"I"m trying not to."
"Oh, for that matter--" She tossed her head, opened her mouth to complete the retort, then changed her mind. "I shall go on with my history. Dad had practically nothing left, and he decided to return to the sea. He"d always loved it, and I half believe that he was glad things had happened as they did. He was like a boy again, busy with plans and preparations from morning till night. He used to sit up half the night talking things over with me. That was after I had shown him that I was really resolved to go along.
"He had made his start, you know, in the South Seas--pearls and pearl sh.e.l.l--and he was sure that more fortunes, in trove of one sort and another, were to be picked up. Cocoanut-planting was his particular idea, with trading, and maybe pearling, along with other things, until the plantation should come into bearing. He traded off his yacht for a schooner, the _Miele_, and away we went. I took care of him and studied navigation. He was his own skipper. We had a Danish mate, Mr. Ericson, and a mixed crew of j.a.panese and Hawaiians. We went up and down the Line Islands, first, until Dad was heartsick. Everything was changed. They had been annexed and divided by one power or another, while big companies had stepped in and gobbled land, trading rights, fishing rights, everything.
"Next we sailed for the Marquesas. They were beautiful, but the natives were nearly extinct. Dad was cut up when he learned that the French charged an export duty on copra--he called it medieval--but he liked the land. There was a valley of fifteen thousand acres on Nuka-hiva, half inclosing a perfect anchorage, which he fell in love with and bought for twelve hundred Chili dollars. But the French taxation was outrageous (that was why the land was so cheap), and, worst of all, we could obtain no labour. What kanakas there were wouldn"t work, and the officials seemed to sit up nights thinking out new obstacles to put in our way.
"Six months was enough for Dad. The situation was hopeless. "We"ll go to the Solomons," he said, "and get a whiff of English rule. And if there are no openings there we"ll go on to the Bismarck Archipelago. I"ll wager the Admiraltys are not yet civilized." All preparations were made, things packed on board, and a new crew of Marquesans and Tahitians shipped. We were just ready to start to Tahiti, where a lot of repairs and refitting for the _Miele_ were necessary, when poor Dad came down sick and died."
"And you were left all alone?"
Joan nodded.
"Very much alone. I had no brothers nor sisters, and all Dad"s people were drowned in a Kansas cloud-burst. That happened when he was a little boy. Of course, I could go back to Von. There"s always a home there waiting for me. But why should I go? Besides, there were Dad"s plans, and I felt that it devolved upon me to carry them out. It seemed a fine thing to do. Also, I wanted to carry them out. And . . . here I am.
"Take my advice and never go to Tahiti. It is a lovely place, and so are the natives. But the white people! Now Barabbas lived in Tahiti.
Thieves, robbers, and lairs--that is what they are. The honest men wouldn"t require the fingers of one hand to count. The fact that I was a woman only simplified matters with them. They robbed me on every pretext, and they lied without pretext or need. Poor Mr. Ericson was corrupted. He joined the robbers, and O.K."d all their demands even up to a thousand per cent. If they robbed me of ten francs, his share was three. One bill of fifteen hundred francs I paid, netted him five hundred francs. All this, of course, I learned afterward. But the _Miele_ was old, the repairs had to be made, and I was charged, not three prices, but seven prices.
"I never shall know how much Ericson got out of it. He lived ash.o.r.e in a nicely furnished house. The shipwrights were giving it to him rent-free.
Fruit, vegetables, fish, meat, and ice came to this house every day, and he paid for none of it. It was part of his graft from the various merchants. And all the while, with tears in his eyes, he bemoaned the vile treatment I was receiving from the gang. No, I did not fall among thieves. I went to Tahiti.
"But when the robbers fell to cheating one another, I got my first clues to the state of affairs. One of the robbed robbers came to me after dark, with facts, figures, and a.s.sertions. I knew I was ruined if I went to law. The judges were corrupt like everything else. But I did do one thing. In the dead of night I went to Ericson"s house. I had the same revolver I"ve got now, and I made him stay in bed while I overhauled things. Nineteen hundred and odd francs was what I carried away with me.
He never complained to the police, and he never came back on board. As for the rest of the gang, they laughed and snapped their fingers at me.
There were two Americans in the place, and they warned me to leave the law alone unless I wanted to leave the _Miele_ behind as well.
"Then I sent to New Zealand and got a German mate. He had a master"s certificate, and was on the ship"s papers as captain, but I was a better navigator than he, and I was really captain myself. I lost her, too, but it"s no reflection on my seamanship. We were drifting four days outside there in dead calms. Then the nor"wester caught us and drove us on the lee sh.o.r.e. We made sail and tried to clew off, when the rotten work of the Tahiti shipwrights became manifest. Our jib-boom and all our head- stays carried away. Our only chance was to turn and run through the pa.s.sage between Florida and Ysabel. And when we were safely through, in the twilight, where the chart shows fourteen fathoms as the shoalest water, we smashed on a coral patch. The poor old _Miele_ struck only once, and then went clear; but it was too much for her, and we just had time to clear away in the boat when she went down. The German mate was drowned. We lay all night to a sea-drag, and next morning sighted your place here."
"I suppose you will go back to Von, now?" Sheldon queried.
"Nothing of the sort. Dad planned to go to the Solomons. I shall look about for some land and start a small plantation. Do you know any good land around here? Cheap?"
"By George, you Yankees are remarkable, really remarkable," said Sheldon.
"I should never have dreamed of such a venture."
"Adventure," Joan corrected him.
"That"s right--adventure it is. And if you"d gone ash.o.r.e on Malaita instead of Guadalcanar you"d have been _kai-kai"d_ long ago, along with your n.o.ble Tahitian sailors."
Joan shuddered.
"To tell the truth," she confessed, "we were very much afraid to land on Guadalcanar. I read in the "Sailing Directions" that the natives were treacherous and hostile. Some day I should like to go to Malaita. Are there any plantations there?"
"Not one. Not a white trader even."
"Then I shall go over on a recruiting vessel some time."
"Impossible!" Sheldon cried. "It is no place for a woman."
"I shall go just the same," she repeated.
"But no self-respecting woman--"
"Be careful," she warned him. "I shall go some day, and then you may be sorry for the names you have called me."
CHAPTER VI--TEMPEST
It was the first time Sheldon had been at close quarters with an American girl, and he would have wondered if all American girls were like Joan Lackland had he not had wit enough to realize that she was not at all typical. Her quick mind and changing moods bewildered him, while her outlook on life was so different from what he conceived a woman"s outlook should be, that he was more often than not at sixes and sevens with her.
He could never antic.i.p.ate what she would say or do next. Of only one thing was he sure, and that was that whatever she said or did was bound to be unexpected and unsuspected. There seemed, too, something almost hysterical in her make-up. Her temper was quick and stormy, and she relied too much on herself and too little on him, which did not approximate at all to his ideal of woman"s conduct when a man was around.
Her a.s.sumption of equality with him was disconcerting, and at times he half-consciously resented the impudence and bizarreness of her intrusion upon him--rising out of the sea in a howling nor"wester, fresh from poking her revolver under Ericson"s nose, protected by her gang of huge Polynesian sailors, and settling down in Berande like any shipwrecked sailor. It was all on a par with her Baden-Powell and the long 38 Colt"s.
At any rate, she did not look the part. And that was what he could not forgive. Had she been short-haired, heavy-jawed, large-muscled, hard- bitten, and utterly unlovely in every way, all would have been well.
Instead of which she was hopelessly and deliciously feminine. Her hair worried him, it was so generously beautiful. And she was so slenderly and prettily the woman--the girl, rather--that it cut him like a knife to see her, with quick, comprehensive eyes and sharply imperative voice, superintend the launching of the whale-boat through the surf. In imagination he could see her roping a horse, and it always made him shudder. Then, too, she was so many-sided. Her knowledge of literature and art surprised him, while deep down was the feeling that a girl who knew such things had no right to know how to rig tackles, heave up anchors, and sail schooners around the South Seas. Such things in her brain were like so many oaths on her lips. While for such a girl to insist that she was going on a recruiting cruise around Malaita was positive self-sacrilege.
He always perturbedly harked back to her feminineness. She could play the piano far better than his sisters at home, and with far finer appreciation--the piano that poor Hughie had so heroically laboured over to keep in condition. And when she strummed the guitar and sang liquid, velvety Hawaiian _hulas_, he sat entranced. Then she was all woman, and the magic of s.e.x kidnapped the irritations of the day and made him forget the big revolver, the Baden-Powell, and all the rest. But what right, the next thought in his brain would whisper, had such a girl to swagger around like a man and exult that adventure was not dead? Woman that adventured were adventuresses, and the connotation was not nice. Besides, he was not enamoured of adventure. Not since he was a boy had it appealed to him--though it would have driven him hard to explain what had brought him from England to the Solomons if it had not been adventure.
Sheldon certainly was not happy. The unconventional state of affairs was too much for his conservative disposition and training. Berande, inhabited by one lone white man, was no place for Joan Lackland. Yet he racked his brain for a way out, and even talked it over with her. In the first place, the steamer from Australia was not due for three weeks.
"One thing is evident: you don"t want me here," she said. "I"ll man the whale-boat to-morrow and go over to Tulagi."
"But as I told you before, that is impossible," he cried. "There is no one there. The Resident Commissioner is away in Australia. Them is only one white man, a third a.s.sistant understrapper and ex-sailor--a common sailor. He is in charge of the government of the Solomons, to say nothing of a hundred or so n.i.g.g.e.rs--prisoners. Besides, he is such a fool that he would fine you five pounds for not having entered at Tulagi, which is the port of entry, you know. He is not a nice man, and, I repeat, it is impossible."
"There is Guvutu," she suggested.
He shook his head.
"There"s nothing there but fever and five white men who are drinking themselves to death. I couldn"t permit it."
"Oh thank you," she said quietly. "I guess I"ll start to-day.--Viaburi!
You go along Noa Noah, speak "m come along me."
Noa Noah was her head sailor, who had been boatswain of the _Miele_.
"Where are you going?" Sheldon asked in surprise.--"Vlaburi! You stop."
"To Guvutu--immediately," was her reply.
"But I won"t permit it."
"That is why I am going. You said it once before, and it is something I cannot brook."
"What?" He was bewildered by her sudden anger. "If I have offended in any way--"
"Viaburi, you fetch "m one fella Noa Noah along me," she commanded.
The black boy started to obey.