over a boiling tide-rip, the boat
+fought its way to the mirrored calm of the lagoon. Young Raoul leaped
+out upon the white sand and shook hands with a tall native. The man's
+chest and shoulders were magnificent, but the stump of a right arm,
+beyond the flesh of which the age-whitened bone projected several
+inches, attested the encounter with a shark that had put an end to his
+diving days and made him a fawner and an intriguer for small favors.
+
+"Have you heard, Alec?" were his first words. "Mapuhi has found a
+pearl--such a pearl. Never was there one like it ever fished up in
+Hikueru, nor in all the Paumotus, nor in all the world. Buy it from him.
+He has it now. And remember that I told you first. He is a fool and you
+can get it cheap. Have you any tobacco?"
+
+Straight up the beach to a shack under a pandanus tree Raoul headed.
+He was his mother's supercargo, and his business was to comb all the
+Paumotus for the wealth of copra, shell, and pearls that they yielded
+up.
+
+He was a young supercargo, it was his second voyage in such capacity,
+and he suffered much secret worry from his lack of experience in pricing
+pearls. But when Mapuhi exposed the pearl to his sight he managed to
+suppress the startle it gave him, and to maintain a careless, commercial
+expression on his face. For the pearl had struck him a blow. It was
+large as a pigeon egg, a perfect sphere, of a whiteness that reflected
+opalescent lights from all colors about it. It was alive. Never had
+he seen anything like it. When Mapuhi dropped it into his hand he was
+surprised by the weight of it. That showed that it was a good pearl. He
+examined it closely, through a pocket magnifying glass. It was without
+flaw or blemish. The purity of it seemed almost to melt into the
+atmosphere out of his hand. In the shade it was softly luminous,
+gleaming like a tender moon. So translucently white was it, that when
+he dropped it into a glass of water he had difficulty in finding it. So
+straight and swiftly had it sunk to the bottom that he knew its weight
+was excellent.
+
+"Well, what do you want for it?" he asked, with a fine assumption of
+nonchalance.
+
+"I want--" Mapuhi began, and behind him, framing his own dark face, the
+dark faces of two women and a girl nodded concurrence in what he wanted.
+Their heads were bent forward, they were animated by a suppressed
+eagerness, their eyes flashed avariciously.
+
+"I want a house," Mapuhi went on. "It must have a roof of galvanized
+iron and an octagon-drop-clock. It must be six fathoms long with a porch
+all around. A big room must be in the centre, with a round table in the
+middle of it and the octagon-drop-clock on the wall. There must be four
+bedrooms, two on each side of the big room, and in each bedroom must be
+an iron bed, two chairs, and a washstand. And back of the house must be
+a kitchen, a good kitchen, with pots and pans and a stove. And you must
+build the house on my island, which is Fakarava."
+
+"Is that all?" Raoul asked incredulously.
+
+"There must be a sewing machine," spoke up Tefara, Mapuhi's wife.
+
+"Not forgetting the octagon-drop-clock," added Nauri, Mapuhi's mother.
+
+"Yes, that is all," said Mapuhi.
+
+Young Raoul laughed. He laughed long and heartily. But while he laughed
+he secretly performed problems in mental arithmetic. He had never built
+a house in his life, and his notions concerning house building were
+hazy. While he laughed, he calculated the cost of the voyage to Tahiti
+for materials, of the materials themselves, of the voyage back again
+to Fakarava, and the cost of landing the materials and of building the
+house. It would come to four thousand French dollars, allowing a margin
+for safety--four thousand French dollars were equivalent to twenty
+thousand francs. It was impossible. How was he to know the value of such
+a pearl? Twenty thousand francs was a lot of money--and of his mother's
+money at that.
+
+"Mapuhi," he said, "you are a big fool. Set a money price."
+
+But Mapuhi shook his head, and the three heads behind him shook with
+his.
+
+"I want the house," he said. "It must be six fathoms long with a porch
+all around--"
+
+"Yes, yes," Raoul interrupted. "I know all about your house, but it
+won't do. I'll give you a thousand Chili dollars."
+
+The four heads chorused a silent negative.
+
+"And a hundred Chili dollars in trade."
+
+"I want the house," Mapuhi began.
+
+"What good will the house do you?" Raoul demanded. "The first hurricane
+that comes along will wash it away. You ought to know."
+
+"Captain Raffy says it looks like a hurricane right now."
+
+"Not on Fakarava," said Mapuhi. "The land is much higher there. On this
+island, yes. Any hurricane can sweep Hikueru. I will have the house on
+Fakarava. It must be six fathoms long with a porch all around--"
+
+And Raoul listened again to the tale of the house. Several hours he
+spent in the endeavor to hammer the house obsession out of Mapuhi's
+mind; but Mapuhi's mother and wife, and Ngakura, Mapuhi's daughter,
+bolstered him in his resolve for the house. Through the open doorway,
+while he listened for the twentieth time to the detailed description of
+the house that was wanted, Raoul saw his schooner's second boat draw up
+on the beach. The sailors rested on the oars, advertising haste to be
+gone. The first mate of the Aorai sprang ashore, exchanged a word with
+the one-armed native, then hurried toward Raoul. The day grew suddenly
+dark, as a squall obscured the face of the sun. Across the lagoon Raoul
+could see approaching the ominous line of the puff of wind.
+
+"Captain Raffy says you've got to get to hell outa here," was the mate's
+greeting. "If there's any shell, we've got to run the risk of
+picking it up later on--so he says. The barometer's dropped to
+twenty-nine-seventy."
+
+The gust of wind struck the pandanus tree overhead and tore through the
+palms beyond, flinging half a dozen ripe cocoanuts with heavy thuds to
+the ground. Then came the rain out of the distance, advancing with the
+roar of a gale of wind and causing the water of the lagoon to smoke in
+driven windrows. The sharp rattle of the first drops was on the leaves
+when Raoul sprang to his feet.
+
+"A thousand Chili dollars, cash down, Mapuhi," he said. "And two hundred
+Chili dollars in trade."
+
+"I want a house--" the other began.
+
+"Mapuhi!" Raoul yelled, in order to make himself heard. "You are a
+fool!"
+
+He flung out of the house, and, side by side with the mate, fought his
+way down the beach toward the boat. They could not see the boat. The
+tropic rain sheeted about them so that they could see only the beach
+under their feet and the spiteful little waves from the lagoon that
+snapped and bit at the sand. A figure appeared through the deluge. It
+was Huru-Huru, the man with the one arm.
+
+"Did you get the pearl?" he yelled in Raoul's ear.
+
+"Mapuhi is a fool!" was the answering yell, and the next moment they
+were lost to each other in the descending water.
+
+Half an hour later, Huru-Huru, watching from the seaward side of the
+atoll, saw the two boats hoisted in and the Aorai pointing her nose
+out to sea. And near her, just come in from the sea on the wings of the
+squall, he saw another schooner hove to and dropping a boat into the
+water. He knew her. It was the OROHENA, owned by Toriki, the half-caste
+trader, who served as his own supercargo and who doubtlessly was even
+then in the stern sheets of the boat. Huru-Huru chuckled. He knew that
+Mapuhi owed Toriki for trade goods advanced the year before.
+
+The squall had passed. The hot sun was blazing down, and the lagoon was
+once more a mirror. But the air was sticky like mucilage, and the weight
+of it seemed to burden the lungs and make breathing difficult.
+
+"Have you heard the news, Toriki?" Huru-Huru asked. "Mapuhi has found
+a pearl. Never was there a pearl like it ever fished up in Hikueru, nor
+anywhere in the Paumotus, nor anywhere in all the world. Mapuhi is a
+fool. Besides, he owes you money. Remember that I told you first. Have
+you any tobacco?"
+
+And to the grass shack of Mapuhi went Toriki. He was a masterful man,
+withal a fairly stupid one. Carelessly he glanced at the wonderful
+pearl--glanced for a moment only; and carelessly he dropped it into his
+pocket.
+
+"You are lucky," he said. "It is a nice pearl. I will give you credit on
+the books."
+
+"I want a house," Mapuhi began, in consternation. "It must be six
+fathoms--"
+
+"Six fathoms your grandmother!" was the trader's retort. "You want to
+pay up your debts, that's what you want. You owed me twelve hundred
+dollars Chili. Very well; you owe them no longer. The amount is squared.
+Besides, I will give you credit for two hundred Chili. If, when I get
+to Tahiti, the pearl sells well, I will give you credit for another
+hundred--that will make three hundred. But mind, only if the pearl sells
+well. I may even lose money on it."
+
+Mapuhi folded his arms in sorrow and sat with bowed head. He had been
+robbed of his pearl. In place of the house, he had paid a debt. There
+was nothing to show for the pearl.
+
+"You are a fool," said Tefara.
+
+"You are a fool," said Nauri, his mother. "Why did you let the pearl
+into his hand?"
+
+"What was I to do?" Mapuhi protested. "I owed him the money. He knew I
+had the pearl. You heard him yourself ask to see it. I had not told him.
+He knew. Somebody else told him. And I owed him the money."
+
+"Mapuhi is a fool," mimicked Ngakura.
+
+She was twelve years old and did not know any better. Mapuhi relieved
+his feelings by sending her reeling from a box on the ear; while Tefara
+and Nauri burst into tears and continued to upbraid him after the manner
+of women.
+
+Huru-Huru, watching on the beach, saw a third schooner that he knew
+heave to outside the entrance and drop a boat. It was the Hira, well
+named, for she was owned by Levy, the German Jew, the greatest pearl
+buyer of them all, and, as was well known, Hira was the Tahitian god of
+fishermen and thieves.
+
+"Have you heard the news?" Huru-Huru asked, as Levy, a fat man with
+massive asymmetrical features, stepped out upon the beach. "Mapuhi has
+found a pearl. There was never a pearl like it in Hikueru, in all the
+Paumotus, in all the world. Mapuhi is a fool. He has sold it to Toriki
+for fourteen hundred Chili--I listened outside and heard. Toriki is
+likewise a fool. You can buy it from him cheap. Remember that I told you
+first. Have you any tobacco?"
+
+"Where is Toriki?"
+
+"In the house of Captain Lynch, drinking absinthe. He has been there an
+hour."
+
+And while Levy and Toriki drank absinthe and chaffered over the pearl,
+Huru-Huru listened and heard the stupendous price of twenty-five
+thousand francs agreed upon.
+
+It was at this time that both the OROHENA and the Hira, running in close
+to the shore, began firing guns and signalling frantically. The three
+men stepped outside in time to see the two schooners go hastily about
+and head off shore, dropping mainsails and flying jibs on the run in
+the teeth of the squall that heeled them far over on the whitened water.
+Then the rain blotted them out.
+
+"They'll be back after it's over," said Toriki. "We'd better be getting
+out of here."
+
+"I reckon the glass has fallen some more," said Captain Lynch.
+
+He was a white-bearded sea-captain, too old for service, who had learned
+that the only way to live on comfortable terms with his asthma was on
+Hikueru. He went inside to look at the barometer.
+
+"Great God!" they heard him exclaim, and rushed in to join him at
+staring at a dial, which marked twenty-nine-twenty.
+
+Again they came out, this time anxiously to consult sea and sky.
+The squall had cleared away, but the sky remained overcast. The two
+schooners, under all sail and joined by a third, could be seen making
+back. A veer in the wind induced them to slack off sheets, and five
+minutes afterward a sudden veer from the opposite quarter caught all
+three schooners aback, and those on shore could see the boom-tackles
+being slacked away or cast off on the jump. The sound of the surf was
+loud, hollow, and menacing, and a heavy swell was setting in. A terrible
+sheet of lightning burst before their eyes, illuminating the dark day,
+and the thunder rolled wildly about them.
+
+Toriki and Levy broke into a run for their boats, the latter ambling
+along like a panic-stricken hippopotamus. As their two boats swept out
+the entrance, they passed the boat of the Aorai coming in. In the stern
+sheets, encouraging the rowers, was Raoul. Unable to shake the vision of
+the pearl from his mind, he was returning to accept Mapuhi's price of a
+house.
+
+He landed on the beach in the midst of a driving thunder squall that was
+so dense that he collided with Huru-Huru before he saw him.
+
+"Too late," yelled Huru-Huru. "Mapuhi sold it to Toriki for fourteen
+hundred Chili, and Toriki sold it to Levy for twenty-five thousand
+francs. And Levy will sell it in France for a hundred thousand francs.
+Have you any tobacco?"
+
+Raoul felt relieved. His troubles about the pearl were over. He need not
+worry any more, even if he had not got the pearl. But he did not believe
+Huru-Huru. Mapuhi might well have sold it for fourteen hundred Chili,
+but that Levy, who knew pearls, should have paid twenty-five thousand
+francs was too wide a stretch. Raoul decided to interview Captain Lynch
+on the subject, but when he arrived at that ancient mariner's house, he
+found him looking wide-eyed at the barometer.
+
+"What do you read it?" Captain Lynch asked anxiously, rubbing his
+spectacles and staring again at the instrument.
+
+"Twenty-nine-ten," said Raoul. "I have never seen it so low before."
+
+"I should say not!" snorted the captain. "Fifty years boy and man on all
+the seas, and I've never seen it go down to that. Listen!"
+
+They stood for a moment, while the surf rumbled and shook the house.
+Then they went outside. The squall had passed. They could see the
+Aorai lying becalmed a mile away and pitching and tossing madly in
+the tremendous seas that rolled in stately procession down out of the
+northeast and flung themselves furiously upon the coral shore. One of
+the sailors from the boat pointed at the mouth of the passage and shook
+his head. Raoul looked and saw a white anarchy of foam and surge.
+
+"I guess I'll stay with you tonight, Captain," he said; then turned to
+the sailor and told him to haul the boat out and to find shelter for
+himself and fellows.
+
+"Twenty-nine flat," Captain Lynch reported, coming out from another look
+at the barometer, a chair in his hand.
+
+He sat down and stared at the spectacle of the sea. The sun came out,
+increasing the sultriness of the day, while the dead calm still held.
+The seas continued to increase in magnitude.
+
+"What makes that sea is what gets me," Raoul muttered petulantly.
+
+"There is no wind, yet look at it, look at that fellow there!"
+
+Miles in length, carrying tens of thousands of tons in weight, its
+impact shook the frail atoll like an earthquake. Captain Lynch was
+startled.
+
+"Gracious!" he bellowed, half rising from his chair, then sinking back.
+
+"But there is no wind," Raoul persisted. "I could understand it if there
+was wind along with it."
+
+"You'll get the wind soon enough without worryin' for it," was the grim
+reply.
+
+The two men sat on in silence. The sweat stood out on their skin in
+myriads of tiny drops that ran together, forming blotches of moisture,
+which, in turn, coalesced into rivulets that dripped to the ground. They
+panted for breath, the old man's efforts being especially painful. A
+sea swept up the beach, licking around the trunks of the cocoanuts and
+subsiding almost at their feet.
+
+"Way past high water mark," Captain Lynch remarked; "and I've been here
+eleven years." He looked at his watch. "It is three o'clock."
+
+A man and woman, at their heels a motley following of brats and curs,
+trailed disconsolately by. They came to a halt beyond the house, and,
+after much irresolution, sat down in the sand. A few minutes later
+another family trailed in from the opposite direction, the men and women
+carrying a heterogeneous assortment of possessions. And soon several
+hundred persons of all ages and sexes were congregated about the
+captain's dwelling. He called to one new arrival, a woman with a nursing
+babe in her arms, and in answer received the information that her house
+had just been swept into the lagoon.
+
+This was the highest spot of land in miles, and already, in many places
+on either hand, the great seas were making a clean breach of the slender
+ring of the atoll and surging into the lagoon. Twenty miles around
+stretched the ring of the atoll, and in no place was it more than fifty
+fathoms wide. It was the height of the diving season, and from all the
+islands around, even as far as Tahiti, the natives had gathered.
+
+"There are twelve hundred men, women, and children here," said Captain
+Lynch. "I wonder how many will be here tomorrow morning."
+
+"But why don't it blow?--that's what I want to know," Raoul demanded.
+
+"Don't worry, young man, don't worry; you'll get your troubles fast
+enough."
+
+Even as Captain Lynch spoke, a great watery mass smote the atoll.
+
+The sea water churned about them three inches deep under the chairs. A
+low wail of fear went up from the many women. The children, with clasped
+hands, stared at the immense rollers and cried piteously. Chickens and
+cats, wading perturbedly in the water, as by common consent, with flight
+and scramble took refuge on the roof of the captain's house. A Paumotan,
+with a litter of new-born puppies in a basket, climbed into a cocoanut
+tree and twenty feet above the ground made the basket fast. The mother
+floundered about in the water beneath, whining and yelping.
+
+And still the sun shone brightly and the dead calm continued. They sat
+and watched the seas and the insane pitching of the Aorai. Captain Lynch
+gazed at the huge mountains of water sweeping in until he could gaze
+no more. He covered his face with his hands to shut out the sight; then
+went into the house.
+
+"Twenty-eight-sixty," he said quietly when he returned.
+
+In his arm was a coil of small rope. He cut it into two-fathom lengths,
+giving one to Raoul and, retaining one for himself, distributed the
+remainder among the women with the advice to pick out a tree and climb.
+
+A light air began to blow out of the northeast, and the fan of it on
+his cheek seemed to cheer Raoul up. He could see the Aorai trimming her
+sheets and heading off shore, and he regretted that he was not on her.
+She would get away at any rate, but as for the atoll--A sea breached
+across, almost sweeping him off his feet, and he selected a tree. Then
+he remembered the barometer and ran back to the house. He encountered
+Captain Lynch on the same errand and together they went in.
+
+"Twenty-eight-twenty," said the old mariner. "It's going to be fair hell
+around here--what was that?"
+
+The air seemed filled with the rush of something. The house quivered and
+vibrated, and they heard the thrumming of a mighty note of sound. The
+windows rattled. Two panes crashed; a draught of wind tore in, striking
+them and making them stagger. The door opposite banged shut, shattering
+the latch. The white door knob crumbled in fragments to the floor.
+The room's walls bulged like a gas balloon in the process of sudden
+inflation. Then came a new sound like the rattle of musketry, as the
+spray from a sea struck the wall of the house. Captain Lynch looked
+at his watch. It was four o'clock. He put on a coat of pilot cloth,
+unhooked the barometer, and stowed it away in a capacious pocket.
+Again a sea struck the house, with a heavy thud, and the light building
+tilted, twisted, quarter around on its foundation, and sank down, its
+floor at an angle of ten degrees.
+
+Raoul went out first. The wind caught him and whirled him away. He noted
+that it had hauled around to the east. With a great effort he threw
+himself on the sand, crouching and holding his own. Captain Lynch,
+driven like a wisp of straw, sprawled over him. Two of the Aorai's
+sailors, leaving a cocoanut tree to which they had been clinging, came
+to their aid, leaning against the wind at impossible angles and fighting
+and clawing every inch of the way.
+
+The old man's joints were stiff and he could not climb, so the sailors,
+by means of short ends of rope tied together, hoisted him up the trunk,
+a few feet at a time, till they could make him fast, at the top of the
+tree, fifty feet from the ground. Raoul passed his length of rope
+around the base of an adjacent tree and stood looking on. The wind was
+frightful. He had never dreamed it could blow so hard. A sea breached
+across the atoll, wetting him to the knees ere it subsided into the
+lagoon. The sun had disappeared, and a lead-colored twilight settled
+down. A few drops of rain, driving horizontally, struck him. The impact
+was like that of leaden pellets. A splash of salt spray struck his face.
+It was like the slap of a man's hand. His cheeks stung, and involuntary
+tears of pain were in his smarting eyes. Several hundred natives had
+taken to the trees, and he could have laughed at the bunches of human
+fruit clustering in the tops. Then, being Tahitian-born, he doubled his
+body at the waist, clasped the trunk of his tree with his hands, pressed
+the soles of his feet against the near surface of the trunk, and began
+to walk up the tree. At the top he found two women, two children, and a
+man. One little girl clasped a housecat in her arms.
+
+From his eyrie he waved his hand to Captain Lynch, and that doughty
+patriarch waved back. Raoul was appalled at the sky. It had approached
+much nearer--in fact, it seemed just over his head; and it had turned
+from lead to black. Many people were still on the ground grouped about
+the bases of the trees and holding on. Several such clusters were
+praying, and in one the Mormon missionary was exhorting. A weird sound,
+rhythmical, faint as the faintest chirp of a far cricket, enduring but
+for a moment, but in the moment suggesting to him vaguely the thought
+of heaven and celestial music, came to his ear. He glanced about him and
+saw, at the base of another tree, a large cluster of people holding on
+by ropes and by one another. He could see their faces working and their
+lips moving in unison. No sound came to him, but he knew that they were
+singing hymns.
+
+Still the wind continued to blow harder. By no conscious process could
+he measure it, for it had long since passed beyond all his experience of
+wind; but he knew somehow, nevertheless, that it was blowing harder. Not
+far away a tree was uprooted, flinging its load of human beings to
+the ground. A sea washed across the strip of sand, and they were gone.
+Things were happening quickly. He saw a brown shoulder and a black head
+silhouetted against the churning white of the lagoon. The next
+instant that, too, had vanished. Other trees were going, falling and
+criss-crossing like matches. He was amazed at the power of the wind. His
+own tree was swaying perilously, one woman was wailing and clutching the
+little girl, who in turn still hung on to the cat.
+
+The man, holding the other child, touched Raoul's arm and pointed. He
+looked and saw the Mormon church careering drunkenly a hundred feet
+away. It had been torn from its foundations, and wind and sea were
+heaving and shoving it toward the lagoon. A frightful wall of water
+caught it, tilted it, and flung it against half a dozen cocoanut trees.
+The bunches of human fruit fell like ripe cocoanuts. The subsiding wave
+showed them on the ground, some lying motionless, others squirming and
+writhing. They reminded him strangely of ants. He was not shocked.
+He had risen above horror. Quite as a matter of course he noted the
+succeeding wave sweep the sand clean of the human wreckage. A third
+wave, more colossal than any he had yet seen, hurled the church into
+the lagoon, where it floated off into the obscurity to leeward,
+half-submerged, reminding him for all the world of a Noah's ark.
+
+He looked for Captain Lynch's house, and was surprised to find it gone.
+Things certainly were happening quickly. He noticed that many of the
+people in the trees that still held had descended to the ground. The
+wind had yet again increased. His own tree showed that. It no longer
+swayed or bent over and back. Instead, it remained practically
+stationary, curved in a rigid angle from the wind and merely vibrating.
+But the vibration was sickening. It was like that of a tuning-fork or
+the tongue of a jew's-harp. It was the rapidity of the vibration that
+made it so bad. Even though its roots held, it could not stand the
+strain for long. Something would have to break.
+
+Ah, there was one that had gone. He had not seen it go, but there it
+stood, the remnant, broken off half-way up the trunk. One did not know
+what happened unless he saw it. The mere crashing of trees and wails
+of human despair occupied no place in that mighty volume of sound. He
+chanced to be looking in Captain Lynch's direction when it happened. He
+saw the trunk of the tree, half-way up, splinter and part without
+noise. The head of the tree, with three sailors of the Aorai and the old
+captain sailed off over the lagoon. It did not fall to the ground, but
+drove through the air like a piece of chaff. For a hundred yards he
+followed its flight, when it struck the water. He strained his eyes, and
+was sure that he saw Captain Lynch wave farewell.
+
+Raoul did not wait for anything more. He touched the native and made
+signs to descend to the ground. The man was willing, but his women were
+paralyzed from terror, and he elected to remain with them. Raoul passed
+his rope around the tree and slid down. A rush of salt water went over
+his head. He held his breath and clung desperately to the rope. The
+water subsided, and in the shelter of the trunk he breathed once more.
+He fastened the rope more securely, and then was put under by another
+sea. One of the women slid down and joined him, the native remaining by
+the other woman, the two children, and the cat.
+
+The supercargo had noticed how the groups clinging at the bases of the
+other trees continually diminished. Now he saw the process work out
+alongside him. It required all his strength to hold on, and the woman
+who had joined him was growing weaker. Each time he emerged from a sea
+he was surprised to find himself still there, and next, surprised to
+find the woman still there. At last he emerged to find himself alone.
+He looked up. The top of the tree had gone as well. At half its original
+height, a splintered end vibrated. He was safe. The roots still held,
+while the tree had been shorn of its windage. He began to climb up. He
+was so weak that he went slowly, and sea after sea caught him before he
+was above them. Then he tied himself to the trunk and stiffened his soul
+to face the night and he knew not what.
+
+He felt very lonely in the darkness. At times it seemed to him that it
+was the end of the world and that he was the last one left alive. Still
+the wind increased. Hour after hour it increased. By what he calculated
+was eleven o'clock, the wind had become unbelievable. It was a horrible,
+monstrous thing, a screaming fury, a wall that smote and passed on but
+that continued to smite and pass on--a wall without end. It seemed to
+him that he had become light and ethereal; that it was he that was in
+motion; that he was being driven with inconceivable velocity through
+unending solidness. The wind was no longer air in motion. It had become
+substantial as water or quicksilver. He had a feeling that he could
+reach into it and tear it out in chunks as one might do with the meat in
+the carcass of a steer; that he could seize hold of the wind and hang on
+to it as a man might hang on to the face of a cliff.
+
+The wind strangled him. He could not face it and breathe, for it rushed
+in through his mouth and nostrils, distending his lungs like bladders.
+At such moments it seemed to him that his body was being packed and
+swollen with solid earth. Only by pressing his lips to the trunk of the
+tree could he breathe. Also, the ceaseless impact of the wind exhausted
+him. Body and brain became wearied. He no longer observed, no
+longer thought, and was but semiconscious. One idea constituted
+his consciousness: SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE. That one idea persisted
+irregularly. It was like a feeble flame that flickered occasionally.
+From a state of stupor he would return to it--SO THIS WAS A HURRICANE.
+Then he would go off into another stupor.
+
+The height of the hurricane endured from eleven at night till three in
+the morning, and it was at eleven that the tree in which clung Mapuhi
+and his women snapped off. Mapuhi rose to the surface of the lagoon,
+still clutching his daughter Ngakura. Only a South Sea islander could
+have lived in such a driving smother. The pandanus tree, to which he
+attached himself, turned over and over in the froth and churn; and it
+was only by holding on at times and waiting, and at other times shifting
+his grips rapidly, that he was able to get his head and Ngakura's to the
+surface at intervals sufficiently near together to keep the breath in
+them. But the air was mostly water, what with flying spray and sheeted
+rain that poured along at right angles to the perpendicular.
+
+It was ten miles across the lagoon to the farther ring of sand. Here,
+tossing tree trunks, timbers, wrecks of cutters, and wreckage of houses,
+killed nine out of ten of the miserable beings who survived the passage
+of the lagoon. Half-drowned, exhausted, they were hurled into this mad
+mortar of the elements and battered into formless flesh. But Mapuhi was
+fortunate. His chance was the one in ten; it fell to him by the freakage
+of fate. He emerged upon the sand, bleeding from a score of wounds.
+
+Ngakura's left arm was broken; the fingers of her right hand were
+crushed; and cheek and forehead were laid open to the bone. He clutched
+a tree that yet stood, and clung on, holding the girl and sobbing for
+air, while the waters of the lagoon washed by knee-high and at times
+waist-high.
+
+At three in the morning the backbone of the hurricane broke. By five no
+more than a stiff breeze was blowing. And by six it was dead calm and
+the sun was shining. The sea had gone down. On the yet restless edge of
+the lagoon, Mapuhi saw the broken bodies of those that had failed in the
+landing. Undoubtedly Tefara and Nauri were among them. He went along the
+beach examining them, and came upon his wife, lying half in and half out
+of the water. He sat down and wept, making harsh animal noises after the
+manner of primitive grief. Then she stirred uneasily, and groaned. He
+looked more closely. Not only was she alive, but she was uninjured. She
+was merely sleeping. Hers also had been the one chance in ten.
+
+Of the twelve hundred alive the night before but three hundred remained.
+The Mormon missionary and a gendarme made the census. The lagoon was
+cluttered with corpses. Not a house nor a hut was standing. In the whole
+atoll not two stones remained one upon another. One in fifty of the
+cocoanut palms still stood, and they were wrecks, while on not one of
+them remained a single nut.
+
+There was no fresh water. The shallow wells that caught the surface
+seepage of the rain were filled with salt. Out of the lagoon a few
+soaked bags of flour were recovered. The survivors cut the hearts out of
+the fallen cocoanut trees and ate them. Here and there they crawled
+into tiny hutches, made by hollowing out the sand and covering over with
+fragments of metal roofing. The missionary made a crude still, but he
+could not distill water for three hundred persons. By the end of the
+second day, Raoul, taking a bath in the lagoon, discovered that his
+thirst was somewhat relieved. He cried out the news, and thereupon three
+hundred men, women, and children could have been seen, standing up to
+their necks in the lagoon and trying to drink water in through their
+skins. Their dead floated about them, or were stepped upon where they
+still lay upon the bottom. On the third day the people buried their dead
+and sat down to wait for the rescue steamers.
+
+In the meantime, Nauri, torn from her family by the hurricane, had been
+swept away on an adventure of her own. Clinging to a rough plank that
+wounded and bruised her and that filled her body with splinters, she
+was thrown clear over the atoll and carried away to sea. Here, under the
+amazing buffets of mountains of water, she lost her plank. She was an
+old woman nearly sixty; but she was Paumotan-born, and she had never
+been out of sight of the sea in her life. Swimming in the darkness,
+strangling, suffocating, fighting for air, she was struck a heavy blow
+on the shoulder by a cocoanut. On the instant her plan was formed,
+and she seized the nut. In the next hour she captured seven more. Tied
+together, they formed a life-buoy that preserved her life while at the
+same time it threatened to pound her to a jelly. She was a fat woman,
+and she bruised easily; but she had had experience of hurricanes, and
+while she prayed to her shark god for protection from sharks, she waited
+for the wind to break. But at three o'clock she was in such a stupor
+that she did not know. Nor did she know at six o'clock when the dead
+calm settled down. She was shocked into consciousness when she was
+thrown upon the sand. She dug in with raw and bleeding hands and feet
+and clawed against the backwash until she was beyond the reach of the
+waves.
+
+She knew where she was. This land could be no other than the tiny islet
+of Takokota. It had no lagoon. No one lived upon it.
+
+Hikueru was fifteen miles away. She could not see Hikueru, but she
+knew that it lay to the south. The days went by, and she lived on the
+cocoanuts that had kept her afloat. They supplied her with drinking
+water and with food. But she did not drink all she wanted, nor eat all
+she wanted. Rescue was problematical. She saw the smoke of the rescue
+steamers on the horizon, but what steamer could be expected to come to
+lonely, uninhabited Takokota?
+
+From the first she was tormented by corpses. The sea persisted in
+flinging them upon her bit of sand, and she persisted, until her
+strength failed, in thrusting them back into the sea where the sharks
+tore at them and devoured them. When her strength failed, the bodies
+festooned her beach with ghastly horror, and she withdrew from them as
+far as she could, which was not far.
+
+By the tenth day her last cocoanut was gone, and she was shrivelling
+from thirst. She dragged herself along the sand, looking for cocoanuts.
+It was strange that so many bodies floated up, and no nuts. Surely,
+there were more cocoanuts afloat than dead men! She gave up at last, and
+lay exhausted. The end had come. Nothing remained but to wait for death.
+
+Coming out of a stupor, she became slowly aware that she was gazing at a
+patch of sandy-red hair on the head of a corpse. The sea flung the body
+toward her, then drew it back. It turned over, and she saw that it had
+no face. Yet there was something familiar about that patch of
+sandy-red hair. An hour passed. She did not exert herself to make the
+identification. She was waiting to die, and it mattered little to her
+what man that thing of horror once might have been.
+
+But at the end of the hour she sat up slowly and stared at the corpse.
+An unusually large wave had thrown it beyond the reach of the lesser
+waves. Yes, she was right; that patch of red hair could belong to but
+one man in the Paumotus. It was Levy, the German Jew, the man who had
+bought the pearl and carried it away on the Hira. Well, one thing was
+evident: The Hira had been lost. The pearl buyer's god of fishermen and
+thieves had gone back on him.
+
+She crawled down to the dead man. His shirt had been torn away, and she
+could see the leather money belt about his waist. She held her breath
+and tugged at the buckles. They gave easier than she had expected, and
+she crawled hurriedly away across the sand, dragging the belt after her.
+Pocket after pocket she unbuckled in the belt and found empty. Where
+could he have put it? In the last pocket of all she found it, the first
+and only pearl he had bought on the voyage. She crawled a few feet
+farther, to escape the pestilence of the belt, and examined the pearl.
+It was the one Mapuhi had found and been robbed of by Toriki. She
+weighed it in her hand and rolled it back and forth caressingly. But in
+it she saw no intrinsic beauty. What she did see was the house Mapuhi
+and Tefara and she had builded so carefully in their minds. Each time
+she looked at the pearl she saw the house in all its details, including
+the octagon-drop-clock on the wall. That was something to live for.
+
+She tore a strip from her ahu and tied the pearl securely about her
+neck. Then she went on along the beach, panting and groaning, but
+resolutely seeking for cocoanuts. Quickly she found one, and, as she
+glanced around, a second. She broke one, drinking its water, which was
+mildewy, and eating the last particle of the meat. A little later she
+found a shattered dugout. Its outrigger was gone, but she was hopeful,
+and, before the day was out, she found the outrigger. Every find was an
+augury. The pearl was a talisman. Late in the afternoon she saw a wooden
+box floating low in the water. When she dragged it out on the beach its
+contents rattled, and inside she found ten tins of salmon. She opened
+one by hammering it on the canoe. When a leak was started, she drained
+the tin. After that she spent several hours in extracting the salmon,
+hammering and squeezing it out a morsel at a time.
+
+Eight days longer she waited for rescue. In the meantime she fastened
+the outrigger back on the canoe, using for lashings all the cocoanut
+fibre she could find, and also what remained of her ahu. The canoe was
+badly cracked, and she could not make it water-tight; but a calabash
+made from a cocoanut she stored on board for a bailer. She was hard put
+for a paddle. With a piece of tin she sawed off all her hair close to
+the scalp. Out of the hair she braided a cord; and by means of the cord
+she lashed a three-foot piece of broom handle to a board from the salmon
+case.
+
+She gnawed wedges with her teeth and with them wedged the lashing.
+
+On the eighteenth day, at midnight, she launched the canoe through the
+surf and started back for Hikueru. She was an old woman. Hardship had
+stripped her fat from her till scarcely more than bones and skin and a
+few stringy muscles remained. The canoe was large and should have been
+paddled by three strong men.
+
+But she did it alone, with a make-shift paddle. Also, the canoe leaked
+badly, and one-third of her time was devoted to bailing. By clear
+daylight she looked vainly for Hikueru. Astern, Takokota had sunk
+beneath the sea rim. The sun blazed down on her nakedness, compelling
+her body to surrender its moisture. Two tins of salmon were left, and in
+the course of the day she battered holes in them and drained the liquid.
+She had no time to waste in extracting the meat. A current was setting
+to the westward, she made westing whether she made southing or not.
+
+In the early afternoon, standing upright in the canoe, she sighted
+Hikueru. Its wealth of cocoanut palms was gone. Only here and there, at
+wide intervals, could she see the ragged remnants of trees. The sight
+cheered her. She was nearer than she had thought. The current was
+setting her to the westward. She bore up against it and paddled on. The
+wedges in the paddle lashing worked loose, and she lost much time, at
+frequent intervals, in driving them tight. Then there was the bailing.
+One hour in three she had to cease paddling in order to bail. And all
+the time she drifted to the westward.
+
+By sunset Hikueru bore southeast from her, three miles away. There was
+a full moon, and by eight o'clock the land was due east and two miles
+away. She struggled on for another hour, but the land was as far away as
+ever. She was in the main grip of the current; the canoe was too large;
+the paddle was too inadequate; and too much of her time and strength
+was wasted in bailing. Besides, she was very weak and growing weaker.
+Despite her efforts, the canoe was drifting off to the westward.
+
+She breathed a prayer to her shark god, slipped over the side, and began
+to swim. She was actually refreshed by the water, and quickly left the
+canoe astern. At the end of an hour the land was perceptibly nearer.
+Then came her fright. Right before her eyes, not twenty feet away, a
+large fin cut the water. She swam steadily toward it, and slowly it
+glided away, curving off toward the right and circling around her. She
+kept her eyes on the fin and swam on. When the fin disappeared, she
+lay face downward in the water and watched. When the fin reappeared she
+resumed her swimming. The monster was lazy--she could see that. Without
+doubt he had been well fed since the hurricane. Had he been very hungry,
+she knew he would not have hesitated from making a dash for her. He was
+fifteen feet long, and one bite, she knew, could cut her in half.
+
+But she did not have any time to waste on him. Whether she swam or not,
+the current drew away from the land just the same. A half hour went
+by, and the shark began to grow bolder. Seeing no harm in her he drew
+closer, in narrowing circles, cocking his eyes at her impudently as
+he slid past. Sooner or later, she knew well enough, he would get up
+sufficient courage to dash at her. She resolved to play first. It was a
+desperate act she meditated. She was an old woman, alone in the sea and
+weak from starvation and hardship; and yet she, in the face of this sea
+tiger, must anticipate his dash by herself dashing at him. She swam on,
+waiting her chance. At last he passed languidly by, barely eight feet
+away. She rushed at him suddenly, feigning that she was attacking him.
+He gave a wild flirt of his tail as he fled away, and his sandpaper
+hide, striking her, took off her skin from elbow to shoulder. He swam
+rapidly, in a widening circle, and at last disappeared.
+
+In the hole in the sand, covered over by fragments of metal roofing,
+Mapuhi and Tefara lay disputing.
+
+"If you had done as I said," charged Tefara, for the thousandth time,
+"and hidden the pearl and told no one, you would have it now."
+
+"But Huru-Huru was with me when I opened the shell--have I not told you
+so times and times and times without end?"
+
+"And now we shall have no house. Raoul told me today that if you had not
+sold the pearl to Toriki--"
+
+"I did not sell it. Toriki robbed me."
+
+"--that if you had not sold the pearl, he would give you five thousand
+French dollars, which is ten thousand Chili."
+
+"He has been talking to his mother," Mapuhi explained. "She has an eye
+for a pearl."
+
+"And now the pearl is lost," Tefara complained.
+
+"It paid my debt with Toriki. That is twelve hundred I have made,
+anyway."
+
+"Toriki is dead," she cried. "They have heard no word of his schooner.
+She was lost along with the Aorai and the Hira. Will Toriki pay you the
+three hundred credit he promised? No, because Toriki is dead. And had
+you found no pearl, would you today owe Toriki the twelve hundred? No,
+because Toriki is dead, and you cannot pay dead men."
+
+"But Levy did not pay Toriki," Mapuhi said. "He gave him a piece of
+paper that was good for the money in Papeete; and now Levy is dead and
+cannot pay; and Toriki is dead and the paper lost with him, and the
+pearl is lost with Levy. You are right, Tefara. I have lost the pearl,
+and got nothing for it. Now let us sleep."
+
+He held up his hand suddenly and listened. From without came a noise,
+as of one who breathed heavily and with pain. A hand fumbled against the
+mat that served for a door.
+
+"Who is there?" Mapuhi cried.
+
+"Nauri," came the answer. "Can you tell me where is my son, Mapuhi?"
+
+Tefara screamed and gripped her husband's arm.
+
+"A ghost!" she chattered. "A ghost!"
+
+Mapuhi's face was a ghastly yellow. He clung weakly to his wife.
+
+"Good woman," he said in faltering tones, striving to disguise his vice,
+"I know your son well. He is living on the east side of the lagoon."
+
+From without came the sound of a sigh. Mapuhi began to feel elated. He
+had fooled the ghost.
+
+"But where do you come from, old woman?" he asked.
+
+"From the sea," was the dejected answer.
+
+"I knew it! I knew it!" screamed Tefara, rocking to and fro.
+
+"Since when has Tefara bedded in a strange house?" came Nauri's voice
+through the matting.
+
+Mapuhi looked fear and reproach at his wife. It was her voice that had
+betrayed them.
+
+"And since when has Mapuhi, my son, denied his old mother?" the voice
+went on.
+
+"No, no, I have not--Mapuhi has not denied you," he cried. "I am not
+Mapuhi. He is on the east end of the lagoon, I tell you."
+
+Ngakura sat up in bed and began to cry. The matting started to shake.
+
+"What are you doing?" Mapuhi demanded.
+
+"I am coming in," said the voice of Nauri.
+
+One end of the matting lifted. Tefara tried to dive under the blankets,
+but Mapuhi held on to her. He had to hold on to something. Together,
+struggling with each other, with shivering bodies and chattering teeth,
+they gazed with protruding eyes at the lifting mat. They saw Nauri,
+dripping with sea water, without her ahu, creep in. They rolled over
+backward from her and fought for Ngakura's blanket with which to cover
+their heads.
+
+"You might give your old mother a drink of water," the ghost said
+plaintively.
+
+"Give her a drink of water," Tefara commanded in a shaking voice.
+
+"Give her a drink of water," Mapuhi passed on the command to Ngakura.
+
+And together they kicked out Ngakura from under the blanket. A minute
+later, peeping, Mapuhi saw the ghost drinking. When it reached out
+a shaking hand and laid it on his, he felt the weight of it and was
+convinced that it was no ghost. Then he emerged, dragging Tefara after
+him, and in a few minutes all were listening to Nauri's tale. And when
+she told of Levy, and dropped the pearl into Tefara's hand, even she was
+reconciled to the reality of her mother-in-law.
+
+"In the morning," said Tefara, "you will sell the pearl to Raoul for
+five thousand French."
+
+"The house?" objected Nauri.
+
+"He will build the house," Tefara answered. "He ways it will cost four
+thousand French. Also will he give one thousand French in credit, which
+is two thousand Chili."
+
+"And it will be six fathoms long?" Nauri queried.
+
+"Ay," answered Mapuhi, "six fathoms."
+
+"And in the middle room will be the octagon-drop-clock?"
+
+"Ay, and the round table as well."
+
+"Then give me something to eat, for I am hungry," said Nauri,
+complacently. "And after that we will sleep, for I am weary. And
+tomorrow we will have more talk about the house before we sell the
+pearl. It will be better if we take the thousand French in cash. Money
+is ever better than credit in buying goods from the traders."
+
+
+
+
+THE WHALE TOOTH
+
+It was in the early days in Fiji, when John Starhurst arose in the
+mission house at Rewa Village and announced his intention of carrying
+the gospel throughout all Viti Levu. Now Viti Levu means the "Great
+Land," it being the largest island in a group composed of many large
+islands, to say nothing of hundreds of small ones. Here and there on
+the coasts, living by most precarious tenure, was a sprinkling of
+missionaries, traders, beche-de-mer fishers, and whaleship deserters.
+The smoke of the hot ovens arose under their windows, and the bodies of
+the slain were dragged by their doors on the way to the feasting.
+
+The Lotu, or the Worship, was progressing slowly, and, often, in
+crablike fashion. Chiefs, who announced themselves Christians and
+were welcomed into the body of the chapel, had a distressing habit of
+backsliding in order to partake of the flesh of some favorite enemy. Eat
+or be eaten had been the law of the land; and eat or be eaten promised
+to remain the law of the land for a long time to come. There were
+chiefs, such as Tanoa, Tuiveikoso, and Tuikilakila, who had literally
+eaten hundreds of their fellow men. But among these gluttons Ra
+Undreundre ranked highest. Ra Undreundre lived at Takiraki. He kept a
+register of his gustatory exploits. A row of stones outside his house
+marked the bodies he had eaten. This row was two hundred and thirty
+paces long, and the stones in it numbered eight hundred and seventy-two.
+Each stone represented a body. The row of stones might have been longer,
+had not Ra Undreundre unfortunately received a spear in the small of his
+back in a bush skirmish on Somo Somo and been served up on the table of
+Naungavuli, whose mediocre string of stones numbered only forty-eight.
+
+The hard-worked, fever-stricken missionaries stuck doggedly to their
+task, at times despairing, and looking forward for some special
+manifestation, some outburst of Pentecostal fire that would bring a
+glorious harvest of souls. But cannibal Fiji had remained obdurate. The
+frizzle-headed man-eaters were loath to leave their fleshpots so long as
+the harvest of human carcases was plentiful. Sometimes, when the harvest
+was too plentiful, they imposed on the missionaries by letting the word
+slip out that on such a day there would be a killing and a barbecue.
+Promptly the missionaries would buy the lives of the victims with stick
+tobacco, fathoms of calico, and quarts of trade beads. Natheless the
+chiefs drove a handsome trade in thus disposing of their surplus live
+meat. Also, they could always go out and catch more.
+
+It was at this juncture that John Starhurst proclaimed that he would
+carry the Gospel from coast to coast of the Great Land, and that he
+would begin by penetrating the mountain fastnesses of the headwaters of
+the Rewa River. His words were received with consternation.
+
+The native teachers wept softly. His two fellow missionaries strove to
+dissuade him. The King of Rewa warned him that the mountain dwellers
+would surely kai-kai him--kai-kai meaning "to eat"--and that he, the
+King of Rewa, having become Lotu, would be put to the necessity of going
+to war with the mountain dwellers. That he could not conquer them he
+was perfectly aware. That they might come down the river and sack Rewa
+Village he was likewise perfectly aware. But what was he to do? If John
+Starhurst persisted in going out and being eaten, there would be a war
+that would cost hundreds of lives.
+
+Later in the day a deputation of Rewa chiefs waited upon John Starhurst.
+He heard them patiently, and argued patiently with them, though he
+abated not a whit from his purpose. To his fellow missionaries he
+explained that he was not bent upon martyrdom; that the call had come
+for him to carry the Gospel into Viti Levu, and that he was merely
+obeying the Lord's wish.
+
+To the traders who came and objected most strenuously of all, he said:
+"Your objections are valueless. They consist merely of the damage that
+may be done your businesses. You are interested in making money, but
+I am interested in saving souls. The heathen of this dark land must be
+saved."
+
+John Starhurst was not a fanatic. He would have been the first man to
+deny the imputation. He was eminently sane and practical.
+
+He was sure that his mission would result in good, and he had
+private visions of igniting the Pentecostal spark in the souls of the
+mountaineers and of inaugurating a revival that would sweep down out of
+the mountains and across the length and breadth of the Great Land from
+sea to sea and to the isles in the midst of the sea. There were no
+wild lights in his mild gray eyes, but only calm resolution and an
+unfaltering trust in the Higher Power that was guiding him.
+
+One man only he found who approved of his project, and that was Ra Vatu,
+who secretly encouraged him and offered to lend him guides to the first
+foothills. John Starhurst, in turn, was greatly pleased by Ra Vatu's
+conduct. From an incorrigible heathen, with a heart as black as his
+practices, Ra Vatu was beginning to emanate light. He even spoke of
+becoming Lotu. True, three years before he had expressed a similar
+intention, and would have entered the church had not John Starhurst
+entered objection to his bringing his four wives along with him. Ra
+Vatu had had economic and ethical objections to monogamy. Besides, the
+missionary's hair-splitting objection had offended him; and, to prove
+that he was a free agent and a man of honor, he had swung his huge war
+club over Starhurst's head. Starhurst had escaped by rushing in under
+the club and holding on to him until help arrived. But all that was now
+forgiven and forgotten. Ra Vatu was coming into the church, not merely
+as a converted heathen, but as a converted polygamist as well. He was
+only waiting, he assured Starhurst, until his oldest wife, who was very
+sick, should die.
+
+John Starhurst journeyed up the sluggish Rewa in one of Ra Vatu's
+canoes. This canoe was to carry him for two days, when, the head of
+navigation reached, it would return. Far in the distance, lifted
+into the sky, could be seen the great smoky mountains that marked the
+backbone of the Great Land. All day John Starhurst gazed at them with
+eager yearning.
+
+Sometimes he prayed silently. At other times he was joined in prayer by
+Narau, a native teacher, who for seven years had been Lotu, ever since
+the day he had been saved from the hot oven by Dr. James Ellery Brown
+at the trifling expense of one hundred sticks of tobacco, two cotton
+blankets, and a large bottle of painkiller. At the last moment, after
+twenty hours of solitary supplication and prayer, Narau's ears had
+heard the call to go forth with John Starhurst on the mission to the
+mountains.
+
+"Master, I will surely go with thee," he had announced.
+
+John Starhurst had hailed him with sober delight. Truly, the Lord was
+with him thus to spur on so broken-spirited a creature as Narau.
+
+"I am indeed without spirit, the weakest of the Lord's vessels," Narau
+explained, the first day in the canoe.
+
+"You should have faith, stronger faith," the missionary chided him.
+
+Another canoe journeyed up the Rewa that day. But it journeyed an
+hour astern, and it took care not to be seen. This canoe was also the
+property of Ra Vatu. In it was Erirola, Ra Vatu's first cousin and
+trusted henchman; and in the small basket that never left his hand was
+a whale tooth. It was a magnificent tooth, fully six inches long,
+beautifully proportioned, the ivory turned yellow and purple with age.
+This tooth was likewise the property of Ra Vatu; and in Fiji, when such
+a tooth goes forth, things usually happen. For this is the virtue of
+the whale tooth: Whoever accepts it cannot refuse the request that may
+accompany it or follow it. The request may be anything from a human life
+to a tribal alliance, and no Fijian is so dead to honor as to deny the
+request when once the tooth has been accepted. Sometimes the request
+hangs fire, or the fulfilment is delayed, with untoward consequences.
+
+High up the Rewa, at the village of a chief, Mongondro by name, John
+Starhurst rested at the end of the second day of the journey. In the
+morning, attended by Narau, he expected to start on foot for the smoky
+mountains that were now green and velvety with nearness. Mongondro was
+a sweet-tempered, mild-mannered little old chief, short-sighted
+and afflicted with elephantiasis, and no longer inclined toward the
+turbulence of war. He received the missionary with warm hospitality,
+gave him food from his own table, and even discussed religious matters
+with him. Mongondro was of an inquiring bent of mind, and pleased
+John Starhurst greatly by asking him to account for the existence and
+beginning of things. When the missionary had finished his summary of
+the Creation according to Genesis, he saw that Mongondro was deeply
+affected. The little old chief smoked silently for some time. Then he
+took the pipe from his mouth and shook his head sadly.
+
+"It cannot be," he said. "I, Mongondro, in my youth, was a good workman
+with the adze. Yet three months did it take me to make a canoe--a small
+canoe, a very small canoe. And you say that all this land and water was
+made by one man--"
+
+"Nay, was made by one God, the only true God," the missionary
+interrupted.
+
+"It is the same thing," Mongondro went on, "that all the land and all
+the water, the trees, the fish, and bush and mountains, the sun, the
+moon, and the stars, were made in six days! No, no. I tell you that in
+my youth I was an able man, yet did it require me three months for one
+small canoe. It is a story to frighten children with; but no man can
+believe it."
+
+"I am a man," the missionary said.
+
+"True, you are a man. But it is not given to my dark understanding to
+know what you believe."
+
+"I tell you, I do believe that everything was made in six days."
+
+"So you say, so you say," the old cannibal murmured soothingly.
+
+It was not until after John Starhurst and Narau had gone off to bed
+that Erirola crept into the chief's house, and, after diplomatic speech,
+handed the whale tooth to Mongondro.
+
+The old chief held the tooth in his hands for a long time. It was a
+beautiful tooth, and he yearned for it. Also, he divined the request
+that must accompany it. "No, no; whale teeth were beautiful," and
+his mouth watered for it, but he passed it back to Erirola with many
+apologies.
+
+                           *****
+
+In the early dawn John Starhurst was afoot, striding along the bush
+trail in his big leather boots, at his heels the faithful Narau, himself
+at the heels of a naked guide lent him by Mongondro to show the way to
+the next village, which was reached by midday. Here a new guide showed
+the way. A mile in the rear plodded Erirola, the whale tooth in the
+basket slung on his shoulder. For two days more he brought up the
+missionary's rear, offering the tooth to the village chiefs. But village
+after village refused the tooth. It followed so quickly the missionary's
+advent that they divined the request that would be made, and would have
+none of it.
+
+They were getting deep into the mountains, and Erirola took a secret
+trail, cut in ahead of the missionary, and reached the stronghold of the
+Buli of Gatoka. Now the Buli was unaware of John Starhurst's imminent
+arrival. Also, the tooth was beautiful--an extraordinary specimen, while
+the coloring of it was of the rarest order. The tooth was presented
+publicly. The Buli of Gatoka, seated on his best mat, surrounded by his
+chief men, three busy fly-brushers at his back, deigned to receive from
+the hand of his herald the whale tooth presented by Ra Vatu and carried
+into the mountains by his cousin, Erirola. A clapping of hands went up
+at the acceptance of the present, the assembled headman, heralds, and
+fly-brushers crying aloud in chorus:
+
+"A! woi! woi! woi! A! woi! woi! woi! A tabua levu! woi! woi! A mudua,
+mudua, mudua!'
+
+"Soon will come a man, a white man," Erirola began, after the proper
+pause. "He is a missionary man, and he will come today. Ra Vatu is
+pleased to desire his boots. He wishes to present them to his good
+friend, Mongondro, and it is in his mind to send them with the feet
+along in them, for Mongondro is an old man and his teeth are not good.
+Be sure, O Buli, that the feet go along in the boots. As for the rest of
+him, it may stop here."
+
+The delight in the whale tooth faded out of the Buli's eyes, and he
+glanced about him dubiously. Yet had he already accepted the tooth.
+
+"A little thing like a missionary does not matter," Erirola prompted.
+
+"No, a little thing like a missionary does not matter," the Buli
+answered, himself again. "Mongondro shall have the boots. Go, you young
+men, some three or four of you, and meet the missionary on the trail. Be
+sure you bring back the boots as well."
+
+"It is too late," said Erirola. "Listen! He comes now."
+
+Breaking through the thicket of brush, John Starhurst, with Narau close
+on his heels, strode upon the scene. The famous boots, having filled in
+wading the stream, squirted fine jets of water at every step. Starhurst
+looked about him with flashing eyes. Upborne by an unwavering trust,
+untouched by doubt or fear, he exulted in all he saw. He knew that
+since the beginning of time he was the first white man ever to tread the
+mountain stronghold of Gatoka.
+
+The grass houses clung to the steep mountain side or overhung the
+rushing Rewa. On either side towered a mighty precipice. At the best,
+three hours of sunlight penetrated that narrow gorge. No cocoanuts
+nor bananas were to be seen, though dense, tropic vegetation overran
+everything, dripping in airy festoons from the sheer lips of the
+precipices and running riot in all the crannied ledges. At the far end
+of the gorge the Rewa leaped eight hundred feet in a single span, while
+the atmosphere of the rock fortress pulsed to the rhythmic thunder of
+the fall.
+
+From the Buli's house, John Starhurst saw emerging the Buli and his
+followers.
+
+"I bring you good tidings," was the missionary's greeting.
+
+"Who has sent you?" the Buli rejoined quietly.
+
+"God."
+
+"It is a new name in Viti Levu," the Buli grinned. "Of what islands,
+villages, or passes may he be chief?"
+
+"He is the chief over all islands, all villages, all passes," John
+Starhurst answered solemnly. "He is the Lord over heaven and earth, and
+I am come to bring His word to you."
+
+"Has he sent whale teeth?" was the insolent query.
+
+"No, but more precious than whale teeth is the--"
+
+"It is the custom, between chiefs, to send whale teeth," the Buli
+interrupted.
+
+"Your chief is either a niggard, or you are a fool, to come empty-handed
+into the mountains. Behold, a more generous than you is before you."
+
+So saying, he showed the whale tooth he had received from Erirola.
+
+Narau groaned.
+
+"It is the whale tooth of Ra Vatu," he whispered to Starhurst. "I know
+it well. Now are we undone."
+
+"A gracious thing," the missionary answered, passing his hand through
+his long beard and adjusting his glasses. "Ra Vatu has arranged that we
+should be well received."
+
+But Narau groaned again, and backed away from the heels he had dogged so
+faithfully.
+
+"Ra Vatu is soon to become Lotu," Starhurst explained, "and I have come
+bringing the Lotu to you."
+
+"I want none of your Lotu," said the Buli, proudly. "And it is in my
+mind that you will be clubbed this day."
+
+The Buli nodded to one of his big mountaineers, who stepped forward,
+swinging a club. Narau bolted into the nearest house, seeking to hide
+among the woman and mats; but John Starhurst sprang in under the club
+and threw his arms around his executioner's neck. From this point of
+vantage he proceeded to argue. He was arguing for his life, and he knew
+it; but he was neither excited nor afraid.
+
+"It would be an evil thing for you to kill me," he told the man. "I have
+done you no wrong, nor have I done the Buli wrong."
+
+So well did he cling to the neck of the one man that they dared not
+strike with their clubs. And he continued to cling and to dispute for
+his life with those who clamored for his death.
+
+"I am John Starhurst," he went on calmly. "I have labored in Fiji for
+three years, and I have done it for no profit. I am here among you for
+good. Why should any man kill me? To kill me will not profit any man."
+
+The Buli stole a look at the whale tooth. He was well paid for the deed.
+
+The missionary was surrounded by a mass of naked savages, all struggling
+to get at him. The death song, which is the song of the oven, was
+raised, and his expostulations could no longer be heard. But so
+cunningly did he twine and wreathe his body about his captor's that the
+death blow could not be struck. Erirola smiled, and the Buli grew angry.
+
+"Away with you!" he cried. "A nice story to go back to the coast--a
+dozen of you and one missionary, without weapons, weak as a woman,
+overcoming all of you."
+
+"Wait, O Buli," John Starhurst called out from the thick of the scuffle,
+"and I will overcome even you. For my weapons are Truth and Right, and
+no man can withstand them."
+
+"Come to me, then," the Buli answered, "for my weapon is only a poor
+miserable club, and, as you say, it cannot withstand you."
+
+The group separated from him, and John Starhurst stood alone, facing the
+Buli, who was leaning on an enormous, knotted warclub.
+
+"Come to me, missionary man, and overcome me," the Buli challenged.
+
+"Even so will I come to you and overcome you," John Starhurst made
+answer, first wiping his spectacles and settling them properly, then
+beginning his advance.
+
+The Buli raised the club and waited.
+
+"In the first place, my death will profit you nothing," began the
+argument.
+
+"I leave the answer to my club," was the Buli's reply.
+
+And to every point he made the same reply, at the same time watching the
+missionary closely in order to forestall that cunning run-in under the
+lifted club. Then, and for the first time, John Starhurst knew that his
+death was at hand. He made no attempt to run in. Bareheaded, he stood in
+the sun and prayed aloud--the mysterious figure of the inevitable white
+man, who, with Bible, bullet, or rum bottle, has confronted the amazed
+savage in his every stronghold. Even so stood John Starhurst in the rock
+fortress of the Buli of Gatoka.
+
+"Forgive them, for they know not what they do," he prayed. "O Lord! Have
+mercy upon Fiji. Have compassion for Fiji. O Jehovah, hear us for His
+sake, Thy Son, whom Thou didst give that through Him all men might also
+become Thy children. From Thee we came, and our mind is that to Thee
+we may return. The land is dark, O Lord, the land is dark. But Thou art
+mighty to save. Reach out Thy hand, O Lord, and save Fiji, poor cannibal
+Fiji."
+
+The Buli grew impatient.
+
+"Now will I answer thee," he muttered, at the same time swinging his
+club with both hands.
+
+Narau, hiding among the women and the mats, heard the impact of the
+blow and shuddered. Then the death song arose, and he knew his beloved
+missionary's body was being dragged to the oven as he heard the words:
+
+"Drag me gently. Drag me gently."
+
+"For I am the champion of my land."
+
+"Give thanks! Give thanks! Give thanks!"
+
+Next, a single voice arose out of the din, asking:
+
+"Where is the brave man?"
+
+A hundred voices bellowed the answer:
+
+"Gone to be dragged into the oven and cooked."
+
+"Where is the coward?" the single voice demanded.
+
+"Gone to report!" the hundred voices bellowed back. "Gone to report!
+Gone to report!"
+
+Narau groaned in anguish of spirit. The words of the old song were true.
+He was the coward, and nothing remained to him but to go and report.
+
+
+
+
+MAUKI
+
+He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His hair was kinky and negroid,
+and he was black. He was peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor
+purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he was the son
+of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is Melanesian for taboo, and
+is first cousin to that Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were
+as follows: First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a
+woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings; secondly, he
+must never eat clams nor any food from a fire in which clams had been
+cooked; thirdly, he must never touch a crocodile, nor travel in a canoe
+that carried any part of a crocodile even if as large as a tooth.
+
+Of a different black were his teeth, which were deep black, or, perhaps
+better, LAMP-black. They had been made so in a single night, by his
+mother, who had compressed about them a powdered mineral which was
+dug from the landslide back of Port Adams. Port Adams is a salt-water
+village on Malaita, and Malaita is the most savage island in the
+Solomons--so savage that no traders or planters have yet gained a
+foothold on it; while, from the time of the earliest beche-de-mer
+fishers and sandalwood traders down to the latest labor recruiters
+equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines, scores of white
+adventurers have been passed out by tomahawks and soft-nosed Snider
+bullets. So Malaita remains today, in the twentieth century, the
+stamping ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for
+laborers who engage and contract themselves to toil on the plantations
+of the neighboring and more civilized islands for a wage of thirty
+dollars a year. The natives of those neighboring and more civilized
+islands have themselves become too civilized to work on plantations.
+
+Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor two places, but in a
+couple of dozen places. In one of the smaller holes he carried a clay
+pipe. The larger holes were too large for such use. The bowl of the pipe
+would have fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each ear
+he habitually wore round wooden plugs that were an even four inches in
+diameter. Roughly speaking, the circumference of said holes was twelve
+and one-half inches. Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In the various
+smaller holes he carried such things as empty rifle cartridges,
+horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of string, braids of sennit,
+strips of green leaf, and, in the cool of the day, scarlet hibiscus
+flowers. From which it will be seen that pockets were not necessary to
+his well-being. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his only wearing
+apparel consisted of a piece of calico several inches wide. A pocket
+knife he wore in his hair, the blade snapped down on a kinky lock. His
+most prized possession was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended
+from a ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn, was passed through the
+partition-cartilage of his nose.
+
+But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice face. It was really
+a pretty face, viewed by any standard, and for a Melanesian it was a
+remarkably good-looking face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It
+was softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were small, regular,
+and delicate. The chin was weak, and the mouth was weak. There was no
+strength nor character in the jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only
+could be caught any hint of the unknown quantities that were so large a
+part of his make-up and that other persons could not understand. These
+unknown quantities were pluck, pertinacity, fearlessness, imagination,
+and cunning; and when they found expression in some consistent and
+striking action, those about him were astounded.
+
+Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port Adams, and thus, by
+birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half amphibian. He knew the way of the
+fishes and oysters, and the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also,
+he knew. He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years he
+could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight down to bottom
+through thirty feet of water. And at seven years he was stolen by
+the bushmen, who cannot even swim and who are afraid of salt water.
+Thereafter Mauki saw the sea only from a distance, through rifts in the
+jungle and from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became the
+slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered bush-villages
+on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of which, on calm mornings,
+is about the only evidence the seafaring white men have of the teeming
+interior population. For the whites do not penetrate Malaita. They tried
+it once, in the days when the search was on for gold, but they always
+left their heads behind to grin from the smoky rafters of the bushmen's
+huts.
+
+When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got out of tobacco. He
+got dreadfully out of tobacco. It was hard times in all his villages.
+He had been guilty of a mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a large
+schooner could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by mangroves
+that overhung the deep water. It was a trap, and into the trap sailed
+two white men in a small ketch. They were after recruits, and they
+possessed much tobacco and trade goods, to say nothing of three rifles
+and plenty of ammunition. Now there were no salt-water men living at
+Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come down to the sea. The
+ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on twenty recruits the first
+day. Even old Fanfoa signed on. And that same day the score of new
+recruits chopped off the two white men's head, killed the boat's crew,
+and burned the ketch. Thereafter, and for three months, there was
+tobacco and trade goods in plenty and to spare in all the bush villages.
+Then came the man-of-war that threw shells for miles into the hills,
+frightening the people out of their villages and into the deeper bush.
+Next the man-of-war sent landing parties ashore. The villages were all
+burned, along with the tobacco and trade stuff.
+
+The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the taro gardens uprooted,
+and the pigs and chickens killed.
+
+It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he was out of tobacco.
+Also, his young men were too frightened to sign on with the recruiting
+vessels. That was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried
+down and signed on for half a case of tobacco advance, along with
+knives, axes, calico, and beads, which he would pay for with his toil
+on the plantations. Mauki was sorely frightened when they brought him on
+board the schooner. He was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were
+ferocious creatures. They had to be, or else they would not make a
+practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all harbors, two
+on a schooner, when each schooner carried from fifteen to twenty blacks
+as boat's crew, and often as high as sixty or seventy black recruits. In
+addition to this, there was always the danger of the shore population,
+the sudden attack and the cutting off of the schooner and all hands.
+Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides, they were possessed of such
+devil-devils--rifles that shot very rapidly many times, things of iron
+and brass that made the schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes
+that talked and laughed just as men talked and laughed.
+
+Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose particular devil-devil was
+so powerful that he could take out all his teeth and put them back at
+will.
+
+Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the one white man kept
+guard with two revolvers in his belt. In the cabin the other white man
+sat with a book before him, in which he inscribed strange marks and
+lines. He looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl, glanced
+under the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the book. Then he held out
+the writing stick and Mauki just barely touched it with his hand, in so
+doing pledging himself to toil for three years on the plantations of the
+Moongleam Soap Company. It was not explained to him that the will of
+the ferocious white men would be used to enforce the pledge, and that,
+behind all, for the same use, was all the power and all the warships of
+Great Britain.
+
+Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of far places, and when
+the white man spoke to them, they tore the long feather from Mauki's
+hair, cut that same hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lava-lava
+of bright yellow calico.
+
+After many days on the schooner, and after beholding more land and
+islands than he had ever dreamed of, he was landed on New Georgia, and
+put to work in the field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the
+first time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to Fanfoa he had not
+worked like this. And he did not like work. It was up at dawn and in at
+dark, on two meals a day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time
+they were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for weeks at
+a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out the cocoanut from the
+shells day after day; and for long days and weeks he fed the fires
+that smoked the copra, till his eyes got sore and he was set to
+felling trees. He was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
+bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put in the
+road-building gang. At times he served as boat's crew in the whale
+boats, when they brought in copra from distant beaches or when the white
+men went out to dynamite fish.
+
+Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English, with which he could
+talk with all white men, and with all recruits who otherwise would have
+talked in a thousand different dialects. Also, he learned certain things
+about the white men, principally that they kept their word. If they told
+a boy he was going to receive a stick of tobacco, he got it. If they
+told a boy they would knock seven bells out of him if he did a certain
+thing, when he did that thing, seven bells invariably were knocked out
+of him. Mauki did not know what seven bells were, but they occurred
+in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to be the blood and teeth that
+sometimes accompanied the process of knocking out seven bells. One other
+thing he learned: no boy was struck or punished unless he did wrong.
+Even when the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they never
+struck unless a rule had been broken.
+
+Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work, and he was the son
+of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten years since he had been stolen from
+Port Adams by Fanfoa, and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the
+slavery under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the bush, with
+the idea of working southward to the beach and stealing a canoe in which
+to go home to Port Adams.
+
+But the fever got him, and he was captured and brought back more dead
+than alive.
+
+A second time he ran away, in the company of two Malaita boys. They got
+down the coast twenty miles, and were hidden in the hut of a Malaita
+freeman, who dwelt in that village. But in the dead of night two white
+men came, who were not afraid of all the village people and who knocked
+seven bells out of the three runaways, tied them like pigs, and
+tossed them into the whale boat. But the man in whose house they had
+hidden--seven times seven bells must have been knocked out of him from
+the way the hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was discouraged for the
+rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.
+
+For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a house-boy, and had good
+food and easy times, with light work in keeping the house clean and
+serving the white men with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and
+most hours of the night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams more. He
+had two years longer to serve, but two years were too long for him in
+the throes of homesickness. He had grown wiser with his year of service,
+and, being now a house-boy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning of
+the rifles, and he knew where the key to the store room was hung. He
+planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys and one boy from San
+Cristoval sneaked from the barracks and dragged one of the whale boats
+down to the beach. It was Mauki who supplied the key that opened the
+padlock on the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a dozen
+Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case of dynamite with
+detonators and fuse, and ten cases of tobacco.
+
+The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled south in the night
+time, hiding by day on detached and uninhabited islets, or dragging
+their whale boat into the bush on the large islands. Thus they gained
+Guadalcanar, skirted halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable
+Straits to Florida Island. It was here that they killed the San
+Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking and eating the rest of him.
+The Malaita coast was only twenty miles away, but the last night a
+strong current and baffling winds prevented them from gaining across.
+Daylight found them still several miles from their goal. But daylight
+brought a cutter, in which were two white men, who were not afraid of
+eleven Malaita men armed with twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions
+were carried back to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all
+the white men. And the great white master held a court, after which,
+one by one, the runaways were tied up and given twenty lashes each,
+and sentenced to a fine of fifteen dollars. They were sent back to New
+Georgia, where the white men knocked seven bells out of them all around
+and put them to work. But Mauki was no longer house-boy. He was put in
+the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen dollars had been paid by the
+white men from whom he had run away, and he was told that he would have
+to work it out, which meant six months' additional toil. Further, his
+share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of toil.
+
+Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so he stole a canoe one
+night, hid on the islets in Manning Straits, passed through the
+Straits, and began working along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to
+be captured, two-thirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe
+Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and took to the bush. There
+were no bush natives on Ysabel, only salt-water men, who were all
+Christians. The white men put up a reward of five-hundred sticks of
+tobacco, and every time Mauki ventured down to the sea to steal a canoe
+he was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this passed, when,
+the reward having been raised to a thousand sticks, he was caught and
+sent back to New Georgia and the road-building gang. Now a thousand
+sticks are worth fifty dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself,
+which required a year and eight months' labor. So Port Adams was now
+five years away.
+
+His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did not appeal to him to
+settle down and be good, work out his four years, and go home. The
+next time, he was caught in the very act of running away. His case was
+brought before Mr. Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap
+Company, who adjudged him an incorrigible. The Company had plantations
+on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds of miles across the sea, and there
+it sent its Solomon Islands' incorrigibles. And there Mauki was sent,
+though he never arrived. The schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in the
+night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a case of tobacco
+from the trader and got away in a canoe to Cristoval. Malaita was now to
+the north, fifty or sixty miles away. But when he attempted the passage,
+he was caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna, where
+the trader clapped him in irons and held him against the return of the
+schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles the trader recovered, but the
+case of tobacco was charged up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The
+sum of years he now owed the Company was six.
+
+On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner dropped anchor in Marau
+Sound, which lies at the southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki
+swam ashore with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The
+schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered a thousand
+sticks, and to him Mauki was brought by the bushmen with a year and
+eight months tacked on to his account. Again, and before the schooner
+called in, he got away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a case
+of the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale wrecked him upon Ugi,
+where the Christian natives stole his tobacco and turned him over to the
+Moongleam trader who resided there. The tobacco the natives stole meant
+another year for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.
+
+"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby. "Bunster is there, and
+we'll let them settle it between them. It will be a case, I imagine, of
+Mauki getting Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in
+either event."
+
+If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers a course due north,
+magnetic, at the end of one hundred and fifty miles he will lift the
+pounded coral beaches of Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of
+land some one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several hundred
+yards wide at its widest, and towering in places to a height of ten feet
+above sea level. Inside this ring of sand is a mighty lagoon studded
+with coral patches. Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither
+geographically nor ethnologically. It is an atoll, while the Solomons
+are high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian, while the
+inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.
+
+Lord Howe has been populated by the westward Polynesian drift which
+continues to this day, big outrigger canoes being washed upon its
+beaches by the southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian
+drift in the period of the northwest monsoon, is also evident.
+
+Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as it is sometimes
+called. Thomas Cook & Son do not sell tickets to it, and tourists do not
+dream of its existence. Not even a white missionary has landed on its
+shore. Its five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are primitive.
+Yet they were not always peaceable. The Sailing Directions speak of
+them as hostile and treacherous. But the men who compile the Sailing
+Directions have never heard of the change that was worked in the hearts
+of the inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut off a big bark and
+killed all hands with the exception of the second mate. The survivor
+carried the news to his brothers. The captains of three trading
+schooners returned with him to Lord Howe. They sailed their vessels
+right into the lagoon and proceeded to preach the white man's gospel
+that only white men shall kill white men and that the lesser breeds must
+keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the lagoon, harrying
+and destroying. There was no escape from the narrow sand-circle, no
+bush to which to flee. The men were shot down at sight, and there was
+no avoiding being sighted. The villages were burned, the canoes smashed,
+the chickens and pigs killed, and the precious cocoanut trees chopped
+down. For a month this continued, when the schooner sailed away; but the
+fear of the white man had been seared into the souls of the islanders
+and never again were they rash enough to harm one.
+
+Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe, trading in the pay of
+the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap Company. And the Company billeted him
+on Lord Howe, because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most
+out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not get rid of
+him was due to the difficulty of finding another man to take his place.
+He was a strapping big German, with something wrong in his brain.
+Semi-madness would be a charitable statement of his condition. He was
+a bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any savage on the
+island.
+
+Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly order. When he
+first went into the Company's employ, he was stationed on Savo. When a
+consumptive colonial was sent to take his place, he beat him up with his
+fists and sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.
+
+Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to relieve Bunster. The
+Yorkshire man had a reputation as a bruiser and preferred fighting to
+eating. But Bunster wouldn't fight. He was a regular little lamb--for
+ten days, at the end of which time the Yorkshire man was prostrated by a
+combined attack of dysentery and fever. Then Bunster went for him, among
+other things getting him down and jumping on him a score or so of times.
+Afraid of what would happen when his victim recovered. Bunster fled away
+in a cutter to Guvutu, where he signalized himself by beating up a young
+Englishman already crippled by a Boer bullet through both hips.
+
+Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord Howe, the falling-off
+place. He celebrated his landing by mopping up half a case of gin and by
+thrashing the elderly and wheezy mate of the schooner which had brought
+him. When the schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to the beach
+and challenged them to throw him in a wrestling bout, promising a case
+of tobacco to the one who succeeded. Three kanakas he threw, but was
+promptly thrown by a fourth, who, instead of receiving the tobacco, got
+a bullet through his lungs.
+
+And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three thousand people lived
+in the principal village; but it was deserted, even in broad day, when
+he passed through. Men, women, and children fled before him. Even the
+dogs and pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above hiding
+under a mat. The two prime ministers lived in terror of Bunster, who
+never discussed any moot subject, but struck out with his fists instead.
+
+And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster for eight long years
+and a half. There was no escaping from Lord Howe. For better or worse,
+Bunster and he were tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds.
+Mauki weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate brute. But
+Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had wills and ways of their
+own.
+
+Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to work for. He had had
+no warnings, and he had concluded as a matter of course that Bunster
+would be like other white men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and a
+lawgiver who always kept his word and who never struck a boy undeserved.
+Bunster had the advantage. He knew all about Mauki, and gloated over the
+coming into possession of him. The last cook was suffering from a broken
+arm and a dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made Mauki cook and general
+house-boy.
+
+And Mauki soon learned that there were white men and white men. On the
+very day the schooner departed he was ordered to buy a chicken from
+Samisee, the native Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed across
+the lagoon and would not be back for three days. Mauki returned with
+the information. He climbed the steep stairway (the house stood on piles
+twelve feet above the sand), and entered the living room to report.
+The trader demanded the chicken. Mauki opened his mouth to explain the
+missionary's absence. But Bunster did not care for explanations. He
+struck out with his fist. The blow caught Mauki on the mouth and lifted
+him into the air. Clear through the doorway he flew, across the narrow
+veranda, breaking the top railing, and down to the ground.
+
+His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his mouth was full of
+blood and broken teeth.
+
+"That'll teach you that back talk don't go with me," the trader shouted,
+purple with rage, peering down at him over the broken railing.
+
+Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he resolved to walk small
+and never offend. He saw the boat boys knocked about, and one of
+them put in irons for three days with nothing to eat for the crime of
+breaking a rowlock while pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of the
+village and learned why Bunster had taken a third wife--by force, as was
+well known. The first and second wives lay in the graveyard, under the
+white coral sand, with slabs of coral rock at head and feet. They had
+died, it was said, from beatings he had given them. The third wife was
+certainly ill-used, as Mauki could see for himself.
+
+But there was no way by which to avoid offending the white man who
+seemed offended with life. When Mauki kept silent, he was struck and
+called a sullen brute. When he spoke, he was struck for giving back
+talk. When he was grave, Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him a
+thrashing in advance; and when he strove to be cheerful and to smile,
+he was charged with sneering at his lord and master and given a taste of
+stick. Bunster was a devil.
+
+The village would have done for him, had it not remembered the lesson
+of the three schooners. It might have done for him anyway, if there had
+been a bush to which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white men,
+of any white man, would bring a man-of-war that would kill the offenders
+and chop down the precious cocoanut trees. Then there were the boat
+boys, with minds fully made up to drown him by accident at the first
+opportunity to capsize the cutter. Only Bunster saw to it that the boat
+did not capsize.
+
+Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being impossible while
+Bunster lived, he was resolved to get the white man. The trouble was
+that he could never find a chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day
+and night his revolvers were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to pass
+behind his back, as Mauki learned after having been knocked down several
+times. Bunster knew that he had more to fear from the good-natured, even
+sweet-faced, Malaita boy than from the entire population of Lord Howe;
+and it gave added zest to the programme of torment he was carrying out.
+And Mauki walked small, accepted his punishments, and waited.
+
+All other white men had respected his tambos, but not so Bunster.
+
+Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks. Bunster passed them
+to his woman and ordered Mauki to receive them from her hand. But this
+could not be, and Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way he was
+made to miss many a meal, and to go hungry many a day. He was ordered to
+make chowder out of the big clams that grew in the lagoon. This he could
+not do, for clams were tambo. Six times in succession he refused to
+touch the clams, and six times he was knocked senseless. Bunster knew
+that the boy would die first, but called his refusal mutiny, and would
+have killed him had there been another cook to take his place.
+
+One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch Mauki's kinky locks and
+bat his head against the wall. Another trick was to catch Mauki unawares
+and thrust the live end of a cigar against his flesh. This Bunster
+called vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times a week.
+Once, in a rage, Bunster ripped the cup handle from Mauki's nose,
+tearing the hole clear out of the cartilage.
+
+"Oh, what a mug!" was his comment, when he surveyed the damage he had
+wrought.
+
+The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin of a ray fish is
+like a rasp. In the South Seas the natives use it as a wood file in
+smoothing down canoes and paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray fish
+skin. The first time he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the hand
+it fetched the skin off his back from neck to armpit. Bunster was
+delighted. He gave his wife a taste of the mitten, and tried it out
+thoroughly on the boat boys. The prime ministers came in for a stroke
+each, and they had to grin and take it for a joke.
+
+"Laugh, damn you, laugh!" was the cue he gave.
+
+Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten. Never a day passed
+without a caress from it. There were times when the loss of so much
+cuticle kept him awake at night, and often the half-healed surface
+was raked raw afresh by the facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his
+patient wait, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later his time
+would come. And he knew just what he was going to do, down to the
+smallest detail, when the time did come.
+
+One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking seven bells out of
+the universe. He began on Mauki, and wound up on Mauki, in the interval
+knocking down his wife and hammering all the boat boys. At breakfast he
+called the coffee slops and threw the scalding contents of the cup into
+Mauki's face. By ten o'clock Bunster was shivering with ague, and half
+an hour later he was burning with fever. It was no ordinary attack. It
+quickly became pernicious, and developed into black-water fever. The
+days passed, and he grew weaker and weaker, never leaving his bed. Mauki
+waited and watched, the while his skin grew intact once more. He ordered
+the boys to beach the cutter, scrub her bottom, and give her a general
+overhauling. They thought the order emanated from Bunster, and they
+obeyed. But Bunster at the time was lying unconscious and giving no
+orders. This was Mauki's chance, but still he waited.
+
+When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but
+weak as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china
+cup handle, into his trade box. Then he went over to the village and
+interviewed the king and his two prime ministers.
+
+"This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too much?" he asked.
+
+They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The
+ministers poured forth a recital of all the indignities and wrongs
+that had been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki
+interrupted rudely.
+
+"You savve me--me big fella marster my country. You no like 'm this
+fella white marster. Me no like 'm. Plenty good you put hundred
+cocoanut, two hundred cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter.
+Him finish, you go sleep 'm good fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good
+fella. Bime by big fella noise along house, you no savve hear 'm that
+fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella too much."
+
+In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered
+Bunster's wife to return to her family house. Had she refused, he would
+have been in a quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to
+lay hands on her.
+
+The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay
+in a doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish
+mitten on his hand. Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten
+that removed the skin the full length of his nose.
+
+"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept
+the forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his
+face. "Laugh, damn you, laugh."
+
+Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses,
+heard the "big fella noise" that Bunster made and continued to make for
+an hour or more.
+
+When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and
+ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases
+of tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing
+came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in
+the sand and mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked
+toward it and hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head, which
+he wrapped in a mat and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.
+
+So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they
+did not see the cutter run out through the passage and head south,
+close-hauled on the southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on
+that long tack to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat
+from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles
+and tobacco such as no one man had ever possessed before. But he did
+not stop there. He had taken a white man's head, and only the bush could
+shelter him. So back he went to the bush villages, where he shot old
+Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made himself the chief
+over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki's brother ruled
+in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the
+resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes
+of Malaita.
+
+More than his fear of the British government was Mauki's fear of the
+all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up
+to him in the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and
+one-half years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then
+appeared the inevitable white man, the captain of the schooner, the
+only white man during Mauki's reign, who ventured the bush and came out
+alive. This man not only came out, but he brought with him seven hundred
+and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns--the money price of eight years
+and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles and cases of
+tobacco.
+
+Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is
+three times its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many
+other things--rifles and revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an
+excellent collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the
+entire collection is another head, perfectly dried and cured, with sandy
+hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped in the finest of fibre
+lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond his realm,
+he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,
+contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls
+on the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The
+head is esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the
+possession of it is ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.
+
+
+
+
+"YAH! YAH! YAH!"
+
+He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat,
+beginning with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and
+thereafter repeating it at regular intervals throughout the day till
+bedtime, which was usually midnight. He slept but five hours out of the
+twenty-four, and for the remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and
+decently drunk. During the eight weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll,
+I never saw him draw a sober breath. In fact, his sleep was so short
+that he never had time to sober up. It was the most beautiful and
+orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.
+
+McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins.
+His hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured
+his whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been
+twenty-eight years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the
+German Solomons, and so thoroughly had he become identified with that
+portion of the world, that he habitually spoke in that bastard lingo
+called "bech-de-mer." Thus, in conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP
+meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that dinner was served; and BELLY
+BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at his stomach. He was
+a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside by ardent
+spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a man, a
+little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by
+starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him
+away. He weighed ninety pounds.
+
+But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled.
+Oolong Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One
+steered by compass course in its lagoon. It was populated by five
+thousand Polynesians, all strapping men and women, many of them standing
+six feet in height and weighing a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was
+two hundred and fifty miles from the nearest land. Twice a year a
+little schooner called to collect copra. The one white man on Oolong was
+McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler; and he ruled Oolong
+and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said come, and they
+came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor judgment.
+He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered
+continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king's daughter,
+wanted to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said
+yes; but McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the
+king wanted to buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest,
+McAllister said no. The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of
+180,000 cocoanuts, and until that was paid he was not to spend a single
+cocoanut on anything else.
+
+And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they
+hated him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the
+priests at the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death.
+The devil-devils they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since
+McAllister did not believe in devil-devils, they were without power over
+him. With drunken Scotchmen all signs fail. They gathered up scraps of
+food which had touched his lips, an empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut
+from which he had drunk, and even his spittle, and performed all kinds
+of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived on. His health was superb.
+He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds; dysentery passed him by;
+and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that attack blacks and
+whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He must have been
+so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I used to
+imagine them falling to the ground in showers of microscopic cinders as
+fast as they entered his whiskey-sodden aura. No one loved him, not even
+germs, while he loved only whiskey, and still he lived.
+
+I was puzzled. I could not understand six thousand natives putting up
+with that withered shrimp of a tyrant. It was a miracle that he had not
+died suddenly long since. Unlike the cowardly Melanesians, the people
+were high-stomached and warlike. In the big graveyard, at head and feet
+of the graves, were relics of past sanguinary history--blubber-spades,
+rusty old bayonets and cutlasses, copper bolts, rudder-irons, harpoons,
+bomb guns, bricks that could have come from nowhere but a whaler's
+trying-out furnace, and old brass pieces of the sixteenth century that
+verified the traditions of the early Spanish navigators. Ship after
+ship had come to grief on Oolong. Not thirty years before, the whaler
+BLENNERDALE, running into the lagoon for repair, had been cut off with
+all hands. In similar fashion had the crew of the GASKET, a sandalwood
+trader, perished. There was a big French bark, the TOULON, becalmed off
+the atoll, which the islanders boarded after a sharp tussle and wrecked
+in the Lipau Passage, the captain and a handful of sailors escaping in
+the longboat. Then there were the Spanish pieces, which told of the
+loss of one of the early explorers. All this, of the vessels named, is
+a matter of history, and is to be found in the SOUTH PACIFIC SAILING
+DIRECTORY. But that there was other history, unwritten, I was yet to
+learn. In the meantime I puzzled why six thousand primitive savages let
+one degenerate Scotch despot live.
+
+One hot afternoon McAllister and I sat on the veranda looking out over
+the lagoon, with all its wonder of jeweled colors. At our backs, across
+the hundred yards of palm-studded sand, the outer surf roared on the
+reef. It was dreadfully warm. We were in four degree south latitude and
+the sun was directly overhead, having crossed the Line a few days before
+on its journey south. There was no wind--not even a catspaw. The season
+of the southeast trade was drawing to an early close, and the northwest
+monsoon had not yet begun to blow.
+
+"They can't dance worth a damn," said McAllister.
+
+I had happened to mention that the Polynesian dances were superior to
+the Papuan, and this McAllister had denied, for no other reason than
+his cantankerousness. But it was too hot to argue, and I said nothing.
+Besides, I had never seen the Oolong people dance.
+
+"I'll prove it to you," he announced, beckoning to the black New Hanover
+boy, a labor recruit, who served as cook and general house servant.
+"Hey, you, boy, you tell 'm one fella king come along me."
+
+The boy departed, and back came the prime minister, perturbed, ill at
+ease, and garrulous with apologetic explanation. In short, the king
+slept, and was not to be disturbed.
+
+"King he plenty strong fella sleep," was his final sentence.
+
+McAllister was in such a rage that the prime minister incontinently
+fled, to return with the king himself. They were a magnificent pair,
+the king especially, who must have been all of six feet three inches in
+height. His features had the eagle-like quality that is so frequently
+found in those of the North American Indian. He had been molded and born
+to rule. His eyes flashed as he listened, but right meekly he obeyed
+McAllister's command to fetch a couple of hundred of the best dancers,
+male and female, in the village. And dance they did, for two mortal
+hours, under that broiling sun. They did not love him for it, and little
+he cared, in the end dismissing them with abuse and sneers.
+
+The abject servility of those magnificent savages was terrifying. How
+could it be? What was the secret of his rule? More and more I puzzled
+as the days went by, and though I observed perpetual examples of his
+undisputed sovereignty, never a clew was there as to how it was.
+
+One day I happened to speak of my disappointment in failing to trade for
+a beautiful pair of orange cowries. The pair was worth five pounds
+in Sydney if it was worth a cent. I had offered two hundred sticks
+of tobacco to the owner, who had held out for three hundred. When I
+casually mentioned the situation, McAllister immediately sent for the
+man, took the shells from him, and turned them over to me. Fifty sticks
+were all he permitted me to pay for them. The man accepted the tobacco
+and seemed overjoyed at getting off so easily. As for me, I resolved to
+keep a bridle on my tongue in the future. And still I mulled over the
+secret of McAllister's power. I even went to the extent of asking
+him directly, but all he did was to cock one eye, look wise, and take
+another drink.
+
+One night I was out fishing in the lagoon with Oti, the man who had
+been mulcted of the cowries. Privily, I had made up to him an additional
+hundred and fifty sticks, and he had come to regard me with a respect
+that was almost veneration, which was curious, seeing that he was an old
+man, twice my age at least.
+
+"What name you fella kanaka all the same pickaninny?" I began on him.
+"This fella trader he one fella. You fella kanaka plenty fella too
+much. You fella kanaka just like 'm dog--plenty fright along that fella
+trader. He no eat you, fella. He no get 'm teeth along him. What name
+you too much fright?"
+
+"S'pose plenty fella kanaka kill 'm?" he asked.
+
+"He die," I retorted. "You fella kanaka kill 'm plenty fella white man
+long time before. What name you fright this fella white man?"
+
+"Yes, we kill 'm plenty," was his answer. "My word! Any amount! Long
+time before. One time, me young fella too much, one big fella ship he
+stop outside. Wind he no blow. Plenty fella kanaka we get 'm canoe,
+plenty fella canoe, we go catch 'm that fella ship. My word--we catch 'm
+big fella fight. Two, three white men shoot like hell. We no fright.
+We come alongside, we go up side, plenty fella, maybe I think fifty-ten
+(five hundred). One fella white Mary (woman) belong that fella ship.
+Never before I see 'm white Mary. Bime by plenty white man finish. One
+fella skipper he no die. Five fella, six fella white man no die. Skipper
+he sing out. Some fella white man he fight. Some fella white man he
+lower away boat. After that, all together over the side they go. Skipper
+he sling white Mary down. After that they washee (row) strong fella
+plenty too much. Father belong me, that time he strong fella. He throw
+'m one fella spear. That fella spear he go in one side that white Mary.
+He no stop. My word, he go out other side that fella Mary. She finish.
+Me no fright. Plenty kanaka too much no fright."
+
+Old Oti's pride had been touched, for he suddenly stripped down his
+lava-lava and showed me the unmistakable scar of a bullet. Before I
+could speak, his line ran out suddenly. He checked it and attempted to
+haul in, but found that the fish had run around a coral branch. Casting
+a look of reproach at me for having beguiled him from his watchfulness,
+he went over the side, feet first, turning over after he got under and
+following his line down to bottom. The water was ten fathoms. I leaned
+over and watched the play of his feet, growing dim and dimmer, as they
+stirred the wan phosphorescence into ghostly fires. Ten fathoms--sixty
+feet--it was nothing to him, an old man, compared with the value of a
+hook and line. After what seemed five minutes, though it could not have
+been more than a minute, I saw him flaming whitely upward. He broke
+surface and dropped a ten pound rock cod into the canoe, the line and
+hook intact, the latter still fast in the fish's mouth.
+
+"It may be," I said remorselessly. "You no fright long ago. You plenty
+fright now along that fella trader."
+
+"Yes, plenty fright," he confessed, with an air of dismissing the
+subject. For half an hour we pulled up our lines and flung them out in
+silence. Then small fish-sharks began to bite, and after losing a hook
+apiece, we hauled in and waited for the sharks to go their way.
+
+"I speak you true," Oti broke into speech, "then you savve we fright
+now."
+
+I lighted up my pipe and waited, and the story that Oti told me in
+atrocious bech-de-mer I here turn into proper English. Otherwise, in
+spirit and order of narrative, the tale is as it fell from Oti's lips.
+
+"It was after that that we were very proud. We had fought many times
+with the strange white men who live upon the sea, and always we had
+beaten them. A few of us were killed, but what was that compared with
+the stores of wealth of a thousand thousand kinds that we found on the
+ships? And then one day, maybe twenty years ago, or twenty-five, there
+came a schooner right through the passage and into the lagoon. It was a
+large schooner with three masts. She had five white men and maybe forty
+boat's crew, black fellows from New Guinea and New Britain; and she
+had come to fish beche-de-mer. She lay at anchor across the lagoon from
+here, at Pauloo, and her boats scattered out everywhere, making camps
+on the beaches where they cured the beche-de-mer. This made them weak
+by dividing them, for those who fished here and those on the schooner at
+Pauloo were fifty miles apart, and there were others farther away still.
+
+"Our king and headmen held council, and I was one in the canoe that
+paddled all afternoon and all night across the lagoon, bringing word
+to the people of Pauloo that in the morning we would attack the fishing
+camps at the one time and that it was for them to take the schooner. We
+who brought the word were tired with the paddling, but we took part
+in the attack. On the schooner were two white men, the skipper and the
+second mate, with half a dozen black boys. The skipper with three boys
+we caught on shore and killed, but first eight of us the skipper killed
+with his two revolvers. We fought close together, you see, at hand
+grapples.
+
+"The noise of our fighting told the mate what was happening, and he put
+food and water and a sail in the small dingy, which was so small that
+it was no more than twelve feet long. We came down upon the schooner, a
+thousand men, covering the lagoon with our canoes. Also, we were blowing
+conch shells, singing war songs, and striking the sides of the canoes
+with our paddles. What chance had one white man and three black boys
+against us? No chance at all, and the mate knew it.
+
+"White men are hell. I have watched them much, and I am an old man now,
+and I understand at last why the white men have taken to themselves all
+the islands in the sea. It is because they are hell. Here are you in
+the canoe with me. You are hardly more than a boy. You are not wise,
+for each day I tell you many things you do not know. When I was a little
+pickaninny, I knew more about fish and the ways of fish than you know
+now. I am an old man, but I swim down to the bottom of the lagoon, and
+you cannot follow me. What are you good for, anyway? I do not know,
+except to fight. I have never seen you fight, yet I know that you are
+like your brothers and that you will fight like hell. Also, you are a
+fool, like your brothers. You do not know when you are beaten. You will
+fight until you die, and then it will be too late to know that you are
+beaten.
+
+"Now behold what this mate did. As we came down upon him, covering the
+sea and blowing our conches, he put off from the schooner in the small
+boat, along with the three black boys, and rowed for the passage. There
+again he was a fool, for no wise man would put out to sea in so small
+a boat. The sides of it were not four inches above the water. Twenty
+canoes went after him, filled with two hundred young men. We paddled
+five fathoms while his black boys were rowing one fathom. He had no
+chance, but he was a fool. He stood up in the boat with a rifle, and he
+shot many times. He was not a good shot, but as we drew close many of us
+were wounded and killed. But still he had no chance.
+
+"I remember that all the time he was smoking a cigar. When we were forty
+feet away and coming fast, he dropped the rifle, lighted a stick of
+dynamite with the cigar, and threw it at us. He lighted another and
+another, and threw them at us very rapidly, many of them. I know now
+that he must have split the ends of the fuses and stuck in match heads,
+because they lighted so quickly. Also, the fuses were very short.
+Sometimes the dynamite sticks went off in the air, but most of them went
+off in the canoes. And each time they went off in a canoe, that canoe
+was finished. Of the twenty canoes, the half were smashed to pieces. The
+canoe I was in was so smashed, and likewise the two men who sat next
+to me. The dynamite fell between them. The other canoes turned and ran
+away. Then that mate yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' at us. Also he went at us
+again with his rifle, so that many were killed through the back as they
+fled away. And all the time the black boys in the boat went on rowing.
+You see, I told you true, that mate was hell.
+
+"Nor was that all. Before he left the schooner, he set her on fire,
+and fixed up all the powder and dynamite so that it would go off at one
+time. There were hundreds of us on board, trying to put out the fire,
+heaving up water from overside, when the schooner blew up. So that all
+we had fought for was lost to us, besides many more of us being killed.
+Sometimes, even now, in my old age, I have bad dreams in which I hear
+that mate yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!' In a voice of thunder he yells, Yah!
+Yah! Yah!' But all those in the fishing camps were killed.
+
+"The mate went out of the passage in his little boat, and that was the
+end of him we made sure, for how could so small a boat, with four men in
+it, live on the ocean? A month went by, and then, one morning, between
+two rain squalls, a schooner sailed in through our passage and dropped
+anchor before the village. The king and the headmen made big talk, and
+it was agreed that we would take the schooner in two or three days. In
+the meantime, as it was our custom always to appear friendly, we went
+off to her in canoes, bringing strings of cocoanuts, fowls, and pigs, to
+trade. But when we were alongside, many canoes of us, the men on board
+began to shoot us with rifles, and as we paddled away I saw the mate who
+had gone to sea in the little boat spring upon the rail and dance and
+yell, Yah! Yah! Yah!'
+
+"That afternoon they landed from the schooner in three small boats
+filled with white men. They went right through the village, shooting
+every man they saw. Also they shot the fowls and pigs. We who were not
+killed got away in canoes and paddled out into the lagoon. Looking back,
+we could see all the houses on fire. Late in the afternoon we saw many
+canoes coming from Nihi, which is the village near the Nihi Passage in
+the northeast. They were all that were left, and like us their village
+had been burned by a second schooner that had come through Nihi Passage.
+
+"We stood on in the darkness to the westward for Pauloo, but in the
+middle of the night we heard women wailing and then we ran into a big
+fleet of canoes. They were all that were left of Pauloo, which likewise
+was in ashes, for a third schooner had come in through the Pauloo
+Passage. You see, that mate, with his black boys, had not been drowned.
+He had made the Solomon Islands, and there told his brothers of what we
+had done in Oolong. And all his brothers had said they would come and
+punish us, and there they were in the three schooners, and our three
+villages were wiped out.
+
+"And what was there for us to do? In the morning the two schooners from
+windward sailed down upon us in the middle of the lagoon. The trade wind
+was blowing fresh, and by scores of canoes they ran us down. And the
+rifles never ceased talking. We scattered like flying fish before the
+bonita, and there were so many of us that we escaped by thousands, this
+way and that, to the islands on the rim of the atoll.
+
+"And thereafter the schooners hunted us up and down the lagoon. In the
+nighttime we slipped past them. But the next day, or in two days or
+three days, the schooners would be coming back, hunting us toward
+the other end of the lagoon. And so it went. We no longer counted nor
+remembered our dead. True, we were many and they were few. But what
+could we do? I was in one of the twenty canoes filled with men who were
+not afraid to die. We attacked the smallest schooner. They shot us down
+in heaps. They threw dynamite into the canoes, and when the dynamite
+gave out, they threw hot water down upon us. And the rifles never ceased
+talking. And those whose canoes were smashed were shot as they swam
+away. And the mate danced up and down upon the cabin top and yelled,
+'Yah! Yah! Yah!'"
+
+"Every house on every smallest island was burned. Not a pig nor a fowl
+was left alive. Our wells were defiled with the bodies of the slain, or
+else heaped high with coral rock. We were twenty-five thousand on Oolong
+before the three schooners came. Today we are five thousand. After the
+schooners left, we were but three thousand, as you shall see.
+
+"At last the three schooners grew tired of chasing us back and forth. So
+they went, the three of them, to Nihi, in the northeast. And then they
+drove us steadily to the west. Their nine boats were in the water as
+well. They beat up every island as they moved along. They drove us,
+drove us, drove us day by day. And every night the three schooners and
+the nine boats made a chain of watchfulness that stretched across the
+lagoon from rim to rim, so that we could not escape back.
+
+"They could not drive us forever that way, for the lagoon was only so
+large, and at last all of us that yet lived were driven upon the last
+sand bank to the west. Beyond lay the open sea. There were ten thousand
+of us, and we covered the sand bank from the lagoon edge to the pounding
+surf on the other side. No one could lie down. There was no room. We
+stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder. Two days they kept us there,
+and the mate would climb up in the rigging to mock us and yell, Yah!
+Yah! Yah!' till we were well sorry that we had ever harmed him or his
+schooner a month before. We had no food, and we stood on our feet two
+days and nights. The little babies died, and the old and weak died,
+and the wounded died. And worst of all, we had no water to quench our
+thirst, and for two days the sun beat down on us, and there was no
+shade. Many men and women waded out into the ocean and were drowned, the
+surf casting their bodies back on the beach. And there came a pest of
+flies. Some men swam to the sides of the schooners, but they were shot
+to the last one. And we that lived were very sorry that in our pride we
+tried to take the schooner with the three masts that came to fish for
+beche-de-mer.
+
+"On the morning of the third day came the skippers of the three
+schooners and that mate in a small boat. They carried rifles, all of
+them, and revolvers, and they made talk. It was only that they were
+weary of killing us that they had stopped, they told us. And we told
+them that we were sorry, that never again would we harm a white man, and
+in token of our submission we poured sand upon our heads. And all the
+women and children set up a great wailing for water, so that for some
+time no man could make himself heard. Then we were told our punishment.
+We must fill the three schooners with copra and beche-de-mer. And we
+agreed, for we wanted water, and our hearts were broken, and we knew
+that we were children at fighting when we fought with white men who
+fight like hell. And when all the talk was finished, the mate stood up
+and mocked us, and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' After that we paddled away in
+our canoes and sought water.
+
+"And for weeks we toiled at catching beche-de-mer and curing it, in
+gathering the cocoanuts and turning them into copra. By day and night
+the smoke rose in clouds from all the beaches of all the islands of
+Oolong as we paid the penalty of our wrongdoing. For in those days of
+death it was burned clearly on all our brains that it was very wrong to
+harm a white man.
+
+"By and by, the schooners full of copra and beche-de-mer and our trees
+empty of cocoanuts, the three skippers and that mate called us all
+together for a big talk. And they said they were very glad that we had
+learned our lesson, and we said for the ten-thousandth time that we were
+sorry and that we would not do it again. Also, we poured sand upon our
+heads. Then the skippers said that it was all very well, but just to
+show us that they did not forget us, they would send a devil-devil that
+we would never forget and that we would always remember any time we
+might feel like harming a white man. After that the mate mocked us
+one more time and yelled, Yah! Yah! Yah!' Then six of our men, whom we
+thought long dead, were put ashore from one of the schooners, and the
+schooners hoisted their sails and ran out through the passage for the
+Solomons.
+
+"The six men who were put ashore were the first to catch the devil-devil
+the skippers sent back after us."
+
+"A great sickness came," I interrupted, for I recognized the trick.
+The schooner had had measles on board, and the six prisoners had been
+deliberately exposed to it.
+
+"Yes, a great sickness," Oti went on. "It was a powerful devil-devil.
+The oldest man had never heard of the like. Those of our priests that
+yet lived we killed because they could not overcome the devil-devil.
+The sickness spread. I have said that there were ten thousand of us
+that stood hip to hip and shoulder to shoulder on the sandbank. When the
+sickness left us, there were three thousand yet alive. Also, having made
+all our cocoanuts into copra, there was a famine.
+
+"That fella trader," Oti concluded, "he like 'm that much dirt. He like
+'m clam he die KAI-KAI (meat) he stop, stink 'm any amount. He like 'm
+one fella dog, one sick fella dog plenty fleas stop along him. We no
+fright along that fella trader. We fright because he white man. We savve
+plenty too much no good kill white man. That one fella sick dog trader
+he plenty brother stop along him, white men like 'm you fight like hell.
+We no fright that damn trader. Some time he made kanaka plenty cross
+along him and kanaka want 'm kill m, kanaka he think devil-devil and
+kanaka he hear that fella mate sing out, Yah! Yah! Yah!' and kanaka no
+kill 'm."
+
+Oti baited his hook with a piece of squid, which he tore with his teeth
+from the live and squirming monster, and hook and bait sank in white
+flames to the bottom.
+
+"Shark walk about he finish," he said. "I think we catch 'm plenty fella
+fish."
+
+His line jerked savagely. He pulled it in rapidly, hand under hand, and
+landed a big gasping rock cod in the bottom of the canoe.
+
+"Sun he come up, I make 'm that dam fella trader one present big fella
+fish," said Oti.
+
+
+
+
+THE HEATHEN
+
+I met him first in a hurricane; and though we had gone through the
+hurricane on the same schooner, it was not until the schooner had gone
+to pieces under us that I first laid eyes on him. Without doubt I
+had seen him with the rest of the kanaka crew on board, but I had not
+consciously been aware of his existence, for the Petite Jeanne was
+rather overcrowded. In addition to her eight or ten kanaka seamen, her
+white captain, mate, and supercargo, and her six cabin passengers,
+she sailed from Rangiroa with something like eighty-five deck
+passengers--Paumotans and Tahitians, men, women, and children each with
+a trade box, to say nothing of sleeping mats, blankets, and clothes
+bundles.
+
+The pearling season in the Paumotus was over, and all hands were
+returning to Tahiti. The six of us cabin passengers were pearl buyers.
+Two were Americans, one was Ah Choon (the whitest Chinese I have ever
+known), one was a German, one was a Polish Jew, and I completed the half
+dozen.
+
+It had been a prosperous season. Not one of us had cause for complaint,
+nor one of the eighty-five deck passengers either. All had done well,
+and all were looking forward to a rest-off and a good time in Papeete.
+
+Of course, the Petite Jeanne was overloaded. She was only seventy tons,
+and she had no right to carry a tithe of the mob she had on board.
+Beneath her hatches she was crammed and jammed with pearl shell and
+copra. Even the trade room was packed full with shell. It was a miracle
+that the sailors could work her. There was no moving about the decks.
+They simply climbed back and forth along the rails.
+
+In the night time they walked upon the sleepers, who carpeted the deck,
+I'll swear, two deep. Oh! And there were pigs and chickens on deck, and
+sacks of yams, while every conceivable place was festooned with strings
+of drinking cocoanuts and bunches of bananas. On both sides, between the
+fore and main shrouds, guys had been stretched, just low enough for
+the foreboom to swing clear; and from each of these guys at least fifty
+bunches of bananas were suspended.
+
+It promised to be a messy passage, even if we did make it in the two
+or three days that would have been required if the southeast trades had
+been blowing fresh. But they weren't blowing fresh. After the first
+five hours the trade died away in a dozen or so gasping fans. The calm
+continued all that night and the next day--one of those glaring, glassy,
+calms, when the very thought of opening one's eyes to look at it is
+sufficient to cause a headache.
+
+The second day a man died--an Easter Islander, one of the best divers
+that season in the lagoon. Smallpox--that is what it was; though how
+smallpox could come on board, when there had been no known cases ashore
+when we left Rangiroa, is beyond me. There it was, though--smallpox, a
+man dead, and three others down on their backs.
+
+There was nothing to be done. We could not segregate the sick, nor could
+we care for them. We were packed like sardines. There was nothing to do
+but rot and die--that is, there was nothing to do after the night that
+followed the first death. On that night, the mate, the supercargo, the
+Polish Jew, and four native divers sneaked away in the large whale boat.
+They were never heard of again. In the morning the captain promptly
+scuttled the remaining boats, and there we were.
+
+That day there were two deaths; the following day three; then it
+jumped to eight. It was curious to see how we took it. The natives,
+for instance, fell into a condition of dumb, stolid fear. The
+captain--Oudouse, his name was, a Frenchman--became very nervous and
+voluble. He actually got the twitches. He was a large fleshy man,
+weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful
+representation of a quivering jelly-mountain of fat.
+
+The German, the two Americans, and myself bought up all the Scotch
+whiskey, and proceeded to stay drunk. The theory was beautiful--namely,
+if we kept ourselves soaked in alcohol, every smallpox germ that came
+into contact with us would immediately be scorched to a cinder. And the
+theory worked, though I must confess that neither Captain Oudouse nor Ah
+Choon were attacked by the disease either. The Frenchman did not drink
+at all, while Ah Choon restricted himself to one drink daily.
+
+It was a pretty time. The sun, going into northern declination, was
+straight overhead. There was no wind, except for frequent squalls, which
+blew fiercely for from five minutes to half an hour, and wound up by
+deluging us with rain. After each squall, the awful sun would come out,
+drawing clouds of steam from the soaked decks.
+
+The steam was not nice. It was the vapor of death, freighted with
+millions and millions of germs. We always took another drink when we saw
+it going up from the dead and dying, and usually we took two or three
+more drinks, mixing them exceptionally stiff. Also, we made it a rule
+to take an additional several each time they hove the dead over to the
+sharks that swarmed about us.
+
+We had a week of it, and then the whiskey gave out. It is just as well,
+or I shouldn't be alive now. It took a sober man to pull through what
+followed, as you will agree when I mention the little fact that only two
+men did pull through. The other man was the heathen--at least, that was
+what I heard Captain Oudouse call him at the moment I first became aware
+of the heathen's existence. But to come back.
+
+It was at the end of the week, with the whiskey gone, and the pearl
+buyers sober, that I happened to glance at the barometer that hung in
+the cabin companionway. Its normal register in the Paumotus was 29.90,
+and it was quite customary to see it vacillate between 29.85 and 30.00,
+or even 30.05; but to see it as I saw it, down to 29.62, was sufficient
+to sober the most drunken pearl buyer that ever incinerated smallpox
+microbes in Scotch whiskey.
+
+I called Captain Oudouse's attention to it, only to be informed that he
+had watched it going down for several hours. There was little to do, but
+that little he did very well, considering the circumstances. He took
+off the light sails, shortened right down to storm canvas, spread life
+lines, and waited for the wind. His mistake lay in what he did after the
+wind came. He hove to on the port tack, which was the right thing to do
+south of the Equator, if--and there was the rub--IF one were NOT in the
+direct path of the hurricane.
+
+We were in the direct path. I could see that by the steady increase of
+the wind and the equally steady fall of the barometer. I wanted him
+to turn and run with the wind on the port quarter until the barometer
+ceased falling, and then to heave to. We argued till he was reduced to
+hysteria, but budge he would not. The worst of it was that I could not
+get the rest of the pearl buyers to back me up. Who was I, anyway, to
+know more about the sea and its ways than a properly qualified captain?
+was what was in their minds, I knew.
+
+Of course, the sea rose with the wind frightfully; and I shall never
+forget the first three seas the Petite Jeanne shipped. She had fallen
+off, as vessels do at times when hove to, and the first sea made a clean
+breach. The life lines were only for the strong and well, and little
+good were they even for them when the women and children, the bananas
+and cocoanuts, the pigs and trade boxes, the sick and the dying, were
+swept along in a solid, screeching, groaning mass.
+
+The second sea filled the Petite Jeanne's decks flush with the rails;
+and, as her stern sank down and her bow tossed skyward, all the
+miserable dunnage of life and luggage poured aft. It was a human
+torrent. They came head first, feet first, sidewise, rolling over and
+over, twisting, squirming, writhing, and crumpling up. Now and again
+one caught a grip on a stanchion or a rope; but the weight of the bodies
+behind tore such grips loose.
+
+One man I noticed fetch up, head on and square on, with the starboard
+bitt. His head cracked like an egg. I saw what was coming, sprang on top
+of the cabin, and from there into the mainsail itself. Ah Choon and one
+of the Americans tried to follow me, but I was one jump ahead of them.
+The American was swept away and over the stern like a piece of chaff.
+Ah Choon caught a spoke of the wheel, and swung in behind it. But a
+strapping Raratonga vahine (woman)--she must have weighed two hundred
+and fifty--brought up against him, and got an arm around his neck. He
+clutched the kanaka steersman with his other hand; and just at that
+moment the schooner flung down to starboard.
+
+The rush of bodies and sea that was coming along the port runway between
+the cabin and the rail turned abruptly and poured to starboard. Away
+they went--vahine, Ah Choon, and steersman; and I swear I saw Ah Choon
+grin at me with philosophic resignation as he cleared the rail and went
+under.
+
+The third sea--the biggest of the three--did not do so much damage. By
+the time it arrived nearly everybody was in the rigging. On deck perhaps
+a dozen gasping, half-drowned, and half-stunned wretches were rolling
+about or attempting to crawl into safety. They went by the board, as
+did the wreckage of the two remaining boats. The other pearl buyers and
+myself, between seas, managed to get about fifteen women and children
+into the cabin, and battened down. Little good it did the poor creatures
+in the end.
+
+Wind? Out of all my experience I could not have believed it possible
+for the wind to blow as it did. There is no describing it. How can one
+describe a nightmare? It was the same way with that wind. It tore the
+clothes off our bodies. I say TORE THEM OFF, and I mean it. I am not
+asking you to believe it. I am merely telling something that I saw and
+felt. There are times when I do not believe it myself. I went through
+it, and that is enough. One could not face that wind and live. It was
+a monstrous thing, and the most monstrous thing about it was that it
+increased and continued to increase.
+
+Imagine countless millions and billions of tons of sand. Imagine this
+sand tearing along at ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, or
+any other number of miles per hour. Imagine, further, this sand to be
+invisible, impalpable, yet to retain all the weight and density of sand.
+Do all this, and you may get a vague inkling of what that wind was like.
+
+Perhaps sand is not the right comparison. Consider it mud, invisible,
+impalpable, but heavy as mud. Nay, it goes beyond that. Consider every
+molecule of air to be a mudbank in itself. Then try to imagine the
+multitudinous impact of mudbanks. No; it is beyond me. Language may
+be adequate to express the ordinary conditions of life, but it cannot
+possibly express any of the conditions of so enormous a blast of wind.
+It would have been better had I stuck by my original intention of not
+attempting a description.
+
+I will say this much: The sea, which had risen at first, was beaten down
+by that wind. More: it seemed as if the whole ocean had been sucked up
+in the maw of the hurricane, and hurled on through that portion of space
+which previously had been occupied by the air.
+
+Of course, our canvas had gone long before. But Captain Oudouse had
+on the Petite Jeanne something I had never before seen on a South Sea
+schooner--a sea anchor. It was a conical canvas bag, the mouth of
+which was kept open by a huge loop of iron. The sea anchor was bridled
+something like a kite, so that it bit into the water as a kite bites
+into the air, but with a difference. The sea anchor remained just under
+the surface of the ocean in a perpendicular position. A long line, in
+turn, connected it with the schooner. As a result, the Petite Jeanne
+rode bow on to the wind and to what sea there was.
+
+The situation really would have been favorable had we not been in the
+path of the storm. True, the wind itself tore our canvas out of the
+gaskets, jerked out our topmasts, and made a raffle of our running gear,
+but still we would have come through nicely had we not been square in
+front of the advancing storm center. That was what fixed us. I was in a
+state of stunned, numbed, paralyzed collapse from enduring the impact of
+the wind, and I think I was just about ready to give up and die when the
+center smote us. The blow we received was an absolute lull. There was
+not a breath of air. The effect on one was sickening.
+
+Remember that for hours we had been at terrific muscular tension,
+withstanding the awful pressure of that wind. And then, suddenly,
+the pressure was removed. I know that I felt as though I was about
+to expand, to fly apart in all directions. It seemed as if every atom
+composing my body was repelling every other atom and was on the verge of
+rushing off irresistibly into space. But that lasted only for a moment.
+Destruction was upon us.
+
+In the absence of the wind and pressure the sea rose. It jumped, it
+leaped, it soared straight toward the clouds. Remember, from every point
+of the compass that inconceivable wind was blowing in toward the center
+of calm. The result was that the seas sprang up from every point of
+the compass. There was no wind to check them. They popped up like corks
+released from the bottom of a pail of water. There was no system to
+them, no stability. They were hollow, maniacal seas. They were eighty
+feet high at the least. They were not seas at all. They resembled no sea
+a man had ever seen.
+
+They were splashes, monstrous splashes--that is all. Splashes that were
+eighty feet high. Eighty! They were more than eighty. They went over our
+mastheads. They were spouts, explosions. They were drunken. They fell
+anywhere, anyhow. They jostled one another; they collided. They rushed
+together and collapsed upon one another, or fell apart like a thousand
+waterfalls all at once. It was no ocean any man had ever dreamed of,
+that hurricane center. It was confusion thrice confounded. It was
+anarchy. It was a hell pit of sea water gone mad.
+
+The Petite Jeanne? I don't know. The heathen told me afterwards that
+he did not know. She was literally torn apart, ripped wide open, beaten
+into a pulp, smashed into kindling wood, annihilated. When I came to I
+was in the water, swimming automatically, though I was about two-thirds
+drowned. How I got there I had no recollection. I remembered seeing the
+Petite Jeanne fly to pieces at what must have been the instant that my
+own consciousness was buffeted out of me. But there I was, with nothing
+to do but make the best of it, and in that best there was little
+promise. The wind was blowing again, the sea was much smaller and more
+regular, and I knew that I had passed through the center. Fortunately,
+there were no sharks about. The hurricane had dissipated the ravenous
+horde that had surrounded the death ship and fed off the dead.
+
+It was about midday when the Petite Jeanne went to pieces, and it must
+have been two hours afterwards when I picked up with one of her hatch
+covers. Thick rain was driving at the time; and it was the merest chance
+that flung me and the hatch cover together. A short length of line was
+trailing from the rope handle; and I knew that I was good for a day,
+at least, if the sharks did not return. Three hours later, possibly
+a little longer, sticking close to the cover, and with closed eyes,
+concentrating my whole soul upon the task of breathing in enough air to
+keep me going and at the same time of avoiding breathing in enough water
+to drown me, it seemed to me that I heard voices. The rain had ceased,
+and wind and sea were easing marvelously. Not twenty feet away from me,
+on another hatch cover were Captain Oudouse and the heathen. They were
+fighting over the possession of the cover--at least, the Frenchman was.
+"Paien noir!" I heard him scream, and at the same time I saw him kick
+the kanaka.
+
+Now, Captain Oudouse had lost all his clothes, except his shoes, and
+they were heavy brogans. It was a cruel blow, for it caught the heathen
+on the mouth and the point of the chin, half stunning him. I looked for
+him to retaliate, but he contented himself with swimming about forlornly
+a safe ten feet away. Whenever a fling of the sea threw him closer, the
+Frenchman, hanging on with his hands, kicked out at him with both feet.
+Also, at the moment of delivering each kick, he called the kanaka a
+black heathen.
+
+"For two centimes I'd come over there and drown you, you white beast!" I
+yelled.
+
+The only reason I did not go was that I felt too tired. The very thought
+of the effort to swim over was nauseating. So I called to the kanaka to
+come to me, and proceeded to share the hatch cover with him. Otoo, he
+told me his name was (pronounced o-to-o ); also, he told me that he
+was a native of Bora Bora, the most westerly of the Society Group. As
+I learned afterward, he had got the hatch cover first, and, after some
+time, encountering Captain Oudouse, had offered to share it with him,
+and had been kicked off for his pains.
+
+And that was how Otoo and I first came together. He was no fighter.
+He was all sweetness and gentleness, a love creature, though he stood
+nearly six feet tall and was muscled like a gladiator. He was no
+fighter, but he was also no coward. He had the heart of a lion; and in
+the years that followed I have seen him run risks that I would never
+dream of taking. What I mean is that while he was no fighter, and while
+he always avoided precipitating a row, he never ran away from trouble
+when it started. And it was "Ware shoal!" when once Otoo went into
+action. I shall never forget what he did to Bill King. It occurred
+in German Samoa. Bill King was hailed the champion heavyweight of the
+American Navy. He was a big brute of a man, a veritable gorilla, one of
+those hard-hitting, rough-housing chaps, and clever with his fists as
+well. He picked the quarrel, and he kicked Otoo twice and struck him
+once before Otoo felt it to be necessary to fight. I don't think it
+lasted four minutes, at the end of which time Bill King was the unhappy
+possessor of four broken ribs, a broken forearm, and a dislocated
+shoulder blade. Otoo knew nothing of scientific boxing. He was merely a
+manhandler; and Bill King was something like three months in recovering
+from the bit of manhandling he received that afternoon on Apia beach.
+
+But I am running ahead of my yarn. We shared the hatch cover between us.
+We took turn and turn about, one lying flat on the cover and resting,
+while the other, submerged to the neck, merely held on with his hands.
+For two days and nights, spell and spell, on the cover and in the water,
+we drifted over the ocean. Towards the last I was delirious most of the
+time; and there were times, too, when I heard Otoo babbling and raving
+in his native tongue. Our continuous immersion prevented us from dying
+of thirst, though the sea water and the sunshine gave us the prettiest
+imaginable combination of salt pickle and sunburn.
+
+In the end, Otoo saved my life; for I came to lying on the beach twenty
+feet from the water, sheltered from the sun by a couple of cocoanut
+leaves. No one but Otoo could have dragged me there and stuck up the
+leaves for shade. He was lying beside me. I went off again; and the next
+time I came round, it was cool and starry night, and Otoo was pressing a
+drinking cocoanut to my lips.
+
+We were the sole survivors of the Petite Jeanne. Captain Oudouse must
+have succumbed to exhaustion, for several days later his hatch cover
+drifted ashore without him. Otoo and I lived with the natives of the
+atoll for a week, when we were rescued by the French cruiser and taken
+to Tahiti. In the meantime, however, we had performed the ceremony of
+exchanging names. In the South Seas such a ceremony binds two men closer
+together than blood brothership. The initiative had been mine; and Otoo
+was rapturously delighted when I suggested it.
+
+"It is well," he said, in Tahitian. "For we have been mates together for
+two days on the lips of Death."
+
+"But death stuttered," I smiled.
+
+"It was a brave deed you did, master," he replied, "and Death was not
+vile enough to speak."
+
+"Why do you 'master' me?" I demanded, with a show of hurt feelings.
+"We have exchanged names. To you I am Otoo. To me you are Charley. And
+between you and me, forever and forever, you shall be Charley, and I
+shall be Otoo. It is the way of the custom. And when we die, if it does
+happen that we live again somewhere beyond the stars and the sky, still
+shall you be Charley to me, and I Otoo to you."
+
+"Yes, master," he answered, his eyes luminous and soft with joy.
+
+"There you go!" I cried indignantly.
+
+"What does it matter what my lips utter?" he argued. "They are only my
+lips. But I shall think Otoo always. Whenever I think of myself, I shall
+think of you. Whenever men call me by name, I shall think of you. And
+beyond the sky and beyond the stars, always and forever, you shall be
+Otoo to me. Is it well, master?"
+
+I hid my smile, and answered that it was well.
+
+We parted at Papeete. I remained ashore to recuperate; and he went on
+in a cutter to his own island, Bora Bora. Six weeks later he was back.
+I was surprised, for he had told me of his wife, and said that he was
+returning to her, and would give over sailing on far voyages.
+
+"Where do you go, master?" he asked, after our first greetings.
+
+I shrugged my shoulders. It was a hard question.
+
+"All the world," was my answer--"all the world, all the sea, and all the
+islands that are in the sea."
+
+"I will go with you," he said simply. "My wife is dead."
+
+I never had a brother; but from what I have seen of other men's
+brothers, I doubt if any man ever had a brother that was to him what
+Otoo was to me. He was brother and father and mother as well. And this
+I know: I lived a straighter and better man because of Otoo. I cared
+little for other men, but I had to live straight in Otoo's eyes. Because
+of him I dared not tarnish myself. He made me his ideal, compounding
+me, I fear, chiefly out of his own love and worship and there were times
+when I stood close to the steep pitch of hell, and would have taken
+the plunge had not the thought of Otoo restrained me. His pride in me
+entered into me, until it became one of the major rules in my personal
+code to do nothing that would diminish that pride of his.
+
+Naturally, I did not learn right away what his feelings were toward me.
+He never criticized, never censured; and slowly the exalted place I held
+in his eyes dawned upon me, and slowly I grew to comprehend the hurt I
+could inflict upon him by being anything less than my best.
+
+For seventeen years we were together; for seventeen years he was at
+my shoulder, watching while I slept, nursing me through fever and
+wounds--ay, and receiving wounds in fighting for me. He signed on the
+same ships with me; and together we ranged the Pacific from Hawaii to
+Sydney Head, and from Torres Straits to the Galapagos. We blackbirded
+from the New Hebrides and the Line Islands over to the westward clear
+through the Louisades, New Britain, New Ireland, and New Hanover. We
+were wrecked three times--in the Gilberts, in the Santa Cruz group, and
+in the Fijis. And we traded and salved wherever a dollar promised in
+the way of pearl and pearl shell, copra, beche-de-mer, hawkbill turtle
+shell, and stranded wrecks.
+
+It began in Papeete, immediately after his announcement that he was
+going with me over all the sea, and the islands in the midst thereof.
+There was a club in those days in Papeete, where the pearlers, traders,
+captains, and riffraff of South Sea adventurers forgathered. The play
+ran high, and the drink ran high; and I am very much afraid that I kept
+later hours than were becoming or proper. No matter what the hour was
+when I left the club, there was Otoo waiting to see me safely home.
+
+At first I smiled; next I chided him. Then I told him flatly that I
+stood in need of no wet-nursing. After that I did not see him when
+I came out of the club. Quite by accident, a week or so later, I
+discovered that he still saw me home, lurking across the street among
+the shadows of the mango trees. What could I do? I know what I did do.
+
+Insensibly I began to keep better hours. On wet and stormy nights, in
+the thick of the folly and the fun, the thought would persist in coming
+to me of Otoo keeping his dreary vigil under the dripping mangoes.
+Truly, he made a better man of me. Yet he was not strait-laced. And he
+knew nothing of common Christian morality. All the people on Bora
+Bora were Christians; but he was a heathen, the only unbeliever on the
+island, a gross materialist, who believed that when he died he was dead.
+He believed merely in fair play and square dealing. Petty meanness, in
+his code, was almost as serious as wanton homicide; and I do believe
+that he respected a murderer more than a man given to small practices.
+
+Concerning me, personally, he objected to my doing anything that was
+hurtful to me. Gambling was all right. He was an ardent gambler himself.
+But late hours, he explained, were bad for one's health. He had seen men
+who did not take care of themselves die of fever. He was no teetotaler,
+and welcomed a stiff nip any time when it was wet work in the boats. On
+the other hand, he believed in liquor in moderation. He had seen many
+men killed or disgraced by square-face or Scotch.
+
+Otoo had my welfare always at heart. He thought ahead for me, weighed my
+plans, and took a greater interest in them than I did myself. At first,
+when I was unaware of this interest of his in my affairs, he had to
+divine my intentions, as, for instance, at Papeete, when I contemplated
+going partners with a knavish fellow-countryman on a guano venture. I
+did not know he was a knave. Nor did any white man in Papeete. Neither
+did Otoo know, but he saw how thick we were getting, and found out for
+me, and without my asking him. Native sailors from the ends of the seas
+knock about on the beach in Tahiti; and Otoo, suspicious merely,
+went among them till he had gathered sufficient data to justify his
+suspicions. Oh, it was a nice history, that of Randolph Waters. I
+couldn't believe it when Otoo first narrated it; but when I sheeted it
+home to Waters he gave in without a murmur, and got away on the first
+steamer to Aukland.
+
+At first, I am free to confess, I couldn't help resenting Otoo's poking
+his nose into my business. But I knew that he was wholly unselfish; and
+soon I had to acknowledge his wisdom and discretion. He had his
+eyes open always to my main chance, and he was both keen-sighted and
+far-sighted. In time he became my counselor, until he knew more of my
+business than I did myself. He really had my interest at heart more than
+I did. Mine was the magnificent carelessness of youth, for I preferred
+romance to dollars, and adventure to a comfortable billet with all night
+in. So it was well that I had some one to look out for me. I know that
+if it had not been for Otoo, I should not be here today.
+
+Of numerous instances, let me give one. I had had some experience in
+blackbirding before I went pearling in the Paumotus. Otoo and I were on
+the beach in Samoa--we really were on the beach and hard aground--when
+my chance came to go as recruiter on a blackbird brig. Otoo signed on
+before the mast; and for the next half-dozen years, in as many ships, we
+knocked about the wildest portions of Melanesia. Otoo saw to it that he
+always pulled stroke-oar in my boat. Our custom in recruiting labor was
+to land the recruiter on the beach. The covering boat always lay on its
+oars several hundred feet off shore, while the recruiter's boat, also
+lying on its oars, kept afloat on the edge of the beach. When I landed
+with my trade goods, leaving my steering sweep apeak, Otoo left his
+stroke position and came into the stern sheets, where a Winchester lay
+ready to hand under a flap of canvas. The boat's crew was also armed,
+the Sniders concealed under canvas flaps that ran the length of the
+gunwales.
+
+While I was busy arguing and persuading the woolly-headed cannibals to
+come and labor on the Queensland plantations Otoo kept watch. And often
+and often his low voice warned me of suspicious actions and impending
+treachery. Sometimes it was the quick shot from his rifle, knocking a
+nigger over, that was the first warning I received. And in my rush to
+the boat his hand was always there to jerk me flying aboard. Once, I
+remember, on SANTA ANNA, the boat grounded just as the trouble began.
+The covering boat was dashing to our assistance, but the several score
+of savages would have wiped us out before it arrived. Otoo took a flying
+leap ashore, dug both hands into the trade goods, and scattered tobacco,
+beads, tomahawks, knives, and calicoes in all directions.
+
+This was too much for the woolly-heads. While they scrambled for the
+treasures, the boat was shoved clear, and we were aboard and forty feet
+away. And I got thirty recruits off that very beach in the next four
+hours.
+
+The particular instance I have in mind was on Malaita, the most savage
+island in the easterly Solomons. The natives had been remarkably
+friendly; and how were we to know that the whole village had been taking
+up a collection for over two years with which to buy a white man's head?
+The beggars are all head-hunters, and they especially esteem a white
+man's head. The fellow who captured the head would receive the whole
+collection. As I say, they appeared very friendly; and on this day I was
+fully a hundred yards down the beach from the boat. Otoo had cautioned
+me; and, as usual when I did not heed him, I came to grief.
+
+The first I knew, a cloud of spears sailed out of the mangrove swamp
+at me. At least a dozen were sticking into me. I started to run,
+but tripped over one that was fast in my calf, and went down. The
+woolly-heads made a run for me, each with a long-handled, fantail
+tomahawk with which to hack off my head. They were so eager for the
+prize that they got in one another's way. In the confusion, I avoided
+several hacks by throwing myself right and left on the sand.
+
+Then Otoo arrived--Otoo the manhandler. In some way he had got hold of a
+heavy war club, and at close quarters it was a far more efficient weapon
+than a rifle. He was right in the thick of them, so that they could
+not spear him, while their tomahawks seemed worse than useless. He was
+fighting for me, and he was in a true Berserker rage. The way he handled
+that club was amazing.
+
+Their skulls squashed like overripe oranges. It was not until he had
+driven them back, picked me up in his arms, and started to run, that
+he received his first wounds. He arrived in the boat with four spear
+thrusts, got his Winchester, and with it got a man for every shot. Then
+we pulled aboard the schooner, and doctored up.
+
+Seventeen years we were together. He made me. I should today be a
+supercargo, a recruiter, or a memory, if it had not been for him.
+
+"You spend your money, and you go out and get more," he said one day.
+"It is easy to get money now. But when you get old, your money will be
+spent, and you will not be able to go out and get more. I know, master.
+I have studied the way of white men. On the beaches are many old men
+who were young once, and who could get money just like you. Now they are
+old, and they have nothing, and they wait about for the young men like
+you to come ashore and buy drinks for them.
+
+"The black boy is a slave on the plantations. He gets twenty dollars a
+year. He works hard. The overseer does not work hard. He rides a horse
+and watches the black boy work. He gets twelve hundred dollars a year.
+I am a sailor on the schooner. I get fifteen dollars a month. That
+is because I am a good sailor. I work hard. The captain has a double
+awning, and drinks beer out of long bottles. I have never seen him haul
+a rope or pull an oar. He gets one hundred and fifty dollars a month.
+I am a sailor. He is a navigator. Master, I think it would be very good
+for you to know navigation."
+
+Otoo spurred me on to it. He sailed with me as second mate on my first
+schooner, and he was far prouder of my command than I was myself. Later
+on it was:
+
+"The captain is well paid, master; but the ship is in his keeping,
+and he is never free from the burden. It is the owner who is better
+paid--the owner who sits ashore with many servants and turns his money
+over."
+
+"True, but a schooner costs five thousand dollars--an old schooner at
+that," I objected. "I should be an old man before I saved five thousand
+dollars."
+
+"There be short ways for white men to make money," he went on, pointing
+ashore at the cocoanut-fringed beach.
+
+We were in the Solomons at the time, picking up a cargo of ivory nuts
+along the east coast of Guadalcanar.
+
+"Between this river mouth and the next it is two miles," he said.
+
+"The flat land runs far back. It is worth nothing now. Next year--who
+knows?--or the year after, men will pay much money for that land. The
+anchorage is good. Big steamers can lie close up. You can buy the land
+four miles deep from the old chief for ten thousand sticks of tobacco,
+ten bottles of square-face, and a Snider, which will cost you, maybe,
+one hundred dollars. Then you place the deed with the commissioner; and
+the next year, or the year after, you sell and become the owner of a
+ship."
+
+I followed his lead, and his words came true, though in three years,
+instead of two. Next came the grasslands deal on Guadalcanar--twenty
+thousand acres, on a governmental nine hundred and ninety-nine years'
+lease at a nominal sum. I owned the lease for precisely ninety days,
+when I sold it to a company for half a fortune. Always it was Otoo who
+looked ahead and saw the opportunity. He was responsible for the
+salving of the Doncaster--bought in at auction for a hundred pounds, and
+clearing three thousand after every expense was paid. He led me into the
+Savaii plantation and the cocoa venture on Upolu.
+
+We did not go seafaring so much as in the old days. I was too well off.
+I married, and my standard of living rose; but Otoo remained the same
+old-time Otoo, moving about the house or trailing through the office,
+his wooden pipe in his mouth, a shilling undershirt on his back, and a
+four-shilling lava-lava about his loins. I could not get him to spend
+money. There was no way of repaying him except with love, and God knows
+he got that in full measure from all of us. The children worshipped
+him; and if he had been spoilable, my wife would surely have been his
+undoing.
+
+The children! He really was the one who showed them the way of their
+feet in the world practical. He began by teaching them to walk. He sat
+up with them when they were sick. One by one, when they were scarcely
+toddlers, he took them down to the lagoon, and made them into
+amphibians. He taught them more than I ever knew of the habits of fish
+and the ways of catching them. In the bush it was the same thing. At
+seven, Tom knew more woodcraft than I ever dreamed existed. At six, Mary
+went over the Sliding Rock without a quiver, and I have seen strong men
+balk at that feat. And when Frank had just turned six he could bring up
+shillings from the bottom in three fathoms.
+
+"My people in Bora Bora do not like heathen--they are all Christians;
+and I do not like Bora Bora Christians," he said one day, when I, with
+the idea of getting him to spend some of the money that was rightfully
+his, had been trying to persuade him to make a visit to his own island
+in one of our schooners--a special voyage which I had hoped to make a
+record breaker in the matter of prodigal expense.
+
+I say one of OUR schooners, though legally at the time they belonged to
+me. I struggled long with him to enter into partnership.
+
+"We have been partners from the day the Petite Jeanne went down,"
+he said at last. "But if your heart so wishes, then shall we become
+partners by the law. I have no work to do, yet are my expenses large. I
+drink and eat and smoke in plenty--it costs much, I know. I do not pay
+for the playing of billiards, for I play on your table; but still the
+money goes. Fishing on the reef is only a rich man's pleasure. It is
+shocking, the cost of hooks and cotton line. Yes; it is necessary that
+we be partners by the law. I need the money. I shall get it from the
+head clerk in the office."
+
+So the papers were made out and recorded. A year later I was compelled
+to complain.
+
+"Charley," said I, "you are a wicked old fraud, a miserly skinflint,
+a miserable land crab. Behold, your share for the year in all our
+partnership has been thousands of dollars. The head clerk has given me
+this paper. It says that in the year you have drawn just eighty-seven
+dollars and twenty cents."
+
+"Is there any owing me?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"I tell you thousands and thousands," I answered.
+
+His face brightened, as with an immense relief.
+
+"It is well," he said. "See that the head clerk keeps good account
+of it. When I want it, I shall want it, and there must not be a cent
+missing.
+
+"If there is," he added fiercely, after a pause, "it must come out of
+the clerk's wages."
+
+And all the time, as I afterwards learned, his will, drawn up by
+Carruthers, and making me sole beneficiary, lay in the American consul's
+safe.
+
+But the end came, as the end must come to all human associations.
+
+It occurred in the Solomons, where our wildest work had been done in the
+wild young days, and where we were once more--principally on a holiday,
+incidentally to look after our holdings on Florida Island and to look
+over the pearling possibilities of the Mboli Pass. We were lying at
+Savo, having run in to trade for curios.
+
+Now, Savo is alive with sharks. The custom of the woolly-heads of
+burying their dead in the sea did not tend to discourage the sharks from
+making the adjacent waters a hangout. It was my luck to be coming aboard
+in a tiny, overloaded, native canoe, when the thing capsized. There
+were four woolly-heads and myself in it, or rather, hanging to it. The
+schooner was a hundred yards away.
+
+I was just hailing for a boat when one of the woolly-heads began to
+scream. Holding on to the end of the canoe, both he and that portion of
+the canoe were dragged under several times. Then he loosed his clutch
+and disappeared. A shark had got him.
+
+The three remaining niggers tried to climb out of the water upon the
+bottom of the canoe. I yelled and cursed and struck at the nearest with
+my fist, but it was no use. They were in a blind funk. The canoe could
+barely have supported one of them. Under the three it upended and rolled
+sidewise, throwing them back into the water.
+
+I abandoned the canoe and started to swim toward the schooner, expecting
+to be picked up by the boat before I got there. One of the niggers
+elected to come with me, and we swam along silently, side by side, now
+and again putting our faces into the water and peering about for sharks.
+The screams of the man who stayed by the canoe informed us that he was
+taken. I was peering into the water when I saw a big shark pass directly
+beneath me. He was fully sixteen feet in length. I saw the whole thing.
+He got the woolly-head by the middle, and away he went, the poor devil,
+head, shoulders, and arms out of the water all the time, screeching in
+a heart-rending way. He was carried along in this fashion for several
+hundred feet, when he was dragged beneath the surface.
+
+I swam doggedly on, hoping that that was the last unattached shark.
+But there was another. Whether it was one that had attacked the natives
+earlier, or whether it was one that had made a good meal elsewhere, I do
+not know. At any rate, he was not in such haste as the others. I could
+not swim so rapidly now, for a large part of my effort was devoted to
+keeping track of him. I was watching him when he made his first attack.
+By good luck I got both hands on his nose, and, though his momentum
+nearly shoved me under, I managed to keep him off. He veered clear,
+and began circling about again. A second time I escaped him by the same
+manoeuvre. The third rush was a miss on both sides. He sheered at the
+moment my hands should have landed on his nose, but his sandpaper hide
+(I had on a sleeveless undershirt) scraped the skin off one arm from
+elbow to shoulder.
+
+By this time I was played out, and gave up hope. The schooner was still
+two hundred feet away. My face was in the water, and I was watching him
+manoeuvre for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us.
+It was Otoo.
+
+"Swim for the schooner, master!" he said. And he spoke gayly, as though
+the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."
+
+I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always
+between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.
+
+"The davit tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he
+explained, a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another
+attack.
+
+By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I
+could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but
+they continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no
+hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time
+Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course, Otoo
+could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.
+
+"Good-by, Charley! I'm finished!" I just managed to gasp.
+
+I knew that the end had come, and that the next moment I should throw up
+my hands and go down.
+
+But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:
+
+"I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark feel sick!"
+
+He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.
+
+"A little more to the left!" he next called out. "There is a line there
+on the water. To the left, master--to the left!"
+
+I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely
+conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on
+board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant
+he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting
+blood.
+
+"Otoo!" he called softly. And I could see in his gaze the love that
+thrilled in his voice.
+
+Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by
+that name.
+
+"Good-by, Otoo!" he called.
+
+Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in
+the captain's arms.
+
+And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in
+the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane, and parted in the maw of
+a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship, the like of
+which I dare to assert has never befallen two men, the one brown and the
+other white. If Jehovah be from His high place watching every sparrow
+fall, not least in His kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora
+Bora.
+
+
+
+
+THE TERRIBLE SOLOMONS
+
+There is no gainsaying that the Solomons are a hard-bitten bunch of
+islands. On the other hand, there are worse places in the world. But to
+the new chum who has no constitutional understanding of men and life in
+the rough, the Solomons may indeed prove terrible.
+
+It is true that fever and dysentery are perpetually on the walk-about,
+that loathsome skin diseases abound, that the air is saturated with a
+poison that bites into every pore, cut, or abrasion and plants malignant
+ulcers, and that many strong men who escape dying there return as wrecks
+to their own countries. It is also true that the natives of the Solomons
+are a wild lot, with a hearty appetite for human flesh and a fad for
+collecting human heads. Their highest instinct of sportsmanship is to
+catch a man with his back turned and to smite him a cunning blow with a
+tomahawk that severs the spinal column at the base of the brain. It is
+equally true that on some islands, such as Malaita, the profit and loss
+account of social intercourse is calculated in homicides. Heads are a
+medium of exchange, and white heads are extremely valuable. Very often a
+dozen villages make a jack-pot, which they fatten moon by moon, against
+the time when some brave warrior presents a white man's head, fresh and
+gory, and claims the pot.
+
+All the foregoing is quite true, and yet there are white men who have
+lived in the Solomons a score of years and who feel homesick when they
+go away from them. A man needs only to be careful--and lucky--to live
+a long time in the Solomons; but he must also be of the right sort.
+He must have the hallmark of the inevitable white man stamped upon his
+soul. He must be inevitable. He must have a certain grand carelessness
+of odds, a certain colossal self-satisfaction, and a racial egotism that
+convinces him that one white is better than a thousand niggers every
+day in the week, and that on Sunday he is able to clean out two
+thousand niggers. For such are the things that have made the white man
+inevitable. Oh, and one other thing--the white man who wishes to be
+inevitable, must not merely despise the lesser breeds and think a lot
+of himself; he must also fail to be too long on imagination. He must not
+understand too well the instincts, customs, and mental processes of the
+blacks, the yellows, and the browns; for it is not in such fashion that
+the white race has tramped its royal road around the world.
+
+Bertie Arkwright was not inevitable. He was too sensitive, too finely
+strung, and he possessed too much imagination. The world was too much
+with him. He projected himself too quiveringly into his environment.
+Therefore, the last place in the world for him to come was the Solomons.
+He did not come, expecting to stay. A five weeks' stop-over between
+steamers, he decided, would satisfy the call of the primitive he felt
+thrumming the strings of his being. At least, so he told the lady
+tourists on the MAKEMBO, though in different terms; and they worshipped
+him as a hero, for they were lady tourists and they would know only
+the safety of the steamer's deck as she threaded her way through the
+Solomons.
+
+There was another man on board, of whom the ladies took no notice. He
+was a little shriveled wisp of a man, with a withered skin the color of
+mahogany. His name on the passenger list does not matter, but his other
+name, Captain Malu, was a name for niggers to conjure with, and to
+scare naughty pickaninnies to righteousness from New Hanover to the
+New Hebrides. He had farmed savages and savagery, and from fever and
+hardship, the crack of Sniders and the lash of the overseers, had
+wrested five millions of money in the form of beche-de-mer, sandalwood,
+pearl-shell and turtle-shell, ivory nuts and copra, grasslands, trading
+stations, and plantations. Captain Malu's little finger, which was
+broken, had more inevitableness in it than Bertie Arkwright's whole
+carcass. But then, the lady tourists had nothing by which to judge save
+appearances, and Bertie certainly was a fine-looking man.
+
+Bertie talked with Captain Malu in the smoking room, confiding to him
+his intention of seeing life red and bleeding in the Solomons. Captain
+Malu agreed that the intention was ambitious and honorable. It was not
+until several days later that he became interested in Bertie, when that
+young adventurer insisted on showing him an automatic 44-caliber pistol.
+Bertie explained the mechanism and demonstrated by slipping a loaded
+magazine up the hollow butt.
+
+"It is so simple," he said. He shot the outer barrel back along the
+inner one. "That loads it and cocks it, you see. And then all I have to
+do is pull the trigger, eight times, as fast as I can quiver my finger.
+See that safety clutch. That's what I like about it. It is safe. It is
+positively fool-proof." He slipped out the magazine. "You see how safe
+it is."
+
+As he held it in his hand, the muzzle came in line with Captain Malu's
+stomach. Captain Malu's blue eyes looked at it unswervingly.
+
+"Would you mind pointing it in some other direction?" he asked.
+
+"It's perfectly safe," Bertie assured him. "I withdrew the magazine.
+It's not loaded now, you know."
+
+"A gun is always loaded."
+
+"But this one isn't."
+
+"Turn it away just the same."
+
+Captain Malu's voice was flat and metallic and low, but his eyes never
+left the muzzle until the line of it was drawn past him and away from
+him.
+
+"I'll bet a fiver it isn't loaded," Bertie proposed warmly.
+
+The other shook his head.
+
+"Then I'll show you."
+
+Bertie started to put the muzzle to his own temple with the evident
+intention of pulling the trigger.
+
+"Just a second," Captain Malu said quietly, reaching out his hand. "Let
+me look at it."
+
+He pointed it seaward and pulled the trigger. A heavy explosion
+followed, instantaneous with the sharp click of the mechanism that
+flipped a hot and smoking cartridge sidewise along the deck.
+
+Bertie's jaw dropped in amazement.
+
+"I slipped the barrel back once, didn't I?" he explained. "It was silly
+of me, I must say."
+
+He giggled flabbily, and sat down in a steamer chair. The blood had
+ebbed from his face, exposing dark circles under his eyes. His hands
+were trembling and unable to guide the shaking cigarette to his lips.
+The world was too much with him, and he saw himself with dripping brains
+prone upon the deck.
+
+"Really," he said, "... really."
+
+"It's a pretty weapon," said Captain Malu, returning the automatic to
+him.
+
+The Commissioner was on board the Makembo, returning from Sydney, and by
+his permission a stop was made at Ugi to land a missionary. And at Ugi
+lay the ketch ARLA, Captain Hansen, skipper. Now the Arla was one of
+many vessels owned by Captain Malu, and it was at his suggestion and
+by his invitation that Bertie went aboard the Arla as guest for a four
+days' recruiting cruise on the coast of Malaita. Thereafter the ARLA
+would drop him at Reminge Plantation (also owned by Captain Malu), where
+Bertie could remain for a week, and then be sent over to Tulagi, the
+seat of government, where he would become the Commissioner's guest.
+Captain Malu was responsible for two other suggestions, which given, he
+disappears from this narrative. One was to Captain Hansen, the other
+to Mr. Harriwell, manager of Reminge Plantation. Both suggestions were
+similar in tenor, namely, to give Mr. Bertram Arkwright an insight into
+the rawness and redness of life in the Solomons. Also, it is whispered
+that Captain Malu mentioned that a case of Scotch would be
+coincidental with any particularly gorgeous insight Mr. Arkwright might
+receive.............
+
+"Yes, Swartz always was too pig-headed. You see, he took four of his
+boat's crew to Tulagi to be flogged--officially, you know--then started
+back with them in the whaleboat. It was pretty squally, and the boat
+capsized just outside. Swartz was the only one drowned. Of course, it
+was an accident."
+
+"Was it? Really?" Bertie asked, only half-interested, staring hard at
+the black man at the wheel.
+
+Ugi had dropped astern, and the ARLA was sliding along through a summer
+sea toward the wooded ranges of Malaita. The helmsman who so attracted
+Bertie's eyes sported a ten penny nail, stuck skewerwise through his
+nose. About his neck was a string of pants buttons. Thrust through holes
+in his ears were a can opener, the broken handle of a toothbrush, a clay
+pipe, the brass wheel of an alarm clock, and several Winchester rifle
+cartridges.
+
+On his chest, suspended from around his neck hung the half of a china
+plate. Some forty similarly appareled blacks lay about the deck, fifteen
+of which were boat's crew, the remainder being fresh labor recruits.
+
+"Of course it was an accident," spoke up the ARLA'S mate, Jacobs,
+a slender, dark-eyed man who looked more a professor than a sailor.
+"Johnny Bedip nearly had the same kind of accident. He was bringing back
+several from a flogging, when they capsized him. But he knew how to swim
+as well as they, and two of them were drowned. He used a boat stretcher
+and a revolver. Of course it was an accident."
+
+"Quite common, them accidents," remarked the skipper. "You see that man
+at the wheel, Mr. Arkwright? He's a man eater. Six months ago, he and
+the rest of the boat's crew drowned the then captain of the ARLA. They
+did it on deck, sir, right aft there by the mizzen-traveler."
+
+"The deck was in a shocking state," said the mate.
+
+"Do I understand--?" Bertie began.
+
+"Yes, just that," said Captain Hansen. "It was an accidental drowning."
+
+"But on deck--?"
+
+"Just so. I don't mind telling you, in confidence, of course, that they
+used an axe."
+
+"This present crew of yours?"
+
+Captain Hansen nodded.
+
+"The other skipper always was too careless," explained the mate. "He but
+just turned his back, when they let him have it."
+
+"We haven't any show down here," was the skipper's complaint. "The
+government protects a nigger against a white every time. You can't shoot
+first. You've got to give the nigger first shot, or else the government
+calls it murder and you go to Fiji. That's why there's so many drowning
+accidents."
+
+Dinner was called, and Bertie and the skipper went below, leaving the
+mate to watch on deck.
+
+"Keep an eye out for that black devil, Auiki," was the skipper's parting
+caution. "I haven't liked his looks for several days."
+
+"Right O," said the mate.
+
+Dinner was part way along, and the skipper was in the middle of his
+story of the cutting out of the Scottish Chiefs.
+
+"Yes," he was saying, "she was the finest vessel on the coast. But when
+she missed stays, and before ever she hit the reef, the canoes started
+for her. There were five white men, a crew of twenty Santa Cruz boys
+and Samoans, and only the supercargo escaped. Besides, there were sixty
+recruits. They were all kai-kai'd. Kai-kai?--oh, I beg your pardon.
+I mean they were eaten. Then there was the James Edwards, a
+dandy-rigged--"
+
+But at that moment there was a sharp oath from the mate on deck and a
+chorus of savage cries. A revolver went off three times, and then was
+heard a loud splash. Captain Hansen had sprung up the companionway on
+the instant, and Bertie's eyes had been fascinated by a glimpse of him
+drawing his revolver as he sprang.
+
+Bertie went up more circumspectly, hesitating before he put his head
+above the companionway slide. But nothing happened. The mate was
+shaking with excitement, his revolver in his hand. Once he startled, and
+half-jumped around, as if danger threatened his back.
+
+"One of the natives fell overboard," he was saying, in a queer tense
+voice. "He couldn't swim."
+
+"Who was it?" the skipper demanded.
+
+"Auiki," was the answer.
+
+"But I say, you know, I heard shots," Bertie said, in trembling
+eagerness, for he scented adventure, and adventure that was happily over
+with.
+
+The mate whirled upon him, snarling:
+
+"It's a damned lie. There ain't been a shot fired. The nigger fell
+overboard."
+
+Captain Hansen regarded Bertie with unblinking, lack-luster eyes.
+
+"I--I thought--" Bertie was beginning.
+
+"Shots?" said Captain Hansen, dreamily. "Shots? Did you hear any shots,
+Mr. Jacobs?"
+
+"Not a shot," replied Mr. Jacobs.
+
+The skipper looked at his guest triumphantly, and said:
+
+"Evidently an accident. Let us go down, Mr. Arkwright, and finish
+dinner."
+
+Bertie slept that night in the captain's cabin, a tiny stateroom off the
+main cabin. The for'ard bulkhead was decorated with a stand of rifles.
+Over the bunk were three more rifles. Under the bunk was a big drawer,
+which, when he pulled it out, he found filled with ammunition, dynamite,
+and several boxes of detonators. He elected to take the settee on the
+opposite side. Lying conspicuously on the small table, was the Arla's
+log. Bertie did not know that it had been especially prepared for the
+occasion by Captain Malu, and he read therein how on September 21, two
+boat's crew had fallen overboard and been drowned. Bertie read between
+the lines and knew better. He read how the Arla's whale boat had
+been bushwhacked at Su'u and had lost three men; of how the skipper
+discovered the cook stewing human flesh on the galley fire--flesh
+purchased by the boat's crew ashore in Fui; of how an accidental
+discharge of dynamite, while signaling, had killed another boat's crew;
+of night attacks; ports fled from between the dawns; attacks by bushmen
+in mangrove swamps and by fleets of salt-water men in the larger
+passages. One item that occurred with monotonous frequency was death by
+dysentery. He noticed with alarm that two white men had so died--guests,
+like himself, on the Arla.
+
+"I say, you know," Bertie said next day to Captain Hansen. "I've been
+glancing through your log."
+
+The skipper displayed quick vexation that the log had been left lying
+about.
+
+"And all that dysentery, you know, that's all rot, just like the
+accidental drownings," Bertie continued. "What does dysentery really
+stand for?"
+
+The skipper openly admired his guest's acumen, stiffened himself to make
+indignant denial, then gracefully surrendered.
+
+"You see, it's like this, Mr. Arkwright. These islands have got a bad
+enough name as it is. It's getting harder every day to sign on white
+men. Suppose a man is killed. The company has to pay through the nose
+for another man to take the job. But if the man merely dies of sickness,
+it's all right. The new chums don't mind disease. What they draw the
+line at is being murdered. I thought the skipper of the Arla had died of
+dysentery when I took his billet. Then it was too late. I'd signed the
+contract."
+
+"Besides," said Mr. Jacobs, "there's altogether too many accidental
+drownings anyway. It don't look right. It's the fault of the government.
+A white man hasn't a chance to defend himself from the niggers."
+
+"Yes, look at the Princess and that Yankee mate," the skipper took up
+the tale. "She carried five white men besides a government agent. The
+captain, the agent, and the supercargo were ashore in the two boats.
+They were killed to the last man. The mate and boson, with about fifteen
+of the crew--Samoans and Tongans--were on board. A crowd of niggers came
+off from shore. First thing the mate knew, the boson and the crew were
+killed in the first rush. The mate grabbed three cartridge belts and two
+Winchesters and skinned up to the cross-trees. He was the sole survivor,
+and you can't blame him for being mad. He pumped one rifle till it got
+so hot he couldn't hold it, then he pumped the other. The deck was black
+with niggers. He cleaned them out. He dropped them as they went over the
+rail, and he dropped them as fast as they picked up their paddles. Then
+they jumped into the water and started to swim for it, and being mad, he
+got half a dozen more. And what did he get for it?"
+
+"Seven years in Fiji," snapped the mate.
+
+"The government said he wasn't justified in shooting after they'd taken
+to the water," the skipper explained.
+
+"And that's why they die of dysentery nowadays," the mate added.
+
+"Just fancy," said Bertie, as he felt a longing for the cruise to be
+over.
+
+Later on in the day he interviewed the black who had been pointed out
+to him as a cannibal. This fellow's name was Sumasai. He had spent three
+years on a Queensland plantation. He had been to Samoa, and Fiji, and
+Sydney; and as a boat's crew had been on recruiting schooners through
+New Britain, New Ireland, New Guinea, and the Admiralties. Also, he was
+a wag, and he had taken a line on his skipper's conduct. Yes, he had
+eaten many men. How many? He could not remember the tally. Yes, white
+men, too; they were very good, unless they were sick. He had once eaten
+a sick one.
+
+"My word!" he cried, at the recollection. "Me sick plenty along him. My
+belly walk about too much."
+
+Bertie shuddered, and asked about heads. Yes, Sumasai had several hidden
+ashore, in good condition, sun-dried, and smoke-cured. One was of the
+captain of a schooner. It had long whiskers. He would sell it for
+two quid. Black men's heads he would sell for one quid. He had some
+pickaninny heads, in poor condition, that he would let go for ten bob.
+
+Five minutes afterward, Bertie found himself sitting on the
+companionway-slide alongside a black with a horrible skin disease. He
+sheered off, and on inquiry was told that it was leprosy. He hurried
+below and washed himself with antiseptic soap. He took many antiseptic
+washes in the course of the day, for every native on board was afflicted
+with malignant ulcers of one sort or another.
+
+As the Arla drew in to an anchorage in the midst of mangrove swamps,
+a double row of barbed wire was stretched around above her rail. That
+looked like business, and when Bertie saw the shore canoes alongside,
+armed with spears, bows and arrows, and Sniders, he wished more
+earnestly than ever that the cruise was over.
+
+That evening the natives were slow in leaving the ship at sundown. A
+number of them checked the mate when he ordered them ashore. "Never
+mind, I'll fix them," said Captain Hansen, diving below.
+
+When he came back, he showed Bertie a stick of dynamite attached to a
+fish hook. Now it happens that a paper-wrapped bottle of chlorodyne with
+a piece of harmless fuse projecting can fool anybody. It fooled Bertie,
+and it fooled the natives. When Captain Hansen lighted the fuse and
+hooked the fish hook into the tail end of a native's loin cloth, that
+native was smitten with so an ardent a desire for the shore that he
+forgot to shed the loin cloth. He started for'ard, the fuse sizzling and
+spluttering at his rear, the natives in his path taking headers over the
+barbed wire at every jump. Bertie was horror-stricken. So was Captain
+Hansen. He had forgotten his twenty-five recruits, on each of which he
+had paid thirty shillings advance. They went over the side along with
+the shore-dwelling folk and followed by him who trailed the sizzling
+chlorodyne bottle.
+
+Bertie did not see the bottle go off; but the mate opportunely
+discharging a stick of real dynamite aft where it would harm nobody,
+Bertie would have sworn in any admiralty court to a nigger blown to
+flinders. The flight of the twenty-five recruits had actually cost the
+Arla forty pounds, and, since they had taken to the bush, there was no
+hope of recovering them. The skipper and his mate proceeded to drown
+their sorrow in cold tea.
+
+The cold tea was in whiskey bottles, so Bertie did not know it was cold
+tea they were mopping up. All he knew was that the two men got very
+drunk and argued eloquently and at length as to whether the exploded
+nigger should be reported as a case of dysentery or as an accidental
+drowning. When they snored off to sleep, he was the only white man left,
+and he kept a perilous watch till dawn, in fear of an attack from shore
+and an uprising of the crew.
+
+Three more days the Arla spent on the coast, and three more nights the
+skipper and the mate drank overfondly of cold tea, leaving Bertie
+to keep the watch. They knew he could be depended upon, while he was
+equally certain that if he lived, he would report their drunken conduct
+to Captain Malu. Then the Arla dropped anchor at Reminge Plantation, on
+Guadalcanar, and Bertie landed on the beach with a sigh of relief and
+shook hands with the manager. Mr. Harriwell was ready for him.
+
+"Now you mustn't be alarmed if some of our fellows seem downcast," Mr.
+Harriwell said, having drawn him aside in confidence. "There's been talk
+of an outbreak, and two or three suspicious signs I'm willing to admit,
+but personally I think it's all poppycock."
+
+"How--how many blacks have you on the plantation?" Bertie asked, with a
+sinking heart.
+
+"We're working four hundred just now," replied Mr. Harriwell,
+cheerfully; "but the three of us, with you, of course, and the skipper
+and mate of the Arla, can handle them all right."
+
+Bertie turned to meet one McTavish, the storekeeper, who scarcely
+acknowledged the introduction, such was his eagerness to present his
+resignation.
+
+"It being that I'm a married man, Mr. Harriwell, I can't very well
+afford to remain on longer. Trouble is working up, as plain as the
+nose on your face. The niggers are going to break out, and there'll be
+another Hohono horror here."
+
+"What's a Hohono horror?" Bertie asked, after the storekeeper had been
+persuaded to remain until the end of the month.
+
+"Oh, he means Hohono Plantation, on Ysabel," said the manager. "The
+niggers killed the five white men ashore, captured the schooner, killed
+the captain and mate, and escaped in a body to Malaita. But I always
+said they were careless on Hohono. They won't catch us napping here.
+Come along, Mr. Arkwright, and see our view from the veranda."
+
+Bertie was too busy wondering how he could get away to Tulagi to the
+Commissioner's house, to see much of the view. He was still wondering,
+when a rifle exploded very near to him, behind his back. At the same
+moment his arm was nearly dislocated, so eagerly did Mr. Harriwell drag
+him indoors.
+
+"I say, old man, that was a close shave," said the manager, pawing him
+over to see if he had been hit. "I can't tell you how sorry I am. But it
+was broad daylight, and I never dreamed."
+
+Bertie was beginning to turn pale.
+
+"They got the other manager that way," McTavish vouchsafed. "And a
+dashed fine chap he was. Blew his brains out all over the veranda. You
+noticed that dark stain there between the steps and the door?"
+
+Bertie was ripe for the cocktail which Mr. Harriwell pitched in and
+compounded for him; but before he could drink it, a man in riding
+trousers and puttees entered.
+
+"What's the matter now?" the manager asked, after one look at the
+newcomer's face. "Is the river up again?"
+
+"River be blowed--it's the niggers. Stepped out of the cane grass, not
+a dozen feet away, and whopped at me. It was a Snider, and he shot from
+the hip. Now what I want to know is where'd he get that Snider?--Oh, I
+beg pardon. Glad to know you, Mr. Arkwright."
+
+"Mr. Brown is my assistant," explained Mr. Harriwell. "And now let's
+have that drink."
+
+"But where'd he get that Snider?" Mr. Brown insisted. "I always objected
+to keeping those guns on the premises."
+
+"They're still there," Mr. Harriwell said, with a show of heat.
+
+Mr. Brown smiled incredulously.
+
+"Come along and see," said the manager.
+
+Bertie joined the procession into the office, where Mr. Harriwell
+pointed triumphantly at a big packing case in a dusty corner.
+
+"Well, then where did the beggar get that Snider?" harped Mr. Brown.
+
+But just then McTavish lifted the packing case. The manager started,
+then tore off the lid. The case was empty. They gazed at one another in
+horrified silence. Harriwell drooped wearily.
+
+Then McVeigh cursed.
+
+"What I contended all along--the house-boys are not to be trusted."
+
+"It does look serious," Harriwell admitted, "but we'll come through it
+all right. What the sanguinary niggers need is a shaking up. Will you
+gentlemen please bring your rifles to dinner, and will you, Mr. Brown,
+kindly prepare forty or fifty sticks of dynamite. Make the fuses good
+and short. We'll give them a lesson. And now, gentlemen, dinner is
+served."
+
+One thing that Bertie detested was rice and curry, so it happened that
+he alone partook of an inviting omelet. He had quite finished his plate,
+when Harriwell helped himself to the omelet. One mouthful he tasted,
+then spat out vociferously.
+
+"That's the second time," McTavish announced ominously.
+
+Harriwell was still hawking and spitting.
+
+"Second time, what?" Bertie quavered.
+
+"Poison," was the answer. "That cook will be hanged yet."
+
+"That's the way the bookkeeper went out at Cape March," Brown spoke up.
+"Died horribly. They said on the Jessie that they heard him screaming
+three miles away."
+
+"I'll put the cook in irons," sputtered Harriwell. "Fortunately we
+discovered it in time."
+
+Bertie sat paralyzed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to
+speak, but only an inarticulate gurgle resulted. All eyed him anxiously.
+
+"Don't say it, don't say it," McTavish cried in a tense voice.
+
+"Yes, I ate it, plenty of it, a whole plateful!" Bertie cried
+explosively, like a diver suddenly regaining breath.
+
+The awful silence continued half a minute longer, and he read his fate
+in their eyes.
+
+"Maybe it wasn't poison after all," said Harriwell, dismally.
+
+"Call in the cook," said Brown.
+
+In came the cook, a grinning black boy, nose-spiked and ear-plugged.
+
+"Here, you, Wi-wi, what name that?" Harriwell bellowed, pointing
+accusingly at the omelet.
+
+Wi-wi was very naturally frightened and embarrassed.
+
+"Him good fella kai-kai," he murmured apologetically.
+
+"Make him eat it," suggested McTavish. "That's a proper test."
+
+Harriwell filled a spoon with the stuff and jumped for the cook, who
+fled in panic.
+
+"That settles it," was Brown's solemn pronouncement. "He won't eat it."
+
+"Mr. Brown, will you please go and put the irons on him?" Harriwell
+turned cheerfully to Bertie. "It's all right, old man, the Commissioner
+will deal with him, and if you die, depend upon it, he will be hanged."
+
+"Don't think the government'll do it," objected McTavish.
+
+"But gentlemen, gentlemen," Bertie cried. "In the meantime think of me."
+
+Harriwell shrugged his shoulders pityingly.
+
+"Sorry, old man, but it's a native poison, and there are no known
+antidotes for native poisons. Try and compose yourself and if--"
+
+Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse,
+and Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle and sat down to table.
+
+"The cook's dead," he said. "Fever. A rather sudden attack."
+
+"I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native
+poisons--"
+
+"Except gin," said Brown.
+
+Harriwell called himself an absent-minded idiot and rushed for the gin
+bottle.
+
+"Neat, man, neat," he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler
+two-thirds full of the raw spirits, and coughed and choked from the
+angry bite of it till the tears ran down his cheeks.
+
+Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for
+him, and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned. Brown and McTavish
+also doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices.
+His appetite had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under
+the table. There was no question but what it was increasing, but he
+failed to ascribe it to the gin he had taken. McTavish, rifle in hand,
+went out on the veranda to reconnoiter.
+
+"They're massing up at the cook-house," was his report. "And they've no
+end of Sniders. My idea is to sneak around on the other side and take
+them in flank. Strike the first blow, you know. Will you come along,
+Brown?"
+
+Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had
+leaped up five beats. Nevertheless, he could not help jumping when the
+rifles began to go off. Above the scattering of Sniders could be
+heard the pumping of Brown's and McTavish's Winchesters--all against a
+background of demoniacal screeching and yelling.
+
+"They've got them on the run," Harriwell remarked, as voices and
+gunshots faded away in the distance.
+
+Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter
+reconnoitered.
+
+"They've got dynamite," he said.
+
+"Then let's charge them with dynamite," Harriwell proposed.
+
+Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping
+themselves with lighted cigars, they started for the door. And just then
+it happened. They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted
+that the charge had been a trifle excessive. But at any rate it went
+off under the house, which lifted up cornerwise and settled back on
+its foundations. Half the china on the table was shattered, while the
+eight-day clock stopped. Yelling for vengeance, the three men rushed out
+into the night, and the bombardment began.
+
+When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away
+to the office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a
+gin-soaked nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the
+valorous fight went on around him. In the morning, sick and headachey
+from the gin, he crawled out to find the sun still in the sky and God
+presumable in heaven, for his hosts were alive and uninjured.
+
+Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing
+immediately on the Arla for Tulagi, where, until the following steamer
+day, he stuck close by the Commissioner's house. There were lady
+tourists on the outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while
+Captain Malu, as usual, passed unnoticed. But Captain Malu sent back
+from Sydney two cases of the best Scotch whiskey on the market, for he
+was not able to make up his mind as to whether it was Captain Hansen or
+Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright the more gorgeous insight
+into life in the Solomons.
+
+
+
+
+THE INEVITABLE WHITE MAN
+
+"The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as
+long as black is black and white is white."
+
+So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts' pub
+in Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the
+aforesaid Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens,
+famous for having invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred
+on by Nile thirst--the Stevens who was responsible for "With Kitchener
+to Kartoun," and who passed out at the siege of Ladysmith.
+
+Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of
+tropic sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in
+a man, spoke from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald
+pate bespoke a tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy
+was the advertisement, front and rear, on the right side of his neck,
+where an arrow had at one time entered and been pulled clean through. As
+he explained, he had been in a hurry on that occasion--the arrow impeded
+his running--and he felt that he could not take the time to break off
+the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come in. At the present
+moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer that recruited
+labor from the westward for the German plantations on Samoa.
+
+"Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites," said Roberts,
+pausing to take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy
+in affectionate terms. "If the white man would lay himself out a bit
+to understand the workings of the black man's mind, most of the messes
+would be avoided."
+
+"I've seen a few who claimed they understood niggers," Captain Woodward
+retorted, "and I always took notice that they were the first to be
+kai-kai'd (eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New
+Hebrides--the martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the
+Austrian expedition that was cut to pieces in the Solomons, in the bush
+of Guadalcanar. And look at the traders themselves, with a score of
+years' experience, making their brag that no nigger would ever get them,
+and whose heads to this day are ornamenting the rafters of the canoe
+houses. There was old Johnny Simons--twenty-six years on the raw edges
+of Melanesia, swore he knew the niggers like a book and that they'd
+never do for him, and he passed out at Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had
+his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and an old nigger with only
+one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a shark while diving
+for dynamited fish. There was Billy Watts, horrible reputation as
+a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at Cape
+Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of
+trade-tobacco--cost him about three dollars and a half. In retaliation
+he turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned
+two villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that
+he was jumped along with fifty Buku boys he had with him fishing
+beche-de-mer. In five minutes they were all dead, with the exception of
+three boys who got away in a canoe. Don't talk to me about understanding
+the nigger. The white man's mission is to farm the world, and it's a
+big enough job cut out for him. What time has he got left to understand
+niggers anyway?"
+
+"Just so," said Roberts. "And somehow it doesn't seem necessary, after
+all, to understand the niggers. In direct proportion to the white man's
+stupidity is his success in farming the world--"
+
+"And putting the fear of God into the nigger's heart," Captain Woodward
+blurted out. "Perhaps you're right, Roberts. Perhaps it's his stupidity
+that makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his
+inability to understand the niggers. But there's one thing sure, the
+white has to run the niggers whether he understands them or not. It's
+inevitable. It's fate."
+
+"And of course the white man is inevitable--it's the niggers' fate,"
+Roberts broke in. "Tell the white man there's pearl shell in some lagoon
+infested by ten-thousand howling cannibals, and he'll head there all by
+his lonely, with half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for
+chronometer, all packed like sardines on a commodious, five-ton ketch.
+Whisper that there's a gold strike at the North Pole, and that same
+inevitable white-skinned creature will set out at once, armed with pick
+and shovel, a side of bacon, and the latest patent rocker--and what's
+more, he'll get there. Tip it off to him that there's diamonds on the
+red-hot ramparts of hell, and Mr. White Man will storm the ramparts
+and set old Satan himself to pick-and-shovel work. That's what comes of
+being stupid and inevitable."
+
+"But I wonder what the black man must think of the--the inevitableness,"
+I said.
+
+Captain Woodward broke into quiet laughter. His eyes had a reminiscent
+gleam.
+
+"I'm just wondering what the niggers of Malu thought and still must be
+thinking of the one inevitable white man we had on board when we visited
+them in the DUCHESS," he explained.
+
+Roberts mixed three more Abu Hameds.
+
+"That was twenty years ago. Saxtorph was his name. He was certainly the
+most stupid man I ever saw, but he was as inevitable as death. There was
+only one thing that chap could do, and that was shoot. I remember the
+first time I ran into him--right here in Apia, twenty years ago. That
+was before your time, Roberts. I was sleeping at Dutch Henry's hotel,
+down where the market is now. Ever heard of him? He made a tidy stake
+smuggling arms in to the rebels, sold out his hotel, and was killed in
+Sydney just six weeks afterward in a saloon row.
+
+"But Saxtorph. One night I'd just got to sleep, when a couple of cats
+began to sing in the courtyard. It was out of bed and up window, water
+jug in hand. But just then I heard the window of the next room go up.
+Two shots were fired, and the window was closed. I fail to impress you
+with the celerity of the transaction. Ten seconds at the outside. Up
+went the window, bang bang went the revolver, and down went the window.
+Whoever it was, he had never stopped to see the effect of his shots. He
+knew. Do you follow me?--he KNEW. There was no more cat concert, and in
+the morning there lay the two offenders, stone dead. It was marvelous
+to me. It still is marvelous. First, it was starlight, and Saxtorph shot
+without drawing a bead; next, he shot so rapidly that the two reports
+were like a double report; and finally, he knew he had hit his marks
+without looking to see.
+
+"Two days afterward he came on board to see me. I was mate, then, on
+the Duchess, a whacking big one-hundred-and fifty-ton schooner, a
+blackbirder. And let me tell you that blackbirders were blackbirders in
+those days. There weren't any government protection for US, either. It
+was rough work, give and take, if we were finished, and nothing said,
+and we ran niggers from every south sea island they didn't kick us off
+from. Well, Saxtorph came on board, John Saxtorph was the name he gave.
+He was a sandy little man, hair sandy, complexion sandy, and eyes sandy,
+too. Nothing striking about him. His soul was as neutral as his color
+scheme. He said he was strapped and wanted to ship on board. Would go
+cabin boy, cook, supercargo, or common sailor. Didn't know anything
+about any of the billets, but said that he was willing to learn. I
+didn't want him, but his shooting had so impressed me that I took him as
+common sailor, wages three pounds per month.
+
+"He was willing to learn all right, I'll say that much. But he was
+constitutionally unable to learn anything. He could no more box the
+compass than I could mix drinks like Roberts here. And as for steering,
+he gave me my first gray hairs. I never dared risk him at the wheel when
+we were running in a big sea, while full-and-by and close-and-by were
+insoluble mysteries. Couldn't ever tell the difference between a sheet
+and a tackle, simply couldn't. The fore-throat-jig and the jib-jig were
+all one to him. Tell him to slack off the mainsheet, and before you know
+it, he'd drop the peak. He fell overboard three times, and he couldn't
+swim. But he was always cheerful, never seasick, and he was the most
+willing man I ever knew. He was an uncommunicative soul. Never talked
+about himself. His history, so far as we were concerned, began the day
+he signed on the DUCHESS. Where he learned to shoot, the stars alone can
+tell. He was a Yankee--that much we knew from the twang in his speech.
+And that was all we ever did know.
+
+"And now we begin to get to the point. We had bad luck in the New
+Hebrides, only fourteen boys for five weeks, and we ran up before the
+southeast for the Solomons. Malaita, then as now, was good recruiting
+ground, and we ran into Malu, on the northwestern corner. There's a
+shore reef and an outer reef, and a mighty nervous anchorage; but we
+made it all right and fired off our dynamite as a signal to the niggers
+to come down and be recruited. In three days we got not a boy. The
+niggers came off to us in their canoes by hundreds, but they only
+laughed when we showed them beads and calico and hatchets and talked of
+the delights of plantation work in Samoa.
+
+"On the fourth day there came a change. Fifty-odd boys signed on and
+were billeted in the main-hold, with the freedom of the deck, of course.
+And of course, looking back, this wholesale signing on was suspicious,
+but at the time we thought some powerful chief had removed the ban
+against recruiting. The morning of the fifth day our two boats went
+ashore as usual--one to cover the other, you know, in case of trouble.
+And, as usual, the fifty niggers on board were on deck, loafing,
+talking, smoking, and sleeping. Saxtorph and myself, along with four
+other sailors, were all that were left on board. The two boats were
+manned with Gilbert Islanders. In the one were the captain, the
+supercargo, and the recruiter. In the other, which was the covering boat
+and which lay off shore a hundred yards, was the second mate. Both boats
+were well-armed, though trouble was little expected.
+
+"Four of the sailors, including Saxtorph, were scraping the poop rail.
+The fifth sailor, rifle in hand, was standing guard by the water-tank
+just for'ard of the mainmast. I was for'ard, putting in the finishing
+licks on a new jaw for the fore-gaff. I was just reaching for my pipe
+where I had laid it down, when I heard a shot from shore. I straightened
+up to look. Something struck me on the back of the head, partially
+stunning me and knocking me to the deck. My first thought was that
+something had carried away aloft; but even as I went down, and before
+I struck the deck, I heard the devil's own tattoo of rifles from the
+boats, and twisting sidewise, I caught a glimpse of the sailor who
+was standing guard. Two big niggers were holding his arms, and a third
+nigger from behind was braining him with a tomahawk.
+
+"I can see it now, the water-tank, the mainmast, the gang hanging on to
+him, the hatchet descending on the back of his head, and all under the
+blazing sunlight. I was fascinated by that growing vision of death.
+The tomahawk seemed to take a horribly long time to come down. I saw it
+land, and the man's legs give under him as he crumpled. The niggers held
+him up by sheer strength while he was hacked a couple of times more.
+Then I got two more hacks on the head and decided that I was dead. So
+did the brute that was hacking me. I was too helpless to move, and I lay
+there and watched them removing the sentry's head. I must say they did
+it slick enough. They were old hands at the business.
+
+"The rifle firing from the boats had ceased, and I made no doubt that
+they were finished off and that the end had come to everything. It was
+only a matter of moments when they would return for my head. They were
+evidently taking the heads from the sailors aft. Heads are valuable on
+Malaita, especially white heads. They have the place of honor in the
+canoe houses of the salt-water natives. What particular decorative
+effect the bushmen get out of them I didn't know, but they prize them
+just as much as the salt-water crowd.
+
+"I had a dim notion of escaping, and I crawled on hands and knees to
+the winch, where I managed to drag myself to my feet. From there I
+could look aft and see three heads on top the cabin--the heads of three
+sailors I had given orders to for months. The niggers saw me standing,
+and started for me. I reached for my revolver, and found they had taken
+it. I can't say that I was scared. I've been near to death several
+times, but it never seemed easier than right then. I was half-stunned,
+and nothing seemed to matter.
+
+"The leading nigger had armed himself with a cleaver from the galley,
+and he grimaced like an ape as he prepared to slice me down. But the
+slice was never made. He went down on the deck all of a heap, and I saw
+the blood gush from his mouth. In a dim way I heard a rifle go off and
+continue to go off. Nigger after nigger went down. My senses began to
+clear, and I noted that there was never a miss. Every time that the
+rifle went off a nigger dropped. I sat down on deck beside the winch and
+looked up. Perched in the crosstrees was Saxtorph. How he had managed
+it I can't imagine, for he had carried up with him two Winchesters and
+I don't know how many bandoliers of ammunition; and he was now doing the
+one only thing in this world that he was fitted to do.
+
+"I've seen shooting and slaughter, but I never saw anything like that.
+I sat by the winch and watched the show. I was weak and faint, and it
+seemed to be all a dream. Bang, bang, bang, bang, went his rifle, and
+thud, thud, thud, thud, went the niggers to the deck. It was amazing to
+see them go down. After their first rush to get me, when about a dozen
+had dropped, they seemed paralyzed; but he never left off pumping his
+gun. By this time canoes and the two boats arrived from shore, armed
+with Sniders, and with Winchesters which they had captured in the boats.
+The fusillade they let loose on Saxtorph was tremendous. Luckily for him
+the niggers are only good at close range. They are not used to putting
+the gun to their shoulders. They wait until they are right on top of
+a man, and then they shoot from the hip. When his rifle got too hot,
+Saxtorph changed off. That had been his idea when he carried two rifles
+up with him.
+
+"The astounding thing was the rapidity of his fire. Also, he never
+made a miss. If ever anything was inevitable, that man was. It was the
+swiftness of it that made the slaughter so appalling. The niggers did
+not have time to think. When they did manage to think, they went over
+the side in a rush, capsizing the canoes of course. Saxtorph never let
+up. The water was covered with them, and plump, plump, plump, he dropped
+his bullets into them. Not a single miss, and I could hear distinctly
+the thud of every bullet as it buried in human flesh.
+
+"The niggers spread out and headed for the shore, swimming. The water
+was carpeted with bobbing heads, and I stood up, as in a dream, and
+watched it all--the bobbing heads and the heads that ceased to bob. Some
+of the long shots were magnificent. Only one man reached the beach, but
+as he stood up to wade ashore, Saxtorph got him. It was beautiful. And
+when a couple of niggers ran down to drag him out of the water, Saxtorph
+got them, too.
+
+"I thought everything was over then, when I heard the rifle go off
+again. A nigger had come out of the cabin companion on the run for the
+rail and gone down in the middle of it. The cabin must have been full
+of them. I counted twenty. They came up one at a time and jumped for the
+rail. But they never got there. It reminded me of trapshooting. A black
+body would pop out of the companion, bang would go Saxtorph's rifle, and
+down would go the black body. Of course, those below did not know what
+was happening on deck, so they continued to pop out until the last one
+was finished off.
+
+"Saxtorph waited a while to make sure, and then came down on deck. He
+and I were all that were left of the DUCHESS'S complement, and I was
+pretty well to the bad, while he was helpless now that the shooting was
+over. Under my direction he washed out my scalp wounds and sewed them
+up. A big drink of whiskey braced me to make an effort to get out. There
+was nothing else to do. All the rest were dead. We tried to get up sail,
+Saxtorph hoisting and I holding the turn. He was once more the stupid
+lubber. He couldn't hoist worth a cent, and when I fell in a faint, it
+looked all up with us.
+
+"When I came to, Saxtorph was sitting helplessly on the rail, waiting to
+ask me what he should do. I told him to overhaul the wounded and see if
+there were any able to crawl. He gathered together six. One, I remember,
+had a broken leg; but Saxtorph said his arms were all right. I lay
+in the shade, brushing the flies off and directing operations, while
+Saxtorph bossed his hospital gang. I'll be blessed if he didn't make
+those poor niggers heave at every rope on the pin-rails before he found
+the halyards. One of them let go the rope in the midst of the hoisting
+and slipped down to the deck dead; but Saxtorph hammered the others and
+made them stick by the job. When the fore and main were up, I told him
+to knock the shackle out of the anchor chain and let her go. I had had
+myself helped aft to the wheel, where I was going to make a shift at
+steering. I can't guess how he did it, but instead of knocking the
+shackle out, down went the second anchor, and there we were doubly
+moored.
+
+"In the end he managed to knock both shackles out and raise the staysail
+and jib, and the Duchess filled away for the entrance. Our decks were a
+spectacle. Dead and dying niggers were everywhere. They were wedged away
+some of them in the most inconceivable places. The cabin was full of
+them where they had crawled off the deck and cashed in. I put Saxtorph
+and his graveyard gang to work heaving them overside, and over they
+went, the living and the dead. The sharks had fat pickings that day.
+Of course our four murdered sailors went the same way. Their heads,
+however, we put in a sack with weights, so that by no chance should they
+drift on the beach and fall into the hands of the niggers.
+
+"Our five prisoners I decided to use as crew, but they decided
+otherwise. They watched their opportunity and went over the side.
+Saxtorph got two in mid-air with his revolver, and would have shot the
+other three in the water if I hadn't stopped him. I was sick of the
+slaughter, you see, and besides, they'd helped work the schooner out.
+But it was mercy thrown away, for the sharks got the three of them.
+
+"I had brain fever or something after we got clear of the land. Anyway,
+the DUCHESS lay hove to for three weeks, when I pulled myself together
+and we jogged on with her to Sydney. Anyway those niggers of Malu
+learned the everlasting lesson that it is not good to monkey with a
+white man. In their case, Saxtorph was certainly inevitable."
+
+Charley Roberts emitted a long whistle and said:
+
+"Well I should say so. But whatever became of Saxtorph?"
+
+"He drifted into seal hunting and became a crackerjack. For six years he
+was high line of both the Victoria and San Francisco fleets. The seventh
+year his schooner was seized in Bering Sea by a Russian cruiser, and all
+hands, so the talk went, were slammed into the Siberian salt mines. At
+least I've never heard of him since."
+
+"Farming the world," Roberts muttered. "Farming the world. Well here's
+to them. Somebody's got to do it--farm the world, I mean."
+
+Captain Woodward rubbed the criss-crosses on his bald head.
+
+"I've done my share of it," he said. "Forty years now. This will be my
+last trip. Then I'm going home to stay."
+
+"I'll wager the wine you don't," Roberts challenged. "You'll die in the
+harness, not at home."
+
+Captain Woodward promptly accepted the bet, but personally I think
+Charley Roberts has the best of it.
+
+
+
+
+THE SEED OF McCOY
+
+The Pyrenees, her iron sides pressed low in the water by her cargo of
+wheat, rolled sluggishly, and made it easy for the man who was climbing
+aboard from out a tiny outrigger canoe. As his eyes came level with the
+rail, so that he could see inboard, it seemed to him that he saw a dim,
+almost indiscernible haze. It was more like an illusion, like a blurring
+film that had spread abruptly over his eyes. He felt an inclination to
+brush it away, and the same instant he thought that he was growing old
+and that it was time to send to San Francisco for a pair of spectacles.
+
+As he came over the rail he cast a glance aloft at the tall masts, and,
+next, at the pumps. They were not working. There seemed nothing the
+matter with the big ship, and he wondered why she had hoisted the signal
+of distress. He thought of his happy islanders, and hoped it was not
+disease. Perhaps the ship was short of water or provisions. He shook
+hands with the captain whose gaunt face and care-worn eyes made no
+secret of the trouble, whatever it was. At the same moment the newcomer
+was aware of a faint, indefinable smell. It seemed like that of burnt
+bread, but different.
+
+He glanced curiously about him. Twenty feet away a weary-faced sailor
+was calking the deck. As his eyes lingered on the man, he saw suddenly
+arise from under his hands a faint spiral of haze that curled and
+twisted and was gone. By now he had reached the deck. His bare feet were
+pervaded by a dull warmth that quickly penetrated the thick calluses.
+He knew now the nature of the ship's distress. His eyes roved swiftly
+forward, where the full crew of weary-faced sailors regarded him
+eagerly. The glance from his liquid brown eyes swept over them like a
+benediction, soothing them, rapping them about as in the mantle of a
+great peace. "How long has she been afire, Captain?" he asked in a voice
+so gentle and unperturbed that it was as the cooing of a dove.
+
+At first the captain felt the peace and content of it stealing in upon
+him; then the consciousness of all that he had gone through and was
+going through smote him, and he was resentful. By what right did this
+ragged beachcomber, in dungaree trousers and a cotton shirt, suggest
+such a thing as peace and content to him and his overwrought, exhausted
+soul? The captain did not reason this; it was the unconscious process of
+emotion that caused his resentment.
+
+"Fifteen days," he answered shortly. "Who are you?"
+
+"My name is McCoy," came the answer in tones that breathed tenderness
+and compassion.
+
+"I mean, are you the pilot?"
+
+McCoy passed the benediction of his gaze over the tall, heavy-shouldered
+man with the haggard, unshaven face who had joined the captain.
+
+"I am as much a pilot as anybody," was McCoy's answer. "We are all
+pilots here, Captain, and I know every inch of these waters."
+
+But the captain was impatient.
+
+"What I want is some of the authorities. I want to talk with them, and
+blame quick."
+
+"Then I'll do just as well."
+
+Again that insidious suggestion of peace, and his ship a raging
+furnace beneath his feet! The captain's eyebrows lifted impatiently and
+nervously, and his fist clenched as if he were about to strike a blow
+with it.
+
+"Who in hell are you?" he demanded.
+
+"I am the chief magistrate," was the reply in a voice that was still the
+softest and gentlest imaginable.
+
+The tall, heavy-shouldered man broke out in a harsh laugh that was
+partly amusement, but mostly hysterical. Both he and the captain
+regarded McCoy with incredulity and amazement. That this barefooted
+beachcomber should possess such high-sounding dignity was inconceivable.
+His cotton shirt, unbuttoned, exposed a grizzled chest and the fact that
+there was no undershirt beneath.
+
+A worn straw hat failed to hide the ragged gray hair. Halfway down his
+chest descended an untrimmed patriarchal beard. In any slop shop, two
+shillings would have outfitted him complete as he stood before them.
+
+"Any relation to the McCoy of the Bounty?" the captain asked.
+
+"He was my great-grandfather."
+
+"Oh," the captain said, then bethought himself. "My name is Davenport,
+and this is my first mate, Mr. Konig."
+
+They shook hands.
+
+"And now to business." The captain spoke quickly, the urgency of a great
+haste pressing his speech. "We've been on fire for over two weeks.
+She's ready to break all hell loose any moment. That's why I held for
+Pitcairn. I want to beach her, or scuttle her, and save the hull."
+
+"Then you made a mistake, Captain," said McCoy. "You should have slacked
+away for Mangareva. There's a beautiful beach there, in a lagoon where
+the water is like a mill pond."
+
+"But we're here, ain't we?" the first mate demanded. "That's the point.
+We're here, and we've got to do something."
+
+McCoy shook his head kindly.
+
+"You can do nothing here. There is no beach. There isn't even
+anchorage."
+
+"Gammon!" said the mate. "Gammon!" he repeated loudly, as the captain
+signaled him to be more soft spoken. "You can't tell me that sort of
+stuff. Where d'ye keep your own boats, hey--your schooner, or cutter, or
+whatever you have? Hey? Answer me that."
+
+McCoy smiled as gently as he spoke. His smile was a caress, an embrace
+that surrounded the tired mate and sought to draw him into the quietude
+and rest of McCoy's tranquil soul.
+
+"We have no schooner or cutter," he replied. "And we carry our canoes to
+the top of the cliff."
+
+"You've got to show me," snorted the mate. "How d'ye get around to the
+other islands, heh? Tell me that."
+
+"We don't get around. As governor of Pitcairn, I sometimes go. When
+I was younger, I was away a great deal--sometimes on the trading
+schooners, but mostly on the missionary brig. But she's gone now, and we
+depend on passing vessels. Sometimes we have had as high as six calls in
+one year. At other times, a year, and even longer, has gone by without
+one passing ship. Yours is the first in seven months."
+
+"And you mean to tell me--" the mate began.
+
+But Captain Davenport interfered.
+
+"Enough of this. We're losing time. What is to be done, Mr. McCoy?"
+
+The old man turned his brown eyes, sweet as a woman's, shoreward, and
+both captain and mate followed his gaze around from the lonely rock of
+Pitcairn to the crew clustering forward and waiting anxiously for the
+announcement of a decision. McCoy did not hurry. He thought smoothly and
+slowly, step by step, with the certitude of a mind that was never vexed
+or outraged by life.
+
+"The wind is light now," he said finally. "There is a heavy current
+setting to the westward."
+
+"That's what made us fetch to leeward," the captain interrupted,
+desiring to vindicate his seamanship.
+
+"Yes, that is what fetched you to leeward," McCoy went on. "Well, you
+can't work up against this current today. And if you did, there is no
+beach. Your ship will be a total loss."
+
+He paused, and captain and mate looked despair at each other.
+
+"But I will tell you what you can do. The breeze will freshen tonight
+around midnight--see those tails of clouds and that thickness to
+windward, beyond the point there? That's where she'll come from, out of
+the southeast, hard. It is three hundred miles to Mangareva. Square away
+for it. There is a beautiful bed for your ship there."
+
+The mate shook his head.
+
+"Come in to the cabin, and we'll look at the chart," said the captain.
+
+McCoy found a stifling, poisonous atmosphere in the pent cabin. Stray
+waftures of invisible gases bit his eyes and made them sting. The deck
+was hotter, almost unbearably hot to his bare feet. The sweat poured
+out of his body. He looked almost with apprehension about him. This
+malignant, internal heat was astounding. It was a marvel that the cabin
+did not burst into flames. He had a feeling as if of being in a huge
+bake oven where the heat might at any moment increase tremendously and
+shrivel him up like a blade of grass.
+
+As he lifted one foot and rubbed the hot sole against the leg of his
+trousers, the mate laughed in a savage, snarling fashion.
+
+"The anteroom of hell," he said. "Hell herself is right down there under
+your feet."
+
+"It's hot!" McCoy cried involuntarily, mopping his face with a bandana
+handkerchief.
+
+"Here's Mangareva," the captain said, bending over the table and
+pointing to a black speck in the midst of the white blankness of the
+chart. "And here, in between, is another island. Why not run for that?"
+
+McCoy did not look at the chart.
+
+"That's Crescent Island," he answered. "It is uninhabited, and it
+is only two or three feet above water. Lagoon, but no entrance. No,
+Mangareva is the nearest place for your purpose."
+
+"Mangareva it is, then," said Captain Davenport, interrupting the mate's
+growling objection. "Call the crew aft, Mr. Konig."
+
+The sailors obeyed, shuffling wearily along the deck and painfully
+endeavoring to make haste. Exhaustion was evident in every movement. The
+cook came out of his galley to hear, and the cabin boy hung about near
+him.
+
+When Captain Davenport had explained the situation and announced his
+intention of running for Mangareva, an uproar broke out. Against a
+background of throaty rumbling arose inarticulate cries of rage, with
+here and there a distinct curse, or word, or phrase. A shrill Cockney
+voice soared and dominated for a moment, crying: "Gawd! After bein' in
+ell for fifteen days--an' now e wants us to sail this floatin' ell to
+sea again?"
+
+The captain could not control them, but McCoy's gentle presence seemed
+to rebuke and calm them, and the muttering and cursing died away, until
+the full crew, save here and there an anxious face directed at the
+captain, yearned dumbly toward the green clad peaks and beetling coast
+of Pitcairn.
+
+Soft as a spring zephyr was the voice of McCoy:
+
+"Captain, I thought I heard some of them say they were starving."
+
+"Ay," was the answer, "and so we are. I've had a sea biscuit and a
+spoonful of salmon in the last two days. We're on whack. You see, when
+we discovered the fire, we battened down immediately to suffocate the
+fire. And then we found how little food there was in the pantry. But it
+was too late. We didn't dare break out the lazarette. Hungry? I'm just
+as hungry as they are."
+
+He spoke to the men again, and again the throat rumbling and cursing
+arose, their faces convulsed and animal-like with rage. The second and
+third mates had joined the captain, standing behind him at the break of
+the poop. Their faces were set and expressionless; they seemed bored,
+more than anything else, by this mutiny of the crew. Captain Davenport
+glanced questioningly at his first mate, and that person merely shrugged
+his shoulders in token of his helplessness.
+
+"You see," the captain said to McCoy, "you can't compel sailors to leave
+the safe land and go to sea on a burning vessel. She has been their
+floating coffin for over two weeks now. They are worked out, and starved
+out, and they've got enough of her. We'll beat up for Pitcairn."
+
+But the wind was light, the Pyrenees' bottom was foul, and she could not
+beat up against the strong westerly current. At the end of two hours she
+had lost three miles. The sailors worked eagerly, as if by main strength
+they could compel the PYRENEES against the adverse elements. But
+steadily, port tack and starboard tack, she sagged off to the westward.
+The captain paced restlessly up and down, pausing occasionally to survey
+the vagrant smoke wisps and to trace them back to the portions of the
+deck from which they sprang. The carpenter was engaged constantly in
+attempting to locate such places, and, when he succeeded, in calking
+them tighter and tighter.
+
+"Well, what do you think?" the captain finally asked McCoy, who was
+watching the carpenter with all a child's interest and curiosity in his
+eyes.
+
+McCoy looked shoreward, where the land was disappearing in the
+thickening haze.
+
+"I think it would be better to square away for Mangareva. With that
+breeze that is coming, you'll be there tomorrow evening."
+
+"But what if the fire breaks out? It is liable to do it any moment."
+
+"Have your boats ready in the falls. The same breeze will carry your
+boats to Mangareva if the ship burns out from under."
+
+Captain Davenport debated for a moment, and then McCoy heard the
+question he had not wanted to hear, but which he knew was surely coming.
+
+"I have no chart of Mangareva. On the general chart it is only a fly
+speck. I would not know where to look for the entrance into the lagoon.
+Will you come along and pilot her in for me?"
+
+McCoy's serenity was unbroken.
+
+"Yes, Captain," he said, with the same quiet unconcern with which
+he would have accepted an invitation to dinner; "I'll go with you to
+Mangareva."
+
+Again the crew was called aft, and the captain spoke to them from the
+break of the poop.
+
+"We've tried to work her up, but you see how we've lost ground. She's
+setting off in a two-knot current. This gentleman is the Honorable
+McCoy, Chief Magistrate and Governor of Pitcairn Island. He will
+come along with us to Mangareva. So you see the situation is not so
+dangerous. He would not make such an offer if he thought he was going
+to lose his life. Besides, whatever risk there is, if he of his own free
+will come on board and take it, we can do no less. What do you say for
+Mangareva?"
+
+This time there was no uproar. McCoy's presence, the surety and calm
+that seemed to radiate from him, had had its effect. They conferred with
+one another in low voices. There was little urging. They were virtually
+unanimous, and they shoved the Cockney out as their spokesman. That
+worthy was overwhelmed with consciousness of the heroism of himself and
+his mates, and with flashing eyes he cried:
+
+"By Gawd! If 'e will, we will!"
+
+The crew mumbled its assent and started forward.
+
+"One moment, Captain," McCoy said, as the other was turning to give
+orders to the mate. "I must go ashore first."
+
+Mr. Konig was thunderstruck, staring at McCoy as if he were a madman.
+
+"Go ashore!" the captain cried. "What for? It will take you three hours
+to get there in your canoe."
+
+McCoy measured the distance of the land away, and nodded.
+
+"Yes, it is six now. I won't get ashore till nine. The people cannot be
+assembled earlier than ten. As the breeze freshens up tonight, you
+can begin to work up against it, and pick me up at daylight tomorrow
+morning."
+
+"In the name of reason and common sense," the captain burst forth, "what
+do you want to assemble the people for? Don't you realize that my ship
+is burning beneath me?"
+
+McCoy was as placid as a summer sea, and the other's anger produced not
+the slightest ripple upon it.
+
+"Yes, Captain," he cooed in his dove-like voice. "I do realize that your
+ship is burning. That is why I am going with you to Mangareva. But I
+must get permission to go with you. It is our custom. It is an important
+matter when the governor leaves the island. The people's interests
+are at stake, and so they have the right to vote their permission or
+refusal. But they will give it, I know that."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Quite sure."
+
+"Then if you know they will give it, why bother with getting it? Think
+of the delay--a whole night."
+
+"It is our custom," was the imperturbable reply. "Also, I am the
+governor, and I must make arrangements for the conduct of the island
+during my absence."
+
+"But it is only a twenty-four hour run to Mangareva," the captain
+objected. "Suppose it took you six times that long to return to
+windward; that would bring you back by the end of a week."
+
+McCoy smiled his large, benevolent smile.
+
+"Very few vessels come to Pitcairn, and when they do, they are usually
+from San Francisco or from around the Horn. I shall be fortunate if I
+get back in six months. I may be away a year, and I may have to go to
+San Francisco in order to find a vessel that will bring me back. My
+father once left Pitcairn to be gone three months, and two years passed
+before he could get back. Then, too, you are short of food. If you have
+to take to the boats, and the weather comes up bad, you may be days in
+reaching land. I can bring off two canoe loads of food in the morning.
+Dried bananas will be best. As the breeze freshens, you beat up against
+it. The nearer you are, the bigger loads I can bring off. Goodby."
+
+He held out his hand. The captain shook it, and was reluctant to let go.
+He seemed to cling to it as a drowning sailor clings to a life buoy.
+
+"How do I know you will come back in the morning?" he asked.
+
+"Yes, that's it!" cried the mate. "How do we know but what he's skinning
+out to save his own hide?"
+
+McCoy did not speak. He looked at them sweetly and benignantly, and
+it seemed to them that they received a message from his tremendous
+certitude of soul.
+
+The captain released his hand, and, with a last sweeping glance that
+embraced the crew in its benediction, McCoy went over the rail and
+descended into his canoe.
+
+The wind freshened, and the Pyrenees, despite the foulness of her
+bottom, won half a dozen miles away from the westerly current. At
+daylight, with Pitcairn three miles to windward, Captain Davenport made
+out two canoes coming off to him. Again McCoy clambered up the side and
+dropped over the rail to the hot deck. He was followed by many packages
+of dried bananas, each package wrapped in dry leaves.
+
+"Now, Captain," he said, "swing the yards and drive for dear life. You
+see, I am no navigator," he explained a few minutes later, as he
+stood by the captain aft, the latter with gaze wandering from aloft to
+overside as he estimated the Pyrenees' speed. "You must fetch her to
+Mangareva. When you have picked up the land, then I will pilot her in.
+What do you think she is making?"
+
+"Eleven," Captain Davenport answered, with a final glance at the water
+rushing past.
+
+"Eleven. Let me see, if she keeps up that gait, we'll sight Mangareva
+between eight and nine o'clock tomorrow morning. I'll have her on the
+beach by ten or by eleven at latest. And then your troubles will be all
+over."
+
+It almost seemed to the captain that the blissful moment had already
+arrived, such was the persuasive convincingness of McCoy.
+
+Captain Davenport had been under the fearful strain of navigating his
+burning ship for over two weeks, and he was beginning to feel that he
+had had enough.
+
+A heavier flaw of wind struck the back of his neck and whistled by his
+ears. He measured the weight of it, and looked quickly overside.
+
+"The wind is making all the time," he announced. "The old girl's
+doing nearer twelve than eleven right now. If this keeps up, we'll be
+shortening down tonight."
+
+All day the Pyrenees, carrying her load of living fire, tore across the
+foaming sea. By nightfall, royals and topgallantsails were in, and she
+flew on into the darkness, with great, crested seas roaring after her.
+The auspicious wind had had its effect, and fore and aft a visible
+brightening was apparent. In the second dog-watch some careless soul
+started a song, and by eight bells the whole crew was singing.
+
+Captain Davenport had his blankets brought up and spread on top the
+house.
+
+"I've forgotten what sleep is," he explained to McCoy. "I'm all in. But
+give me a call at any time you think necessary."
+
+At three in the morning he was aroused by a gentle tugging at his arm.
+He sat up quickly, bracing himself against the skylight, stupid yet from
+his heavy sleep. The wind was thrumming its war song in the rigging, and
+a wild sea was buffeting the PYRENEES. Amidships she was wallowing first
+one rail under and then the other, flooding the waist more often than
+not. McCoy was shouting something he could not hear. He reached out,
+clutched the other by the shoulder, and drew him close so that his own
+ear was close to the other's lips.
+
+"It's three o'clock," came McCoy's voice, still retaining its dovelike
+quality, but curiously muffled, as if from a long way off. "We've
+run two hundred and fifty. Crescent Island is only thirty miles away,
+somewhere there dead ahead. There's no lights on it. If we keep running,
+we'll pile up, and lose ourselves as well as the ship."
+
+"What d' ye think--heave to?"
+
+"Yes; heave to till daylight. It will only put us back four hours."
+
+So the Pyrenees, with her cargo of fire, was hove to, bitting the teeth
+of the gale and fighting and smashing the pounding seas. She was a
+shell, filled with a conflagration, and on the outside of the shell,
+clinging precariously, the little motes of men, by pull and haul, helped
+her in the battle.
+
+"It is most unusual, this gale," McCoy told the captain, in the lee of
+the cabin. "By rights there should be no gale at this time of the year.
+But everything about the weather has been unusual. There has been a
+stoppage of the trades, and now it's howling right out of the trade
+quarter." He waved his hand into the darkness, as if his vision could
+dimly penetrate for hundreds of miles. "It is off to the westward. There
+is something big making off there somewhere--a hurricane or something.
+We're lucky to be so far to the eastward. But this is only a little
+blow," he added. "It can't last. I can tell you that much."
+
+By daylight the gale had eased down to normal. But daylight revealed
+a new danger. It had come on thick. The sea was covered by a fog, or,
+rather, by a pearly mist that was fog-like in density, in so far as it
+obstructed vision, but that was no more than a film on the sea, for the
+sun shot it through and filled it with a glowing radiance.
+
+The deck of the Pyrenees was making more smoke than on the preceding
+day, and the cheerfulness of officers and crew had vanished. In the lee
+of the galley the cabin boy could be heard whimpering. It was his first
+voyage, and the fear of death was at his heart. The captain wandered
+about like a lost soul, nervously chewing his mustache, scowling, unable
+to make up his mind what to do.
+
+"What do you think?" he asked, pausing by the side of McCoy, who was
+making a breakfast off fried bananas and a mug of water.
+
+McCoy finished the last banana, drained the mug, and looked slowly
+around. In his eyes was a smile of tenderness as he said:
+
+"Well, Captain, we might as well drive as burn. Your decks are not going
+to hold out forever. They are hotter this morning. You haven't a pair of
+shoes I can wear? It is getting uncomfortable for my bare feet."
+
+The Pyrenees shipped two heavy seas as she was swung off and put once
+more before it, and the first mate expressed a desire to have all that
+water down in the hold, if only it could be introduced without taking
+off the hatches. McCoy ducked his head into the binnacle and watched the
+course set.
+
+"I'd hold her up some more, Captain," he said. "She's been making drift
+when hove to."
+
+"I've set it to a point higher already," was the answer. "Isn't that
+enough?"
+
+"I'd make it two points, Captain. This bit of a blow kicked that
+westerly current ahead faster than you imagine."
+
+Captain Davenport compromised on a point and a half, and then went
+aloft, accompanied by McCoy and the first mate, to keep a lookout for
+land. Sail had been made, so that the Pyrenees was doing ten knots. The
+following sea was dying down rapidly. There was no break in the pearly
+fog, and by ten o'clock Captain Davenport was growing nervous. All hands
+were at their stations, ready, at the first warning of land ahead, to
+spring like fiends to the task of bringing the Pyrenees up on the wind.
+That land ahead, a surf-washed outer reef, would be perilously close
+when it revealed itself in such a fog.
+
+Another hour passed. The three watchers aloft stared intently into the
+pearly radiance. "What if we miss Mangareva?" Captain Davenport asked
+abruptly.
+
+McCoy, without shifting his gaze, answered softly:
+
+"Why, let her drive, captain. That is all we can do. All the Paumotus
+are before us. We can drive for a thousand miles through reefs and
+atolls. We are bound to fetch up somewhere."
+
+"Then drive it is." Captain Davenport evidenced his intention of
+descending to the deck. "We've missed Mangareva. God knows where
+the next land is. I wish I'd held her up that other half-point," he
+confessed a moment later. "This cursed current plays the devil with a
+navigator."
+
+"The old navigators called the Paumotus the Dangerous Archipelago,"
+McCoy said, when they had regained the poop. "This very current was
+partly responsible for that name."
+
+"I was talking with a sailor chap in Sydney, once," said Mr. Konig.
+"He'd been trading in the Paumotus. He told me insurance was eighteen
+per cent. Is that right?"
+
+McCoy smiled and nodded.
+
+"Except that they don't insure," he explained. "The owners write off
+twenty per cent of the cost of their schooners each year."
+
+"My God!" Captain Davenport groaned. "That makes the life of a schooner
+only five years!" He shook his head sadly, murmuring, "Bad waters! Bad
+waters!"
+
+Again they went into the cabin to consult the big general chart; but the
+poisonous vapors drove them coughing and gasping on deck.
+
+"Here is Moerenhout Island," Captain Davenport pointed it out on the
+chart, which he had spread on the house. "It can't be more than a
+hundred miles to leeward."
+
+"A hundred and ten." McCoy shook his head doubtfully. "It might be done,
+but it is very difficult. I might beach her, and then again I might put
+her on the reef. A bad place, a very bad place."
+
+"We'll take the chance," was Captain Davenport's decision, as he set
+about working out the course.
+
+Sail was shortened early in the afternoon, to avoid running past in
+the night; and in the second dog-watch the crew manifested its regained
+cheerfulness. Land was so very near, and their troubles would be over in
+the morning.
+
+But morning broke clear, with a blazing tropic sun. The southeast trade
+had swung around to the eastward, and was driving the PYRENEES through
+the water at an eight-knot clip. Captain Davenport worked up his dead
+reckoning, allowing generously for drift, and announced Moerenhout
+Island to be not more than ten miles off. The Pyrenees sailed the
+ten miles; she sailed ten miles more; and the lookouts at the three
+mastheads saw naught but the naked, sun-washed sea.
+
+"But the land is there, I tell you," Captain Davenport shouted to them
+from the poop.
+
+McCoy smiled soothingly, but the captain glared about him like a madman,
+fetched his sextant, and took a chronometer sight.
+
+"I knew I was right," he almost shouted, when he had worked up the
+observation. "Twenty-one, fifty-five, south; one-thirty-six, two, west.
+There you are. We're eight miles to windward yet. What did you make it
+out, Mr. Konig?"
+
+The first mate glanced at his own figures, and said in a low voice:
+
+"Twenty-one, fifty-five all right; but my longitude's one-thirty-six,
+forty-eight. That puts us considerably to leeward--"
+
+But Captain Davenport ignored his figures with so contemptuous a silence
+as to make Mr. Konig grit his teeth and curse savagely under his breath.
+
+"Keep her off," the captain ordered the man at the wheel. "Three
+points--steady there, as she goes!"
+
+Then he returned to his figures and worked them over. The sweat poured
+from his face. He chewed his mustache, his lips, and his pencil, staring
+at the figures as a man might at a ghost. Suddenly, with a fierce,
+muscular outburst, he crumpled the scribbled paper in his fist and
+crushed it under foot. Mr. Konig grinned vindictively and turned away,
+while Captain Davenport leaned against the cabin and for half an
+hour spoke no word, contenting himself with gazing to leeward with an
+expression of musing hopelessness on his face.
+
+"Mr. McCoy," he broke silence abruptly. "The chart indicates a group
+of islands, but not how many, off there to the north'ard, or
+nor'-nor'westward, about forty miles--the Acteon Islands. What about
+them?"
+
+"There are four, all low," McCoy answered. "First to the southeast is
+Matuerui--no people, no entrance to the lagoon. Then comes Tenarunga.
+There used to be about a dozen people there, but they may be all gone
+now. Anyway, there is no entrance for a ship--only a boat entrance,
+with a fathom of water. Vehauga and Teua-raro are the other two. No
+entrances, no people, very low. There is no bed for the Pyrenees in that
+group. She would be a total wreck."
+
+"Listen to that!" Captain Davenport was frantic. "No people! No
+entrances! What in the devil are islands good for?
+
+"Well, then," he barked suddenly, like an excited terrier, "the chart
+gives a whole mess of islands off to the nor'west. What about them? What
+one has an entrance where I can lay my ship?"
+
+McCoy calmly considered. He did not refer to the chart. All these
+islands, reefs, shoals, lagoons, entrances, and distances were marked
+on the chart of his memory. He knew them as the city dweller knows his
+buildings, streets, and alleys.
+
+"Papakena and Vanavana are off there to the westward, or
+west-nor'westward a hundred miles and a bit more," he said. "One is
+uninhabited, and I heard that the people on the other had gone off to
+Cadmus Island. Anyway, neither lagoon has an entrance. Ahunui is another
+hundred miles on to the nor'west. No entrance, no people."
+
+"Well, forty miles beyond them are two islands?" Captain Davenport
+queried, raising his head from the chart.
+
+McCoy shook his head.
+
+"Paros and Manuhungi--no entrances, no people. Nengo-Nengo is forty
+miles beyond them, in turn, and it has no people and no entrance. But
+there is Hao Island. It is just the place. The lagoon is thirty miles
+long and five miles wide. There are plenty of people. You can usually
+find water. And any ship in the world can go through the entrance."
+
+He ceased and gazed solicitously at Captain Davenport, who, bending over
+the chart with a pair of dividers in hand, had just emitted a low groan.
+
+"Is there any lagoon with an entrance anywhere nearer than Hao Island?"
+he asked.
+
+"No, Captain; that is the nearest."
+
+"Well, it's three hundred and forty miles." Captain Davenport was
+speaking very slowly, with decision. "I won't risk the responsibility of
+all these lives. I'll wreck her on the Acteons. And she's a good ship,
+too," he added regretfully, after altering the course, this time making
+more allowance than ever for the westerly current.
+
+An hour later the sky was overcast. The southeast trade still held, but
+the ocean was a checker board of squalls.
+
+"We'll be there by one o'clock," Captain Davenport announced
+confidently. "By two o'clock at the outside. McCoy, you put her ashore
+on the one where the people are."
+
+The sun did not appear again, nor, at one o'clock, was any land to be
+seen. Captain Davenport looked astern at the Pyrenees' canting wake.
+
+"Good Lord!" he cried. "An easterly current? Look at that!"
+
+Mr. Konig was incredulous. McCoy was noncommittal, though he said that
+in the Paumotus there was no reason why it should not be an easterly
+current. A few minutes later a squall robbed the Pyrenees temporarily of
+all her wind, and she was left rolling heavily in the trough.
+
+"Where's that deep lead? Over with it, you there!" Captain Davenport
+held the lead line and watched it sag off to the northeast. "There, look
+at that! Take hold of it for yourself."
+
+McCoy and the mate tried it, and felt the line thrumming and vibrating
+savagely to the grip of the tidal stream.
+
+"A four-knot current," said Mr. Konig.
+
+"An easterly current instead of a westerly," said Captain "Davenport,
+glaring accusingly at McCoy, as if to cast the blame for it upon him.
+
+"That is one of the reasons, Captain, for insurance being eighteen per
+cent in these waters," McCoy answered cheerfully. "You can never tell.
+The currents are always changing. There was a man who wrote books, I
+forget his name, in the yacht Casco. He missed Takaroa by thirty miles
+and fetched Tikei, all because of the shifting currents. You are up to
+windward now, and you'd better keep off a few points."
+
+"But how much has this current set me?" the captain demanded irately.
+"How am I to know how much to keep off?"
+
+"I don't know, Captain," McCoy said with great gentleness.
+
+The wind returned, and the PYRENEES, her deck smoking and shimmering in
+the bright gray light, ran off dead to leeward. Then she worked back,
+port tack and starboard tack, crisscrossing her track, combing the sea
+for the Acteon Islands, which the masthead lookouts failed to sight.
+
+Captain Davenport was beside himself. His rage took the form of sullen
+silence, and he spent the afternoon in pacing the poop or leaning
+against the weather shrouds. At nightfall, without even consulting
+McCoy, he squared away and headed into the northwest. Mr. Konig,
+surreptitiously consulting chart and binnacle, and McCoy, openly and
+innocently consulting the binnacle, knew that they were running for Hao
+Island. By midnight the squalls ceased, and the stars came out. Captain
+Davenport was cheered by the promise of a clear day.
+
+"I'll get an observation in the morning," he told McCoy, "though what
+my latitude is, is a puzzler. But I'll use the Sumner method, and settle
+that. Do you know the Sumner line?"
+
+And thereupon he explained it in detail to McCoy.
+
+The day proved clear, the trade blew steadily out of the east, and the
+Pyrenees just as steadily logged her nine knots. Both the captain and
+mate worked out the position on a Sumner line, and agreed, and at noon
+agreed again, and verified the morning sights by the noon sights.
+
+"Another twenty-four hours and we'll be there," Captain Davenport
+assured McCoy. "It's a miracle the way the old girl's decks hold out.
+But they can't last. They can't last. Look at them smoke, more and
+more every day. Yet it was a tight deck to begin with, fresh-calked in
+Frisco. I was surprised when the fire first broke out and we battened
+down. Look at that!"
+
+He broke off to gaze with dropped jaw at a spiral of smoke that coiled
+and twisted in the lee of the mizzenmast twenty feet above the deck.
+
+"Now, how did that get there?" he demanded indignantly.
+
+Beneath it there was no smoke. Crawling up from the deck, sheltered from
+the wind by the mast, by some freak it took form and visibility at that
+height. It writhed away from the mast, and for a moment overhung the
+captain like some threatening portent. The next moment the wind whisked
+it away, and the captain's jaw returned to place.
+
+"As I was saying, when we first battened down, I was surprised. It was
+a tight deck, yet it leaked smoke like a sieve. And we've calked and
+calked ever since. There must be tremendous pressure underneath to drive
+so much smoke through."
+
+That afternoon the sky became overcast again, and squally, drizzly
+weather set in. The wind shifted back and forth between southeast and
+northeast, and at midnight the Pyrenees was caught aback by a sharp
+squall from the southwest, from which point the wind continued to blow
+intermittently.
+
+"We won't make Hao until ten or eleven," Captain Davenport complained
+at seven in the morning, when the fleeting promise of the sun had been
+erased by hazy cloud masses in the eastern sky. And the next moment he
+was plaintively demanding, "And what are the currents doing?"
+
+Lookouts at the mastheads could report no land, and the day passed in
+drizzling calms and violent squalls. By nightfall a heavy sea began
+to make from the west. The barometer had fallen to 29.50. There was no
+wind, and still the ominous sea continued to increase. Soon the
+Pyrenees was rolling madly in the huge waves that marched in an unending
+procession from out of the darkness of the west. Sail was shortened as
+fast as both watches could work, and, when the tired crew had finished,
+its grumbling and complaining voices, peculiarly animal-like and
+menacing, could be heard in the darkness. Once the starboard watch was
+called aft to lash down and make secure, and the men openly advertised
+their sullenness and unwillingness. Every slow movement was a protest
+and a threat. The atmosphere was moist and sticky like mucilage, and in
+the absence of wind all hands seemed to pant and gasp for air. The sweat
+stood out on faces and bare arms, and Captain Davenport for one, his
+face more gaunt and care-worn than ever, and his eyes troubled and
+staring, was oppressed by a feeling of impending calamity.
+
+"It's off to the westward," McCoy said encouragingly. "At worst, we'll
+be only on the edge of it."
+
+But Captain Davenport refused to be comforted, and by the light of a
+lantern read up the chapter in his Epitome that related to the strategy
+of shipmasters in cyclonic storms. From somewhere amidships the silence
+was broken by a low whimpering from the cabin boy.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" Captain Davenport yelled suddenly and with such force as
+to startle every man on board and to frighten the offender into a wild
+wail of terror.
+
+"Mr. Konig," the captain said in a voice that trembled with rage and
+nerves, "will you kindly step for'ard and stop that brat's mouth with a
+deck mop?"
+
+But it was McCoy who went forward, and in a few minutes had the boy
+comforted and asleep.
+
+Shortly before daybreak the first breath of air began to move from out
+the southeast, increasing swiftly to a stiff and stiffer breeze. All
+hands were on deck waiting for what might be behind it. "We're all
+right now, Captain," said McCoy, standing close to his shoulder. "The
+hurricane is to the west'ard, and we are south of it. This breeze is the
+in-suck. It won't blow any harder. You can begin to put sail on her."
+
+"But what's the good? Where shall I sail? This is the second day without
+observations, and we should have sighted Hao Island yesterday morning.
+Which way does it bear, north, south, east, or what? Tell me that, and
+I'll make sail in a jiffy."
+
+"I am no navigator, Captain," McCoy said in his mild way.
+
+"I used to think I was one," was the retort, "before I got into these
+Paumotus."
+
+At midday the cry of "Breakers ahead!" was heard from the lookout. The
+Pyrenees was kept off, and sail after sail was loosed and sheeted home.
+The Pyrenees was sliding through the water and fighting a current that
+threatened to set her down upon the breakers. Officers and men were
+working like mad, cook and cabin boy, Captain Davenport himself, and
+McCoy all lending a hand. It was a close shave. It was a low shoal, a
+bleak and perilous place over which the seas broke unceasingly, where no
+man could live, and on which not even sea birds could rest. The PYRENEES
+was swept within a hundred yards of it before the wind carried her
+clear, and at this moment the panting crew, its work done, burst out
+in a torrent of curses upon the head of McCoy--of McCoy who had come on
+board, and proposed the run to Mangareva, and lured them all away from
+the safety of Pitcairn Island to certain destruction in this baffling
+and terrible stretch of sea. But McCoy's tranquil soul was undisturbed.
+He smiled at them with simple and gracious benevolence, and, somehow,
+the exalted goodness of him seemed to penetrate to their dark and somber
+souls, shaming them, and from very shame stilling the curses vibrating
+in their throats.
+
+"Bad waters! Bad waters!" Captain Davenport was murmuring as his ship
+forged clear; but he broke off abruptly to gaze at the shoal which
+should have been dead astern, but which was already on the PYRENEES'
+weather-quarter and working up rapidly to windward.
+
+He sat down and buried his face in his hands. And the first mate saw,
+and McCoy saw, and the crew saw, what he had seen. South of the shoal
+an easterly current had set them down upon it; north of the shoal an
+equally swift westerly current had clutched the ship and was sweeping
+her away.
+
+"I've heard of these Paumotus before," the captain groaned, lifting
+his blanched face from his hands. "Captain Moyendale told me about them
+after losing his ship on them. And I laughed at him behind his back. God
+forgive me, I laughed at him. What shoal is that?" he broke off, to ask
+McCoy.
+
+"I don't know, Captain."
+
+"Why don't you know?"
+
+"Because I never saw it before, and because I have never heard of it. I
+do know that it is not charted. These waters have never been thoroughly
+surveyed."
+
+"Then you don't know where we are?"
+
+"No more than you do," McCoy said gently.
+
+At four in the afternoon cocoanut trees were sighted, apparently growing
+out of the water. A little later the low land of an atoll was raised
+above the sea.
+
+"I know where we are now, Captain." McCoy lowered the glasses from his
+eyes. "That's Resolution Island. We are forty miles beyond Hao Island,
+and the wind is in our teeth."
+
+"Get ready to beach her then. Where's the entrance?"
+
+"There's only a canoe passage. But now that we know where we are, we can
+run for Barclay de Tolley. It is only one hundred and twenty miles
+from here, due nor'-nor'west. With this breeze we can be there by nine
+o'clock tomorrow morning."
+
+Captain Davenport consulted the chart and debated with himself.
+
+"If we wreck her here," McCoy added, "we'd have to make the run to
+Barclay de Tolley in the boats just the same."
+
+The captain gave his orders, and once more the Pyrenees swung off for
+another run across the inhospitable sea.
+
+And the middle of the next afternoon saw despair and mutiny on her
+smoking deck. The current had accelerated, the wind had slackened, and
+the Pyrenees had sagged off to the west. The lookout sighted Barclay de
+Tolley to the eastward, barely visible from the masthead, and vainly and
+for hours the PYRENEES tried to beat up to it. Ever, like a mirage, the
+cocoanut trees hovered on the horizon, visible only from the masthead.
+From the deck they were hidden by the bulge of the world.
+
+Again Captain Davenport consulted McCoy and the chart. Makemo lay
+seventy-five miles to the southwest. Its lagoon was thirty miles long,
+and its entrance was excellent. When Captain Davenport gave his orders,
+the crew refused duty. They announced that they had had enough of hell
+fire under their feet. There was the land. What if the ship could not
+make it? They could make it in the boats. Let her burn, then. Their
+lives amounted to something to them. They had served faithfully the
+ship, now they were going to serve themselves.
+
+They sprang to the boats, brushing the second and third mates out of the
+way, and proceeded to swing the boats out and to prepare to lower away.
+Captain Davenport and the first mate, revolvers in hand, were advancing
+to the break of the poop, when McCoy, who had climbed on top of the
+cabin, began to speak.
+
+He spoke to the sailors, and at the first sound of his dovelike,
+cooing voice they paused to hear. He extended to them his own ineffable
+serenity and peace. His soft voice and simple thoughts flowed out
+to them in a magic stream, soothing them against their wills. Long
+forgotten things came back to them, and some remembered lullaby songs of
+childhood and the content and rest of the mother's arm at the end of the
+day. There was no more trouble, no more danger, no more irk, in all
+the world. Everything was as it should be, and it was only a matter of
+course that they should turn their backs upon the land and put to sea
+once more with hell fire hot beneath their feet.
+
+McCoy spoke simply; but it was not what he spoke. It was his personality
+that spoke more eloquently than any word he could utter. It was an
+alchemy of soul occultly subtile and profoundly deep--a mysterious
+emanation of the spirit, seductive, sweetly humble, and terribly
+imperious. It was illumination in the dark crypts of their souls, a
+compulsion of purity and gentleness vastly greater than that which
+resided in the shining, death-spitting revolvers of the officers.
+
+The men wavered reluctantly where they stood, and those who had loosed
+the turns made them fast again. Then one, and then another, and then all
+of them, began to sidle awkwardly away.
+
+McCoy's face was beaming with childlike pleasure as he descended from
+the top of the cabin. There was no trouble. For that matter there had
+been no trouble averted. There never had been any trouble, for there was
+no place for such in the blissful world in which he lived.
+
+"You hypnotized em," Mr. Konig grinned at him, speaking in a low voice.
+
+"Those boys are good," was the answer. "Their hearts are good. They have
+had a hard time, and they have worked hard, and they will work hard to
+the end."
+
+Mr. Konig had not time to reply. His voice was ringing out orders, the
+sailors were springing to obey, and the PYRENEES was paying slowly off
+from the wind until her bow should point in the direction of Makemo.
+
+The wind was very light, and after sundown almost ceased. It was
+insufferably warm, and fore and aft men sought vainly to sleep. The deck
+was too hot to lie upon, and poisonous vapors, oozing through the seams,
+crept like evil spirits over the ship, stealing into the nostrils and
+windpipes of the unwary and causing fits of sneezing and coughing.
+The stars blinked lazily in the dim vault overhead; and the full moon,
+rising in the east, touched with its light the myriads of wisps and
+threads and spidery films of smoke that intertwined and writhed and
+twisted along the deck, over the rails, and up the masts and shrouds.
+
+"Tell me," Captain Davenport said, rubbing his smarting eyes, "what
+happened with that BOUNTY crowd after they reached Pitcairn? The account
+I read said they burnt the Bounty, and that they were not discovered
+until many years later. But what happened in the meantime? I've always
+been curious to know. They were men with their necks in the rope. There
+were some native men, too. And then there were women. That made it look
+like trouble right from the jump."
+
+"There was trouble," McCoy answered. "They were bad men. They quarreled
+about the women right away. One of the mutineers, Williams, lost his
+wife. All the women were Tahitian women. His wife fell from the cliffs
+when hunting sea birds. Then he took the wife of one of the native men
+away from him. All the native men were made very angry by this, and they
+killed off nearly all the mutineers. Then the mutineers that escaped
+killed off all the native men. The women helped. And the natives killed
+each other. Everybody killed everybody. They were terrible men.
+
+"Timiti was killed by two other natives while they were combing his hair
+in friendship. The white men had sent them to do it. Then the white
+men killed them. The wife of Tullaloo killed him in a cave because she
+wanted a white man for husband. They were very wicked. God had hidden
+His face from them. At the end of two years all the native men were
+murdered, and all the white men except four. They were Young, John
+Adams, McCoy, who was my great-grandfather, and Quintal. He was a very
+bad man, too. Once, just because his wife did not catch enough fish for
+him, he bit off her ear."
+
+"They were a bad lot!" Mr. Konig exclaimed.
+
+"Yes, they were very bad," McCoy agreed and went on serenely cooing of
+the blood and lust of his iniquitous ancestry. "My great-grandfather
+escaped murder in order to die by his own hand. He made a still and
+manufactured alcohol from the roots of the ti-plant. Quintal was his
+chum, and they got drunk together all the time. At last McCoy got
+delirium tremens, tied a rock to his neck, and jumped into the sea.
+
+"Quintal's wife, the one whose ear he bit off, also got killed by
+falling from the cliffs. Then Quintal went to Young and demanded his
+wife, and went to Adams and demanded his wife. Adams and Young were
+afraid of Quintal. They knew he would kill them. So they killed him,
+the two of them together, with a hatchet. Then Young died. And that was
+about all the trouble they had."
+
+"I should say so," Captain Davenport snorted. "There was nobody left to
+kill."
+
+"You see, God had hidden His face," McCoy said.
+
+By morning no more than a faint air was blowing from the eastward, and,
+unable to make appreciable southing by it, Captain Davenport hauled up
+full-and-by on the port track. He was afraid of that terrible westerly
+current which had cheated him out of so many ports of refuge. All day
+the calm continued, and all night, while the sailors, on a short ration
+of dried banana, were grumbling. Also, they were growing weak and
+complaining of stomach pains caused by the straight banana diet. All day
+the current swept the PYRENEES to the westward, while there was no wind
+to bear her south. In the middle of the first dogwatch, cocoanut trees
+were sighted due south, their tufted heads rising above the water and
+marking the low-lying atoll beneath.
+
+"That is Taenga Island," McCoy said. "We need a breeze tonight, or else
+we'll miss Makemo."
+
+"What's become of the southeast trade?" the captain demanded. "Why don't
+it blow? What's the matter?"
+
+"It is the evaporation from the big lagoons--there are so many of them,"
+McCoy explained. "The evaporation upsets the whole system of trades. It
+even causes the wind to back up and blow gales from the southwest. This
+is the Dangerous Archipelago, Captain."
+
+Captain Davenport faced the old man, opened his mouth, and was about to
+curse, but paused and refrained. McCoy's presence was a rebuke to
+the blasphemies that stirred in his brain and trembled in his larynx.
+McCoy's influence had been growing during the many days they had been
+together. Captain Davenport was an autocrat of the sea, fearing no man,
+never bridling his tongue, and now he found himself unable to curse in
+the presence of this old man with the feminine brown eyes and the
+voice of a dove. When he realized this, Captain Davenport experienced a
+distinct shock. This old man was merely the seed of McCoy, of McCoy
+of the BOUNTY, the mutineer fleeing from the hemp that waited him in
+England, the McCoy who was a power for evil in the early days of blood
+and lust and violent death on Pitcairn Island.
+
+Captain Davenport was not religious, yet in that moment he felt a mad
+impulse to cast himself at the other's feet--and to say he knew not
+what. It was an emotion that so deeply stirred him, rather than
+a coherent thought, and he was aware in some vague way of his own
+unworthiness and smallness in the presence of this other man who
+possessed the simplicity of a child and the gentleness of a woman.
+
+Of course he could not so humble himself before the eyes of his officers
+and men. And yet the anger that had prompted the blasphemy still raged
+in him. He suddenly smote the cabin with his clenched hand and cried:
+
+"Look here, old man, I won't be beaten. These Paumotus have cheated and
+tricked me and made a fool of me. I refuse to be beaten. I am going
+to drive this ship, and drive and drive and drive clear through the
+Paumotus to China but what I find a bed for her. If every man deserts,
+I'll stay by her. I'll show the Paumotus. They can't fool me. She's a
+good girl, and I'll stick by her as long as there's a plank to stand on.
+You hear me?"
+
+"And I'll stay with you, Captain," McCoy said.
+
+During the night, light, baffling airs blew out of the south, and
+the frantic captain, with his cargo of fire, watched and measured his
+westward drift and went off by himself at times to curse softly so that
+McCoy should not hear.
+
+Daylight showed more palms growing out of the water to the south.
+
+"That's the leeward point of Makemo," McCoy said. "Katiu is only a few
+miles to the west. We may make that."
+
+But the current, sucking between the two islands, swept them to the
+northwest, and at one in the afternoon they saw the palms of Katiu rise
+above the sea and sink back into the sea again.
+
+A few minutes later, just as the captain had discovered that a new
+current from the northeast had gripped the Pyrenees, the masthead
+lookouts raised cocoanut palms in the northwest.
+
+"It is Raraka," said McCoy. "We won't make it without wind. The current
+is drawing us down to the southwest. But we must watch out. A few miles
+farther on a current flows north and turns in a circle to the northwest.
+This will sweep us away from Fakarava, and Fakarava is the place for the
+Pyrenees to find her bed."
+
+"They can sweep all they da--all they well please," Captain Davenport
+remarked with heat. "We'll find a bed for her somewhere just the same."
+
+But the situation on the Pyrenees was reaching a culmination. The deck
+was so hot that it seemed an increase of a few degrees would cause it to
+burst into flames. In many places even the heavy-soled shoes of the
+men were no protection, and they were compelled to step lively to avoid
+scorching their feet. The smoke had increased and grown more acrid.
+Every man on board was suffering from inflamed eyes, and they coughed
+and strangled like a crew of tuberculosis patients. In the afternoon the
+boats were swung out and equipped. The last several packages of dried
+bananas were stored in them, as well as the instruments of the officers.
+Captain Davenport even put the chronometer into the longboat, fearing
+the blowing up of the deck at any moment.
+
+All night this apprehension weighed heavily on all, and in the first
+morning light, with hollow eyes and ghastly faces, they stared at one
+another as if in surprise that the Pyrenees still held together and that
+they still were alive.
+
+Walking rapidly at times, and even occasionally breaking into an
+undignified hop-skip-and-run, Captain Davenport inspected his ship's
+deck.
+
+"It is a matter of hours now, if not of minutes," he announced on his
+return to the poop.
+
+The cry of land came down from the masthead. From the deck the land was
+invisible, and McCoy went aloft, while the captain took advantage of the
+opportunity to curse some of the bitterness out of his heart. But
+the cursing was suddenly stopped by a dark line on the water which he
+sighted to the northeast. It was not a squall, but a regular breeze--the
+disrupted trade wind, eight points out of its direction but resuming
+business once more.
+
+"Hold her up, Captain," McCoy said as soon as he reached the poop.
+"That's the easterly point of Fakarava, and we'll go in through the
+passage full-tilt, the wind abeam, and every sail drawing."
+
+At the end of an hour, the cocoanut trees and the low-lying land
+were visible from the deck. The feeling that the end of the PYRENEES'
+resistance was imminent weighed heavily on everybody. Captain Davenport
+had the three boats lowered and dropped short astern, a man in each
+to keep them apart. The Pyrenees closely skirted the shore, the
+surf-whitened atoll a bare two cable lengths away.
+
+And a minute later the land parted, exposing a narrow passage and the
+lagoon beyond, a great mirror, thirty miles in length and a third as
+broad.
+
+"Now, Captain."
+
+For the last time the yards of the Pyrenees swung around as she obeyed
+the wheel and headed into the passage. The turns had scarcely been made,
+and nothing had been coiled down, when the men and mates swept back to
+the poop in panic terror. Nothing had happened, yet they averred that
+something was going to happen. They could not tell why. They merely
+knew that it was about to happen. McCoy started forward to take up
+his position on the bow in order to con the vessel in; but the captain
+gripped his arm and whirled him around.
+
+"Do it from here," he said. "That deck's not safe. What's the matter?"
+he demanded the next instant. "We're standing still."
+
+McCoy smiled.
+
+"You are bucking a seven-knot current, Captain," he said. "That is the
+way the full ebb runs out of this passage."
+
+At the end of another hour the Pyrenees had scarcely gained her length,
+but the wind freshened and she began to forge ahead.
+
+"Better get into the boats, some of you," Captain Davenport commanded.
+
+His voice was still ringing, and the men were just beginning to move in
+obedience, when the amidship deck of the Pyrenees, in a mass of flame
+and smoke, was flung upward into the sails and rigging, part of it
+remaining there and the rest falling into the sea. The wind being abeam,
+was what had saved the men crowded aft. They made a blind rush to gain
+the boats, but McCoy's voice, carrying its convincing message of vast
+calm and endless time, stopped them.
+
+"Take it easy," he was saying. "Everything is all right. Pass that boy
+down somebody, please."
+
+The man at the wheel had forsaken it in a funk, and Captain Davenport
+had leaped and caught the spokes in time to prevent the ship from yawing
+in the current and going ashore.
+
+"Better take charge of the boats," he said to Mr. Konig. "Tow one of
+them short, right under the quarter.... When I go over, it'll be on the
+jump."
+
+Mr. Konig hesitated, then went over the rail and lowered himself into
+the boat.
+
+"Keep her off half a point, Captain."
+
+Captain Davenport gave a start. He had thought he had the ship to
+himself.
+
+"Ay, ay; half a point it is," he answered.
+
+Amidships the Pyrenees was an open flaming furnace, out of which
+poured an immense volume of smoke which rose high above the masts and
+completely hid the forward part of the ship. McCoy, in the shelter of
+the mizzen-shrouds, continued his difficult task of conning the ship
+through the intricate channel. The fire was working aft along the deck
+from the seat of explosion, while the soaring tower of canvas on the
+mainmast went up and vanished in a sheet of flame. Forward, though they
+could not see them, they knew that the head-sails were still drawing.
+
+"If only she don't burn all her canvas off before she makes inside," the
+captain groaned.
+
+"She'll make it," McCoy assured him with supreme confidence. "There is
+plenty of time. She is bound to make it. And once inside, we'll put her
+before it; that will keep the smoke away from us and hold back the fire
+from working aft."
+
+A tongue of flame sprang up the mizzen, reached hungrily for the lowest
+tier of canvas, missed it, and vanished. From aloft a burning shred of
+rope stuff fell square on the back of Captain Davenport's neck. He acted
+with the celerity of one stung by a bee as he reached up and brushed the
+offending fire from his skin.
+
+"How is she heading, Captain?"
+
+"Nor'west by west."
+
+"Keep her west-nor-west."
+
+Captain Davenport put the wheel up and steadied her.
+
+"West by north, Captain."
+
+"West by north she is."
+
+"And now west."
+
+Slowly, point by point, as she entered the lagoon, the PYRENEES
+described the circle that put her before the wind; and point by point,
+with all the calm certitude of a thousand years of time to spare, McCoy
+chanted the changing course.
+
+"Another point, Captain."
+
+"A point it is."
+
+Captain Davenport whirled several spokes over, suddenly reversing and
+coming back one to check her.
+
+"Steady."
+
+"Steady she is--right on it."
+
+Despite the fact that the wind was now astern, the heat was so intense
+that Captain Davenport was compelled to steal sidelong glances into the
+binnacle, letting go the wheel now with one hand, now with the other, to
+rub or shield his blistering cheeks.
+
+McCoy's beard was crinkling and shriveling and the smell of it, strong
+in the other's nostrils, compelled him to look toward McCoy with sudden
+solicitude. Captain Davenport was letting go the spokes alternately with
+his hands in order to rub their blistering backs against his trousers.
+Every sail on the mizzenmast vanished in a rush of flame, compelling the
+two men to crouch and shield their faces.
+
+"Now," said McCoy, stealing a glance ahead at the low shore, "four
+points up, Captain, and let her drive."
+
+Shreds and patches of burning rope and canvas were falling about them
+and upon them. The tarry smoke from a smouldering piece of rope at the
+captain's feet set him off into a violent coughing fit, during which he
+still clung to the spokes.
+
+The Pyrenees struck, her bow lifted and she ground ahead gently to a
+stop. A shower of burning fragments, dislodged by the shock, fell about
+them. The ship moved ahead again and struck a second time. She crushed
+the fragile coral under her keel, drove on, and struck a third time.
+
+"Hard over," said McCoy. "Hard over?" he questioned gently, a minute
+later.
+
+"She won't answer," was the reply.
+
+"All right. She is swinging around." McCoy peered over the side. "Soft,
+white sand. Couldn't ask better. A beautiful bed."
+
+As the Pyrenees swung around her stern away from the wind, a fearful
+blast of smoke and flame poured aft. Captain Davenport deserted the
+wheel in blistering agony. He reached the painter of the boat that lay
+under the quarter, then looked for McCoy, who was standing aside to let
+him go down.
+
+"You first," the captain cried, gripping him by the shoulder and almost
+throwing him over the rail. But the flame and smoke were too terrible,
+and he followed hard after McCoy, both men wriggling on the rope and
+sliding down into the boat together. A sailor in the bow, without
+waiting for orders, slashed the painter through with his sheath knife.
+The oars, poised in readiness, bit into the water, and the boat shot
+away.
+
+"A beautiful bed, Captain," McCoy murmured, looking back.
+
+"Ay, a beautiful bed, and all thanks to you," was the answer.
+
+The three boats pulled away for the white beach of pounded coral, beyond
+which, on the edge of a cocoanut grove, could be seen a half dozen grass
+houses and a score or more of excited natives, gazing wide-eyed at the
+conflagration that had come to land.
+
+The boats grounded and they stepped out on the white beach.
+
+"And now," said McCoy, "I must see about getting back to Pitcairn."
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of South Sea Tales, by Jack London
+
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