“They came along paddling under the counter, waving their paddles to
us, and then, having gone round us, like as if they were making a tour
of inspection, they tied up and came on board, led by a big Kanaka
Mary—a beauty to look at, with lovely eyes—Lord, I remember those
eyes—who gave herself a bang on the chest with her fist and said
‘Tawela.’ That was how she presented her visiting card.
“We had a Kanaka with us who could talk most of the island tongues,
and we put him on to Tawela to extract information from her and it
came up in chunks.
“Tawela, by her own accounts, was anxious to trade anything from
cocoanuts to her back teeth. She wanted guns and rum, which we hadn’t
got, but she said she’d try to make out with tobacco and beads. She
said she had plenty of pink coral, and would we come on shore and look
at it, also would we come to dinner and she would give us the time of
our lives.
“Then she went off ashore, us promising to follow on in an hour or so.
“I was talking to Sellers after she’d left, when Sellers says to me:
‘Look over there, what’s that?’ I looks where he was pointing and I
sees something black sticking from the water away out in the lagoon.
The tide was ebbing, as I’ve told you, and the thing, whatever it was,
had been uncovered by the ebb; it didn’t look like the top of a rock,
it didn’t look like anything you could put a name to unless maybe the
top of an old stake sticking from the water. ‘Go over and have a
look,’ says Sellers, ‘and find what it is.’ I took the boat which had
been lowered ready to take us ashore, and me and Heffernan pulls out.
“‘It’s the mast of a ship,’ says Heff, who was steering, and no sooner
had he given it its name than I saw plain enough it couldn’t be
anything else.
“It was, and as we brought the boat along careful, the ship bloomed up
at us, the fish playing round the standing rigging and a big green
turtle sinking from sight of us into her shadow.
“She lay as trigg as if she was on the stocks, with scarcely a list
and her bow pointing to the break in the reef. Her anchor was in the
coral, and you could see the slack of the chain running to her bow.
She’d been a brig. The top masts had been hacked off for some reason
or another, and pieces of canvas, yards long some of them, showed
waving from her foreyard, and it was plain to be seen she’d been sunk
with the foresail on her and the canvas had got slashed by fish and
the wear of the tides bellying it this way and that till there was
nothing left but just them rags.
“I’d never seen a ship murdered before and said so.
“‘Yes,’ says Heffernan, ‘it’s plain enough, she’s been sunk at her
moorings; look at the way she’s lying, and look at that anchor chain.
Well, I never did think to see a sunk ship at anchor, but I’ve seen it
now.’
“‘It’s the chaps ashore that have done this,’ said I.
“‘Sure,’ said Heffernan. ‘Done in the ship and done in the crew. We’ve
got to go careful.’
“We put back to the _Mary Waters_ and reported to Sellers.
“‘Skunks!’ said Sellers. ‘Tawela’s Queen Bee of a proper hive. Well,
we must be careful, that’s all. Keep our guns handy and give word to
the Kanakas to be on the look-out.’
“The _Mary Waters_ had a Kanaka crew as I’ve said, and having given
the bo’sun the tip to be on the look-out for squalls, we got rowed
ashore, sending the boat back to the schooner.
“Tawela’s house was the first of the line of houses that ran east and
west along the beach; it was the biggest, too, and there was only her
and her son at the dinner; the rest of the tribe had gone off in the
canoes right across the lagoon to the opposite shore to gather
shell-fish on the outer beach. Our Kanaka boy that acted as
interpreter got this news from Tawela, and it lightened our minds a
lot, for if any killing had been meant the tribe wouldn’t have gone
off like that.
“It wasn’t a bad dinner, take it all round. Baked pig and oysters, and
sweet potatoes and so on, with a palm salad that Tawela never invented
herself, that I’ll lay a dollar, and said so.
“‘Oh, she’s probably made the cook of that brig show her how to do
things white man style before she murdered him,’ says Sellers.
“‘Damn her,’ says Heffernan, and there those two sat talking away, she
listening but not understanding; it was better than a pantomime.
“Then the son gets up and brings in some palm toddy, best I ever
struck, and Sellers opens a box of cigars he’d brought with him, and
we all lit up, Tawela included.
“I remember, as plain as if it was only ten minutes ago, sitting there
looking at the sunlight coming in through the door behind Sellers and
striking through the blue smoke of the cigars, and then the next thing
I remember is waking up with my hands tied and my feet roped together,
lying on my back in a shack with the morning light coming through the
cracks in the wall, Heffernan and Sellers beside me.
“It was plain enough what had happened; we’d been doped. I heard
Sellers give a groan and called out to him, then Heffernan woke, and
there we lay admiring ourselves for the fools we’d been in falling
into that mug trap. We’d each landed with a revolver strapped to his
belt, but the revolvers were gone.