“I knew a chap in Hawaii,” Grief said, “superintendent of a sugar
plantation, who used a hammer and a ten-penny nail.”
They were sitting on the broad bungalow veranda, and watching Worth, the
manager of New Gibbon, doctoring the sick squad. They were New Georgia
boys, a dozen of them, and the one with the aching tooth had been put
back to the last. Worth had just failed in his first attempt. He wiped
the sweat from his forehead with one hand and waved the forceps with the
other.
“And broke more than one jaw,” he asserted grimly.
Grief shook his head. Wallenstein smiled and elevated his brows.
“He said not, at any rate,” Grief qualified. “He assured me,
furthermore, that he always succeeded on the first trial.”
“I saw it done when I was second mate on a lime-juicer,” Captain Ward
spoke up. “The old man used a caulking mallet and a steel marlin-spike.
He took the tooth out with the first stroke, too, clean as a whistle.”
“Me for the forceps,” Worth muttered grimly, inserting his own pair in
the mouth of the black. As he pulled, the man groaned and rose in the
air. “Lend a hand, somebody, and hold him down,” the manager appealed.
Grief and Wallenstein, on either side, gripped the black and held him.
And he, in turn, struggled against them and clenched his teeth on the
forceps. The group swayed back and forth. Such exertion, in the stagnant
heat, brought the sweat out on all of them. The black sweated, too, but
his was the sweat of excruciating pain. The chair on which he sat was
overturned. Captain Ward paused in the act of pouring himself a drink,
and called encouragement. Worth pleaded with his assistants to hang
on, and hung on himself, twisting the tooth till it crackled and then
attempting a straightaway pull.
Nor did any of them notice the little black man who limped up the steps
and stood looking on. Koho was a conservative. His fathers before him
had worn no clothes, and neither did he, not even a gee-string. The many
empty perforations in nose and lips and ears told of decorative passions
long since dead. The holes on both ear-lobes had been torn out, but
their size was attested by the strips of withered flesh that hung down
and swept his shoulders. He cared now only for utility, and in one of
the half dozen minor holes in his right ear he carried a short clay
pipe. Around his waist was buckled a cheap trade-belt, and between the
imitation leather and the naked skin was thrust the naked blade of a
long knife. Suspended from the belt was his bamboo betel-nut and lime
box. In his hand was a short-barrelled, large-bore Snider rifle. He
was indescribably filthy, and here and there marred by scars, the worst
being the one left by the Lee-Enfield bullet, which had withered the
calf to half the size of its mate. His shrunken mouth showed that few
teeth were left to serve him. Face and body were shrunken and withered,
but his black, bead-like eyes, small and close together, were very
bright, withal they were restless and querulous, and more like a
monkey's than a man's.
He looked on, grinning like a shrewd little ape. His joy in the torment
of the patient was natural, for the world he lived in was a world of
pain. He had endured his share of it, and inflicted far more than his
share on others. When the tooth parted from its locked hold in the jaw
and the forceps raked across the other teeth and out of the mouth with a
nerve-rasping sound, old Koho's eyes fairly sparkled, and he looked
with glee at the poor black, collapsed on the veranda floor and groaning
terribly as he held his head in both his hands.
“I think he's going to faint,” Grief said, bending over the victim.
“Captain Ward, give him a drink, please. You'd better take one yourself,
Worth; you're shaking like a leaf.”
“And I think I'll take one,” said Wallenstein, wiping the sweat from his
face. His eye caught the shadow of Koho on the floor and followed it up
to the old chief himself. “Hello! who's this?”
“Hello, Koho!” Grief said genially, though he knew better than to offer
to shake hands.
It was one of Koho's _tambos_, given him by the devil-devil doctors when
he was born, that never was his flesh to come in contact with the flesh
of a white man. Worth and Captain Ward, of the _Wonder_, greeted Koho,
but Worth frowned at sight of the Snider, for it was one of his _tambos_
that no visiting bushman should carry a weapon on the plantation. Rifles
had a nasty way of going off at the hip under such circumstances. The
manager clapped his hands, and a black house-boy, recruited from San
Cristobal, came running. At a sign from Worth, he took the rifle from
the visitor's hand and carried it inside the bungalow.
“Koho,” Grief said, introducing the German Resident, “this big fella
marster belong Bougainville--my word, big fella marster too much.”
Koho, remembering the visits of the various German cruisers, smiled with
a light of unpleasant reminiscence in his eyes.
“Don't shake hands with him, Wallenstein,” Grief warned. “_Tambo_, you
know.” Then to Koho, “My word, you get 'm too much fat stop along you.
Bime by you marry along new fella Mary, eh?”
“Too old fella me,” Koho answered, with a weary shake of the head. “Me
no like 'm Mary. Me no like 'm _kai-kai_ (food). Close up me die along
altogether.” He stole a significant glance at Worth, whose head was
tilted back to a long glass. “Me like 'm rum.”
Grief shook his head.
“_Tambo_ along black fella.”
“He black fella no tambo,” Koho retorted, nodding toward the groaning
labourer.
“He fella sick,” Grief explained.
“Me fella sick.”
“You fella big liar,” Grief laughed. “Rum tambo, all the time tambo.
Now, Koho, we have big fella talk along this big fella mar-ster.”
And he and Wallenstein and the old chief sat down on the veranda to
confer about affairs of state. Koho was complimented on the peace he
had kept, and he, with many protestations of his aged decrepitude, swore
peace again and everlasting. Then was discussed the matter of starting a
German plantation twenty miles down the coast. The land, of course, was
to be bought from Koho, and the price was arranged in terms of tobacco,
knives, beads, pipes, hatchets, porpoise teeth and shell-money--in terms
of everything except rum. While the talk went on, Koho, glancing through
the window, could see Worth mixing medicines and placing bottles back in
the medicine cupboard. Also, he saw the manager complete his labours by
taking a drink of Scotch. Koho noted the bottle carefully. And, though
he hung about for an hour after the conference was over, there was never
a moment when some one or another was not in the room. When Grief and
Worth sat down to a business talk, Koho gave it up.
“Me go along schooner,” he announced, then turned and limped out.
“How are the mighty fallen,” Grief laughed. “To think that used to be
Koho, the fiercest red-handed murderer in the Solomons, who defied all
his life two of the greatest world powers. And now he's going aboard to
try and cadge Denby for a drink.”