King stood on a gentle rise of rich turf, gazing off through the
binoculars across cultivated fields. Presently up toward him through a
shining little valley rode a Japanese on one of the Australian ponies
Utterbourne had imported. King lowered his glass and watched, a smile
half of amusement on his face. It was Tsuda—an amazing creature of
prowess and contradictions. The Captain had plucked him out of a brawl
over a geisha girl up in Yezo—“Fancy—h’m?”—to begin with. And after
that—oh, but the Captain possessed faculties unfathomable for picking his
men. According to Tsuda, the Captain had saved his life—indeed, Tsuda was
very dogmatic about it.
“Ho, there!” King called out, as the Japanese, having dismounted in the
shade of a thicket of dwarf palms, trotted up the incline to the spot
where the new overseer stood. “Don’t begin any salaaming or kowtowing,
Tsuda,” he begged him with a laugh. “I’ve been salaamed to death all
morning. What have you done to those poor devils of Ainu?”
Tsuda stood beside him, very little and humble. He wheezed some. “Taught
the fear of the gods,” he replied. “Yes, _sir_!”
King hooted. “You’ll finish me, Tsuda, with your priest-ideas and your
fairy tales. I never heard such a bunch of outlandish nonsense in my
life! But of course we’ve got to hand the method credit, I suppose, since
it keeps us supplied with free labour.”
Tsuda bowed solemnly. “It is—gn—the way of the gods,” he murmured. And
then, making sure they were quite alone, he edged a step nearer, assumed
a less formal bearing, and added, in a voice which had startlingly
acquired a note of the utmost sophistication: “If that fail—gn—there
is always the saké!” And he chuckled like an incorrigible urchin up to
tricks.
Tsuda’s English was quite remarkable. It was rather a mystery where
he’d managed to pick it all up, packed, as it was, with slyly winking
colloquialisms, even occasional wisps of slang. Tsuda was a genuine man
of the world, in his own odd way. Very up-to-date, very devious, subtly
sophisticated—a very waggish person, too; though he could upset it all
in a minute with revelations of a most utter and child-like simplicity.
As for the curious “gn” which now and then punctuated his talk, that
mystified rather, till one came to detect about it the humble earmarks of
asthma.
“Look here, Mr. Priest,” said King, who had raised his binoculars again,
“there’s a queer something or other going on—come here and look through
the glasses. It’s one of your Ainu women, and she seems to be burying
something—I can’t make out what.”
Tsuda handled the binoculars proudly but awkwardly. “Oh, that’s a woman
who don’t want her husband any more,” he shrugged casually. “Want him to
die—yes, _sir_! So she make his head-dress like a corpse. Dig a hole for
it—gn. You see how she bob her head up and down? She pray that he rot
with the head-dress.”
King exclaimed in amazement: “What piece of crazy superstition do you
call this?” The island lay still and glowing round about them. The sky
was without a cloud, the sea without a sail.
“Don’t ask _me_!” shrugged Tsuda waggishly. “Don’t blame me for any
of these damn kind of thing! You see such go on all the time. No
telling—gn—what a lot of damn heathen ideas I’ve had to put out of their
heads! By golly tried to tell me once the earth rest on the back of a
fish, and when he wiggle that make earthquakes! But they’re toned down a
whole lot since then. It was a time in Paromushir you see an Ainu woman
give suck to a bear cub. But no more. No sir!” He shook his head a
little sadly. “These fellows haven’t got the pep they used to have—not
by a God-damn! All mixed up with Russian and Japanese. No good—no good.”
He looked really mournful over the undoubted decay of this lost tribe on
which he had lavished his affection so many years.
Tsuda had succeeded, when the Imperial summons came from Tōkyō ordering
all the Kurile Ainu down to a convenient pen at Shikotan, in concealing a
whole tribe up in the remote mountains of Paromushir, becoming himself a
sort of perpetual king over them. It was wild and daring—yes, a work of
genius, clearly, though Tsuda’s affection was never without its ulterior
motive. There had been a lucrative business in salmon, which by this
novel method he acquired gratis. And then—Utterbourne.
Yes, Utterbourne had come along with Hagen’s Island fresh in mind, and
the problem of cheap labour as yet unsolved, he had plucked Tsuda out
of the brawl in Yezo; had looked at him with eyes half closed, in his
quizzical poising way; had hinted discreetly about gold, much gold. A few
months later Tsuda led his Ainu tribe down out of the mountains and into
the hold of the _Star of Troy_, whose prow was turned toward the dreamy
south.
Hagen’s Island—a fugitive, lost tribe: what an inspiration to bring them
together! In truth, it had been one of the Captain’s very finest flashes.