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WHERE THE PAVEMENT ENDS
by
JOHN RUSSELL
Author of
In Dark Places, Etc.
[Illustration:
_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._
_Where the Pavement Ends._
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]
"The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it,
But in another country, as he said,
Bore a bright golden flow'r...."
COMUS
[Illustration]
Publishers
Grosset & Dunlap
New York
Made in the United States of America
Copyright, 1919, by John Russell
_Published, October, 1919
Second Printing, September, 1921
Third Printing, March, 1922
Fourth Printing, November, 1922
Fifth Printing, April, 1923
Sixth Printing, August, 1923_
English Edition Published May 1921
London, Thornton Butterworth Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
_To_
CARL BRANDT
CONTENTS
THE FOURTH MAN 9
THE LOST GOD 33
THE PASSION VINE 59
THE PRICE OF THE HEAD 91
THE SLANTED BEAM 106
THE RED MARK 121
EAST OF EASTWARD 162
JETSAM 183
THE ADVERSARY 206
MEANING--CHASE YOURSELF 221
THE WICKS OF MACASSAR 239
DOUBLOON GOLD 253
THE PRACTICING OF CHRISTOPHER 284
AMOK 308
THE FOURTH MAN
The raft might have been taken for a swath of cut sedge or a drifting
tangle of roots as it slid out of the shadowy river mouth at dawn and
dipped into the first ground swell. But while the sky brightened and the
breeze came fresh offshore it picked a way among shoals and swampy
islets with purpose and direction, and when at last the sun leaped up
and cleared his bright eye of the morning mist it had passed the wide
entrance to the bay and stood to open sea.
It was a curious craft for such a venture, of a type that survives here
and there in the obscure corners of the world. The coracle maker would
have scorned it. The first navigating pithecanthrope built nearly as
well with his log and bush. A mat of pandanus leaves served for its sail
and a paddle of niaouli wood for its helm. But it had a single point of
real seaworthiness. Its twin floats, paired as a catamaran, were woven
of reed bundles and bamboo sticks upon triple rows of bladders. It was
light as a bladder itself, elastic, fit to ride any weather. One other
quality this raft possessed which recommended it beyond all comfort and
all safety to its present crew. It was very nearly invisible. They had
only to unstep its mast and lie flat in the cup of its soggy platform
and they could not be spied half a mile away.
Four men occupied the raft. Three of them were white. Their bodies had
been scored with brambles and blackened with dried blood, and on wrist
and ankle they bore the dark and wrinkled stain of the gyves. The hair
upon them was long and matted. They wore only the rags of blue canvas
uniforms. But they were whites, members of the superior race--members of
a highly superior race according to those philosophers who rate the
criminal aberration as a form of genius.
The fourth was the man who had built the raft and was now sailing it.
There was nothing superior about him. His skin was a layer of soot. His
prognathous jaw carried out the angle of a low forehead. No line of
beauty redeemed his lean limbs and knobby joints. Nature had set upon
him her plainest stamp of inferiority, and his only attempts to relieve
it were the twist of bark about his middle and the prong of pig ivory
through the cartilage of his nose. Altogether a very ordinary specimen
of one of the lowest branches of the human family--the Canaques of New
Caledonia.
* * * * *
The three whites sat together well forward, and so they had sat in
silence for hours. But at sunrise, as if some spell had been raised by
the clang of that great copper gong in the east, they stirred and
breathed deep of the salt air and looked at one another with hope in
their haggard faces, and then back toward the land which was now no more
than a gray-green smudge behind them.... "Friends," said the eldest,
whose temples were bound with a scrap of crimson scarf, "Friends--the
thing is done."
With a gesture like conjuring he produced from the breast of his
tattered blouse three cigarettes, fresh and round, and offered them.
"Nippers!" cried the one at his right. "True nippers--name of a little
good man! And here? Doctor, I always said you were a marvel. See if they
be not new from the box!"
Dr. Dubosc smiled. Those who had known him in very different
circumstances about the boulevards, the lobbies, the clubs, would have
known him again and in spite of all disfigurement by that smile. And
here, at the bottom of the earth, it had set him still apart in the
prisons, the cobalt mines, the chain gangs of a community not much given
to mirth. Many a crowded lecture hall at Montpellier had seen him touch
some intellectual firework with just such a twinkle behind his bristly
gray brows, with just such a thin curl of lip.
"By way of celebration," he explained. "Consider. There are seventy-five
evasions from Noumea every six months, of which not more than one
succeeds. I had the figures myself from Dr. Pierre at the infirmary. He
is not much of a physician, but a very honest fellow. Could anybody win
on that percentage without dissipating? I ask you."
"Therefore you prepared for this?"
"It is now three weeks since I bribed the night guard to get these same
nippers."
The other regarded him with admiration. Sentiment came readily upon this
beardless face, tender and languid, but overdrawn, with eyes too large
and soft and oval too long. It was one of those faces familiar enough to
the police which might serve as model for an angel were it not
associated with some revolting piece of deviltry. Fenayrou himself had
been condemned "to perpetuity" as an incorrigible.
"Is not our doctor a wonder?" he inquired as he handed a cigarette along
to the third white man. "He thinks of everything. You should be ashamed
to grumble. See--we are free, after all. Free!"
The third was a gross, pock-marked man with hairless lids known
sometimes as Niniche, Trois Huit, Le Tordeur, but chiefly among copains
as Perroquet--a name derived perhaps from his beaked nose, or from some
perception of his jailbird character. He was a garroter by profession,
accustomed to rely upon his fists only for the exchange of amenities.
Dubosc might indulge a fancy and Fenayrou seek to carry it as a pose,
but The Parrot remained a gentleman of strictly serious turn. There is
perhaps a tribute to the practical spirit of penal administration in the
fact that while Dubosc was the most dangerous of these three and
Fenayrou the most depraved, Perroquet was the one with the official
reputation, whose escape would be signaled first among the "Wanted." He
accepted the cigarette because he was glad to get it, but he said
nothing until Dubosc passed a tin box of matches and the first gulp of
picadura filled his lungs....
"Wait till you've got your two feet on a pave, my boy. That will be the
time to talk of freedom. What? Suppose there came a storm."
"It is not the season of storms," observed Dubosc.
But The Parrot's word had given them a check. Such spirits as these, to
whom the land had been a horror, would be slow to feel the terror of the
sea. Back there they had left the festering limbo of a convict colony,
oblivion. Out here they had reached the rosy threshold of the big round
world again. They were men raised from the dead, charged with all the
furious appetites of lost years, with the savor of life strong and sweet
on their lips. And yet they paused and looked about in quickened
perception, with the clutch at the throat that takes the landsman on big
waters. The spaces were so wide and empty. The voices in their ears were
so strange and murmurous. There was a threat in each wave that came from
the depths, a sinister vibration. None of them knew the sea. None knew
its ways, what tricks it might play, what traps it might spread--more
deadly than those of the jungle.
The raft was running now before a brisk chop with alternate spring and
wallow, while the froth bubbled in over the prow and ran down among
them as they sat. "Where is that cursed ship that was to meet us here?"
demanded Fenayrou.
"It will meet us right enough." Dubosc spoke carelessly, though behind
the blown wisp of his cigarette he had been searching the outer horizon
with keen glance. "This is the day, as agreed. We will be picked up off
the mouth of the river."
"You say," growled Perroquet. "But where is any river now? Or any mouth?
Sacred name! this wind will blow us to China if we keep on."
"We dare not lie in any closer. There is a government launch at Torrien.
Also the traders go armed hereabouts, ready for chaps like us. And don't
imagine that the native trackers have given us up. They are likely to be
following still in their proas."
"So far!"
Fenayrou laughed, for The Parrot's dread of their savage enemies had a
morbid tinge.
"Take care, Perroquet. They will eat you yet."
"Is it true?" demanded the other, appealing to Dubosc. "I have heard it
is even permitted these devils to keep all runaways they can
capture--Name of God!--to fatten on."
"An idle tale," smiled Dubosc. "They prefer the reward. But one hears of
convicts being badly mauled. There was a forester who made a break from
Baie du Sud and came back lacking an arm. Certainly these people have
not lost the habit of cannibalism."
"Piecemeal," chuckled Fenayrou. "They will only sample you, Perroquet.
Let them make a stew of your brains. You would miss nothing."
But The Parrot swore.
"Name of a name--what brutes!" he said, and by a gesture recalled the
presence of that fourth man who was of their party and yet so completely
separated from them that they had almost forgotten him.
* * * * *
The Canaque was steering the raft. He sat crouched at the stern, his
body glistening like varnished ebony with spray. He held the steering
paddle, immobile as an image, his eyes fixed upon the course ahead.
There was no trace whatever of expression on his face, no hint of what
he thought or felt or whether he thought or felt anything. He seemed not
even aware of their regard, and each one of them experienced somehow
that twinge of uneasiness with which the white always confronts his
brother of color--this enigma brown or yellow or black he is fated never
wholly to understand or to fathom....
"It occurs to me," said Fenayrou, in a pause, "that our friend here who
looks like a shiny boot is able to steer us God knows where. Perhaps to
claim the reward."
"Reassure yourself," answered Dubosc. "He steers by my order. Besides,
it is a simple creature--an infant, truly, incapable of any but the most
primitive reasoning."
"Is he incapable of treachery?"
"Of any that would deceive us. Also, he is bound by his duty. I made my
bargain with his chief, up the river, and this one is sent to deliver us
on board our ship. It is the only interest he has in us."
"And he will do it?"
"He will do it. Such is the nature of the native."
"I am glad you feel so," returned Fenayrou, adjusting himself indolently
among the drier reeds and nursing the last of his cigarette. "For my
part I wouldn't trust a figurehead like that for two sous. Mazette! What
a monkey face!"
"Brute!" repeated Perroquet, and this man, sprung from some vile
river-front slum of Argenteuil, whose home had been the dock pilings,
the grog shop, and the jail, even this man viewed the black Canaque
from an immeasurable distance with the look of hatred and contempt....
Under the heat of the day the two younger convicts lapsed presently into
dozing. But Dubosc did not doze. His tormented soul peered out behind
its mask as he stood to sweep the sky line again under shaded hand. His
theory had been so precise, the fact was so different. He had counted
absolutely on meeting the ship--some small schooner, one of those
flitting, half-piratical traders of the copra islands that can be hired
like cabs in a dark street for any questionable enterprise. Now there
was no ship, and here was no crossroads where one might sit and wait.
Such a craft as the catamaran could not be made to lie to.
The doctor foresaw ugly complications for which he had not prepared and
whereof he must bear the burden. The escape had been his own conception,
directed by him from the start. He had picked his companions
deliberately from the whole forced labor squad, Perroquet for his great
strength, Fenayrou as a ready echo. He had made it plain since their
first dash from the mine, during their skirmish with the military
guards, their subsequent wanderings in the brush with bloodhounds and
trackers on the trail--through every crisis--that he alone should be the
leader.
For the others, they had understood well enough which of their number
was the chief beneficiary. Those mysterious friends on the outside that
were reaching half around the world to further their release had never
heard of such individuals as Fenayrou and The Parrot. Dubosc was the man
who had pulled the wires: that brilliant physician whose conviction for
murder had followed so sensationally, so scandalously, upon his sweep of
academic and social honors. There would be clacking tongues in many a
Parisian salon, and white faces in some, when news should come of his
escape. Ah, yes, for example, they knew the highflyer of the band, and
they submitted--so long as he led them to victory. They submitted, while
reserving a depth of jealousy, the inevitable remnant of caste
persisting still in this democracy of stripes and shame.
By the middle of the afternoon the doctor had taken certain necessary
measures.
"Ho," said Fenayrou sleepily. "Behold our colors at the masthead. What
is that for, comrade?"
The sail had been lowered and in its place streamed the scrap of crimson
scarf that had served Dubosc as a turban.
"To help them sight us when the ship comes."
"What wisdom!" cried Fenayrou. "Always he thinks of everything, our
doctor: everything--"
He stopped with the phrase on his lips and his hand outstretched toward
the center of the platform. Here, in a damp depression among the reeds,
had lain the wicker-covered bottle of green glass in which they carried
their water. It was gone.
"Where is that flask?" he demanded. "The sun has grilled me like a
bone."
"You will have to grill some more," said Dubosc grimly. "This crew is
put on rations."
Fenayrou stared at him wide-eyed, and from the shadow of a folded mat
The Parrot thrust his purpled face. "What do you sing me there? Where is
that water?"
"I have it," said Dubosc.
They saw, in fact, that he held the flask between his knees, along with
their single packet of food in its wrapping of cocoanut husk.
"I want a drink," challenged Perroquet.
"Reflect a little. We must guard our supplies like reasonable men. One
does not know how long we may be floating here."...
Fell a silence among them, heavy and strained, in which they heard only
the squeaking of frail basketwork as their raft labored in the wash.
Slow as was their progress, they were being pushed steadily outward and
onward, and the last cliffs of New Caledonia were no longer even a
smudge in the west, but only a hazy line. And still they had seen no
moving thing upon the great round breast of the sea that gleamed in its
corselet of brass plates under a brazen sun. "So that is the way you
talk now?" began The Parrot, half choking. "You do not know how long?
But you were sure enough when we started."
"I am still sure," returned Dubosc. "The ship will come. Only she cannot
stay for us in one spot. She will be cruising to and fro until she
intercepts us. We must wait."
"Ah, good! We must wait. And in the meantime, what? Fry here in the
sacred heat with our tongues hanging out while you deal us drop by
drop--hein?"
"Perhaps."
"But no!" The garroter clenched his hands. "Blood of God, there is no
man big enough to feed me with a spoon!"
Fenayrou's chuckle came pat, as it had more than once, and Dubosc
shrugged.
"You laugh!" cried Perroquet, turning in fury. "But how about this
lascar of a captain that lets us put to sea unprovided? What? He thinks
of everything, does he? He thinks of everything!... Sacred farceur--let
me hear you laugh again!"
Somehow Fenayrou was not so minded.
"And now he bids us be reasonable," concluded The Parrot. "Tell that to
the devils in hell. You and your cigarettes, too. Bah--comedian!"
"It is true," muttered Fenayrou, frowning. "A bad piece of work for a
captain of runaways."
But the doctor faced mutiny with his thin smile.
"All this alters nothing. Unless we would die very speedily, we must
guard our water."
"By whose fault?"
"Mine," acknowledged the doctor. "I admit it. What then? We can't turn
back. Here we are. Here we must stay. We can only do our best with what
we have."
"I want a drink," repeated The Parrot, whose throat was afire since he
had been denied.
"You can claim your share, of course. But take warning of one thing.
After it is gone do not think to sponge on us--on Fenayrou and me."
"He would be capable of it, the pig!" exclaimed Fenayrou, to whom this
thrust had been directed. "I know him. See here, my old, the doctor is
right. Fair for one, fair for all."
"I want a drink."
Dubosc removed the wooden plug from the flask.
"Very well," he said quietly.
With the delicacy that lent something of legerdemain to all his
gestures, he took out a small canvas wallet, the crude equivalent of the
professional black bag, from which he drew a thimble. Meticulously he
poured a brimming measure, and Fenayrou gave a shout at the grumbler's
fallen jaw as he accepted that tiny cup between his big fingers. Dubosc
served Fenayrou and himself with the same amount before he recorked the
bottle.
"In this manner we should have enough to last us three days--maybe
more--with equal shares among the three of us."...
Such was his summing of the demonstration, and it passed without
comment, as a matter of course in the premises, that he should count as
he did--ignoring that other who sat alone at the stern of the raft, the
black Canaque, the fourth man.
Perroquet had been outmaneuvered, but he listened sullenly while for
the hundredth time Dubosc recited his easy and definite plan for their
rescue, as arranged with his secret correspondents.
"That sounds very well," observed The Parrot, at last. "But what if
these jokers only mock themselves of you? What if they have counted it
good riddance to let you rot here? And us? Sacred name, that would be a
famous jest! To let us wait for a ship and they have no ship!"
"Perhaps the doctor knows better than we how sure a source he counts
upon," suggested Fenayrou slyly.
"That is so," said Dubosc, with great good humor. "My faith, it would
not be well for them to fail me. Figure to yourselves that there is a
safety vault in Paris full of papers to be opened at my death. Certain
friends of mine could hardly afford to have some little confessions
published that would be found there.... Such a tale as this, for
instance--"
And to amuse them he told an indecent anecdote of high life, true or
fictitious, it mattered nothing, so he could make Fenayrou's eyes
glitter and The Parrot growl in wonder. Therein lay his means of
ascendancy over such men, the knack of eloquence and vision. Harried,
worn, oppressed by fears that he could sense so much more sharply than
they, he must expend himself now in vulgar marvels to distract these
ruder minds. He succeeded so far that when the wind fell at sunset they
were almost cheerful, ready to believe that the morning would bring
relief. They dined on dry biscuit and another thimbleful of water apiece
and took watch by amiable agreement. And through that long, clear night
of stars, whenever the one of the three who lay awake between his
comrades chanced to look aft, he could see the vague blot of another
figure--the naked Canaque, who slumbered there apart....
It was an evil dawning. Fenayrou, on the morning trick, was aroused by
a foot as hard as a hoof, and started up at Perroquet's wrathful face,
with the doctor's graver glance behind.
"Idler! Good-for-nothing! Will you wake at least before I smash your
ribs? Name of God, here is a way to stand watch!"
"Keep off!" cried Penayrou wildly. "Keep off. Don't touch me!"
"Eh, and why not, fool? Do you know that the ship could have missed us?
A ship could have passed us a dozen times while you slept!"
"Bourrique!"
"Vache!"
They spat the insults of the prison while Perroquet knotted his great
fist over the other, who crouched away catlike, his mobile mouth twisted
to a snarl. Dubosc stood aside in watchful calculation until against the
angry red sunrise in which they floated there flashed the naked red
gleam of steel. Then he stepped between.
"Enough. Fenayrou, put up that knife."
"The dog kicked me!"
"You were at fault," said Dubosc sternly. "Perroquet!"
"Are we all to die that he may sleep?" stormed The Parrot.
"The harm is done. Listen now, both of you. Things are bad enough
already. We may need all our energies. Look about."
* * * * *
They looked and saw the far, round horizon and the empty desert of the
sea and their own long shadows that slipped slowly before them over its
smooth, slow heaving, and nothing else. The land had sunk away from them
in the night--some one of the chance currents that sweep among the
islands had drawn them none could say where or how far. The trap had
been sprung. "Good God, how lonely it is!" breathed Fenayrou in a hush.
No more was said. They dropped their quarrel. Silently they shared their
rations as before, made shift to eat something with their few drops of
water, and sat down to pit themselves one against another in the vital
struggle that each could feel was coming--a sort of tacit test of
endurance.
A calm had fallen, as it does between trades in this flawed belt, an
absolute calm. The air hung weighted. The sea showed no faintest
crinkle, only the maddening, unresting heave and fall in polished
undulations on which the lances of the sun broke and drove in under
their eyelids as white-hot splinters; a savage sun that kindled upon
them with the power of a burning glass, that sucked the moisture from
poor human bits of jelly and sent them crawling to the shelter of their
mats and brought them out again, gasping, to shrivel anew. The water,
the world of water, seemed sleek and thick as oil. They came to loathe
it and the rotting smell of it, and when the doctor made them dip
themselves overside they found little comfort. It was warm, sluggish,
slimed. But a curious thing resulted....
While they clung along the edge of the raft they all faced inboard, and
there sat the black Canaque. He did not join them. He did not glance at
them. He sat hunkered on his heels in the way of the native, with arms
hugging his knees. He stayed in his place at the stern, motionless under
that shattering sun, gazing out into vacancy. Whenever they raised their
eyes they saw him. He was the only thing to see.
"Here is one who appears to enjoy himself quite well," remarked Dubosc.
"I was thinking so myself," said Fenayrou.
"The animal!" rumbled Perroquet.
They observed him, and for the first time with direct interest, with
thought of him as a fellow being--with the beginning of envy.
"He does not seem to suffer."
"What is going on in his brain? What does he dream of there? One would
say he despises us."
"The beast!"
"Perhaps he is waiting for us to die," suggested Fenayrou with a harsh
chuckle. "Perhaps he is waiting for the reward. He would not starve on
the way home, at least. And he could deliver us--piecemeal."
They studied him.
"How does he do it, doctor? Has he no feeling?"
"I have been wondering," said Dubosc. "It may be that his fibers are
tougher--his nerves."
"Yet we have had water and he none."
"But look at his skin, fresh and moist."
"And his belly, fat as a football!"
The Parrot hauled himself aboard.
"Don't tell me this black beast knows thirst!" he cried with a strange
excitement. "Is there any way he could steal our supplies?"
"Certainly not."
"Then, name of a dog, what if he has supplies of his own hidden about?"
The same monstrous notion struck them all, and the others swarmed to
help. They knocked the black aside. They searched the platform where he
had sat, burrowing among the rushes, seeking some secret cache, another
bottle or a gourd. They found nothing.
"We were mistaken," said Dubosc.
But Perroquet had a different expression for disappointment. He turned
on the Canaque and caught him by the kinky mop of the hair and proceeded
to give him what is known as gruel in the cobalt mines. This was a
little specialty of The Parrot's. He paused only when he himself was
breathless and exhausted and threw the limp, unresisting body from him.
"There, lump of dirt! That will teach you. Maybe you're not so chipper
now, my boy--hein? Not quite so satisfied with your luck. Pig! That will
make you feel."...
It was a ludicrous, a wanton, a witless thing. But the others said
nothing. The learned Dubosc made no protest. Fenayrou had none of his
usual jests at the garroter's stupidity. They looked on as at the
satisfaction of a common grudge. The white trampled the black with or
without cause, and that was natural. And the black crept away into his
place with his hurts and his wrongs and made no sign and struck no blow.
And that was natural too.
The sun declined into a blazing furnace whereof the gates stood wide,
and they prayed to hasten it and cursed because it hung enchanted. But
when it was gone their blistered bodies still held the heat like things
incandescent. The night closed down over them like a purple bowl, glazed
and impermeable. They would have divided the watches again, though none
of them thought of sleep, but Fenayrou made a discovery.
"Idiots!" he rasped. "Why should we look and look? A whole navy of ships
cannot help us now. If we are becalmed, why so are they!"
The Parrot was singularly put out.
"Is this true?" he asked Dubosc.
"Yes, we must hope for a breeze first."
"Then, name of God, why didn't you tell us so? Why did you keep on
playing out the farce?"
He pondered it for a time. "See here," he said. "You are wise, eh? You
are very wise. You know things we do not and you keep them to yourself."
He leaned forward to peer into the doctor's face. "Very good. But if you
think you're going to use that cursed smartness to get the best of us in
any way--see here, my zig, I pull your gullet out like the string of an
orange.... Like that. What?"
Fenayrou gave a nervous giggle and Dubosc shrugged, but it was perhaps
about this time that he began to regret his intervention in the knife
play.
For there was no breeze and there was no ship.
By the third morning each had sunk within himself, away from the rest.
The doctor was lost in a profound depression, Perroquet in dark
suspicion, and Fenayrou in bodily suffering, which he supported ill.
Only two effective ties still bound their confederacy. One was the flask
which Dubosc had slung at his side by a strip of the wickerwork. Every
move he made with it, every drop he poured, was followed by burning
eyes. And he knew and he had no advantage of them in knowing that the
will to live was working its relentless formula aboard that raft. Under
his careful saving there still remained nearly half of their original
store.
The other bond, as it had come to be by strange mutation, was the
presence of the black Canaque.
* * * * *
There was no forgetting the fourth man now, no overlooking of him. He
loomed upon their consciousness, more formidable, more mysterious, more
exasperating with every hour. Their own powers were ebbing. The naked
savage had yet to give the slightest sign of complaint or weakness.
During the night he had stretched himself out on the platform as before,
and after a time he had slept. Through the hours of darkness and silence
while each of the whites wrestled with despair, this black man had slept
as placidly as a child, with easy, regular breathing. Since then he had
resumed his place aft. And so he remained, unchanged, a fixed fact and a
growing wonder.
The brutal rage of Perroquet, in which he had vented his distorted hate
of the native, had been followed by superstitious doubts.
"Doctor," he said at last, in awed huskiness, "is this a man or a
fiend?"
"It is a man."
"A miracle," put in Fenayrou.
But the doctor lifted a finger in a way his pupils would have
remembered.
"It is a man," he repeated, "and a very poor and wretched example of a
man. You will find no lower type anywhere. Observe his cranial angle,
the high ears, the heavy bones of his skull. He is scarcely above the
ape. There are educated apes more intelligent."
"Ah? Then what?"
"He has a secret," said the doctor.
That was a word to transfix them.
"A secret! But we see him--every move he makes, every instant. What
chance for a secret?"
The doctor rather forgot his audience, betrayed by chagrin and
bitterness.
"How pitiful!" he mused. "Here are we three--children of the century,
products of civilization--I fancy none would deny that, at least. And
here is this man who belongs before the Stone Age. In a set trial of
fitness, of wits, of resource, is he to win? Pitiful!"
"What kind of secret?" demanded Perroquet fuming.
"I cannot say," admitted Dubosc, with a baffled gesture. "Possibly some
method of breathing, some peculiar posture that operates to cheat the
sensations of the body. Such things are known among primitive
peoples--known and carefully guarded--like the properties of certain
drugs, the uses of hypnotism and complex natural laws. Then, again, it
may be psychologic--a mental attitude persistently held. Who knows?....
"To ask him? Useless. He will not tell. Why should he? We scorn him. We
give him no share with us. We abuse him. He simply falls back on his
own expedients. He simply remains inscrutable--as he has always been and
will always be. He never tells those innermost secrets. They are the
means by which he has survived from the depth of time, by which he may
yet survive when all our wisdom is dust."
"I know several very excellent ways of learning secrets," said Fenayrou
as he passed his dry tongue over his lips. "Shall I begin?"
Dubosc came back with a start and looked at him.
"It would be useless. He could stand any torture you could invent. No,
that is not the way."
"Listen to mine," said Perroquet, with sudden violence. "Me, I am
wearied of the gab. You say he is a man? Very well. If he is a man, he
must have blood in his veins. That would be, anyway, good to drink."
"No," returned Dubosc. "It would be hot. Also it would be salt. For
food--perhaps. But we do not need food."
"Kill the animal, then, and throw him over!"
"We gain nothing."
"Well, sacred name, what do you want?"
"To beat him!" cried the doctor, curiously agitated. "To beat him at the
game--that's what I want! For our own sakes, for our racial pride, we
must, we must. To outlast him, to prove ourselves his masters. By better
brain, by better organization and control. Watch him, watch him,
friends--that we may ensnare him, that we may detect and defeat him in
the end!"
But the doctor was miles beyond them.
"Watch?" growled The Parrot. "I believe you, old windbag. It is all one
watch. I sleep no more and leave any man alone with that bottle."
To this the issue finally sharpened. Such craving among such men could
not be stayed much longer by driblets. They watched. They watched the
Canaque. They watched each other. And they watched the falling level in
their flask--until the tension gave.
Another dawn upon the same dead calm, rising like a conflagration
through the puddled air, cloudless, hopeless! Another day of blinding,
slow-drawn agony to meet. And Dubosc announced that their allowance must
be cut to half a thimbleful.
There remained perhaps a quarter of a liter--a miserable reprieve of
bare life among the three of them, but one good swallow for a yearning
throat.
At sight of the bottle, at the tinkle of its limpid content, so cool and
silvery green inside the glass, Fenayrou's nerve snapped....
"More!" he begged, with pleading hands. "I die. More!"
When the doctor refused him he groveled among the reeds, then rose
suddenly to his knees and tossed his arms abroad with a hoarse cry:
"A ship! A ship!"
The others span about. They saw the thin unbroken ring of this greater
and more terrible prison to which they had exchanged: and that was all
they saw, though they stared and stared. They turned back to Fenayrou
and found him in the act of tilting the bottle. A cunning slash of his
knife had loosed it from its sling at the doctor's side.... Even now he
was sucking at the mouth, spilling the precious liquid--
With one sweep Perroquet caught up their paddle and flattened him,
crushed him.
Springing across the prostrate man, Dubosc snatched the flask upright
and put the width of the raft between himself and the big garroter who
stood wide-legged, his bloodshot eyes alight, rumbling in his chest.
"There is no ship," said The Parrot. "There will be no ship. We are
done. Because of you and your rotten promises that brought us
here--doctor, liar, ass!"
Dubosc stood firm.
"Come a step nearer and I break bottle and all over your head."
They stood regarding each other, and Perroquet's brows gathered in a
slow effort of thought.
"Consider," urged Dubosc with his quaint touch of pedantry. "Why should
you and I fight? We are rational men. We can see this trouble through
and win yet. Such weather cannot last forever. Besides, here are only
two of us to divide the water now."
"That is true," nodded The Parrot. "That is true, isn't it? Fenayrou
kindly leaves us his share. An inheritance--what? A famous idea. I'll
take mine now."
Dubosc probed him keenly.
"My share, at once, if you please," insisted Perroquet, with heavy
docility. "Afterward, we shall see. Afterward."
The doctor smiled his grim and wan little smile.
"So be it."
Without relinquishing the flask he brought out his canvas wallet once
more--that wallet which replaced the professional black bag--and rolled
out the thimble by some swift sleight of his flexible fingers while he
held Perroquet's glance with his own.
"I will measure it for you."
He poured the thimbleful and handed it over quickly, and when Perroquet
had tossed it off he filled again and again.
"Four--five," he counted. "That is enough."
But The Parrot's big grip closed quietly around his wrist at the last
offering and pinioned him and held him helpless.
"No, it is not enough. Now I will take the rest. Ha, wise man! Have I
fooled you at last?"
There was no chance to struggle, and Dubosc did not try, only stayed
smiling up at him, waiting.
Perroquet took the bottle.
"The best man wins," he remarked. "Eh, my zig? A bright notion--of
yours. The--best--"
His lips moved, but no sound issued. A look of the most intense surprise
spread upon his round face. He stood swaying a moment, and collapsed
like a huge hinged toy when the string is cut.
Dubosc stooped and caught the bottle again, looking down at his big
adversary, who sprawled in brief convulsion and lay still, a bluish scum
oozing between his teeth....
"Yes, the best man wins," repeated the doctor, and laughed as he in turn
raised the flask for a draft.
"The best wins!" echoed a voice in his ear.
Fenayrou, writhing up and striking like a wounded snake, drove the knife
home between his shoulders.
The bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the platform, and there,
while each strove vainly to reach it, it poured out its treasure in a
tiny stream that trickled away and was lost.
* * * * *
It may have been minutes or hours later--for time has no count in
emptiness--when next a sound proceeded from that frail slip of a raft,
hung like a mote between sea and sky. It was a phrase of song, a
wandering strain in half tones and fluted accidentals, not unmelodious.
The black Canaque was singing. He sang without emotion or effort, quite
casually and softly to himself. So he might sing by his forest hut to
ease some hour of idleness. Clasping his knees and gazing out into
space, untroubled, unmoved, enigmatic to the end, he sang--he sang.
And, after all, the ship came.
She came in a manner befitting the sauciest little tops'l schooner
between Nukahiva and the Pelews--as her owner often averred and none
but the envious denied--in a manner worthy, too, of that able Captain
Jean Guibert, the merriest little scamp that ever cleaned a pearl bank
or snapped a cargo of labor from a scowling coast. Before the first
whiff out of the west came the _Petite Suzanne_, curtsying and skipping
along with a flash of white frill by her forefoot, and brought up
startled and stood shaking her skirts and keeping herself quite daintily
to windward.
"And 'ere they are sure enough, by dam!" said the polyglot Captain Jean
in the language of commerce and profanity. "Zose passengers for us, hey?
They been here all the time, not ten mile off--I bet you, Marteau. Ain't
it 'ell? What you zink, my gar?"
His second, a tall and excessively bony individual of gloomy outlook,
handed back the glasses.
"More bad luck. I never approved of this job. And now--see?--we have had
our voyage for nothing. What misfortune!"
"Marteau, if that good Saint Pierre gives you some day a gold 'arp still
you would holler bad luck--bad job!" retorted Captain Jean. "Do I 'ire
you to stand zere and cry about ze luck? Get a boat over, and quicker
zan zat!"
M. Marteau aroused himself sufficiently to take command of the boat's
crew that presently dropped away to investigate....
"It is even as I thought," he called up from the quarter when he
returned with his report. "I told you how it would be, Captain Jean."
"Hey?" cried the captain, bouncing at the rail. "Have you got zose
passengers yet, _enfant de salaud_?"
"I have not," said Marteau in the tone of lugubrious triumph. There was
nothing in the world that could have pleased him quite so much as this
chance to prove Captain Jean the loser on a venture. "We are too late.
Bad luck, bad luck--that calm. What misfortune! They are all dead!"
"Will you mind your business?" shouted the skipper.
"But still, the gentlemen are dead--"
"What is zat to me? All ze better, they will cost nozing to feed."
"But how--"
"Hogsheads, my gar," said Captain Jean paternally. "Zose hogsheads in
the afterhold. Fill them nicely with brine, and zere we are!" And,
having drawn all possible satisfaction from the other's amazement, he
sprang the nub of his joke with a grin. "Ze gentlemen's passage is all
paid, Marteau. Before we left Sydney, Marteau. I contrac' to bring back
three escape' convicts, and so by 'ell I do--in pickle! And now if
you'll kindly get zose passengers aboard like I said an' bozzer less
about ze goddam luck, I be much oblige'. Also, zere is no green on my
eye, Marteau, and you can dam' well smoke it!"
Marteau recovered himself with difficulty in time to recall another
trifling detail. "There is a fourth man on board that raft, Captain
Jean. He is a Canaque--still alive. What shall we do with him?"
"A Canaque?" snapped Captain Jean. "A Canaque! I had no word in my
contrac' about any Canaque.... Leave him zere.... He is only a dam'
nigger. He'll do well enough where he is."
And Captain Jean was right, perfectly right, for while the _Petite
Suzanne_ was taking aboard her grisly cargo the wind freshened from the
west, and just about the time she was shaping away for Australia the
"dam' nigger" spread his own sail of pandanus leaves and twirled his own
helm of niaouli wood and headed the catamaran eastward, back toward New
Caledonia.
Feeling somewhat dry after his exertion, he plucked at random from the
platform a hollow reed with a sharp end and, stretching himself at full
length in his accustomed place at the stern, he thrust the reed down
into one of the bladders underneath and drank his fill of sweet
water....
He had a dozen such storage bladders remaining, built into the floats at
intervals above the water line--quite enough to last him safely home
again.
[Illustration:
_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._
_Where the Pavement Ends._
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]
THE LOST GOD
Prophets have cried out in print, no man regarding, and saints have been
known to write their autobiographies, and even angels are credited now
and then with revealing most curious matters in language quite plain and
ungrammatical. But I have seen the diary of an authentic god who once
went to and fro on the earth and in the waters underneath.
His record is the Book of Jim Albro, and he made it at Barange Bay,
which is Papua, which is the end of the back of beyond and a bit farther
yet; the great, dark, and smiling land that no white man has ever yet
gripped as a conqueror, where anything can happen that you would care to
believe and many things that you never would. He neglected to copyright
it himself. The chances of his returning to claim it are apparently
remote. And Jeckol says that fiction is stranger than truth anyhow, and
pays better. So I shall feel quite safe in making free of that
remarkable work, just as Jim Albro set it down with a leaden bullet on
some strips of bark and left it for those who came after to find....
In his very blackest hour Jim Albro must have known that somebody would
come after him, some time. Somebody always did come after him, no matter
how far and to what desperate chance his trail might lead. He was that
kind. All his days he never lacked the friend to hunt him up and to pack
him home when he was helpless, to pay his bills or to bail him out at
need. One of those irresistible rascals born to a soft place near the
world's heart, whose worst follies serve only to endear them, whose
wildest errors are accepted as the manifestation of an engaging caprice,
while they go on serenely drawing blank checks against destiny!
It is odd that he should have had to settle up in the end unaided, cut
off from all help, completely isolated--and yet with the savor of
popular admiration still rising about him, amid the continued applause
of a multitude....
"A chap like Albro can't simply drop out of sight, like you or me
might," said Cap'n Bartlet, thoughtfully. "He's filled too much space
and pulled through too many scrapes. He's had his way too often with men
and devils--and women too."
We were strung along the rail on the after-deck of the little _Aurora
Bird_, as she began to grope her passage through the barrier reef, a
silent lot. Talk had been cheap enough on the long stretch up the Coral
Sea, when every possible theory of Albro's fate, and the fate of his
three white shipmates and their native crew, had been thrashed to
weariness. But now suspense held us all by the throat, for we were come
at last to Barange, the falling-off place.
And something else held us--I could call it a spell and not be so far
wrong. The lazy airs offshore bore down to us the scent that is like
nothing else in the world, of rotting jungle and teeming soil; of
poisonous, lush green, and rare, sleepy blossoms, heavy with death and
ardent with a fierce vitality. This is the breath of Papua, stirring
warm on her lips, that none who has known between loathing and desire
can ever forget. Many men have known it, traders, pearlers, recruiters,
gold hunters, and eagerly have sought to know more and have died
seeking. There she lies, the last enigma, guarding her secrets still
behind her savage coasts and the fringe of her untracked forests--the
black sphinx of the seas, lovely, vast, and cruel.
We had been watching the widening gap of the bay off our quarter, the
palm-tufted threads of beach, the sullen hills aquiver in the heat haze
and the nameless dim mountains beyond. For an hour or more the only
sounds had been Bartlet's gruff orders to the Kanaka at the wheel, the
gentle crush of foam overside, the musical cry of the leadsman and the
tap-tap of reef points and creak of tackle as our sails slatted and
filled again. Each one of us was intent for some sign of the disaster.
Each one of us had a question pressing on his tongue--pretty much the
same question, I judge--but nobody cared to voice it until the cap'n
spoke. He had had, we knew, rather a special interest in Albro....
"Throw him how you like, he'd land on his feet," he said.
"Aye," confirmed Peters, the lank trader from Samarai. "Or if so be he
couldn't stand, why the crowd would fairly fight for the privilege of
proppin' him up and buying him the last drink in the house."
"You think he's alive?" piped Harris then.
"I think he's alive," said Bartlet, without turning his shaggy gray
head. "He weren't made to finish hugger-mugger in no such hell hole. I'm
backing the luck of Jim Albro, that always had his way."
"Like as not," said Peters, and span the cylinder of his big Webley
revolver and chuckled a little; "like as not we'll find him sittin' on a
stump all so lofty with the niggers squatted round in rows, addressin'
of the congregation."
You will note--and a queer thing too--that this happened before we had
learned the first sure detail of the affair at Barange Bay.
* * * * *
It was now the 20th of April. On the 2nd of November preceding, the
pearling schooner _Timothy S._ had cleared from Cooktown on her lawful
occasions for Joannet Harbor in the Louisiades. She had never reached
Joannet. A month later she had been spoken by a Sydney steamer up among
the Bismarck Group, where she had no ostensible business to be. And
early in March some cannibal gossip of the West Coast, friendly or only
boastful, had passed word to some missionary of a British schooner cut
off at Barange. That was strictly all. It remained for certain friends
and backers at Cooktown, with or without lawful occasion, to link up the
vaguely rumored outrage with the actual and private destination of the
_Timothy S._, and to send our search party go-look-see.
But Jeckol snorted.... You could hardly blame him, at that. Among the
five of us he was the only man who had never crossed Jim Albro at one
point or another in the career of that eccentric luminary. And, besides,
it was Jeckol's business to snort. You must have read his clever bits in
the "Bulletin"--those little running paragraphs that snap and fume like
a pack of Chinese crackers? He had been loafing about Bananaland on
vacation just before we started, and of course he got wind and wished
himself along. Trust a pressman to know the necessary people and a
chance for copy.
"I've heard a deal of talk of this Albro since we weighed anchor," he
said. "What's all about him? He wasn't commanding the _Timothy S._?"
"No," drawled Peters. "No--he didn't command. Mullhall was skipper."
"Did he launch the scheme then? Was he the discoverer of this wonderful
virgin shell bed they were going to strip?"
"No," returned Peters. "No--you couldn't say he had any regular standin'
in the expedition.... He shipped as a sort of supercargo--didn't he,
Cap'n Bartlet?"
"Cabin boy, more likely," said Bartlet in his slow way. "Or bos'n's
mate--or even midshipmite."
Jeckol eyed us all around, but nobody smiled.
"You're getting at me," he said. "Never mind. Only I'm going to write
the yarn, you know. You'd much better help me pick the right hero.
What's your famous Albro like?"
"The takingest chap that ever stood in shoe leather," cried young Harris
with a rush. "Absolutely. I never saw him only twice, but I remember
just how he looked and what he said. The first time he was
drunk--but--but that was all right. He sang 'Mad Bess of Bedlam' to make
your hair curl. And one night in Brisbane when he took on the
Castlereagh Slasher for two rounds--"
"Six foot of mad Irishman," said Peters, "and about three inches of
dreamy Spaniard atop of that--to put a head on the mixture, you might
say. Blue-black wavy beard and an eye like a blue glass marble--"
"With the sunlight shining through!" Harris shot in.
"James O'Shaughnessy Albro." Peters lingered upon the name. "As to his
luck, Cap'n Bartlet may be right, but I wouldn't call it so. He was born
too late. He should ha' been a conquistador--d'y' call 'em?--and gone
swaggerin' up and down in the old time holdin' pepper rajahs to ransom
and carvin' out kingdoms. Whereas he was only Jim and anything you like
between a navvy and a millionaire.