THE JUMPING BAMBOO
To enter an unknown, hostile town in the heart of New Guinea――to have
trouble over a village beauty, see a sorcerer restore the dead to life,
discover a huge diamond, and be involved in a sudden death――all within
twenty-four hours――is adventure enough for any one. Enough even for the
Marquis.
It was more than enough for me――I do not go out looking for adventures,
any more than I suppose a confectioner’s boy would go out looking for
cakes; and for the same reason――I am sick of them. I go looking for
gold, as a rule; sometimes I find it, and sometimes I don’t. If I do, I
can have a good time with it in Sydney or Melbourne; if I didn’t, I can
look again. But I never saw the adventure that you could pay in over
the counter of a bar, or at the box-office of a theater. Adventures
are a nuisance and a hindrance, so far as I have experienced them; and
as to going out actually hunting for them――――
Well, that was very much what the Marquis was doing. I will say this
much for him――he wasn’t any sort of a coward. I have seen him cry like
a girl; I have seen him shiver with excitement, but I never saw him
frightened, and I never saw him give anything the best of it. That
would have kept me in his company, even if the big diamond had not.
But now we were inevitably linked by that double interest. It shows
what a good sort the Marquis was, that we hadn’t a word’s dispute as to
who found it first, or whose was the right to claim it――if we ever got
it. We just assumed that, being in the thing together, it was “halves.”
I was to stick to the Marquis, and he to me, till the business was
through.
Good Lord! if we had had an idea of how much that meant!...
We were beginning to have an inkling, no more, the morning after the
poor little pretty girl had been buried. They carried her away, wrapped
in mats, to some burial place in the forest as soon as the daylight
broke, and we did not get a chance to examine the corpse, as I had
wished to do. That hurried look-over in her own house, when we found
her dead, had shown me that there was no obvious trace of injury; but I
thought her slightly swollen. I suspected poison――the sorcerers of New
Guinea are clever poisoners, and very ready to use their powers. But
nothing would ever tell us now.
Under ordinary circumstances I would have cleared out of the town
straight away, for I knew well that some kind of trouble was sure to
follow such an unlucky introduction. But with a diamond the size of
a chandelier-luster knocking about in a sorcerer’s bag, within a few
yards of us, we were not likely to move on in a hurry.
The Marquis and I, on the morning following that eventful night, held a
council of war in front of our tent where we could see all that went
on in the village street, and keep an eye on the whereabouts of Mo. So
long as we saw him, we knew that he could not be doing much mischief.
The bat-eared little man was not to be seen that day. (I had
ascertained through Koppi Koko that the dead girl was his promised
wife, and that she had told him, after watching the Marquis dance,
that she never would marry an ugly little thing like him.) He was the
sorcerer’s youngest and favorite brother, so the useful Koppi Koko
had found out――being very anxious to retrieve his character, and save
himself the hammering that he feared his desertion might bring down
on him. I did not touch him as it happened, not because I thought he
didn’t deserve it, but because I knew he would be more useful if he
were kept in suspense.
I thought his information interesting, but by no means reassuring. It
was too much to suppose that the matter would be allowed to end there.
The little man must have developed a worse grudge against us than
against his late unlucky fiancée, and if her fate was an example of
what we had got to expect, things were looking lively.
So I told the Marquis. We were sitting on the ground outside
our tent and watching the villagers moving about their daily
tasks――water-carrying, net-making, wood-cutting, fetching sago from the
forest, going out to dig yams, or to hunt pig. They looked peaceable
enough, and it was a peaceful, pretty scene, with the sun just rising
over the tall green palms and the smoke curling thin and blue from
under the deep thatch roofs.
But the old hand in New Guinea knows well――too well――that the Papuan is
most dangerous when, apparently, most friendly. The quiet aspect of the
place meant nothing――or worse.
“There is a feeling of sadness upon me this morning; I have the
blooming hump,” said the Marquis, his fat chin resting upon his pink
fat hand. “If you offered me the――the big diamond itself――in payment, I
could not dance a step.”
“That’s right. I reckon you’d better keep on feeling that way as long
as you can,” I said. “We’ve trouble enough on our hands without making
any more, and your accomplishments do seem to bring the thunder about
one’s ears, somehow. Mark, let’s talk it all out.”
“Perfectly,” said the Marquis, turning his full-moon face round upon me.
“Look here. We’ve got to get that diamond. And we’ve got to avoid being
poisoned, as the girl was. And we’ve got to get our carriers out safe
with ourselves, and be on our way to the coast inside of a day or so at
the most: it isn’t healthy to stop here too long.”
“Perfectly. That’s right.”
“Well, then, I reckon the sorcerer’s not going to go on keeping the
diamond where he did, because a blind baby could have seen that we
wanted it. We must get some idea of likely hiding-places――――”
“Hold a minute. Could we not buy it, quite simply?”
“No, Mark; I’ve tried.”
“Already?”
“This morning, while you were choosing between your heliotrope shirt
with the green tie, and your pink one with the blue, I went and had a
talk with the brute――I’d rather have pounded him to a jelly, but you
can’t always do the thing you ought to do, up-country in Papua. Told
him we had a fancy for his magic crystal; said you were a bit of a
sorcerer yourself, and would give a lot for it; offered all it was safe
to offer. No go; he didn’t rise to it worth twopence. You see, if I had
shown him all we had, he would simply have looted our stores and had us
knocked on the head――or tried to――and anything I offered didn’t tempt
him, in comparison with the stone. We have pretty short tucker, you
know, Mark――I’m not blaming you, for I know you couldn’t afford a big
outfit, but there it is: we can’t bid high even if it was safe to show
everything.”
“But, see then!” exclaimed the Marquis. “Could we not promise him?”
“Oh, you could promise him anything, but he wouldn’t believe you.
They never keep promises themselves, and can’t understand any one
else doing it. And I put it to you: Would even a white man part with
something he valued quite a lot, to a couple of strangers, just on a
promise?”
“No,” said the Marquis thoughtfully. “Assuredly he would say that a
bird in the bush blows nobody good, and laugh in your nose at you.”
“Well, what I propose to do is just to take the diamond any way we can
get it――steal it, if you like to say so――and when we get back to Port
Moresby, send him a big equivalent for it――a case of valuable goods of
some kind or other. That would be treating him as fairly as we can.
Anyhow, there is one thing we aren’t going to do, Marky, and that is,
leave a chunk of a rough diamond you could break a man’s head with
knocking loose about Kata-Kata in a sorcerer’s bag.”
“I am all of accord with you――no blooming fear!” said the Marquis.
“But, Flint, there is one thing that I must not forget, even on account
of the diamond――my seek for the occult. Can we not get this Mo to show
us more things of his magic?”
“If Mo doesn’t intend to show you more of his ‘magic’ without being
asked or wanted, you may call me a yellow Chow,” I said. “Don’t you
worry about that; you’ll get all you want, I reckon.”
We had left the tent now, as it was growing very hot in the village,
and we were walking along the bank of the river that ran close beside
the street. It was a pretty river, shallow and foamy, and full of big
rocks covered with moss and fern. Here and there you could see a pink
or purple orchid, and the cocoanuts cast wonderful shadows on the pools.
Just where the shadow was deepest and coolest something stirred in the
brown of the water――something that was brown itself and that glittered
with wet. It was Mo, bathing.
I pulled the Marquis back into the shade. “This is luck!” I whispered.
“The village is quiet; we can very likely get into Mo’s own house, and
have a look round. Come on as quick as you can.”
... How still the wide brown street was, under the terrible mid-day
sun! Noon is the lonely hour in Papua, when the heat is at its worst;
no man stirs about who is not compelled to do so. The women were in the
yam fields, taking their mid-day rest from toil beneath the shelter of
the bush. The men were loafing about somewhere in the depths of the
forest, pretending to hunt. In the town itself there were only a few
old people and children, all asleep. The main street was a river of
white fire; the shadows beneath the long-legged houses were like pools
of tar. Not a dog stirred out from shelter. Not a footstep rustled or a
palm-sheath floor gave forth a creak. It was undoubtedly the moment.
We knew where Mo’s house was――a fine building with a high-gabled roof,
and an extraordinary amount of ornament in the way of carved birds and
crocodiles, and fringes of waving fiber. We scuttled up the ladder
silently and swiftly, like two thieves, and dodged in under the low
door. Inside, the house was high and cool and empty. A pleasant amber
light filtered down from somewhere in the lofty roof; but there were no
windows, and the door was buried in the overhanging thatch. Straining
our eyes, we looked about us.... Mats, wooden sleeping-pillows shaped
like alligators; lime gourds carved and poker-worked; tall shields with
devilish faces carved upon them; a string of human skulls, extending
from the gable to the floor; a dagger carved from a thigh-bone;
dancing-masks made in the semblance of sharks and birds and kangaroos;
arrows; pineapple-shaped stone clubs; long, barked, ebony spears....
In one corner hung the sorcerer’s great feather bonnet, taken off for
bathing; his ugly human-hand locket was tidily laid away on a rafter.
The thick bamboo that we had seen him carrying like a wand lay on the
floor――tightly corked up. But what interested us more than anything was
the big charm-bag, hung on the wall, and bursting full.
We had it down in a moment, and tumbled the things out on the floor,
tossing them recklessly here and there, in the search for our
wonderful stone. I took the opportunity of looking at all the quartz
crystals it contained――there were a good many――and opening all the
little banana-leaf parcels, hoping to find another diamond in the
absence of our first discovery, which (I saw almost at once) was not
there. But there was nothing.
This did not surprise me much, for Koppi Koko had told me (under
pressure of certain threats) that the crystal, which was well known
to all the natives, had been the property of innumerable sorcerers
from time to time, and had, in all probability, passed about over
half Papua. Nothing could be more impossible, in that country of
Babel-dialects, than to find out where the stone had originally come
from. However, if we could only get hold of it, I was not bothering
much about anything else.
“It seems to me,” said the Marquis, drawing himself erect and kicking
aside the bag with his foot, “that our friend, Monsieur Mo, is not such
a fool as he glitters.”
[Illustration:
_I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder
and out in the street almost before the Marquis_]
“That’s right,” I answered, looking round again. Rolled-up
mats?――gourds?――clay water-pots? Impossible to say. At all events, we
might――――
“My God, Flint!” said the Marquis, in a low, horrified voice. “My God
of Gods, look at that!”
The flimsy flooring shook as he bounded back toward the door. I jumped
back with him――and then looked.
The bamboo was rolling about on the floor, and trying to stand on its
end!
We stood with our backs against the thatch by the door, breathing very
hard, and staring still harder. The thing kept on jumping and rolling.
It was rolling toward us.
I have never been called a nervous man; but I was down the ladder and
out in the street almost before the Marquis. It has always seemed to me
a special Providence that we did not meet, and stick, in the door.
We were scarcely out, and beginning to feel a little foolish――I, for
one, had made up my mind already to go back and investigate the thing,
sorcery, trick, or whatever it was――when we saw the tall, wet figure of
Mo coming up through the trees from the river. It did not seem a happy
time to continue our investigations, so we made for the tent, trying
to look as if we had only been out for a stroll, and (I dare say)
succeeding just about as well as a couple of small boys caught coming
away from the fruit garden.
“No go,” I said, flinging myself down on the pile of sacks inside our
tent. “Mark, we’ll have a smoke and a game of cards, and then we’ll go
to sleep.”
“What for, to sleep?” asked the Marquis.
“Because I don’t propose to sleep much tonight――nor will you. It seems
to me that things are given to happening here at night, and I intend to
keep a look-out instead.”
“We will sleep, then,” agreed my companion. And we did, after our smoke
and our game――all through the burning afternoon, until the sun began
to drop behind the cocoanuts, and the leather-necks commenced their
evening squawking and squabbling, and the smoke of supper fires stole
out, smelling pleasant and peaceful and homey and everything that it
particularly was not――here in the heart of cannibal Papua, in the
sorcerer’s town.
When we woke up we were thoroughly rested, for we had slept long and
deep, after our broken rest the night before. I called up Koppi Koko,
and bade him get the supper ready. The Marquis yawned, stretched, and
sat up on his mat.
“Hallo!” I said. “There’s another of your singlets going; you won’t
have enough clothes to carry you back to Port Moresby, at this rate.”
For the Marquis, being big and fat, stretched his clothes terribly,
and, in consequence, they were wearing very fast.
“I do feel like a cool window in my back; have a look, kindly,” he
said, trying to see over his own shoulder.
I looked at his back. “Mark,” I said, “take off your singlet and look
at it. I don’t like this.”
I had to peel him out of it, for it had shrunk and was tight. When he
was clear, and had the garment on his knee, he gave it one glance and
then looked at me.
“My friend, as I said yesterday, we are in deep waters,” he remarked.
“This, while I lay asleep, has been cut. This cut, it has taken out a
piece, and the piece is the same size as――――”
“As the piece out of the girl’s belt,” I finished.
We looked at each other; the leather-necks squawked outside; the dogs
of the village began that peculiarly mournful, wolf-like howling that
native dogs always do set up about sunset.
“And the girl, the little beautiful, that night she died,” observed
the Marquis. He whistled softly to himself: an air I did not know――a
crying, sobbing sort of tune it was, and not calculated to raise any
one’s spirits if they had needed it――which I should have thought the
Marquis’ might.
“See, I will dance her requiem,” he said. “Perhaps my own, good Flint.
One never knows.”
Singing the air gently to himself――I can not describe how mournful
and calling-you-to-come-back it sounded, or how the horrid wailing
of the native dogs chimed in and became a part――he danced, in the
twelve-by-fourteen space of the tent.... I have seen something like
it in the Islands, when the warriors were dancing for the funeral of
a great dead chief――something, but not so good. It was grief, and
death, and despair put into motion, and translated, by the Marquis’
huge limbs, into a language that even the Papuans themselves would have
understood. All, too, as lightly as――as――well, as the feathers waving
in the wind upon a hearse.
When he had done he sat down, and smiles broke out all over his pink,
fat face.
“Good, eh?” he said. “That was a funeral dance of prehistoric Crete,
that I found among the buried carvings of the palace of Minos, which
they have lately――――”
“Come back,” I said. “This isn’t ancient Crete, it’s modern New Guinea,
and we’re in a hole. Mark, I propose, for tonight, that we let on to go
to sleep, but don’t――and then we’ll see what happens. As for supper,
I’m going out to cook that myself. I’m not taking any chances just now.”
“As you wish,” said the Marquis. “But you can not deny that it is all
most interesting.”
“Oh, very――damned――interesting,” I said. “I hope it doesn’t get any
more so. I’d like a little boredom for a change, if you ask me.” And I
went to cook the supper――not that I thought it really necessary, but
just――in case. One does a lot of things for that reason, in the queer
places of Papua.
We had a little coffee in our stores, and I brewed a billy-can full,
for I did not want any mistakes made about going to sleep. At the usual
hour we put out our light and lay down on the rough sack-beds I had
fixed up. The Marquis and I were near enough together to touch each
other if we wished. We turned in all standing, even to our boots. The
carriers were camped in a little hut close by; our stores were mostly
piled up in the tent, and we had our revolvers strapped round our
waists.
It was arranged that we were to take watch and watch about, for two
hours each, and that the man on watch should sit on his bed, not lie.
I could guess the time easily enough, and the Marquis thought he could
also. In any case, there should be no striking of matches.
The night wore on but slowly. At first there were constant stirrings
in the village――talking, squabbling, moving here and there; then the
dogs began to fight; then some of the roosters waked up and crowed,
and roused out the rest a good many hours too soon. But by degrees the
town settled to rest. I had taken the first watch; had lain down――not
to sleep――through the Marquis’; and now my second watch was well on its
way.
After a time it grew so still that the silence seemed to tingle, in
the way it does when you are awake at night and listening. There was
not a breath of wind, no moon, and few stars; the weather had been
heavy and thunderous all day, and the sky was clouded. In the triangle
made by the opening of the tent I could see――when I had been straining
my eyes into the dark for quite a long time――the dim grayness of the
village street, and the black bank of palms beyond.
I say there was not a sound, nor anything to see. Seated there on my
rough bed, every sense alert, I might have been alone at the end of the
world, with the last man dead beside me.
But it came to me, not suddenly, quietly and surely, that we were not
alone. I do not know whence the first warning conveyed itself; it came,
however, and I found myself listening and looking expectantly, with a
certainty in my mind that something was going to happen.
Sight and hearing are not the only senses that a bushman can use to
good effect. I smelt, cautiously and without noise.
There was the marshy odor of the river behind the palms. There was
the indescribable smell of a native village――dry, sun-baked earth,
insanitary whiffs of decaying stuff, the hay-like odor of old thatch.
And something more――the smell of cocoanut-oil warm and fresh, and very
near.
I remembered that the Papuan always oils himself after bathing. I
recollected having seen Mo in the river.
Very cautiously I stretched out and touched the Marquis’ hand. He was
awake――he was not the kind of man to sleep when he ought to have been
waking, for all his flummery――and his hand met mine with a squeeze. We
listened hard. There was not the ghost of a sound, but the smell grew
stronger, passed, and died away. And, just after, the faintest possible
shadow crossed the gray of the road.
We listened again, and I for one did not like it, for I knew that
whatever Mo had meant to do was done. Then, suddenly, the Marquis’ hand
caught hold of mine in a grip that was painful.
“Flint, a light!” was all he said. I had my matches in my hand, and I
struck one almost before he had done speaking. The Marquis was sitting
up on his bed, looking white and drawn.
“It is the ‘touch of death,’” he said. “I have felt it――cold as――as
nothing but death is cold.” He sat like a statue; his hand had let mine
go and was gripping tight to the edge of the bed. I was up in a moment,
and looking all round the tent. There was not a thing to be seen.
Having searched, I put out the light again and waited. It is not a good
thing to make yourself a target for possible arrows shot in the dark. I
could hear the Marquis breathing heavily.
Then, in a moment, he gave a terrible cry, leaped right on to my bed,
and brought it and me and himself down to the earth together in one
tremendous crash.
There was no use trying to “lie low” after that. I struggled out
somehow, lit the hurricane lamp, and asked the Marquis, who was sitting
half-dazed in the midst of the ruins, what he supposed had happened.
He was still deadly pale.
“I don’t know, my Flint,” he answered, looking at me with the fixed
expression of a man who has had a shock. “I know only that the hand of
death itself was laid upon me, there in the dark――first it has touched
my arm, and then my heart where my clothes were open for the heat.”
“How do you know it was the hand of death?” I asked, getting a bottle
of whisky out of one of our swags. “How do you know you weren’t asleep
after all, and having a bad dream?”
“I was not asleep; you will remember I clasped your hand. And that
thing was death, I know, because in these plains where it is all the
time hot there is nothing cold at all, and that which has touched me
was the cold of death.”
“Rats! You aren’t dead. Have some whisky,” I said, pouring it out.
“Yes, I am escaped; that’s what I don’t comprehend,” said the Marquis
thoughtfully. “That is good whisky; that warms the muscles of the
heart. Flint――” with a sudden revival―― “you can not but must allow,
this is the very devil interesting!”
* * * * *
We were rather sleepy in the morning, I remember――the effect of the
coffee having worn off. I had an idea or two as to what course we had
best follow for the capturing of the stone; but nothing could be done
before midday. So I and the Marquis kept watch for each other to sleep,
and we got in a good three hours apiece before noon.
When the white blaze of twelve o’clock was searing the palms once
more, and the village folk were away or asleep, and Mo had gone down
to the river again to bathe, I beckoned the Marquis out. We wore the
rubber-soled shoes that one uses for easy bush-walking, and made not a
sound as we passed along the street. The shadows of the palms were ink
upon white paper; the dogs slept beneath the houses; the tame cockatoos
and parrots drowsed upon the eaves. The heat was awful: it seemed as
though the village in its stillness lay dead beneath a torrent of white
fire from the implacable sky.
We gained the sorcerer’s house without being seen and slipped into the
cool interior, gasping like creatures that find water after drought.
“What a day!” choked the Marquis, in a whisper――we feared, somehow,
to talk aloud. “You may have thankfulness that you are as lean as a
herring, Flint. If you had my weight――――”
He sat down on the floor to cool off――and it promptly gave way beneath
him. I hauled him out with some trouble, and set him in a safe place.
“I believe that’s a trap-door,” I said, looking at it. “Seems to be
meant for a hurried get-away in case of trouble. Not a bad idea. I
wonder how he came to leave it open.”
We looked about us. The bamboo that had given us such an unpleasant
start on the day before was nowhere to be seen. Otherwise the house
was the same. Still――whether it was the effect of the alarm in the
night, or simply the discouragement that always treads close on the
heels of excited hope――I did not feel that we were nearer our goal.
Rather, I felt farther away.
“We must look,” said the Marquis, who evidently did not share my
discouragement. “You will look one side of the house, I will look the
other, and before Mo will come back――――”
He did not finish the sentence, for up the long ladder leading to the
door (Mo’s house was the highest in the village) came, at that moment,
a slowly creaking step.
With one consent we dived through the trap-door and pulled it flat
after us. Then we halted under the house, listening and looking eagerly.
“If he doesn’t see us――” I whispered.
“I think he can not,” answered the Marquis, cautiously. “But we can see
him through these cracks――What chance! What chance!”
... It is long ago now, but to this day I am vexed when I think how
easily the greasy old villain took us in――how readily we dropped into
his snare. That Mo had been perfectly aware of our visit the day
before, that he guessed we would come again, had returned early in
order to hurry us out, had left the trap-door open in order that we
might go through it and watch him underneath the house――had indeed
planned the whole thing from start to finish――never occurred to either
of us at the time, though, indeed, we might have guessed that the chief
sorcerer of the chief town of sorcery-riddled Kata-Kata was not likely
to be quite so simple as he seemed.
At any rate, there we stood in the dark under the house, looking
breathlessly through the cracks in the floor, and watching Mo. And Mo
knew it, little as we thought it.
First of all, he took the long bamboo off his breast――it had
accompanied him to the river today, seemingly――uncorked the top, and
looked cautiously in. We could not see what was inside. He put his palm
over the opening, and with the other hand drew toward him one of the
large clay water-pots standing on the floor. These water-pots narrowed
to a mouth about four inches across; some of them had baked-clay lids
on the top. He chose one that had a lid, uncovered it, and dropped
something in.
Where had he produced it from? The man was like a conjurer. I had not
seen anything in his hand a moment before――but it was undoubtedly
the great diamond that he dropped into the jar. I even heard it
tinkle against the hard clay bottom as it fell. The Marquis, in
his excitement, pinched my arm so hard that it was black and blue
afterward. I knew he was simply boiling with corked-up speech, and I
wondered how long he could hold on.
Now the sorcerer, after a hurried look round the empty house (he really
was a splendid actor), removed his palm from the top of the bamboo,
and inverted it over the jar. We could see by his motions that he was
pouring something from the one to the other; it seemed to come slowly,
and take some time. When he had done, he put the clay cover on the jar,
shook the empty bamboo, and threw it down.
After this he produced a small trade looking-glass, oiled his hair, put
feathers in it, painted his face, took his bag of charms off the wall,
slung a tall bow on his shoulder, and whistled to his dog. It was plain
that he was going hunting――probably courting also, the two occupations
often mixing and overlapping a good deal in the Papuan forests.
We waited. We waited till Mo and his dog and his bow and his bag had
disappeared down the village street, pale and unsubstantial in the
glaring overhead sun. We waited another ten minutes after. Silence: the
village slept beneath the fiery enchantment of noon; the birds were
voiceless in the forest; the giant leaves hung still.
“Now!” I said, and we crept back through the trap-door.
For a moment we stood silent in the lonely house, the scene of Satan
alone knew what deviltries. The hideous dancing-masks grinned at us
from the walls; the skulls showed their teeth. The sorcerer’s bamboo
lay on the floor, empty, open, defying us to solve its mystery. And at
our very feet stood the water-jar, its wide-splayed mouth covered only
by the lid of baked clay.
Was the prize really in our grasp at last? I hesitated, stretched out a
hand, and took it back――stopped, listened....
There certainly was a sound somewhere. It was a familiar sound, and yet
I could not say exactly what it was. It was near and it was not near.
It was――What in the name of the devil was it?
“See, Flint, I tire of this!” shouted the Marquis suddenly and
imprudently. (I judge that he had heard it too, and it and other things
had “got on his nerves,” as women say.) “Faint heart gathers no
moss――here goes for France, my brave!” He made a dart at the jar and
snatched off the lid.
Do you know what is the swiftest thing in the animal kingdom? Did you
ever see a brown flash of lightning get up from the ground and strike?
I know, and I had seen just such a thing before. So I didn’t have to
stop and think.... The Marquis got my punch fair in the chest; it
doubled him up and sent him half across the house. My right hand being
thus occupied, I hadn’t time to attend to my left and it got in the
way. It was on the first joint of the third finger that the snake got
me. He held on like a bulldog.
Now, I must have knocked the wind pretty well out of the Marquis,
in throwing him out of the way as I did; but you never saw a man
recover quicker. He was up on his feet before one would have time to
tell of it. He had got a great steel clearing-knife down from the
wall (evidently Mo did a bit of coastal trading) in two seconds or
thereabouts, and had slashed the snake clean through before I got it
shaken off. I pulled its head away then and threw it on the floor. I
had had a look at it and saw that there was only one thing to do.
“Give me the knife,” I said. The Marquis gave it and, as I am alive, he
was crying as he did.
There was nothing to make a fuss about. I had the top joint of the
finger off in two clean chops. And there is no finger a man can spare
better than the left-hand third.
I tied it up and put a sort of tourniquet on. Then I remembered the
diamond――it was not so strange that I’d forgotten it for a minute or
two, all things considered――and put my right hand into the jar that had
lately held such an unpleasant occupant. I pulled out――not the diamond,
but a bit of common stone tied up in a leaf.
The sorcerer had us again. No doubt he had palmed the jewel, somehow or
other, when setting his trap.
I was feeling a bit sick, what with loss of blood and the small amount
of poison that had got into circulation before I took the finger off.
I was sure now that we had not a chance of getting the stone――as things
were. Mo was thoroughly awake, and there was nothing for it but to
retreat――for the present.
“Wait till I come back with an R. M. and a score of armed native
constabulary, you heathen beast,” I said to myself. “Just wait. You’ve
earned what you’ll get――richly earned it.”
“We’ve got to go, Mark,” I said aloud. “Get the carriers together for
me as quick as you can; it’s the best time, with all the people away.
If we stay on, there’ll be a row tonight as sure as Fate, and the
Government don’t like unofficial people to do its killing for it. We’ll
come back, and give them what-for with the chill off. Oh, Lord, don’t
do that!”
For the Marquis was hanging round my neck――a pretty solid weight――and
had already kissed me loudly on both cheeks.
“My brave retainer!” he said, with tears in his voice (I reckoned
he meant preserver, but it was all one), “what can I ever do to
recompense you of my life that you have saved?”
“I told you what to do just now,” I said. “Get the carriers under way,
and sharp. I want to drink some ammonia.”
I did, and it did me good; I was able to walk almost as well as usual
in half an hour. I slung my arm up in a long sheaf of grass, and we
set off from the village as hard as we could, keeping a look-out for
ambushes all the way. But the noonday hush lay on all the forest and
the track, and there was not a sign of life.
When we were an hour or two away, I halted for a rest; the bite was
getting at me a little, and I felt slightly giddy, though I knew by now
that there was no danger.
“Tell me, what was all this thing that has happened?” demanded the
Marquis, dropping on a log at my side and fanning himself with his hat.
“I am bursting of curiosity, but I would not disturb you.”
“Well,” I said, “if I had known Kata-Kata as I know other districts in
New Guinea, none of them would have happened at all. The whole thing
might have been foreseen. It’s true I had heard silly yarns about
this part of the country, but I didn’t believe them, they seemed so
exaggerated――and they quite went out of my head, anyhow, for I was
hardly more than a kid when I did hear them. But I’ve remembered them
today.”
“What were they, then?”
“People――natives, I mean――said that the Kata-Kata sorcerers know how
to tame snakes and make them like dogs, and that the brutes would bite
any one their masters told them to. The sorcerers would get a bit of a
man’s clothing, taken next his skin where it had the scent of his body,
and worry and tease the snake with it so that it would know the smell,
and hate it. And then they said the sorcerer would let loose his snake
at night in the house of the man he wanted to kill, and the brute would
bite him, and the sorcerer would get it and take it home again before
he was seen.”
“_Taubada_, true you talk,” broke in Koppi Koko, who was squatting
on the ground close to us, chewing betel-nut most contentedly. “That
puri-puri man, he take him snake all the time ’long one bamboo, carry
him along him chest.”
“That accounts for the milk of the cocoanut,” I said. “What a pair of
babies to be scared by a stick with a snake in it, hopping about! Of
course, the thing heard people and was trying to get loose.”
“Yes, and the snake――the cold snake――that was the touch of death last
night――not?”
“Very nearly,” I said. “The general smash you made saved your life,
Marky.”
“And the little beautiful, and the piece cut out of her belt――yes, now
one sees all,” said the Marquis, musingly. “Flint, this is a devil of a
country of yours; but, on my soul, it is interesting. What adventures!”
“I take no stock in adventures,” I said. “I’d rather keep out of them.
But I reckon, somehow, there’s more ahead before we get that stone.”
III
THE EMPTY DIVING
DRESS