superflous violence that was his caste mark. "And you--y' big
Dutchman--'in't you swilled enough beer in your time to judge? Besides,
the bally can 'olds three gallon--bound to. There's one sure measure....
I say we got, anyw'y, eleven pounds of this stuff, and I 'appen to know
that Bendemeer's fair crazy after it. He'll pay big. We ought to 'ave
two thousands dollars Chile to split.... Two thousands silver dibs!"
It was a cue to friendly feeling, that luscious phrase. The two men
beamed upon it as Sydney dumped the balance and swung the fiber net.
But it was also a cue of another kind, for it brought Junius Peabody on
stage. He arrived by the simple process of sliding on a bundle over the
brow of the cliff.
"That's mine," he announced.
The beachcombers stayed stricken, which was pardonable. Surely there
never showed a less heroic figure on a stranger defiance than that of
Mr. Peabody, torn, bedraggled, and besmeared. There was nothing muscular
or threatening about him. He took no pose. He offered no weapon. He came
on at them limping, with quivering lip and empty hands, even with open
hands. And yet the incredible fact remained that he did come on at them
and continued to come.
"It's mine," repeated Junius. "All mine, and I'm going to have it--all!"
Amazement held them motionless for as long as it took him to cross the
ledge--pleased amazement, as they knew him better. There are few things
more congenial to certain gentlemen than a chance to maul an easy
victim. And here was the easiest victim that either of these gentlemen
had seen in many a day. He was no match for them, could be no possible
match. Since he would have it so, they accepted joyously, closed in upon
him from either side and started to drag him down as a preliminary to
trampling the lights out of him....
But they counted without the absolute simplicity of a man who has found
an objective for the first time in his life and has set himself to reach
it, regardless. Mr. Peabody did not pause to fight or to wrestle. He let
them get a good grip on him and then took the unexpected way by keeping
right on--and, pinioning their arms, merely walking them over the edge
into space.
For an instant the three seemed to hang suspended, interlocked amid
smashing vines and taut creepers, and then toppled toward the lagoon.
* * * * *
Even before they struck, Sydney's despairing yell rang out. Their plunge
drowned it and gave way to the cries of startled sea birds, knifing the
air in flung white crescents and circling about the troubled spot that
boiled like blue champagne. But when he came up again the unfortunate
larrikin loosed shriek after bubbling shriek and floundered madly for
shore, all else forgotten in his dominant terror.
Willems was made of sterner metal. He grappled Peabody as they rose and
sought to use his long arms, reaching for the throat. He learned better
presently, however, and he learned, too, how much chance he had against
a man who had once won a fancy diving title at Travers Island. Junius
took him down by the feet and held him down until there was no spring
and no temper left to him, only a large and limp and very badly
frightened Hollander who wanted to get out of the wet. He was quite
willing to paddle after the Sydney Duck. Meanwhile Junius gathered up an
object in a fiber net that was floating near by and swam on to follow
his purpose....
The man Bendemeer was standing behind his little zinc bar when a shadow
sifted in through the doorway, and, looking up, he took a backward step
that nearly cost him his stock of glassware. The man Bendemeer was not
used to stepping back from anything, but the red and dripping ruin that
confronted him was beyond usage of any kind. Junius Peabody looked as if
he had been run through a mangle. His dress was fragmentary. Most of the
skin had been flayed from the more prominent curves of his anatomy. His
left arm hung useless. He crawled in and propped himself to keep from
falling, and called for brandy in a voice scarcely recognizable.
"Peabody--is it?" demanded Bendemeer, incredulous.
"Will you keep a customer waiting?" rasped Junius. "You needn't stare."
He laughed weakly. "You can't order me off now, Bendemeer. I'm a paying
customer again."
"As how?"
Junius lifted a fist and dropped the sopping net on the bar.
"Ambergris--eleven pounds of it. My property."
Bendemeer inspected the brownish lump, and as he understood, his thin
lips pleated and his glance quickened. "Oh, ho!" he said. "Was it _this_
they robbed you of?"
Peabody nodded.
"You got it back from them--yourself?"
"There's the stuff."
"So I see. But I'm asking--did you take it away from those two
cutthroats alone, without any help?"
"I did. And now I've come to talk business. It's a good proposition,
Bendemeer."
The tall, grim white man studied him with a narrow regard glinting like
a probe and equally cool, detached, and impersonal. He had the air of a
surgeon who approaches a clinical experiment. "I'm inclined to think it
may be," he decided. "Yes--a sporting risk; though I'm certain enough of
the result, Peabody, mind that. I believe I might make a bit of a gamble
with myself, just to see that I'm right. Come now--what do you want?"
"A thousand silver," said Junius.
"I haven't so much about me. Suppose we say a standing credit for a
thousand drinks instead."
Junius stiffened against the bar.
"It amounts to the same thing, doesn't it?" continued Bendemeer: "Why
should you trouble about dollars--mere tokens? You can't get away from
Fufuti. The _Jane_ out there, she's due to sail this morning on a round
of my plantations. She's the only ship clearing for a month at least....
By the time you'd drunk yourself to death I'd simply have the money back
again."
* * * * *
Peabody stared, and a streak of crimson leaped into his cheek as if a
whiplash had been laid across it.
"Damn you--!" he cried shakily. "Give me that brandy--I'll pay for it.
Here's the stuff. It's mine. I went after it and I got it. I earned it
myself, and fairly!"
"To what end?" Bendemeer cut in. "So you can pickle yourself before
burial?"
Junius Peabody writhed. "What's it to you how I spend it afterward? I'm
a free agent. I can do as I like."
"That," said Bendemeer with quiet emphasis, "is a lie."
Holding his quivering subject, impaled on his glance as it seemed, he
reached a black, square bottle. He shoved a glass in front of Junius
Peabody and poured a generous measure. With one hand he kept the glass
covered and with the other pointed out through the doorway.
"I'll say you lie, and I'll demonstrate:
"You see my schooner out there? That's her boat on the beach. She leaves
in half an hour; her captain's come now for final orders. She goes first
from here to an island of mine a hundred miles away. I planted it with
coconuts five years ago, and left a population of maybe a dozen Kanakas
to tend them--it's going to be worth money some day. Nukava, they call
it, and it's the edge of the earth, the farthest corner, and the
loneliest and the driest. There's not a drop of anything on the place
except water, scant and brackish at that. But a white man could live
there, if he were fit to live at all, and wanted to badly enough.
"Now I'll make you an offer. I'll buy this lump of stuff from you, and
I'll buy it either of two ways. A half interest in Nukava and you go
there at once to take charge as agent.... Or else--here's your brandy
and I'll keep you perpetually drunk as long as you last."
Junius swayed on his feet. "Agent?" he stammered. "To go away--?"
"Now. And once there you can't escape. You're stuck for a year on a
coral gridiron, Peabody, to sit and fry."
"What for? You--! What for?"
Bendemeer shrugged.
"Because it amuses me. Because I please. Because--I know what you'll do.
I've been watching men of your sort all my life, and I know what they're
worth--drift on the beaches, scraps, trash, jetsam. Regeneration, eh?
Rot and drivel! You can't save yourself any more than you could lift
yourself by your own boot straps. It suits me to prove it to you this
way."
He lifted his hand away from the glass. Peabody's stare dropped from
that cryptic regard to the waiting brandy before him, the red liquor,
odorous and maddening. Peabody's lips moved, and he wet them with the
tip of his tongue and gripped the bar with straining white fingers.
"You're wrong," he breathed. "You lose, Bendemeer. I can do it--I've
just learned I can do it. And, by God," he added, prayerfully, "I will."
Bendemeer took up the netted lump.
"Very well," he said, offhand. "Just a moment, while I chuck this stuff
in the storeroom."
He turned and tramped out through the rear without a glance behind
him--and left Junius Peabody there alone before the bar.
He was gone perhaps five minutes, quite as much as that, an ample space
of time. When he came back there was no glass in sight. It had vanished,
and the room reeked with the fumes of a very flagrant distillation of
French brandy. He looked his customer up and down and his lids lowered a
trifle.
"Well, how did you like the flavor?"
The face of Junius Peabody was like a death's-head, but the eyes in his
sockets blazed with a light all their own, and, standing there erect,
standing square on his two legs with his feet braced apart, he
swore--somewhat inexpertly, it was true, but still quite heartily; good,
crisp profanity such as one able man may use with another--until
Bendemeer's puzzled gaze caught the sparkle of broken glass lying in a
great splash of liquid in a corner of the floor. "I'm going to Nukava!"
cried Junius Peabody. "And you see--you see there are some scraps thrown
up on the beach that are worth something after all, and be damned to
you, Bendemeer!"
Bendemeer's grip shot out as if against his volition and after an
instant's hesitation Peabody took it. He did not yet know all the trader
had done for him, perhaps would never know, but on the inscrutable front
of that remarkable man was a faint glow curiously unlike a loser's
chagrin.
"So it seems," acknowledged Bendemeer. "So it seems"--and smiled a
little, rather oddly....
* * * * *
Bendemeer was still smiling that way, all by himself, an hour or so
later when he had watched the _Likely Jane_ lay her course for Nukava
with the new agent on board and had gone down into his storeroom to put
the place to rights. There was a clutter of odds and ends of cargo that
had been spilled from an upset surfboat the day before. Most of it had
been salvaged by his Kanaka boys along shore, but a certain broken tub
containing tallow had lost part of its contents. However, he was able
now to restore a large lump weighing perhaps eleven pounds or so, which
made the tally nearly good.
THE ADVERSARY
In the good old days of Thursday Island there passed as waif currency a
certain local jest. When some pride of the pearling fleet was moved to
approve himself, his company, and the pervading wickedness in general he
was wont to state--more or less titubant on his pins the while--that the
only honest men in that merry little hell had come by land. It was a
useful and a harmless jest, salted with the essential fact whereby
legends are preserved and made historic. But from a date it lost its
savor....
At the Portugee's one night--Saturday, be sure, for it was always
Saturday on Thursday with the pearlers--a gentleman from Wooloomooloo
who had just adorned the traditional witticism with profane fancy found
himself confronted by a quiet stranger who laid down his coat and a new
law.
"I don't mind so much what you call yourselves _to_ yourselves," he
observed, while the circle shouted and spread about. "Nor your nice new
magistrate, nor your missionaries, nor your artillery guard on the hill.
Maybe you've overlooked the modern spread of respectability and
corrugated roofings. Or maybe you know 'em better than I do. But I've
come to tarry with you for a time, my friends. And, as long as I'm in
your midst, any chap that says I'm not honest--and can't prove it--I'll
knock seven bells out of him."
Which he did, _seriatim_.
* * * * *
Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday
Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the
last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering
grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human
complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is
only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying
very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are
prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.
Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a
color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among
the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their
common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred
words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in _beche de mer_.
Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success.
Nobody questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or
the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on
a pearling license. Nobody wondered when he paid off and scattered his
Kanaka crew--possible links with his past--and shipped a new lot from
the motley mob on the jetty.
And a motley lot he picked! His cook was Chinese; his head diver a
Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of
the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded
West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp,
the name of Buttermilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at
Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact--which again nobody noticed--that
they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who
do.
This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face
value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It
continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself
might have filled a whole illustration; thewed like a colossus, crop
black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw
always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With
his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles
underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging
along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds
must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an
institution....
"'Im? Cap'n of the _Fancy Free_, that flash little lugger out beyond.
'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable
informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on shore
leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might
ha' owed you--that's 'is sort. And--my word!--'e's got a jab to the boko
you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im.
'Honest Wetherbee'--that's 'im."
For he lived to the title. If it is honest to abide by every hampering
regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices
over a bit of inferior shell; to lose two weeks with your outfit in
quarantine, voluntarily--that happened when the _Opalton_ brought a hot
cholera scare and her passenger list camped on Friday Island--to share
your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard
cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole
damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of
honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee
played it. Amazingly--as a man might play an arduous game!
Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by
him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the harbor master and was
calling various pilots, navigators, and odd fish of Torres Strait by
their handier names--especially the pilots. These were the rewards of
reputation, and they defined Thursday's acceptance of him up to that
night in the wet season when his visit ended....
A Saturday again. The northwest monsoon had broken with torrential
downpour, and now the island reeked in a steam bath, as if the young
moon had focused a sick, intolerable ray upon it. A high wind stormed
the sands and brought no relief. The quiver of the surf beat on the
senses like heat waves. A few thrashing pawpaws and palm tufts threw
shadows like tormented sleepers along the beach. But up in the town
Thursday took its usual "tangle," shouted and sang and drowned its fever
without assuagement in the periodic crisis of the fortune hunt. A
Brisbane steamer lay ready to depart with the morning tide. Meanwhile
her shore goers, "seeing a bit o' life," did their possible to keep up
the prevailing temperature. Only the long jetty was quiet. Here a man
might stand back and away from it all and hear the single note of its
turmoil and peer into the mist of its lights like a contemplative
Lucifer at the verge of some lesser inferno.
* * * * *
And in truth there stood such a man in much that manner. He had come
down soft-footed from the streets and, lingering to assure himself he
had not been followed, stepped out upon the jetty where he stayed
motionless and attentive. His glance roved from point to point, noting,
verifying. First the outward spread twinkle of the deserted lugger fleet
at anchor; then the bulk of the Brisbane steamer at the T head, with her
yellow cargo flares that showed loading still in progress: and the town,
all unconscious of him. Something sinister seemed to detach this big,
dim figure from the restlessness of the night; brooding apart there so
coolly alert and contained. He regarded Thursday for a while, and at
last, alone and with himself for confidant, he made a gesture as if to
seal its folly and its whole destiny with final contempt and triumph.
He was turning away with a swing of broad shoulders when another figure
slipped from the shadow and moved suddenly to confront him.
"Ah--Captain Wetherbee?"
Everywhere and always up and down the earth, and more particularly in
rather unhealthful corners of it, are men who have to go braced for that
questioning slur, that significant little drag before the name. It is a
challenge out of time and space, and at sound of it the big fellow drew
up tense like a battler in a ring.
"Halvers," stated the newcomer without preamble or apology. "I'll take
halvers, if you please, Captain Wetherbee."
He revealed himself as a long, weedy frame in limp linen. Both hands
were jammed into his side pockets with a singular effect--against a
hypothetical chill, one would have thought. Without his stoop he might
have been as tall as Wetherbee, but he had shrunken like the sleeves
tucked above his bony wrists. He had an air at once fearful and
implacable--the doubly dangerous menace of a timid man ready to strike.
Wetherbee was aware of it, though incredulous.
"You spoke?" he inquired, from a lengthened jaw.
"I said--halvers," affirmed this extraordinary apparition. There was no
mistaking the peculiar flavor in his husky voice--no mistaking, either,
that at present its owner was deadly cold sober. "Don't move, captain.
I've got you covered from here.... And this time I'm not afraid to
shoot!"
Wetherbee continued aware of it.
"Just my little device for holding your attention," explained the
newcomer, between a cough and a snuffle, the remnant of polite
affectation. "I thought it out very carefully."
"Ho! You did?" queried Wetherbee.
"You used to be such a damnably abrupt sort of person yourself."
"Ho! Did I?"
"Even then. Even then, when we sat under the same pulpit--such time as
you found it socially expedient to attend--it was a matter of grave
doubt to me whether you took any real benefit. You were always a poor
listener, Mr.--ah--Wetherbee. Whereas I--I was chosen deacon that
winter, you may remember."
Wetherbee stared into the shaven, haunted face thus preposterously
thrust at him across the years. Aside from the unimaginable oddity of
the attack, there was cunning and unsettling purpose in it, but he
yielded no nerve reaction, no start or outcry; not even a denial. And by
this--had he been wise--the other might have taken warning.
"By Jove!" was all his comment.
"We've come a considerable distance," suggested the new arrival.
They looked in curious silence, each measuring that span from the edge
of things. Thursday howled on one side of them and on the other wind and
the sea, until the humor of it won Wetherbee to a grim chuckle.
"Well, what do they call you nowadays--deacon?"
"I'm usually known as Selden, thanks."
"Seldom?"
"I shouldn't insist: any more than you yourself, captain."
"And what are you doing here?"
"I dropped in from Samarai, meaning to catch the Brisbane steamer
yonder. I've been diving up there all season. I'm a very fair diver,
really; only my luck is generally so poor."
* * * * *
To any passer-by he must have seemed the usual loafer, with a string of
woes on tap. But Wetherbee, one eye to the bulging pockets, appeared in
no way bored.
"Strolling along the front, I chanced to recognize you. _That_ was luck,
if you like. I've thought so. Especially since making inquiries. I've
made rather exhaustive inquiries. In fact, I believe I have your rating
fairly up to date." He coughed again. "Captain Wetherbee, do you
remember when we last met?"
"No," said Wetherbee shortly.
Thereupon Mr. Selden recalled that meeting, and others, and his voice
trailed like a snake in the dust, looping cryptic patterns. It was one
of those counts of grievance and disaster such as almost any broken
fugitive among far places has to tell. Thursday can offer them by the
yard, and dear at the price of a drink. He spoke of shares and deals and
swindling betrayal; of hope and fortune lost, and the false lead that
puts a man on the chute and sets him off for a blackleg and a wanderer.
All in the clipped jargon of the markets, a common tale, but with this
difference in the telling--it came away briefly, with the slow-biting
venom that such a fugitive would be apt to reserve for only one out of
all possible living listeners in the world. From over the hidden weapon
he drove home his point; while Wetherbee stood there rooted on the
jetty, like the Wedding Guest.
"... So you knifed the lot of us in the dark--everyone that trusted
you--and bolted. That was your way. You sent me ashore from that last
yachting party all primed to go my last penny on a dead bird. I was
flattered. I used to credit your honesty more or less myself--then."
"And now?" suggested Wetherbee.
Mr. Selden, late deacon, drew a husky breath.
"Why, now--I've caught up with you. I'm the flaw in the title, at 50 per
cent. I'm judgment out of the past! Verily, no man shall escape it: do
you mark? No man comes so far or hides his track so cleverly, even at
Thursday Island. I've got your record--as you've got mine, of course;
but yours is rather worse, with a warrant pending--of which, by the way,
I know the very date.... And, besides, I've nothing at all to lose. I'm
only a broken diver. Nobody ever called me 'Honest' Selden or 'Honest'
anything else!"
His wrists stiffened as Wetherbee took a step.
"You mean to blow, you wasp?"
"You won't make me. Blow! That's no good to me: I mean to get level.
Halvers, I said--captain.... I'm in!"
"On what?"
"On your new speculation, of course." He came very close to capering.
"Your latest deviltry. Don't I know your little methods? D'you think I
couldn't smell it out? Public character, no suspicion, traces all
removed--alibi all complete--_and_ a clear road to the back door.
"You sneaked your crew out of town to-night. Your lugger's ready to slip
cable. You've been hobnobbing all evening with the pilot you camped
along with on Friday Island for two weeks--that had the _Opalton_--by
George, I believe it was you made him a sot on the sly! I wouldn't put
it past you. You used to gammon us the same way on your cursed week-end
sprees. Don't I _know_? Haven't I _reason_ to know?
"But you needn't have pumped him so close. I could have told you days
ago what she takes aboard of her this trip."...
"The hell you could!"