and Sona’s story did not vary from the version that was generally
current about the island. She thought, on the whole, that she believed
in it. There was no doubt that many of the white people gave it credit,
though a few of them declared the man must have died in a drunken fit.
A paper in Australia had published an account of the mysterious
incident, and the spiritualistic set in Sydney were so deeply interested
in it that a letter of inquiry from a psychical research society had
been sent up to the island, inquiring into the matter. But it happened
that the trader to whom the letter was addressed had committed suicide a
good many months earlier, and excellent onions and pumpkins (much
appreciated by his successor) were growing green upon his grave by the
time the letter reached the island. So the inquiry was never answered.
Yes, on the whole, Vaiti thought she believed the story. That a similar
result would follow in the case of a “papalangi” (white man) who
followed the deceased magician’s example she did not, however, believe.
She thought it very likely, however, that mischief of one kind or
another would result.... And if the worst should chance to come
about....
Vaiti took another cigar.
“What does your misinari say?” she asked. “He is not the right sort of
misinari, it is true, but still, he should know more about devils than
the traders.”
“Our good misinari was not here when it happened,” replied Sona in a
pious tone. “It was the doctor misinari. Our own good misinari says
that devils cannot do harm to any but bad men.”
Vaiti reflected, her eyes on the floor. She really had some respect, in
an odd, upside-down kind of way, for missionary opinion. It is bred in
the bone with the younger generation of Eastern Pacific islanders.
Donahue was certainly a very bad man. She did not think she had ever
met any one much worse. Perhaps the badness, balanced against the
whiteness, might swing down the scale. At any rate....
“Hear me, Sona!” she said, in a voice of command. “I have bought you
to-night, and you belong to me. There will be more to pay by-and-by if
you do as I tell you. But I would warn you to be careful, for you will
not find it pleasant lying on the shore down there, with your inside
hanging out like a gutted fish, and the crabs coming running to eat you
before you are dead, as you will if you make any mistakes. Listen,
then, very carefully.”
“I listen, I listen!” cried Sona.
*CHAPTER XIV*
*HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK*
When the trader’s wife came in next morning with Vaiti’s cup of tea, she
was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.
“Poor young dear,” said the good woman, “lying there so sweet and
innocent, sleeping like a baby! It’s only the good heart that rests like
that. I don’t believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her.
Here, dear, wake up,” she called gently. “Your good papa is ever so
much better this morning, and looking for you to come in. And it is
Sunday morning, and a nice cool day.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Vaiti politely, broad awake at once. “May
I asking you one little hot water? I like get up and go to turch.”
Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise, was not one of the
amusements patronised by the nameless white man of the bush. Indeed,
his amusements, such as they were, were so far confined to the native
villages of the interior that very few of the other whites had seen him.
He was not good for trade, having no money and possessing no credit—that
was all they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about him.
There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in the shanty owned by
the Mua trader, away up in the bush, when the unknown man walked into
the store that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the same time
showing a sovereign he held in his hand. He was dressed in a pitiful
mass of rags, none too clean, but he looked well pleased with himself,
and was more than half drunk. Fortune had apparently found him out at
last.
The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not see why he should not
have a share in anything good that happened to be available about that
lonely and unprofitable district. So he welcomed the stranger in with
much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.
The newcomer had no objection in the world to come in and share the
trader’s good tinned meats and new yeast bread, and he made himself very
much at home without pressing. The trader, who had a private store of
consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the spirits freely. He was
curious, and he believed in the old saw of “Wine in, truth out.” A
couple of friends who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were
equally curious about the derelict’s sudden access to fortune, did their
disinterested best to help, and the bottle went merrily round. The Niué
traders are a sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had mixed
with them so little that he did not know this, and consequently was not
put on his guard by the unusual conviviality. Indeed, he was by no
means the same active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare
of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago. A white man cannot
“live native” without going downhill very fast, and Donahue was nearly
at the bottom.
So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew quarrelsome, and
pathetic, and finally affectionate and confidential, in well-defined
stages, while all the time the other men kept sober, or nearly so. The
Mua trader in particular hardly touched his glass. But Donahue, once so
wary, never saw, and chattered on.
Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay calico for the native’
girls, and a little tinned meat and flour, and half-a-dozen various
trifles that brought the score up to about a pound. Here the guest came
to a pause and fingered his coin.
“Oh, well, if that’s all you have, you won’t get any more goods
to-night. Thanks,” said the trader, putting out his hand.
The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money. He would pay
to-morrow, he said. He was not going to leave himself without money
again—not if he knew it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the
trader wouldn’t send up the goods without the cash to-night, why, he
might keep his condemned rubbish, and his customer would go elsewhere.
Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and sent a boy away with
the stuff. It would always be easy to bully him out of it afterwards,
he thought, and there was no arguing with a drunken man’s whim.
Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to find out where the
money had come from.
Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded readily. It was the silly
old chap who lived down on Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was
an uncle of a girl who was a friend of his. The old chap had a notion
that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden somewhere on the island,
but in a place he was afraid to touch, so he had forked out a good
British sovereign, and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and
share the money with him. Donahue was to keep the earnest money for his
trouble, if nothing came of it, and if anything did turn up he was to
take half. So he was going, that very night—the sooner the better.
Natives were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of nothing.
“Thasser-sort-er-man I am,” he finished thickly, looking round for
applause.
He did not get it. The traders one and all burst out laughing. The
story of the doubloons, they told him, was a very old one in the island,
and only the newest of new chums thought of believing it. It was quite
true that the natives, who were perfect magpies for hoarding, did
possess among them a certain number of doubloons, which came from
God-knows-where—for the coinage used in the island was British—and true
also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of them every now and
then in the course of business, always with some mystery attached to it,
and some reluctance to part with the coin. But the Resident
Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the missionary too,
had long been certain that the store was merely the remains of some
ship-wrecking raid of past days, about which the Niuéans were now
ashamed to speak. They were great misers, and it would like enough be
another generation before all the hoarded coins had come to light and
passed through the traders’ hands. But hidden treasure in Niué! Pf!
If old Sona had been giving away money, he must be either going mad with
age or (more likely) up to something. He was the cutest old fox on Niué,
and that was saying something. Why, when he had come into that very
store to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man who lived in a
waist-cloth and nothing else wanted with a darning-needle he hadn’t
explained), it had been all the trader could do to prevent his picking
up half-a-dozen odds and ends. That was what he was like if one ever
took an eye off him; and he wouldn’t even pay for the needle, either,
till the trader had threatened to hammer him unless he forked out. Take
his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money, he meant to have it
back—somehow. And the treasure was poppy-cock.
Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage, and he rose with
tipsy dignity from his seat.
“I considdle you no gennlemen,” he said scornfully. “For half a Chile
dorrer I’d” ... He mentioned what he would do, in gross and in detail,
to the assembled company for the small sum mentioned.
“Kick the dirty brute out,” said the Alofi trader disgustedly. “It’s
easy to see what sort of company that carrion has kept.”
Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising agility, and lurching
rapidly up the forest pathway towards his house. His legs were always
the last thing to fail him.
He knew very well that he had had too much, and when he reached his hut
he proceeded to sober himself by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket
of water. Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea, drank
it, and set off considerably sobered.
It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he stumbled badly now and
then as he went over the graves that lay thick about the edges of the
path. Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué, where they
like to keep an eye on their dead and see that they are lying quiet in
their graves—a thing that no one considers at all a matter of course.
Some of the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon them;
others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil, fans—all to amuse the
ghost and keep it quiet; and one or two looked ghostly enough to scare a
nervous person as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains
thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious relatives.
Every grave was completed by a solid mass of concrete, weighing anything
from several hundredweight to a ton. It was not the fault of any Niuéan
if his dead relatives “walked.”
Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the thought of his keenness in
over-reaching the old witch-doctor. He had used him for his own
purposes through the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked
out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the discredit, not he.
He would use him again now, and in another way. It was in the daytime
that Sona had arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump. At night, he
said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight no one would
linger there who could help it. He at least would never dare to disturb
the big tomb in which the money was hidden and call down the anger of
the devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him who feared
nothing. So next morning, very early, the white man who was so brave
would meet him, and they would open the big, cracked tomb together—the
tomb that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before, though
there were one or two besides himself who suspected that it was just
there the mysterious foreign coins had come from years ago, and that
there were a good many left.
Thus the witch-doctor. And Donahue had assented eagerly, and gone off
with his earnest money. And, on arriving at his hut, he had looked out
an old axe that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged a drop
of oil from the nearest native house. For he meant to go that very
night, and take everything there was for himself. Who was to prove it?
Which was just the course of action that Sona had calculated very
confidently on his taking.
It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in the hot season, and
the great rains were out. Donahue could not light his lamp when he came
to the clump of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost in
the pitch dark. It thundered soon after, and the sky was split from
pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of lightning. In one of these,
Donahue, feeling about the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something
moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand. It made his throat
turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt his hair prickle curiously. But
he went on groping. Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller
one, but for one horrible moment he thought he had been struck, for
something stinging streaked across his face and gave him an ugly thrill.
But it passed immediately, and he began groping again—groping with both
hands, in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to apply
the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like some deadly graveyard
mole, breathless, with beads of warm sweat coursing down his face
through the streams of chilly rain.... He was fighting—fighting he knew
not what and knew not why—but he was fighting, for all that, fighting
hard, with the stone falling away from his nerveless hands, and the
breath in his body sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and the
sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending itself with another
and far louder sound that was battering madly in his ears. He was
fighting with—— Christ!—it was Death!
The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly and completely.
The dawn shot up in the east, wet and red, and cast long, black, ghostly
shadows, set shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the palm-trunks and
the grave. But Donahue did not want the light. The axe lay untouched
beside him; and he lay over the tomb, dead. And his face was black and
his body was all contorted.
It was barely daylight yet when something small and slow crept out of
the bush, and began hunting carefully near the corpse. It could not
find what it wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered
pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before it desisted. Then
it put its claws into the dead man’s pockets, and hunted through them,
before it finally disappeared down the road.
* * * * *
The Mua trader was at his door when a howling procession of natives came
into the village, carrying the white man’s corpse to his home. The
Alofi trader, who had found the body, stepped aside to speak. After the
tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader asked slowly:
“Did you think of searching his pockets? A dead man’s a dead man—and
I’d not be sorry to have the money he owed me, for the natives will have
taken the goods by this time.”
“They were empty when I found him. Queer, for I was the first to see
him,” said the other. “I found this thing on the road close by, though.
Do you recognise it?”
It was the trader’s darning-needle, stuck neatly into the end of a tiny,
arrow-like reed, and stained at the point with some dark sticky stuff.
The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked at it closely.
Then he walked to his kitchen, and, watched by the Alofi trader, threw
the thing into the fire.
“That’s what I think of it,” he said. “My boy, I traded in the worst of
the Solomons for three years. I’m the only man on the island that knows
that thing, bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons, in the
black-birding days. There’s no wanderers like the Nuié men.”
“Do you think——” began the other.
“I think,” said the Mua trader, “that old Sona has got his money back.”
* * * * *
The schooner _Sybil_ had no reason for staying longer in Niué, for the
business of the ship was done, and the captain was quite well again. A
picture of perfect beauty the _Sybil_ made, as she stood out of Alofi
roads in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch of cloth
straining to the merry breeze. Niué was sorry to part with Vaiti, for
she had interested the island considerably, and her beauty had, as
usual, won her more admiration than her temper deserved. Every one, on
parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the _Sybil_ and her owners
again.
For all that, and all that, the schooner came back no more. Vaiti had
won the game at last, but she never willingly mentioned Niué again.
*CHAPTER XV*
*THE CALAMITY OF CORAL BAY*
The wide, still waters of Coral Bay were turning glassy pink under the
sunset afterglow. The _Sybil’s_ boat, rowing rapidly towards the
schooner, left as it went a long, ugly flaw upon the stainless crystal
of the sea. It was very still, and the night was coming down.
Even in that uncertain twilight the colour of the boat as it cut through
the pale-hued water stood out strange and sinister. Most boats are
white in tropic seas: the _Sybil’s_ had always been snowy as her own
graceful hull. Now they were vivid scarlet, and the ship herself had a
wide band of scarlet round her counter and flew a scarlet flag at her
masthead.
Any islander could have told you at a glance what these things meant.
The schooner was “recruiting”—conveying natives from the wild cannibal
islands of the New Hebrides to the Queensland sugar plantations. Ten
pounds a head was paid for the men on their arrival, and it was politely
supposed that these ignorant heathen had one and all been duly engaged
under a contract to serve three years, at a wage of five pounds a year.
How much they understood of contracts, times, and wages—where and what
they thought Australia might be—and what were the means employed to get
them on board the ship, nobody asked. Saxon was not the man to answer,
if any one had.
Why he had temporarily deserted the pleasant, peaceful islands of the
Eastern Pacific, and gone “black-birding” in the wild and wicked and
fever-smitten groups of the West, was Saxon’s own affair. Doubtless he
had his reasons; possibly they were satisfactory. But there is reason
to believe that about Apia and Papeëte at this time he was characterised
as a (double-adjectived) liar, and an (impolite expression) villain, who
was running away because it was (adverbially) unsafe for him to stay and
risk his (past participled) neck among (adjective) men. This is not the
history of Captain Saxon; at least, not all of it—from such a recital as
that may the eleven thousand virgins of Saint Mudie, and the Blessed
Young Person of Sixteen, deliver us! It must therefore be enough to say
that, for sufficient reasons, he decided to shift his headquarters to
the New Hebrides, and immediately did so, leaving behind him certain
unsettled scores with which this tale has nothing to do.
He was not new to the islands or the natives, having been one of the
most notorious of the sandal-wood traders in years gone by. The
sandal-wood was gone, and of the money he had made by it not even the
memory remained. But there was still something in the labour trade, and
Saxon liked the lawless atmosphere of the place.
Vaiti remembered the islands well, though she had only been there as a
child, and she was glad to have the excitement of the change. When the
recruiting boat left the schooner (guarded by a companion, full of armed
men) and drew up on the beach to negotiate with the islanders, she
always sat in the stern, with a very smart little Winchester rifle
across her knees, and took command, if her father was not there. Very
often he was not; for the New Hebrideans have long memories, and there
was many a spot where Saxon had run up so many bad, black scores in the
sandal-wood days that he could not hope for success—or safety, if he had
minded that—in going ashore. Harris usually took command of the
covering boat, a post of comparative security that suited him very well,
while the dauntless Vaiti managed all the real business, and seldom came
back with an empty bag.
They had good luck, on the whole, and not many narrow escapes. Coasting
round the notorious island of Mallicolo, or Malekula, they succeeded in
obtaining about forty natives in a week or two. Saxon was well pleased,
and began to count up his profits. Also he began to drink again.
Then it was that trouble came, as trouble generally does, out of a
fair-seeming sky.
Half-a-dozen natives had been given up to the missionaries on the far
side of Malekula, to hand over to the British gunboat _Alligator_, which
at that time was cruising about the islands, intent on punishing the
Malekulans for a more than usually atrocious murder of whites. The
tribes to whom the culprits belonged had taken fright, and were anxious
to save themselves at any cost. The missionaries, when asked by them,
consented to take charge of the prisoners, but refused to keep them any
longer than could possibly be helped, since they did not consider
themselves judges or gaolers. At this point the _Sybil_ turned up, and
the missionaries, hearing she was bound for Parrot Harbour, where the
_Alligator_ was certain to call, put the men on board, and engaged Saxon
to hand them over to the Parrot Harbour mission, receiving from the
missionaries there the price of their passage, which the man-of-war
would doubtless refund.
Saxon, understanding that he had not to meet the _Alligator_, undertook
the job at a rather excessive rate, and brought the prisoners over as
agreed. But, finding that the Parrot Harbour mission refused to pay the
passage money until the man-of-war arrived, he went into a towering rage
and abused everybody. Wait for the _Alligator_? Not he! He had
something else to do, and he wouldn’t have any condemned gunboat that
ever sailed the sanguinary waters of the Pacific poking her nose into
any of his business. He had been promised the money as soon as he
arrived, and the money or its equivalent he meant to have or know the
reason why. Off he went, with much more whisky in his brain than was
compatible with sober judgment—off out to sea again, taking with him the
whole six prisoners, and openly declaring his intention either to hold
them for ransom or run them down to the Queensland plantations, as
seemed most convenient.
Next day the _Alligator_ appeared, and her commander was informed of the
occurrence. Saxon, master of a miserable labour schooner, had run off
with prisoners of war belonging to a British gunboat, defied the
Imperial Government, and offered open disrespect to the Crown! The
commander, an iron-faced, flinty-eyed disciplinarian of the toughest
school, and a first-class pepper-pot into the bargain, nearly choked
with rage and indignation. Out went the _Alligator_ again, full steam
ahead, making the captain’s dainty suite of cabins tremble like an
ill-set jelly in the stern as the ship forged along at thirteen knots an
hour, blackening the crystal sky with trails of smoke, and looking
implacably about for the offending _Sybil_. That delinquent of the high
seas was farther off than might have been supposed. The wind, though
light, was in her favour, and she had managed to get round the far end
of the island, and down the other side to Coral Bay, eighty miles off,
before the _Alligator_ came up with her, late in the afternoon. Once
caught, her shrift was short. The prisoners were at once transferred;
Saxon was arrested and taken, still half drunk, on board the man-of-war,
and his ship was confiscated, “just to learn him,” as Gray (who had
viewed his captain’s proceedings with sour and silent disapproval
throughout) was heard to remark, not without a little I-told-you-so
satisfaction.
And so it came about that Vaiti, returning with the boat from an
unsuccessful recruiting expedition, and not in the best of humours to
begin with, was met on her arrival with extremely unpleasant news.
“We’re took, cap’n; we’re took, ma’am!” shouted Gray over the bulwarks,
as the boat nosed along the side of the schooner. He added a rapid
account of the calamity, in which he was careful to suppress his
personal feelings of triumph.