too many boundaries and needed room. He blew into the Endeavor River one
season with a tradin' schooner of his own--curly maple saloon, satin
divans, silver-mounted gun racks--by Joe, you'd ha' thought he was goin'
to trade with cherryubims for golden harps in the isles of paradise. And
so he very nearly did, too, what with the dare-devil chances he took,
till he lost craft and all on a race back from Thursday Island."
"Wrecked?" asked Jeckol.
"Just gambled. Old man Tyler could lay his _Hawfinch_ half a point
nearer the wind than a chap has a right to expect from an archbishop.
Jimmie paid over at the dock head and went weavin' his way up Charlotte
Street a beggar, turned into a political barney they were havin' there,
and made them a roarin' speech on somethin'--temperance prob'ly. And, by
Joe, if they didn't elect him a divisional councilor the next day!"
"I've heard of that," proffered Harris with a grin. "Wasn't it the same
winter he did a quick dash to the tin mines for his health? It seems
there was a beauteous and wealthy widow. He couldn't have loved her half
so well had he not loved her pretty under-housemaid more. So he started
for Mount Romeo!... My word, he'd turn the worst scrape into a romance,
that fellow! They say he made a big winning at Romeo--just to console
himself."
"He made a dozen winnings. And I've helped him to a job as warehouse
clerk at Samarai when he wore no shirt under his coat, and gunny bags
for trousies. That's what the cap'n here means by his luck, I fancy,
because you couldn't keep him down. Capitalist, miner, politician,
stevedore--it was all one to Jimmie. Look how he brought up the
_Creswick_ that nobody else would touch when she went ashore on
Turn-again Island, cleared two thou' off her by the nerviest kind of
work and dropped it all on the next Melbourne Cup. Little he cared. He
was havin' his own way with life--as you say, Cap'n Bartlet."
But Jeckol frowned and pursed his thin lips.
"He never saw the game that was too big for him," said Harris, "nor held
back his smile nor his fist."
"Darlinghurst jail is full of the same sort," observed Jeckol dryly.
"You ask what he was like?" Cap'n Bartlet swung around beside the wheel.
"I'll tell you. I'm married to a girl that was pretty chief with Jim
Albro once. There's no living man dare stand and say a word agen my
wife--the finest in Queensland, sir--but I knew all the talk when I
married her. And yet you see me here."
"Ah? With an entirely friendly purpose?" queried Jeckol, peering at him.
"Or to make sure he won't come back?"
I saw the color flood to Bartlet's rugged cheek and ebb again.
"In friendship," he answered simply.
Jeckol made a gesture like a salute, with a hint of mockery perhaps, but
he said no more. And we others said rather less. Bartlet brought the
schooner smartly about on her heel and laid her square through the gap
and we turned again to that sinister bay, opening before us like the
painted depth of a stage set, whereon we were now to discover and
reconstruct our obscure tragedy.
We drew a quick curtain on it. Scarcely had we come abreast the near
headland when one of the brown, breech-clouted sailors leaped up forward
with a yell, and each startled eye swept past his darting finger to the
wreck of the _Timothy S._ There could be no manner of doubt--a green
hull with a black water line, bedded low and on her side, hatches awash,
just behind a shallow jag of the shore well away to leeward. We needed
no glasses to pick her name or to see that nothing remained of life or
value about the battered shell. She lay in her last berth, in the final
stage of naval decay, stripped to the shreds of rigging, her masts
broken short and bare as bleached bones; and from her whitened rail rose
up a flight of boobies that cried like shrill, mournful ghosts and
vanished....
"Aye--that's the end of their pearlin' cruise," said Peters grimly.
"That's Mullhall's craft, sure enough. The southwest gales would drive
her there. She must ha' been anchored just about where we're passin'
now, and I shouldn't wonder."
"On the shell bank?" sniffed Jeckol, leaning to squint down into the
sparkling blue.
"Fair under our keel, I'd say."
At a signal the leadsman had flown his pigeon again, though we were well
past all reefs.
"Eleven fathom!" Harris echoed the cry. "That's diving! I heard it was a
deep-water bed. D'you suppose they were at it when the niggers jumped
'em?"
"I figger they were," said Peters. "See that scrubby bit of island?--the
point's not a hundred yards away. A dozen canoes could mass up there and
never be noticed. By Joe, it's plain as paint. The ship snugged down for
business--the diver below, like as not--pumps and tackle goin'--all
hands busy on board and the watch calculatin' profits to three decimals
behind the windlass. Aye, there's your treasure hunter, every time! Then
perhaps a slant of wind settin' around that point to give the raid a
runnin' start--and--"
"Him finish," concluded Harris briefly. "All over in ten minutes. They'd
hardly know what hit 'em. A black cloud--that's all. A black cloud."
And Peters was right--it was all too plain. None of us but had heard
tales enough, and stark history enough, of these blood-stained barriers
that hedge the true unknown continent. To our waiting minds his few
phrases threw a sharp picture of the careless ship, the stalking death,
and the swift horror that must have followed. There lay the wreck and
there the empty bay. The rest we could fill in for ourselves, or just
about.
"Then what are we doing here?" asked Jeckol at last.
Peters was already dealing out rifles and ammunition by the deck house,
and Bartlet, looking drawn and old, did not seem to hear, but Harris
jerked an answer over his shoulder with the flippancy of emotion. "Oh,
you can't tell--we might find some smoked heads to bring away."...
* * * * *
A few minutes later the cap'n was giving his last instructions, while we
of the shore party dropped to our places in the big whaleboat.
"You're not to follow us in whatever happens--mind that. If you sight
more'n three canoes at a time, knock out the shackles and run for open
sea. I'm leaving you Obadiah--he's a goodish shot--and four of the best
boys."
The young mate nodded. He hated not coming with us, but Bartlet knew.
This was Papua, where wise men take no chance and fools seldom live long
enough to take a second.
We took none ourselves as we rowed slowly shoreward and sheered off
out of spear throw, watching the wall of jungle. There is no beach
inside Barange, only the mangrove roots that writhe down to the water's
edge like tangled pythons through the oozy bank of salt marsh. It was
very still and very clear in the afternoon sunlight, though the heat
pouring out over us seemed the exhalation of a great steam bath, choked
with stewing vegetation. Now and then our crew of clean-limbed Tonga
boys rested on their oars, with timid, limpid gaze turned askance. We
heard their quick breathing and the drip from the oar blades--nothing
else. At such times we floated in a mirage where each leaf and frond and
webbed liana with its mirrored image had an unnatural brilliance and
precision, like a labored canvas or a view seen through a stereoscope.
* * * * *
And there stole upon us again the oppressive solicitation of the land,
subtle and perilous. Behind the beauty and wonder of it, beyond those
bright shores and the first low foot-hills of the range--what? Nobody
knows, that is the charm and the lure. Peoples, religions, empires
untouched since the birth of time--fabulous wealth, mountains of gold,
cliffs of ruby, "cataracts of adamant," any marvel that fantasy still
dares to dream in a prosaic century. They may be; no man has ever drawn
the map to deny them. They must be: why else should the sphinx smile?...
"I suppose a hundred woolly-heads are spying on us now," whispered
Jeckol suddenly. "Why don't they do something?" He fiddled nervously
with his rifle and sniffed. "What a place! This air is deadly--rotten
with fever. Faugh! It's animal. It's like--it's like a tiger's throat!"
I blinked at the little chap and with the same glance was aware of
Peters standing up in the bow. The trader was just lighting a
short-fused stick of dynamite from his cigar. Before I could cry murder
he had lobbed it in and shot the bush.
It struck with the smash of all calamity in that utter quiet. The trees
sprang toward us and the roar rolled back from angry rocks. Like a
multi-colored dust of the explosion burst a myriad of screaming birds,
lories, parakeets, kingfishers, flashing motes of green and blue and
scarlet in the sunshine. But they dwindled and passed. The echoes died.
The smoke drifted away and the green wall closed up without a scar; the
silence engulfed us once more, floating there, futile invaders who
assaulted its immense riddle with a squib....
"They don't seem to care much," giggled Jeckol.
But Bartlet raised a finger.
Far away in the wood something stirred. It drew nearer, with long
pauses, pressing on and at last charging recklessly through the
undergrowth. We had the spot covered from half a dozen rifles as there
broke out at the verge a creature that leaped and clung among the
creepers.
"Mahrster!" it cried, imploring. "Mahrster!"
A man--though more like a naked, starving ape with his knobby joints and
the bones in a rack under his black skin--and shaken now by the ecstasy
of terror! Not at us. He faced the guns without wincing. His beady eyes
kept coasting behind him the way he had come as if he looked to see a
dreadful hand reach from the thicket and pluck him back. The jungle, the
land, was what he feared--
"Mahrster," he gasped, "you take'm me that fella boat along you! One
fella ship-boy me--good fella too much!"
"What name?" challenged Peters. "What fella ship?"
From the chattered reply we caught a startling word.
"By Joe--he's one of their boys! Give way, cap'n."...
We edged in until Peters could yank the quaking bundle aboard and pulled
again to safety from the mangrove shadow while the fugitive stammered
his story in broken _beche de mer_.
It was true: we had found a survivor from the lost _Timothy S._ Kakwe,
he called himself, and he had come to Barange "long time before
altogether." Two months, at least, we judged. In the attack on the
schooner he had escaped by swimming. Himself a Papuan, of a different
tribe and region, he had taken to the tree tops after the fashion of his
own people, the painted monkey folk of Princess Marianne Straits--a
facility to which he owed his life, it appeared, for he had since lived
on fruits and nuts among the cockatoos, undiscovered.
This much we gathered from his gabble before Peters caught him up.
"But the others--them white fella?"
"All finish," said Kakwe bluntly.
"How?" cried Peters.
"No savee, me. Too much fright--walk along salt water--get to hell along
beach, along tree. Me fright like hell!"
* * * * *
His account tallied with our own theory of the massacre, but he had seen
no bodies brought ashore, could not identify the murderers, could not
say where the native village lay or how to reach it, would not guide any
one into that bush on any consideration. For the rest--this was a "good
fella place" to get away from quickly.
"Ah," said Jeckol, sympathizing. "And that's a true word."
So indeed it seemed, and it is odd to think how close we were to giving
up then. Aye, we were that close. We drifted out toward the anchorage
and looked helplessly around us. The place was so huge, so baffling.
Hopeless to search further among empty swamps and forests, to grope at
large in this hushed wilderness, to coerce a jungle. The cruisers that
have bombarded these same coasts on many a punitive expedition have
learned how hopeless--against Papua, who keeps her secrets.
We must have been halfway back to the _Aurora Bird_ when Bartlet,
sitting thoughtful in the stern, made the sign that brought us up all
sharp.
"He's lying," he said quietly.
Jeckol's nerves jumped in protest.
"Eh--what? The black? He's only scared half to death. You wouldn't blame
him for wanting to get out of this trap, would you? I do myself."
"He couldn't have lived overhead the whole nest o' them all this time
without learning something," declared Bartlet.
"Why should he lie?"
But Peters had risen to snatch around that weazened face, blank as a
mummy's--his own was alight. "By Joe, and a timely reminder. When you've
got to ask why a Papuan nigger should lie you've gone pretty wide! As
for scare--what d'y' suppose he must ha' seen to scare him so?"
Here he bent our monkey man over a thwart and introduced him
affectionately to the Webley....
"You fella Kakwe," he said, "my survivin' jewel--I forgot your breed. I
should ha' begun by bang'm black head b'long you. Now don't stop to
gammon. Whatever you're holdin' back you _show_--savee? S'pose you no
show'm straight, me finish 'long you close up altogether!"
And Kakwe showed. Dominated by superior wickedness, with all the black
man's docility under the instant threat, he collapsed quite simply at
the touch of steel, and he showed--the nook where a tiny, hidden creek
flowed down among the mangroves, the winding course that led by the
swamp's edge through dank and darksome channels to a trodden mud bank
and Barange village itself, tucked away there like a huddle of giant
hives in a back lot. This time we paused for no maneuvering. Even Jeckol
grabbed a boat hook and we pushed through, eager to strike on a definite
lead at last--
Though we might have saved our energy, for the wild had its surprise in
waiting. The village was silent, deserted, tenantless.
We landed at the square, to call it so, a rude clearing on which the few
houses faced, those sprawling, spacious communal dwellings--palaces
among huts--that sometimes amaze the explorer along the West Coast.
None opposed us. Nothing moved, not so much as a curl of smoke. An
insect hummed in the sun like a bullet, and I take no shame to say I
ducked. But that was all. And when the groveling Kakwe led us to a wide
platform that ran breast high across the front of the largest house we
stood with rifles propped and quickened pulses, staring stupidly at the
thing we had come this far to find....
Only a box, lying on the middle of the platform, under the shadow of the
lofty thatch--a small, brass-bound chest such as sailormen love and
ships carry everywhere! "Loot!" snorted Jeckol. "Well--?"
But Cap'n Bartlet had laid hold of another trove, a coil of ringed
rubber tubing, neatly disposed about the chest. "What's there?"
"A diver's air pipe," stated the cap'n.
"What about it?"
"It's been cut--top and bottom."
* * * * *
We crowded for a look, and I saw his tanned fist tremble ever so
slightly.
"A diver's pipe," he repeated. "A diver, d'you see? They had a diver,
and--according to your notions, Peters--" He drew a slow breath.
"What--what if that there diver _did_ happen to be overboard at the
minute the rush came?"
And then came the voice of Peters, cool and drawling: "Some one's left a
message on the box."
As we span around he turned it over atilt, so that all might see the
bold letters, scarred in lead, of that laconic legend--all but Bartlet,
who fumbled for his spectacles. "Writ with a Snider bullet, I take it,"
continued the trader. "One of them soft-nosed kind as supplied to
heathen parts for a blessin' of civilization."
"Read it, can't you?" begged the cap'n.
And this was the notice Jeckol read:
The Crew of the Schooner _Timothy S._ of Cooktown
that tried a cast with fortune and turned
a deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19--
J. MULLHALL, _master_ BAMBA, KOHO
B. SMYTHE, _mate_ KAKWE, JACK-JACK
HENRY NEW MENOMI, FRANK
_Hic finis fandi_
Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with
deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he
observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that
'hic' language."
"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained
Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't
complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"
Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he
inquired, "that the niggers run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books--?"
He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the
box--a packet of thin bark strips covered with coarse markings and bound
with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in
his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....
And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro.
Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail
of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl
and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung
in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's
earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still
unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figures of our Tonga
boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the
master's next whim; the massed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked
houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners;
the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among
lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the
heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of
Papua!
_Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and
I came up a professional god. But I wish I could find which son of
a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the
altar._
This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived.
Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some
are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early
hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous
adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here
was the man "with an eye like a blue glass marble," that "never held his
fist or his smile." No other could have written it after the events he
had survived.
Just as Peters inferred to have been the case, the attack on the
_Timothy S._ caught the whole crew of pearl hunters unready. They had
seen no natives at Barange, they kept no lookout, and when Albro stepped
off the ladder that morning of January 22 he left his shipmates
contentedly employed on deck. He never saw any of them again, or--what
might have been a different matter--any part of them. He went down to
the shell bed, and while he was there the black raiders made their sweep
of the schooner.
It is likely the savages took the diving lines for an extra mooring--it
is certain they knew nothing whatever about the apparatus--and Albro's
first warning was the cutting of that air pipe, when he found his
pressure gone and water trickling through the inlet valve. Fortunately,
he was just preparing to ascend and had tightened his outlet to inflate
the suit. Fortunately, too, his helmet was furnished with an adjustable
inlet and he was able hastily to close both valves.
He tugged at his life line, but it drew loose in his hand. He turned
over on his side to look upward, but he could see nothing--only the
vague blue twilight through which the slack coils of his severed air
pipe came sagging. Then he knew that he had been cut off, and the
hideous fear that lies in wait for every diver, amid the perils and
loneliness of the sea bottom seized upon him. He might have popped to
the surface by throwing off his forty-pound weights, but he was aware
that no chance accident could have served him so, and his impulse was to
get away, from schooner and all, to shore. Under water he had some few
minutes to live, perhaps four or five, as long as the inclosed air
should last him. Frantically he began to struggle toward the beach,
yielding to a moment's panic that was to cost him dear.... While trying
blindly to slash free the useless pipe he lost his diver's knife.
* * * * *
The rotten coral burst and sank under footing. Clogging weeds enwreathed
and held him back with evil embrace. A tridacna spread its jaws before
his steps so that he nearly plunged into the deadly springtrap of the
deep. But he kept on up the slope; his keen spirit rallied and bore him
through, and he came surging from the waves at last on a point of rocks
outside the bay where he could cling and open the emergency cock in the
helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered
his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness
took him and he slipped and pitched forward heavily, and with a great
clang of armor the god fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.
_Broke left arm getting ashore. Walking the beach when I met the
niggers. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected._
These are the words with which Jim Albro chooses to make his note of a
scene that can scarcely have had its parallel in human experience. With
two dozen words, no more. You figure him there, I hope, that muffled
colossus with his huge copper helm flashing red and his monstrous
cyclopean eye agleam, striding along the strip of white beach against
the hostile green hills of Papua. You see him break, an incredible
apparition of power and majesty, upon the view of the dusky cannibal
folk and stand towering over their stricken ranks, triumphant--a glimpse
as through the flick of a shutter that passes and leaves the beholder
dazzled and unsatisfied! But the whole record is only a series of such
glimpses, some focused with startling lucidity, some clouded and
confused, and all too brief.
One other bit remains to fix the picture--an inimitable splash of color,
flung at the end of a perplexing page....
_I picked out the chief devil-devil doctor, and raised him to
honor. Old Gum-eye. Friend of mine._
Mark the spirit of the man. Whole chapters could supply no clearer
tribute to his resilience and entire adequacy. Unerringly he took the
right course to enforce the role thus amazingly thrust upon him and to
establish his godhead. Already he had caught up the situation, had put
its shock behind him. The inscription on the box remains his only
reference to the loss of the schooner and her crew. And while this might
seem to argue a certain lack of sensibility, I cannot feel it was so
with Albro. His was a nature essentially episodic, prompt to the play of
circumstance. The thing was done and past crying over; the blacks had
acted by their lights, and he had very swiftly to act by his. They had
given him his cue. How well he filled the part we can guess. By evening
he had been installed in some kind of temple or devil house as an
accredited deity to the Barange tribes....
* * * * *
Here ends the first part of the Book, so far as its unnumbered and
fugitive entries can be arranged--the first part and the only part quite
comprehensible, before the haze of distress and anxiety has dimmed our
image of that strange god, whose mortality was all too real. He began
its composition that same night, picking up the Snider cartridge and the
bark strips while still he had some measure of liberty. Perhaps he
foresaw that he would want to leave the record. Perhaps he merely sought
distraction, and he had need of it.
Squatting above his own altar, he prepared his own epistle. Around his
sanctuary slept a guard of devil doctors, priests, sorcerers--he uses
all three terms. No sleep for Albro. But while he wrestled there alone
through long hours he found the pluck to jot those early notes by the
flare of a guttering torch, beguiling the pain of his broken arm and the
new terror that was now rapidly closing upon him.
Like a glint of lightning from a cloud comes the following spurted item,
written the next day:
_Forty hours of this. Am growing weaker. My arm--[word scratched
out]. Had to give up trying to start the glass in my helmet. Can't
budge it...._
Soon afterward occurs another passage in the same startling altered key:
_Tried to get away this [morning], but the priests too suspicious.
I wanted to try smashing the glass on a rock. Likely would have
burst my ear drums anyway--_
And further:
_If I could get hold of a knife for three minutes. Bamboo stick
[part illegible here]--can't tear vulcan canvas. No use...._
When Peters read those lines aloud and looked up he confronted a sickly
ring of auditors.
"Good God!" breathed Bartlet. "_He couldn't get out!_"