and less vigorous, his periods of coma longer, until he came to know,
beyond the last promptings of the optimism inherent in so tremendous a
constitution as his own, that he would never live to cross the grass
lands, perforate the perilous coast jungle, and reach the sea. He faded
as the Southern Cross rose higher in the sky, till even Balatta knew that
he would be dead ere the nuptial date determined by his taboo. Ngurn
made pilgrimage personally and gathered the smoke materials for the
curing of Bassett’s head, and to him made proud announcement and
exhibition of the artistic perfectness of his intention when Bassett
should be dead. As for himself, Bassett was not shocked. Too long and
too deeply had life ebbed down in him to bite him with fear of its
impending extinction. He continued to persist, alternating periods of
unconsciousness with periods of semi-consciousness, dreamy and unreal, in
which he idly wondered whether he had ever truly beheld the Red One or
whether it was a nightmare fancy of delirium.
Came the day when all mists and cob-webs dissolved, when he found his
brain clear as a bell, and took just appraisement of his body’s weakness.
Neither hand nor foot could he lift. So little control of his body did
he have, that he was scarcely aware of possessing one. Lightly indeed
his flesh sat upon his soul, and his soul, in its briefness of clarity,
knew by its very clarity that the black of cessation was near. He knew
the end was close; knew that in all truth he had with his eyes beheld the
Red One, the messenger between the worlds; knew that he would never live
to carry that message to the world—that message, for aught to the
contrary, which might already have waited man’s hearing in the heart of
Guadalcanal for ten thousand years. And Bassett stirred with resolve,
calling Ngurn to him, out under the shade of the breadfruit tree, and
with the old devil-devil doctor discussing the terms and arrangements of
his last life effort, his final adventure in the quick of the flesh.
“I know the law, O Ngurn,” he concluded the matter. “Whoso is not of the
folk may not look upon the Red One and live. I shall not live anyway.
Your young men shall carry me before the face of the Red One, and I shall
look upon him, and hear his voice, and thereupon die, under your hand, O
Ngurn. Thus will the three things be satisfied: the law, my desire, and
your quicker possession of my head for which all your preparations wait.”
To which Ngurn consented, adding:
“It is better so. A sick man who cannot get well is foolish to live on
for so little a while. Also is it better for the living that he should
go. You have been much in the way of late. Not but what it was good for
me to talk to such a wise one. But for moons of days we have held little
talk. Instead, you have taken up room in the house of heads, making
noises like a dying pig, or talking much and loudly in your own language
which I do not understand. This has been a confusion to me, for I like
to think on the great things of the light and dark as I turn the heads in
the smoke. Your much noise has thus been a disturbance to the
long-learning and hatching of the final wisdom that will be mine before I
die. As for you, upon whom the dark has already brooded, it is well that
you die now. And I promise you, in the long days to come when I turn
your head in the smoke, no man of the tribe shall come in to disturb us.
And I will tell you many secrets, for I am an old man and very wise, and
I shall be adding wisdom to wisdom as I turn your head in the smoke.”
So a litter was made, and, borne on the shoulders of half a dozen of the
men, Bassett departed on the last little adventure that was to cap the
total adventure, for him, of living. With a body of which he was
scarcely aware, for even the pain had been exhausted out of it, and with
a bright clear brain that accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of sheer
lucidness of thought, he lay back on the lurching litter and watched the
fading of the passing world, beholding for the last time the breadfruit
tree before the devil-devil house, the dim day beneath the matted jungle
roof, the gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, the saddle of
raw limestone, and the mesa of black volcanic sand.
Down the spiral path of the pit they bore him, encircling the sheening,
glowing Red One that seemed ever imminent to iridesce from colour and
light into sweet singing and thunder. And over bones and logs of
immolated men and gods they bore him, past the horrors of other immolated
ones that yet lived, to the three-king-post tripod and the huge king-post
striker.
Here Bassett, helped by Ngurn and Balatta, weakly sat up, swaying weakly
from the hips, and with clear, unfaltering, all-seeing eyes gazed upon
the Red One.
“Once, O Ngurn,” he said, not taking his eyes from the sheening,
vibrating surface whereon and wherein all the shades of cherry-red played
unceasingly, ever a-quiver to change into sound, to become silken
rustlings, silvery whisperings, golden thrummings of cords, velvet
pipings of elfland, mellow distances of thunderings.
“I wait,” Ngurn prompted after a long pause, the long-handled tomahawk
unassumingly ready in his hand.
“Once, O Ngurn,” Bassett repeated, “let the Red One speak so that I may
see it speak as well as hear it. Then strike, thus, when I raise my
hand; for, when I raise my hand, I shall drop my head forward and make
place for the stroke at the base of my neck. But, O Ngurn, I, who am
about to pass out of the light of day for ever, would like to pass with
the wonder-voice of the Red One singing greatly in my ears.”
“And I promise you that never will a head be so well cured as yours,”
Ngurn assured him, at the same time signalling the tribesmen to man the
propelling ropes suspended from the king-post striker. “Your head shall
be my greatest piece of work in the curing of heads.”
Bassett smiled quietly to the old one’s conceit, as the great carved log,
drawn back through two-score feet of space, was released. The next
moment he was lost in ecstasy at the abrupt and thunderous liberation of
sound. But such thunder! Mellow it was with preciousness of all
sounding metals. Archangels spoke in it; it was magnificently beautiful
before all other sounds; it was invested with the intelligence of
supermen of planets of other suns; it was the voice of God, seducing and
commanding to be heard. And—the everlasting miracle of that interstellar
metal! Bassett, with his own eyes, saw colour and colours transform into
sound till the whole visible surface of the vast sphere was a-crawl and
titillant and vaporous with what he could not tell was colour or was
sound. In that moment the interstices of matter were his, and the
interfusings and intermating transfusings of matter and force.
Time passed. At the last Bassett was brought back from his ecstasy by an
impatient movement of Ngurn. He had quite forgotten the old devil-devil
one. A quick flash of fancy brought a husky chuckle into Bassett’s
throat. His shot-gun lay beside him in the litter. All he had to do,
muzzle to head, was to press the trigger and blow his head into
nothingness.
But why cheat him? was Bassett’s next thought. Head-hunting, cannibal
beast of a human that was as much ape as human, nevertheless Old Ngurn
had, according to his lights, played squarer than square. Ngurn was in
himself a forerunner of ethics and contract, of consideration, and
gentleness in man. No, Bassett decided; it would be a ghastly pity and
an act of dishonour to cheat the old fellow at the last. His head was
Ngurn’s, and Ngurn’s head to cure it would be.
And Bassett, raising his hand in signal, bending forward his head as
agreed so as to expose cleanly the articulation to his taut spinal cord,
forgot Balatta, who was merely a woman, a woman merely and only and
undesired. He knew, without seeing, when the razor-edged hatchet rose in
the air behind him. And for that instant, ere the end, there fell upon
Bassett the shadows of the Unknown, a sense of impending marvel of the
rending of walls before the imaginable. Almost, when he knew the blow
had started and just ere the edge of steel bit the flesh and nerves it
seemed that he gazed upon the serene face of the Medusa, Truth—And,
simultaneous with the bite of the steel on the onrush of the dark, in a
flashing instant of fancy, he saw the vision of his head turning slowly,
always turning, in the devil-devil house beside the breadfruit tree.
THE END
Waikiki, Honolulu,
_May_ 22, 1916.
THE HUSSY
THERE are some stories that have to be true—the sort that cannot be
fabricated by a ready fiction-reckoner. And by the same token there are
some men with stories to tell who cannot be doubted. Such a man was
Julian Jones. Although I doubt if the average reader of this will
believe the story Julian Jones told me. Nevertheless I believe it. So
thoroughly am I convinced of its verity that I am willing, nay, eager, to
invest capital in the enterprise and embark personally on the adventure
to a far land.
It was in the Australian Building at the Panama Pacific Exposition that I
met him. I was standing before an exhibit of facsimiles of the record
nuggets which had been discovered in the goldfields of the Antipodes.
Knobbed, misshapen and massive, it was as difficult to believe that they
were not real gold as it was to believe the accompanying statistics of
their weights and values.
“That’s what those kangaroo-hunters call a nugget,” boomed over my
shoulder directly at the largest of the specimens.
I turned and looked up into the dim blue eyes of Julian Jones. I looked
up, for he stood something like six feet four inches in height. His
hair, a wispy, sandy yellow, seemed as dimmed and faded as his eyes. It
may have been the sun which had washed out his colouring; at least his
face bore the evidence of a prodigious and ardent sun-burn which had long
since faded to yellow. As his eyes turned from the exhibit and focussed
on mine I noted a queer look in them as of one who vainly tries to recall
some fact of supreme importance.
“What’s the matter with it as a nugget?” I demanded.
The remote, indwelling expression went out of his eyes as he boomed
“Why, its size.”
“It does seem large,” I admitted. “But there’s no doubt it’s authentic.
The Australian Government would scarcely dare—”
“Large!” he interrupted, with a sniff and a sneer.
“Largest ever discovered—” I started on.
“Ever discovered!” His dim eyes smouldered hotly as he proceeded. “Do
you think that every lump of gold ever discovered has got into the
newspapers and encyclopedias?”
“Well,” I replied judicially, “if there’s one that hasn’t, I don’t see
how we’re to know about it. If a really big nugget, or nugget-finder,
elects to blush unseen—”
“But it didn’t,” he broke in quickly. “I saw it with my own eyes, and,
besides, I’m too tanned to blush anyway. I’m a railroad man and I’ve
been in the tropics a lot. Why, I used to be the colour of mahogany—real
old mahogany, and have been taken for a blue-eyed Spaniard more than
once—”
It was my turn to interrupt, and I did.
“Was that nugget bigger than those in there, Mr.—er—?”
“Jones, Julian Jones is my name.”
He dug into an inner pocket and produced an envelope addressed to such a
person, care of General Delivery, San Francisco; and I, in turn,
presented him with my card.
“Pleased to know you, sir,” he said, extending his hand, his voice
booming as if accustomed to loud noises or wide spaces. “Of course I’ve
heard of you, seen your picture in the papers, and all that, and, though
I say it that shouldn’t, I want to say that I didn’t care a rap about
those articles you wrote on Mexico. You’re wrong, all wrong. You make
the mistake of all Gringos in thinking a Mexican is a white man. He
ain’t. None of them ain’t—Greasers, Spiggoties, Latin-Americans and all
the rest of the cattle. Why, sir, they don’t think like we think, or
reason, or act. Even their multiplication table is different. You think
seven times seven is forty-nine; but not them. They work it out
different. And white isn’t white to them, either. Let me give you an
example. Buying coffee retail for house-keeping in one-pound or
ten-pound lots—”
“How big was that nugget you referred to?” I queried firmly. “As big as
the biggest of those?”
“Bigger,” he said quietly. “Bigger than the whole blamed exhibit of them
put together, and then some.” He paused and regarded me with a steadfast
gaze. “I don’t see no reason why I shouldn’t go into the matter with
you. You’ve got a reputation a man ought to be able to trust, and I’ve
read you’ve done some tall skylarking yourself in out-of-the-way places.
I’ve been browsing around with an eye open for some one to go in with me
on the proposition.”
“You can trust me,” I said.
And here I am, blazing out into print with the whole story just as he
told it to me as we sat on a bench by the lagoon before the Palace of
Fine Arts with the cries of the sea gulls in our ears. Well, he should
have kept his appointment with me. But I anticipate.
As we started to leave the building and hunt for a seat, a small woman,
possibly thirty years of age, with a washed-out complexion of the
farmer’s wife sort, darted up to him in a bird-like way, for all the
world like the darting veering gulls over our heads and fastened herself
to his arm with the accuracy and dispatch and inevitableness of a piece
of machinery.
“There you go!” she shrilled. “A-trottin’ right off and never givin’ me
a thought.”
I was formally introduced to her. It was patent that she had never heard
of me, and she surveyed me bleakly with shrewd black eyes, set close
together and as beady and restless as a bird’s.
“You ain’t goin’ to tell him about that hussy?” she complained.
“Well, now, Sarah, this is business, you see,” he argued plaintively.
“I’ve been lookin’ for a likely man this long while, and now that he’s
shown up it seems to me I got a right to give him the hang of what
happened.”
The small woman made no reply, but set her thin lips in a needle-like
line. She gazed straight before her at the Tower of Jewels with so
austere an expression that no glint of refracted sunlight could soften
it. We proceeded slowly to the lagoon, managed to obtain an unoccupied
seat, and sat down with mutual sighs of relief as we released our weights
from our tortured sightseeing feet.
“One does get so mortal weary,” asserted the small woman, almost
defiantly.
Two swans waddled up from the mirroring water and investigated us. When
their suspicions of our niggardliness or lack of peanuts had been
confirmed, Jones half-turned his back on his life-partner and gave me his
story.
“Ever been in Ecuador? Then take my advice—and don’t. Though I take
that back, for you and me might be hitting it for there together if you
can rustle up the faith in me and the backbone in yourself for the trip.
Well, anyway, it ain’t so many years ago that I came ambling in there on
a rusty, foul-bottomed, tramp collier from Australia, forty-three days
from land to land. Seven knots was her speed when everything favoured,
and we’d had a two weeks’ gale to the north’ard of New Zealand, and broke
our engines down for two days off Pitcairn Island.
“I was no sailor on her. I’m a locomotive engineer. But I’d made
friends with the skipper at Newcastle an’ come along as his guest for as
far as Guayaquil. You see, I’d heard wages was ’way up on the American
railroad runnin’ from that place over the Andes to Quito. Now
Guayaquil—”
“Is a fever-hole,” I interpolated.
Julian Jones nodded.
“Thomas Nast died there of it within a month after he landed.—He was our
great American cartoonist,” I added.
“Don’t know him,” Julian Jones said shortly. “But I do know he wasn’t
the first to pass out by a long shot. Why, look you the way I found it.
The pilot grounds is sixty miles down the river. ‘How’s the fever?’ said
I to the pilot who came aboard in the early morning. ‘See that Hamburg
barque,’ said he, pointing to a sizable ship at anchor. ‘Captain and
fourteen men dead of it already, and the cook and two men dying right
now, and they’re the last left of her.’
“And by jinks he told the truth. And right then they were dying forty a
day in Guayaquil of Yellow Jack. But that was nothing, as I was to find
out. Bubonic plague and small-pox were raging, while dysentery and
pneumonia were reducing the population, and the railroad was raging worst
of all. I mean that. For them that insisted in riding on it, it was
more dangerous than all the other diseases put together.
“When we dropped anchor off Guayaquil half a dozen skippers from other
steamers came on board to warn our skipper not to let any of his crew or
officers go ashore except the ones he wanted to lose. A launch came off
for me from Duran, which is on the other side of the river and is the
terminal of the railroad. And it brought off a man that soared up the
gangway three jumps at a time he was that eager to get aboard. When he
hit the deck he hadn’t time to speak to any of us. He just leaned out
over the rail and shook his fist at Duran and shouted: ‘I beat you to it!
I beat you to it!’
“‘Who’d you beat to it, friend?’ I asked. ‘The railroad,’ he said, as he
unbuckled the straps and took off a big ’44 Colt’s automatic from where
he wore it handy on his left side under his coat, ‘I staved as long as I
agreed—three months—and it didn’t get me. I was a conductor.’
“And that was the railroad I was to work for. All of which was nothing
to what he told me in the next few minutes. The road ran from sea level
at Duran up to twelve thousand feet on Chimborazo and down to ten
thousand at Quito on the other side the range. And it was so dangerous
that the trains didn’t run nights. The through passengers had to get off
and sleep in the towns at night while the train waited for daylight. And
each train carried a guard of Ecuadoriano soldiers which was the most
dangerous of all. They were supposed to protect the train crews, but
whenever trouble started they unlimbered their rifles and joined the mob.
You see, whenever a train wreck occurred, the first cry of the spiggoties
was ‘Kill the Gringos!’ They always did that, and proceeded to kill the
train crew and whatever chance Gringo passengers that’d escaped being
killed in the accident. Which is their kind of arithmetic, which I told
you a while back as being different from ours.
“Shucks! Before the day was out I was to find out for myself that that
ex-conductor wasn’t lying. It was over at Duran. I was to take my run
on the first division out to Quito, for which place I was to start next
morning—only one through train running every twenty-four hours. It was
the afternoon of my first day, along about four o’clock, when the boilers
of the _Governor Hancock_ exploded and she sank in sixty feet of water
alongside the dock. She was the big ferry boat that carried the railroad
passengers across the river to Guayaquil. It was a bad accident, but it
was the cause of worse that followed. By half-past four, big trainloads
began to arrive. It was a feast day and they’d run an excursion up
country but of Guayaquil, and this was the crowd coming back.
“And the crowd—there was five thousand of them—wanted to get ferried
across, and the ferry was at the bottom of the river, which wasn’t our
fault. But by the Spiggoty arithmetic, it was. ‘Kill the Gringos!’
shouts one of them. And right there the beans were spilled. Most of us
got away by the skin of our teeth. I raced on the heels of the Master
Mechanic, carrying one of his babies for him, for the locomotives that
was just pulling out. You see, way down there away from everywhere they
just got to save their locomotives in times of trouble, because, without
them, a railroad can’t be run. Half a dozen American wives and as many
children were crouching on the cab floors along with the rest of us when
we pulled out; and the Ecuadoriano soldiers, who should have been
protecting our lives and property, turned loose with their rifles and
must have given us all of a thousand rounds before we got out of range.
“We camped up country and didn’t come back to clean up until next day.
It was some cleaning. Every flat-car, box-car, coach, asthmatic switch
engine, and even hand-car that mob of Spiggoties had shoved off the dock
into sixty feet of water on top of the _Governor Hancock_. They’d burnt
the round house, set fire to the coal bunkers, and made a scandal of the
repair shops. Oh, yes, and there were three of our fellows they’d got
that we had to bury mighty quick. It’s hot weather all the time down
there.”
Julian Jones came to a full pause and over his shoulder studied the
straight-before-her gaze and forbidding expression of his wife’s face.
“I ain’t forgotten the nugget,” he assured me.
“Nor the hussy,” the little woman snapped, apparently at the mud-hens
paddling on the surface of the lagoon.
“I’ve been travelling toward the nugget right along—”
“There was never no reason for you to stay in that dangerous country,”
his wife snapped in on him.
“Now, Sarah,” he appealed. “I was working for you right along.” And to
me he explained: “The risk was big, but so was the pay. Some months I
earned as high as five hundred gold. And here was Sarah waiting for me
back in Nebraska—”
“An’ us engaged two years,” she complained to the Tower of Jewels.
“—What of the strike, and me being blacklisted, and getting typhoid down
in Australia, and everything,” he went on. “And luck was with me on that
railroad. Why, I saw fellows fresh from the States pass out, some of
them not a week on their first run. If the diseases and the railroad
didn’t get them, then it was the Spiggoties got them. But it just wasn’t
my fate, even that time I rode my engine down to the bottom of a
forty-foot washout. I lost my fireman; and the conductor and the
Superintendent of Rolling Stock (who happened to be running down to Duran
to meet his bride) had their heads knifed off by the Spiggoties and
paraded around on poles. But I lay snug as a bug under a couple of feet
of tender coal, and they thought I’d headed for tall timber—lay there a
day and a night till the excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky. The
worst that happened to me was I caught a cold once, and another time had
a carbuncle. But the other fellows! They died like flies, what of
Yellow Jack, pneumonia, the Spiggoties, and the railroad. The trouble
was I didn’t have much chance to pal with them. No sooner’d I get some
intimate with one of them he’d up and die—all but a fireman named
Andrews, and he went loco for keeps.
“I made good on my job from the first, and lived in Quito in a ’dobe
house with whacking big Spanish tiles on the roof that I’d rented. And I
never had much trouble with the Spiggoties, what of letting them sneak
free rides in the tender or on the cowcatcher. Me throw them off?
Never! I took notice, when Jack Harris put off a bunch of them, that I
attended his funeral _muy pronto_—”
“Speak English,” the little woman beside him snapped.
“Sarah just can’t bear to tolerate me speaking Spanish,” he apologized.
“It gets so on her nerves that I promised not to. Well, as I was saying,
the goose hung high and everything was going hunky-dory, and I was piling
up my wages to come north to Nebraska and marry Sarah, when I run on to
Vahna—”
“The hussy!” Sarah hissed.
“Now, Sarah,” her towering giant of a husband begged, “I just got to
mention her or I can’t tell about the nugget.—It was one night when I was
taking a locomotive—no train—down to Amato, about thirty miles from
Quito. Seth Manners was my fireman. I was breaking him in to engineer
for himself, and I was letting him run the locomotive while I sat up in
his seat meditating about Sarah here. I’d just got a letter from her,
begging as usual for me to come home and hinting as usual about the
dangers of an unmarried man like me running around loose in a country
full of senoritas and fandangos. Lord! If she could only a-seen them.
Positive frights, that’s what they are, their faces painted white as
corpses and their lips red as—as some of the train wrecks I’ve helped
clean up.
“It was a lovely April night, not a breath of wind, and a tremendous big
moon shining right over the top of Chimborazo.—Some mountain that. The
railroad skirted it twelve thousand feet above sea level, and the top of
it ten thousand feet higher than that.
“Mebbe I was drowsing, with Seth running the engine; but he slammed on
the brakes so sudden hard that I darn near went through the cab window.