For many days, tied by the stick, Jerry remained Lamai's prisoner. It
was not a happy time, for the house of Lumai was a house of perpetual
bickering and quarrelling. Lamai fought pitched battles with his
brothers and sisters for teasing Jerry, and these battles invariably
culminated in Lenerengo taking a hand and impartially punishing all her
progeny.
After that, as a matter of course and on general principles, she would
have it out with Lumai, whose soft voice always was for quiet and repose,
and who always, at the end of a tongue-lashing, took himself off to the
canoe house for a couple of days. Here, Lenerengo was helpless. Into
the canoe house of the stags no Mary might venture. Lenerengo had never
forgotten the fate of the last Mary who had broken the taboo. It had
occurred many years before, when she was a girl, and the recollection was
ever vivid of the unfortunate woman hanging up in the sun by one arm for
all of a day, and for all of a second day by the other arm. After that
she had been feasted upon by the stags of the canoe house, and for long
afterward all women had talked softly before their husbands.
Jerry did discover liking for Lamai, but it was not strong nor
passionate. Rather was it out of gratitude, for only Lamai saw to it
that he received food and water. Yet this boy was no Skipper, no Mister
Haggin. Nor was he even a Derby or a Bob. He was that inferior
man-creature, a nigger, and Jerry had been thoroughly trained all his
brief days to the law that the white men were the superior two-legged
gods.
He did not fail to recognize, however, the intelligence and power that
resided in the niggers. He did not reason it out. He accepted it. They
had power of command over other objects, could propel sticks and stones
through the air, could even tie him a prisoner to a stick that rendered
him helpless. Inferior as they might be to the white-gods, still they
were gods of a sort.
It was the first time in his life that Jerry had been tied up, and he did
not like it. Vainly he hurt his teeth, some of which were loosening
under the pressure of the second teeth rising underneath. The stick was
stronger than he. Although he did not forget Skipper, the poignancy of
his loss faded with the passage of time, until uppermost in his mind was
the desire to be free.
But when the day came that he was freed, he failed to take advantage of
it and scuttle away for the beach. It chanced that Lenerengo released
him. She did it deliberately, desiring to be quit of him. But when she
untied Jerry, he stopped to thank her, wagging his tail and smiling up at
her with his hazel-brown eyes. She stamped her foot at him to be gone,
and uttered a harsh and intimidating cry. This Jerry did not understand,
and so unused was he to fear that he could not be frightened into running
away. He ceased wagging his tail, and, though he continued to look up at
her, his eyes no longer smiled. Her action and noise he identified as
unfriendly, and he became alert and watchful, prepared for whatever
hostile act she might next commit.
Again she cried out and stamped her foot. The only effect on Jerry was
to make him transfer his watchfulness to the foot. This slowness in
getting away, now that she had released him, was too much for her short
temper. She launched the kick, and Jerry, avoiding it, slashed her
ankle.
War broke on the instant, and that she might have killed Jerry in her
rage was highly probable had not Lamai appeared on the scene. The stick
untied from Jerry's neck told the tale of her perfidy and incensed Lamai,
who sprang between and deflected the blow with a stone poi-pounder that
might have brained Jerry.
Lamai was now the one in danger of grievous damage, and his mother had
just knocked him down with a clout alongside the head when poor Lumai,
roused from sleep by the uproar, ventured out to make peace. Lenerengo,
as usual, forgot everything else in the fiercer pleasure of berating her
spouse.
The conclusion of the affair was harmless enough. The children stopped
their crying, Lamai retied Jerry with the stick, Lenerengo harangued
herself breathless, and Lumai departed with hurt feelings for the canoe
house where stags could sleep in peace and Marys pestered not.
That night, in the circle of his fellow stags, Lumai recited his sorrows
and told the cause of them--the puppy dog which had come on the _Arangi_.
It chanced that Agno, chief of the devil devil doctors, or high priest,
heard the tale, and recollected that he had sent Jerry to the canoe house
along with the rest of the captives. Half an hour later he was having it
out with Lamai. Beyond doubt, the boy had broken the taboos, and privily
he told him so, until Lamai trembled and wept and squirmed abjectly at
his feet, for the penalty was death.
It was too good an opportunity to get a hold over the boy for Agno to
misplay it. A dead boy was worth nothing to him, but a living boy whose
life he carried in his hand would serve him well. Since no one else knew
of the broken taboo, he could afford to keep quiet. So he ordered Lamai
forthright down to live in the youths' canoe house, there to begin his
novitiate in the long series of tasks, tests and ceremonies that would
graduate him into the bachelors' canoe house and half way along toward
being a recognized man.
* * * * *
In the morning, obeying the devil devil doctor's commands, Lenerengo tied
Jerry's feet together, not without a struggle in which his head was
banged about and her hands were scratched. Then she carried him down
through the village on the way to deliver him at Agno's house. On the
way, in the open centre of the village where stood the kingposts, she
left him lying on the ground in order to join in the hilarity of the
population.
Not only was old Bashti a stern law-giver, but he was a unique one. He
had selected this day at the one time to administer punishment to two
quarrelling women, to give a lesson to all other women, and to make all
his subjects glad once again that they had him for ruler. Tiha and
Wiwau, the two women, were squat and stout and young, and had long been a
scandal because of their incessant quarrelling. Bashti had set them a
race to run. But such a race. It was side-splitting. Men, women, and
children, beholding, howled with delight. Even elderly matrons and
greybeards with a foot in the grave screeched and shrilled their joy in
the spectacle.
The half-mile course lay the length of the village, through its heart,
from the beach where the _Arangi_ had been burned to the beach at the
other end of the sea-wall. It had to be covered once in each direction
by Tiha and Wiwau, in each case one of them urging speed on the other and
the other desiring speed that was unattainable.
Only the mind of Bashti could have devised the show. First, two round
coral stones, weighing fully forty pounds each, were placed in Tiha's
arms. She was compelled to clasp them tightly against her sides in order
that they might not roll to the ground. Behind her, Bashti placed Wiwau,
who was armed with a bristle of bamboo splints mounted on a light long
shaft of bamboo. The splints were sharp as needles, being indeed the
needles used in tattooing, and on the end of the pole they were intended
to be applied to Tiha's back in the same way that men apply ox-goads to
oxen. No serious damage, but much pain, could be inflicted, which was
just what Bashti had intended.
Wiwau prodded with the goad, and Tiha stumbled and wabbled in gymnastic
efforts to make speed. Since, when the farther beach had been reached,
the positions would be reversed and Wiwau would carry the stones back
while Tiha prodded, and since Wiwau knew that for what she gave Tiha
would then try to give more, Wiwau exerted herself to give the utmost
while yet she could. The perspiration ran down both their faces. Each
had her partisans in the crowd, who encouraged and heaped ridicule with
every prod.
Ludicrous as it was, behind it lay iron savage law. The two stones were
to be carried the entire course. The woman who prodded must do so with
conviction and dispatch. The woman who was prodded must not lose her
temper and fight her tormentor. As they had been duly forewarned by
Bashti, the penalty for infraction of the rules he had laid down was
staking out on the reef at low tide to be eaten by the fish-sharks.
As the contestants came opposite where Bashti and Aora his prime minister
stood, they redoubled their efforts, Wiwau goading enthusiastically, Tiha
jumping with every thrust to the imminent danger of dropping the stones.
At their heels trooped the children of the village and all the village
dogs, whooping and yelping with excitement.
"Long time you fella Tiha no sit 'm along canoe," Aora bawled to the
victim and set Bashti cackling again.
At an unusually urgent prod, Tiha dropped a stone and was duly goaded
while she sank to her knees and with one arm scooped it in against her
side, regained her feet, and waddled on.
Once, in stark mutiny at so much pain, she deliberately stopped and
addressed her tormentor.
"Me cross along you too much," she told Wiwau. "Bime by, close--"
But she never completed the threat. A warmly administered prod broke
through her stoicism and started her tottering along.
The shouting of the rabble ebbed away as the queer race ran on toward the
beach. But in a few minutes it could be heard flooding back, this time
Wiwau panting with the weight of coral stone and Tiha, a-smart with what
she had endured, trying more than to even the score.
Opposite Bashti, Wiwau lost one of the stones, and, in the effort to
recover it, lost the other, which rolled a dozen feet away from the
first. Tiha became a whirlwind of avenging fury. And all Somo went
wild. Bashti held his lean sides with merriment while tears of purest
joy ran down his prodigiously wrinkled cheeks.
And when all was over, quoth Bashti to his people: "Thus shall all women
fight when they desire over much to fight."
Only he did not say it in this way. Nor did he say it in the Somo
tongue. What he did say was in beche-de-mer, and his words were:
"Any fella Mary he like 'm fight, all fella Mary along Somo fight 'm this
fella way."