own small can. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with
implacable bitterness. He was a man who preferred to drink by himself.
Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played
twitches of mockery that caught Fatty’s eye. And Fatty, making sure
first that his rock-chunk was within reach, challenged.
“Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish? It’s your turn.”
The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty’s until he physically
betrayed uncomfortableness.
“I’ve lived a hard life,” Slim grated harshly. “What do I know about
love passages?”
“No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them,” Fatty
wheedled.
“And what of it?” Slim snarled. “It’s no reason for a gentleman to boast
of amorous triumphs.”
“Oh, go on, be a good fellow,” Fatty urged. “The night’s still young.
We’ve still some drink left. Delarouse and I have contributed our share.
It isn’t often that three real ones like us get together for a telling.
Surely you’ve got at least one adventure in love you aren’t ashamed to
tell about—”
Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to debate
whether or not he should brain the other. He sighed, and put back the
quoit.
“Very well, if you will have it,” he surrendered with manifest
reluctance. “Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution. And
right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the both of you
down when you were at your prime. Like you two, my beginnings were far
distant and different. That I am marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood
there is no discussion . . . unless either of you care to discuss the
matter now . . . ”
His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit. Neither of
his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his menace.
“It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the
island of Tagalag,” he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine
disappointment in that there had been no discussion. “But first I must
tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by
paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the
prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger
sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so
well known that she shall remain historically nameless. I was running
blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the
plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili—”
“It was you who cleaned out the entire population of—” Fatty exploded,
ere he could check his speech.
The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and flashed
back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.
“Proceed,” Fatty sighed. “I . . . I have quite forgotten what I was
going to say.”
“Beastly funny country over that way,” the narrator drawled with perfect
casualness. “You’ve read this Sea Wolf stuff—”
“You weren’t the Sea Wolf,” Whiskers broke in with involuntary
positiveness.
“No, sir,” was the snarling answer. “The Sea Wolf’s dead, isn’t he? And
I’m still alive, aren’t I?”
“Of course, of course,” Whiskers conceded. “He suffocated head-first in
the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back.”
“As I was saying—and I don’t like interruptions,” Bruce Cadogan Cavendish
proceeded, “it’s a beastly funny country over that way. I was at
Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but
that geologically doesn’t at all, for the Solomons are high islands.
Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia,
because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by
canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred.
The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically
speaking, resides in Taka-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof I
speak.
“It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing
beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory-nuts,
running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was
having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig. To the
westward it was fierce—funny little black kinky-heads, man-eaters the
last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling over with wealth—”
“Jack-pots?” Fatty queried. At sight of an irritable movement, he added:
“You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you.”
“They’re all head-hunters. Heads are valuable, especially a white man’s
head. They decorate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with them.
Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes. Whoever brings in a
white man’s head takes the pot. If there aren’t openers for a long time,
the pot grows to tremendous proportions. Beastly funny, isn’t it?
“I know. Didn’t a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? And didn’t I
win a pot myself? It was this way. We were lying at Lango-lui at the
time. I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my
boat-steerer. He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. He cut the
dead mate’s head off and sneaked ashore in the night, while I whanged
away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him. He opened the pot
with the mate’s head, and got it, too. Of course, next day I sent in a
landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the
loot.”
“How big was the pot?” Whiskers asked. “I heard of a pot at Orla worth
eighty quid.”
“To commence with,” Slim answered, “there were forty fat pigs, each worth
a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom.
That was two hundred dollars right there. There were ninety-eight
fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself.
And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. I split it four ways:
one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner,
and one-fourth to me as skipper. Johnny never complained. He’d never
had so much wealth all at one time in his life. Besides, I gave him a
couple of the mate’s old shirts. And I fancy the mate’s head is still
there decorating the canoe-house.”
“Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian,” Whiskers observed.
“But a lucrative burial,” Slim retorted. “I had to feed the rest of the
mate over-side to the sharks for nothing. Think of feeding an
eight-hundred-dollar head along with it. It would have been criminal
waste and stark lunacy.
“Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the westward.
And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki-Tiki, except that
I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour, and for
my manner of collecting them had two British ships of war combing the
Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to the westward thinking to
dispose of the lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar.
“Typhoon season. We caught it. The _Merry Mist_ was my schooner’s name,
and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon. I
never saw such seas. They pounded that stout craft to pieces, literally
so. The sticks were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to
match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst had passed, the
covering boards began to go. We just managed to repair what was left of
one boat and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went down barely
enough to get away. And we outfitted that boat in a hurry. The
carpenter and I were the last, and we had to jump for it as he went down.
There were only four of us—”
“Lost all the niggers?” Whiskers inquired.
“Some of them swam for some time,” Slim replied. “But I don’t fancy they
made the land. We were ten days’ in doing it. And we had a spanking
breeze most of the way. And what do you think we had in the boat with
us? Cases of square-face gin and cases of dynamite. Funny, wasn’t it?
Well, it got funnier later on. Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a
little salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit—enough to keep
us alive to Tagalag.
“Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island I’ve ever beheld. It shows
up out of the sea so as you can make its fall twenty miles off. It is a
volcano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a segment of the crater wall
broken out. This gives sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes a
fine sheltered harbour. And that’s all. Nothing lives there. The
outside and the inside of the crater are too steep. At one place,
inside, is a patch of about a thousand coconut palms. And that’s all, as
I said, saving a few insects. No four-legged thing, even a rat, inhabits
the place. And it’s funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts,
not even a coconut crab. The only meat-food living was schools of mullet
in the harbour—fattest, finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on.
“And the four of us landed on the little beach and set up housekeeping
among the coconuts with a larder full of dynamite and square-face. Why
don’t you laugh? It’s funny, I tell you. Try it some time.—Holland gin
and straight coconut diet. I’ve never been able to look a confectioner’s
window in the face since. Now I’m not strong on religion like Chauncey
Delarouse there, but I have some primitive ideas; and my concept of hell
is an illimitable coconut plantation, stocked with cases of square-face
and populated by ship-wrecked mariners. Funny? It must make the devil
scream.
“You know, straight coconut is what the agriculturists call an unbalanced
ration. It certainly unbalanced our digestions. We got so that whenever
hunger took an extra bite at us, we took another drink of gin. After a
couple of weeks of it, Olaf, a squarehead sailor, got an idea. It came
when he was full of gin, and we, being in the same fix, just watched him
shove a cap and short fuse into a stick of dynamite and stroll down
toward the boat.
“It dawned on me that he was going to shoot fish if there were any about;
but the sun was beastly hot, and I just reclined there and hoped he’d
have luck.
“About half an hour after he disappeared we heard the explosion. But he
didn’t come back. We waited till the cool of sunset, and down on the
beach found what had become of him. The boat was there all right,
grounded by the prevailing breeze, but there was no Olaf. He would never
have to eat coconut again. We went back, shakier than ever, and cracked
another square-face.
“The next day the cook announced that he would rather take his chance
with dynamite than continue trying to exist on coconut, and that, though
he didn’t know anything about dynamite, he knew a sight too much about
coconut. So we bit the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse, and
picked him a good fire-stick, while he jolted up with a couple more stiff
ones of gin.
“It was the same programme as the day before. After a while we heard the
explosion and at twilight went down to the boat, from which we scraped
enough of the cook for a funeral.
“The carpenter and I stuck it out two days more, then we drew straws for
it and it was his turn. We parted with harsh words; for he wanted to
take a square-face along to refresh himself by the way, while I was set
against running any chance of wasting the gin. Besides, he had more than
he could carry then, and he wobbled and staggered as he walked.
“Same thing, only there was a whole lot of him left for me to bury,
because he’d prepared only half a stick. I managed to last it out till
next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I got sufficient courage to
tackle the dynamite. I used only a third of a stick—you know, short
fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of a safety match.
That’s where I mended my predecessors’ methods. Not using the
match-head, they’d too-long fuses. Therefore, when they spotted a school
of mullet; and lighted the fuse, they had to hold the dynamite till the
fuse burned short before they threw it. If they threw it too soon, it
wouldn’t go off the instant it hit the water, while the splash of it
would frighten the mullet away. Funny stuff dynamite. At any rate, I
still maintain mine was the safer method.
“I picked up a school of mullet before I’d been rowing five minutes.
Fine big fat ones they were, and I could smell them over the fire. When
I stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick in the other, my knees
were knocking together. Maybe it was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the
weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was the result of all of them, but
at any rate I was all of a shake. Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick
to the dynamite. Then I did, heard the match-head splutter, and let her
go.
“Now I don’t know what happened to the others, but I know what I did. I
got turned about. Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw the
strawberry away and pop the stem into your mouth? That’s what I did. I
threw the fire-stick into the water after the mullet and held on to the
dynamite. And my arm went off with the stick when it went off. . . . ”
Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to mix himself a drink, but
found it empty. He stood up.
“Heigh ho,” he yawned, and started down the path to the river.
In several minutes he was back. He mixed the due quantity of river slush
with the alcohol, took a long, solitary drink, and stared with bitter
moodiness into the fire.
“Yes, but . . . ” Fatty suggested. “What happened then?”
“Oh,” sad Slim. “Then the princess married me, of course.”
“But you were the only person left, and there wasn’t any princess . . . ”
Whiskers cried out abruptly, and then let his voice trail away to
embarrassed silence.
Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire.
Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse looked at each other. Quietly,
in solemn silence, each with his one arm aided the one arm of the other
in rolling and tying his bundle. And in silence, bundles slung on
shoulders, they went away out of the circle of firelight. Not until they
reached the top of the railroad embankment did they speak.
“No gentleman would have done it,” said Whiskers.
“No gentleman would have done it,” Fatty agreed.
THE END
Glen Ellen, California,
_September_ 26, 1916.