Back on board, Van Horn immediately hove short, hoisted sail, broke out
the anchor, and filled away for the ten-mile beat up the lagoon to
windward that would fetch Somo. On the way, he stopped at Binu to greet
Chief Johnny and land a few Binu returns. Then it was on to Somo, and to
the end of voyaging for ever of the _Arangi_ and of many that were aboard
of her.
Quite the opposite to his treatment at Langa-Langa was that accorded Van
Horn at Somo. Once the return boys were put ashore, and this was
accomplished no later than three-thirty in the afternoon, he invited
Chief Bashti on board. And Chief Bashti came, very nimble and active
despite his great age, and very good-natured--so good-natured, in fact,
that he insisted on bringing three of his elderly wives on board with
him. This was unprecedented. Never had he permitted any of his wives to
appear before a white man, and Van Horn felt so honoured that he
presented each of them with a gay clay pipe and a dozen sticks of
tobacco.
Late as the afternoon was, trade was brisk, and Bashti, who had taken the
lion's share of the wages due to the fathers of two boys who had died,
bought liberally of the _Arangi's_ stock. When Bashti promised plenty of
fresh recruits, Van Horn, used to the changeableness of the savage mind,
urged signing them up right away. Bashti demurred, and suggested next
day. Van Horn insisted that there was no time like the present, and so
well did he insist that the old chief sent a canoe ashore to round up the
boys who had been selected to go away to the plantations.
"Now, what do you think?" Van Horn asked of Borckman, whose eyes were
remarkably fishy. "I never saw the old rascal so friendly. Has he got
something up his sleeve?"
The mate stared at the many canoes alongside, noted the numbers of women
in them, and shook his head.
"When they're starting anything they always send the Marys into the
bush," he said.
"You never can tell about these niggers," the captain grumbled. "They
may be short on imagination, but once in a while they do figure out
something new. Now Bashti's the smartest old nigger I've ever seen.
What's to prevent his figuring out that very bet and playing it in
reverse? Just because they've never had their women around when trouble
was on the carpet is no reason that they will always keep that practice."
"Not even Bashti's got the savvee to pull a trick like that," Borckman
objected. "He's just feeling good and liberal. Why, he's bought forty
pounds of goods from you already. That's why he wants to sign on a new
batch of boys with us, and I'll bet he's hoping half of them die so's he
can have the spending of their wages."
All of which was most reasonable. Nevertheless, Van Horn shook his head.
"All the same keep your eyes sharp on everything," he cautioned. "And
remember, the two of us mustn't ever be below at the same time. And no
more schnapps, mind, until we're clear of the whole kit and caboodle."
Bashti was incredibly lean and prodigiously old. He did not know how old
he was himself, although he did know that no person in his tribe had been
alive when he was a young boy in the village. He remembered the days
when some of the old men, still alive, had been born; and, unlike him,
they were now decrepit, shaken with palsy, blear-eyed, toothless of
mouth, deaf of ear, or paralysed. All his own faculties remained
unimpaired. He even boasted a dozen worn fangs of teeth, gum-level, on
which he could still chew. Although he no longer had the physical
endurance of youth, his thinking was as original and clear as it had
always been. It was due to his thinking that he found his tribe stronger
than when he had first come to rule it. In his small way he had been a
Melanesian Napoleon. As a warrior, the play of his mind had enabled him
to beat back the bushmen's boundaries. The scars on his withered body
attested that he had fought to the fore. As a Law-giver, he had
encouraged and achieved strength and efficiency within his tribe. As a
statesman, he had always kept one thought ahead of the thoughts of the
neighbouring chiefs in the making of treaties and the granting of
concessions.
And with his mind, still keenly alive, he had but just evolved a scheme
whereby he might outwit Van Horn and get the better of the vast British
Empire about which he guessed little and know less.
For Somo had a history. It was that queer anomaly, a salt-water tribe
that lived on the lagoon mainland where only bushmen were supposed to
live. Far back into the darkness of time, the folk-lore of Somo cast a
glimmering light. On a day, so far back that there was no way of
estimating its distance, one, Somo, son of Loti, who was the chief of the
island fortress of Umbo, had quarrelled with his father and fled from his
wrath along with a dozen canoe-loads of young men. For two monsoons they
had engaged in an odyssey. It was in the myth that they circumnavigated
Malaita twice, and forayed as far as Ugi and San Cristobal across the
wide seas.
Women they had inevitably stolen after successful combats, and, in the
end, being burdened with women and progeny, Somo had descended upon the
mainland shore, driven the bushmen back, and established the salt-water
fortress of Somo. Built it was, on its sea-front, like any island
fortress, with walled coral-rock to oppose the sea and chance marauders
from the sea, and with launching ways through the walls for the long
canoes. To the rear, where it encroached on the jungle, it was like any
scattered bush village. But Somo, the wide-seeing father of the new
tribe, had established his boundaries far up in the bush on the shoulders
of the lesser mountains, and on each shoulder had planted a village. Only
the greatly daring that fled to him had Somo permitted to join the new
tribe. The weaklings and cowards they had promptly eaten, and the
unbelievable tale of their many heads adorning the canoe-houses was part
of the myth.
And this tribe, territory, and stronghold, at the latter end of time,
Bashti had inherited, and he had bettered his inheritance. Nor was he
above continuing to better it. For a long time he had reasoned closely
and carefully in maturing the plan that itched in his brain for
fulfilment. Three years before, the tribe of Ano Ano, miles down the
coast, had captured a recruiter, destroyed her and all hands, and gained
a fabulous store of tobacco, calico, beads, and all manner of trade
goods, rifles and ammunition.
Little enough had happened in the way of price that was paid. Half a
year after, a war vessel had poked her nose into the lagoon, shelled Ano
Ano, and sent its inhabitants scurrying into the bush. The landing-party
that followed had futilely pursued along the jungle runways. In the end
it had contented itself with killing forty fat pigs and chopping down a
hundred coconut trees. Scarcely had the war vessel passed out to open
sea, when the people of Ano Ano were back from the bush to the village.
Shell fire on flimsy grass houses is not especially destructive. A few
hours' labour of the women put that little matter right. As for the
forty dead pigs, the entire tribe fell upon the carcasses, roasted them
under the ground with hot stones, and feasted. The tender tips of the
fallen palms were likewise eaten, while the thousands of coconuts were
husked and split and sun-dried and smoke-cured into copra to be sold to
the next passing trader.
Thus, the penalty exacted had proved a picnic and a feast--all of which
appealed to the thrifty, calculating brain of Bashti. And what was good
for Ano Ano, in his judgment was surely good for Somo. Since such were
white men's ways who sailed under the British flag and killed pigs and
cut down coconuts in cancellation of blood-debts and headtakings, Bashti
saw no valid reason why he should not profit as Ano Ano had profited. The
price to be paid at some possible future time was absurdly
disproportionate to the immediate wealth to be gained. Besides, it had
been over two years since the last British war vessel had appeared in the
Solomons.
And thus, Bashti, with a fine fresh idea inside his head, bowed his
chief's head in consent that his people could flock aboard and trade.
Very few of them knew what his idea was or that he even had an idea.
Trade grew still brisker as more canoes came alongside and black men and
women thronged the deck. Then came the recruits, new-caught, young,
savage things, timid as deer, yet yielding to stern parental and tribal
law and going down into the _Arangi's_ cabin, one by one, their fathers
and mothers and relatives accompanying them in family groups, to confront
the big fella white marster, who wrote their names down in a mysterious
book, had them ratify the three years' contract of their labour by a
touch of the right hand to the pen with which he wrote, and who paid the
first year's advance in trade goods to the heads of their respective
families.
Old Bashti sat near, taking his customary heavy tithes out of each
advance, his three old wives squatting humbly at his feet and by their
mere presence giving confidence to Van Horn, who was elated by the stroke
of business. At such rate his cruise on Malaita would be a short one,
when he would sail away with a full ship.
On deck, where Borckman kept a sharp eye out against danger, Jerry
prowled about, sniffing the many legs of the many blacks he had never
encountered before. The wild-dog had gone ashore with the return boys,
and of the return boys only one had come back. It was Lerumie, past whom
Jerry repeatedly and stiff-leggedly bristled without gaining response of
recognition. Lerumie coolly ignored him, went down below once and
purchased a trade hand-mirror, and, with a look of the eyes, assured old
Bashti that all was ready and ripe to break at the first favourable
moment.
On deck, Borckman gave this favourable moment. Nor would he have so
given it had he not been guilty of carelessness and of disobedience to
his captain's orders. He did not leave the schnapps alone. Be did not
sense what was impending all about him. Aft, where he stood, the deck
was almost deserted. Amidships and for'ard, gamming with the boat's
crew, the deck was crowded with blacks of both sexes. He made his way to
the yam sacks lashed abaft the mizzenmast and got his bottle. Just
before he drank, with a shred of caution, he cast a glance behind him.
Near him stood a harmless Mary, middle-aged, fat, squat, asymmetrical,
unlovely, a sucking child of two years astride her hip and taking
nourishment. Surely no harm was to be apprehended there. Furthermore,
she was patently a weaponless Mary, for she wore no stitch of clothing
that otherwise might have concealed a weapon. Over against the rail, ten
feet to one side, stood Lerumie, smirking into the trade mirror he had
just bought.
It was in the trade mirror that Lerumie saw Borckman bend to the
yam-sacks, return to the erect, throw his head back, the mouth of the
bottle glued to his lips, the bottom elevated skyward. Lerumie lifted
his right hand in signal to a woman in a canoe alongside. She bent
swiftly for something that she tossed to Lerumie. It was a long-handled
tomahawk, the head of it an ordinary shingler's hatchet, the haft of it,
native-made, a black and polished piece of hard wood, inlaid in rude
designs with mother-of-pearl and wrapped with coconut sennit to make a
hand grip. The blade of the hatchet had been ground to razor-edge.
As the tomahawk flew noiselessly through the air to Lerumie's hand, just
as noiselessly, the next instant, it flew through the air from his hand
into the hand of the fat Mary with the nursing child who stood behind the
mate. She clutched the handle with both hands, while the child, astride
her hip, held on to her with both small arms part way about her.
Still she waited the stroke, for with Borckman's head thrown back was no
time to strive to sever the spinal cord at the neck. Many eyes beheld
the impending tragedy. Jerry saw, but did not understand. With all his
hostility to niggers he had not divined the attack from the air. Tambi,
who chanced to be near the skylight, saw, and, seeing, reached for a Lee-
Enfield. Lerumie saw Tambi's action and hissed haste to the Mary.
Borckman, as unaware of this, his last second of life, as he had been of
his first second of birth, lowered the bottle and straightened forward
his head. The keen edge sank home. What, in that flash of instant when
his brain was severed from the rest of his body, Borckman may have felt
or thought, if he felt or thought at all, is a mystery unsolvable to
living man. No man, his spinal cord so severed, has ever given one word
or whisper of testimony as to what were his sensations and impressions.
No less swift than the hatchet stroke was the limp placidity into which
Borckman's body melted to the deck. He did not reel or pitch. He
_melted_, as a sack of wind suddenly emptied, as a bladder of air
suddenly punctured. The bottle fell from his dead hand upon the yams
without breaking, although the remnant of its contents gurgled gently out
upon the deck.
So quick was the occurrence of action, that the first shot from Tambi's
musket missed the Mary ere Borckman had quite melted to the deck. There
was no time for a second shot, for the Mary, dropping the tomahawk,
holding her child in both her hands and plunging to the rail, was in the
air and overboard, her fall capsizing the canoe which chanced to be
beneath her.
Scores of actions were simultaneous. From the canoes on both sides
uprose a glittering, glistening rain of mother-of-pearl-handled tomahawks
that descended into the waiting hands of the Somo men on deck, while the
Marys on deck crouched down and scrambled out of the fray. At the same
time that the Mary who had killed Borckman leapt the rail, Lerumie bent
for the tomahawk she had dropped, and Jerry, aware of red war, slashed
the hand that reached for the tomahawk. Lerumie stood upright and loosed
loudly, in a howl, all the pent rage and hatred, of months which he had
cherished against the puppy. Also, as he gained the perpendicular and as
Jerry flew at his legs, he launched a kick with all his might that caught
and lifted Jerry squarely under the middle.
And in the next second, or fraction of second, as Jerry lifted and soared
through the air, over the barbed wire of the rail and overboard, while
Sniders were being passed up overside from the canoes, Tambi fired his
next hasty shot. And Lerumie, the foot with which he had kicked not yet
returned to the deck as again he was in mid-action of stooping to pick up
the tomahawk, received the bullet squarely in the heart and pitched down
to melt with Borckman into the softness of death.
Ere Jerry struck the water, the glory of Tambi's marvellously lucky shot
was over for Tambi; for, at the moment he pressed trigger to the
successful shot, a tomahawk bit across his skull at the base of the brain
and darkened from his eyes for ever the bright vision of the sea-washed,
sun-blazoned tropic world. As swiftly, all occurring almost
simultaneously, did the rest of the boat's crew pass and the deck became
a shambles.
It was to the reports of the Sniders and the noises of the death scuffle
that Jerry's head emerged from the water. A man's hand reached over a
canoe-side and dragged him in by the scruff of the neck, and, although he
snarled and struggled to bite his rescuer, he was not so much enraged as
was he torn by the wildest solicitude for Skipper. He knew, without
thinking about it, that the _Arangi_ had been boarded by the hazily
sensed supreme disaster of life that all life intuitively apprehends and
that only man knows and calls by the name of "death." Borckman he had
seen struck down. Lerumie he had heard struck down. And now he was
hearing the explosions of rifles and the yells and screeches of triumph
and fear.
So it was, helpless, suspended in the air by the nape of the neck, that
he bawled and squalled and choked and coughed till the black, disgusted,
flung him down roughly in the canoe's bottom. He scrambled to his feet
and made two leaps: one upon the gunwale of the canoe; the next,
despairing and hopeless, without consideration of self, for the rail of
the _Arangi_.
His forefeet missed the rail by a yard, and he plunged down into the sea.
He came up, swimming frantically, swallowing and strangling salt water
because he still yelped and wailed and barked his yearning to be on board
with Skipper.
But a boy of twelve, in another canoe, having witnessed the first black's
adventure with Jerry, treated him without ceremony, laying, first the
flat, and next the edge, of a paddle upon his head while he still swam.
And the darkness of unconsciousness welled over his bright little love-
suffering brain, so that it was a limp and motionless puppy that the
black boy dragged into his canoe.
In the meantime, down below in the _Arangi's_ cabin, ere ever Jerry hit
the water from Lerumie's kick, even while he was in the air, Van Horn, in
one great flashing profound fraction of an instant, had known his death.
Not for nothing had old Bashti lived longest of any living man in his
tribe, and ruled wisest of all the long line of rulers since Somo's time.
Had he been placed more generously in earth space and time, he might well
have proved an Alexander, a Napoleon, or a swarthy Kahehameha. As it
was, he performed well, and splendidly well, in his limited little
kingdom on the leeward coast of the dark cannibal island of Malaita.
And such a performance! In cool good nature in rigid maintenance of his
chiefship rights, he had smiled at Van Horn, given royal permission to
his young men to sign on for three years of plantation slavery, and
exacted his share of each year's advance. Aora, who might be described
as his prime minister and treasurer, had received the tithes as fast as
they were paid over, and filled them into large, fine-netted bags of
coconut sennit. At Bashti's back, squatting on the bunk-boards, a slim
and smooth-skinned maid of thirteen had flapped the flies away from his
royal head with the royal fly-flapper. At his feet had squatted his
three old wives, the oldest of them, toothless and somewhat palsied, ever
presenting to his hand, at his head nod, a basket rough-woven of pandanus
leaf.
And Bashti, his keen old ears pitched for the first untoward sound from
on deck, had continually nodded his head and dipped his hand into the
proffered basket--now for betel-nut, and lime-box, and the invariable
green leaf with which to wrap the mouthful; now for tobacco with which to
fill his short clay pipe; and, again, for matches with which to light the
pipe which seemed not to draw well and which frequently went out.
Toward the last the basket had hovered constantly close to his hand, and,
at the last, he made one final dip. It was at the moment when the Mary's
axe, on deck, had struck Borckman down and when Tambi loosed the first
shot at her from his Lee-Enfield. And Bashti's withered ancient hand,
the back of it netted with a complex of large up-standing veins from
which the flesh had shrunk away, dipped out a huge pistol of such remote
vintage that one of Cromwell's round-heads might well have carried it or
that it might well have voyaged with Quiros or La Perouse. It was a
flint-lock, as long as a man's forearm, and it had been loaded that
afternoon by no less a person than Bashti himself.
Quick as Bashti had been, Van Horn was almost as quick, but not quite
quick enough. Even as his hand leapt to the modern automatic lying out
of it's holster and loose on his knees, the pistol of the centuries went
off. Loaded with two slugs and a round bullet, its effect was that of a
sawed-off shotgun. And Van Horn knew the blaze and the black of death,
even as "Gott fer dang!" died unuttered on his lips and as his fingers
relaxed from the part-lifted automatic, dropping it to the floor.
Surcharged with black powder, the ancient weapon had other effect. It
burst in Bashti's hand. While Aora, with a knife produced apparently
from nowhere, proceeded to hack off the white master's head, Bashti
looked quizzically at his right forefinger dangling by a strip of skin.
He seized it with his left hand, with a quick pull and twist wrenched it
off, and grinningly tossed it, as a joke, into the pandanus basket which
still his wife with one hand held before him while with the other she
clutched her forehead bleeding from a flying fragment of pistol.
Collaterally with this, three of the young recruits, joined by their
fathers and uncles, had downed, and were finishing off the only one of
the boat's crew that was below. Bashti, who had lived so long that he
was a philosopher who minded pain little and the loss of a finger less,
chuckled and chirped his satisfaction and pride of achievement in the
outcome, while his three old wives, who lived only at the nod of his
head, fawned under him on the floor in the abjectness of servile
congratulation and worship. Long had they lived, and they had lived long
only by his kingly whim. They floundered and gibbered and mowed at his
feet, lord of life and death that he was, infinitely wise as he had so
often proved himself, as he had this time proved himself again.
And the lean, fear-stricken girl, like a frightened rabbit in the mouth
of its burrow, on hands and knees peered forth upon the scene from the
lazarette and knew that the cooking-pot and the end of time had come for
her.