Villa"s eyes brightened with quick comprehension. "You mean ... ?" she began.
He nodded. "Just that. Sing Song Silly beat him to it." He bent, rolled the man over, and discovered the lacerated back of the neck.
"That"s where he landed on him first, and he must have had his finger on the trigger, drawing down on you and me, most likely me first, when Sing Song Silly broke up his calculations."
Villa was only half hearing, for she had Jerry in her arms and was calling him "Blessed Dog," the while she stilled his snarling and soothed down the last bristling hair.
But Jerry snarled again and was for leaping upon the black when he stirred restlessly and dizzily sat up. Harley removed a knife from between the bare skin and a belt.
"What name belong you?" he demanded.
But the black had eyes only for Jerry, staring at him in wondering amaze until he pieced the situation together in his growing clarity of brain and realized that such a small chunky animal had spoiled his game.
"My word," he grinned to Harley, "that fella dog put "m crimp along me any amount."
He felt out the wounds of his neck and face, while his eyes embraced the fact that the white master was in possession of his rifle.
"You give "m musket belong me," he said impudently.
"I give "m you bang alongside head," was Harley"s answer.
"He doesn"t seem to me to be a regular Malaitan," he told Villa. "In the first place, where would he get a rifle like that? Then think of his nerve. He must have seen us drop anchor, and he must have known our launch was on the beach. Yet he played to take our heads and get away with them back into the bush--"
"What name belong you?" he again demanded.
But not until Johnny and the launch crew arrived breathless from their run, did he learn. Johnny"s eyes gloated when he beheld the prisoner, and he addressed Kennan in evident excitement.
"You give "m me that fella boy," he begged. "Eh? You give "m me that fella boy."
"What name you want "m?"
Not for some time would Johnny answer this question, and then only when Kennan told him that there was no harm done and that he intended to let the black go. At this Johnny protested vehemently.
"Maybe you fetch "m that fella boy along Government House, Tulagi, Government House give "m you twenty pounds. Him plenty bad fella boy too much. Makawao he name stop along him. Bad fella boy too much. Him Queensland boy--"
"What name Queensland?" Kennan interrupted. "He belong that fella place?"
Johnny shook his head.
"Him belong along Malaita first time. Long time before too much he recruit "m along schooner go work along Queensland."
"He"s a return Queenslander," Harley interpreted to Villa. "You know, when Australia went "all white," the Queensland plantations had to send all the black birds back. This Makawao is evidently one of them, and a hard case as well, if there"s anything in Johnny"s gammon about twenty pounds reward for him. That"s a big price for a black."
Johnny continued his explanation which, reduced to flat and sober English, was to the effect that Makawao had always borne a bad character.
In Queensland he had served a total of four years in jail for thefts, robberies, and attempted murder. Returned to the Solomons by the Australian government, he had recruited on Buli Plantation for the purpose--as was afterwards proved--of getting arms and ammunition. For an attempt to kill the manager he had received fifty lashes at Tulagi and served a year. Returned to Buli Plantation to finish his labour service, he had contrived to kill the owner in the manager"s absence and to escape in a whaleboat.
In the whaleboat with him he had taken all the weapons and ammunition of the plantation, the owner"s head, ten Malaita recruits, and two recruits from San Cristobal--the two last because they were salt-water men and could handle the whaleboat. Himself and the ten Malaitans, being bushmen, were too ignorant of the sea to dare the long pa.s.sage from Guadalcanar.
On the way, he had raided the little islet of Ugi, sacked the store, and taken the head of the solitary trader, a gentle-souled half-caste from Norfolk Island who traced back directly to a Pitcairn ancestry straight from the loins of McCoy of the Bounty. Arrived safely at Malaita, he and his fellows, no longer having any use for the two San Cristobal boys, had taken their heads and eaten their bodies.
"My word, him bad fella boy any amount," Johnny finished his tale.
"Government House, Tulagi, d.a.m.n glad give "m twenty pounds along that fella."
"You blessed Sing Song Silly," Villa, murmured in Jerry"s ears. "If it hadn"t been for you--"
"Your head and mine would even now be galumping through the bush as Makawao hit the high places for home," Harley concluded for her. "My word, some fella dog that, any amount," he added lightly. "And I gave him merry Ned just the other day for n.i.g.g.e.r-chasing, and he knew his business better than I did all the time."
"If anybody tries to claim him--" Villa threatened.
Harley confirmed her muttered sentiment with a nod.
"Any way," he said, with a smile, "there would have been one consolation if your head had gone up into the bush."
"Consolation!" she cried, throaty with indignation.
"Why, yes; because in that case my head would have gone along."
"You dear and blessed Husband-Man," she murmured, a quick cloudiness of moisture in her eyes, as with her eyes she embraced him, her arms still around Jerry, who, sensing the ecstasy of the moment, kissed her fragrant cheek with his ribbon-tongue of love.
CHAPTER XXIV
When the _Ariel_ cleared from Malu, on the north-west coast of Malaita, Malaita sank down beneath the sea-rim astern and, so far as Jerry"s life was concerned, remained sunk for ever--another vanished world, that, in his consciousness, partook of the ultimate nothingness that had befallen Skipper. For all Jerry might have known, though he pondered it not, Malaita was a universe, beheaded and resting on the knees of some brooding lesser G.o.d, himself vastly mightier than Bashti whose knees bore the brooding weight of Skipper"s sun-dried, smoke-cured head, this lesser G.o.d vexed and questing, feeling and guessing at the dual twin-mysteries of time and s.p.a.ce and of motion and matter, above, beneath, around, and beyond him.
Only, in Jerry"s case, there was no pondering of the problem, no awareness of the existence of such mysteries. He merely accepted Malaita as another world that had ceased to be. He remembered it as he remembered dreams. Himself a live thing, solid and substantial, possessed of weight and dimension, a reality incontrovertible, he moved through the s.p.a.ce and place of being, concrete, hard, quick, convincing, an absoluteness of something surrounded by the shades and shadows of the fluxing phantasmagoria of nothing.
He took his worlds one by one. One by one his worlds evaporated, rose beyond his vision as vapours in the hot alembic of the sun, sank for ever beneath sea-levels, themselves unreal and pa.s.sing as the phantoms of a dream. The totality of the minute, simple world of the humans, microscopic and negligible as it was in the siderial universe, was as far beyond his guessing as is the siderial universe beyond the starriest guesses and most abysmal imaginings of man.
Jerry was never to see the dark island of savagery again, although often in his sleeping dreams it was to return to him in vivid illusion, as he relived his days upon it, from the destruction of the _Arangi_ and the man-eating orgy on the beach to his flight from the sh.e.l.l-scattered house and flesh of Nalasu. These dream episodes const.i.tuted for him another land of Otherwhere, mysterious, unreal, and evanescent as clouds drifting across the sky or bubbles taking iridescent form and bursting on the surface of the sea. Froth and foam it was, quick-vanishing as he awoke, non-existent as Skipper, Skipper"s head on the withered knees of Bashti in the lofty gra.s.s house. Malaita the real, Malaita the concrete and ponderable, vanished and vanished for ever, as Meringe had vanished, as Skipper had vanished, into the nothingness.
From Malaita the _Ariel_ steered west of north to Ongtong Java and to Tasman--great atolls that sweltered under the Line not quite awash in the vast waste of the West South Pacific. After Tasman was another wide sea- stretch to the high island of Bougainville. Thence, bearing generally south-east and making slow progress in the dead beat to windward, the _Ariel_ dropped anchor in nearly every harbour of the Solomons, from Choiseul and Ronongo islands, to the islands of Kulambangra, Vangunu, Pavuvu, and New Georgia. Even did she ride to anchor, desolately lonely, in the Bay of a Thousand Ships.
Last of all, so far as concerned the Solomons, her anchor rumbled down and bit into the coral-sanded bottom of the harbour of Tulagi, where, ash.o.r.e on Florida Island, lived and ruled the Resident Commissioner.
To the Commissioner, Harley Kennan duly turned over Makawao, who was committed to a gra.s.s-house jail, well guarded, to sit in leg-irons against the time of trial for his many crimes. And Johnny, the pilot, ere he returned to the service of the Commissioner, received a fair portion of the twenty pounds of head money that Kennan divided among the members of the launch crew who had raced through the jungle to the rescue the day Jerry had taken Makawao by the back of the neck and startled him into pulling the trigger of his unaimed rifle.
"I"ll tell you his name," the Commissioner said, as they sat on the wide veranda of his bungalow. "It"s one of Haggin"s terriers--Haggin of Meringe Lagoon. The dog"s father is Terrence, the mother is Biddy. The dog"s own name is Jerry, for I was present at the christening before ever his eyes were open. Better yet, I"ll show you his brother. His brother"s name is Michael. He"s n.i.g.g.e.r-chaser on the _Eugenie_, the two- topmast schooner that rides abreast of you. Captain Kellar is the skipper. I"ll have him bring Michael ash.o.r.e. Beyond all doubt, this Jerry is the sole survivor of the _Arangi_."
"When I get the time, and a sufficient margin of funds, I shall pay a visit to Chief Bashti--oh, no British cruiser program. I"ll charter a couple of trading ketches, take my own black police force and as many white men as I cannot prevent from volunteering. There won"t be any sh.e.l.ling of gra.s.s houses. I"ll land my sh.o.r.e party down the coast and cut in and come down upon Somo from the rear, timing my vessels to arrive on Somo"s sea-front at the same time."
"You will answer slaughter with slaughter?" Villa Kennan objected.
"I will answer slaughter with law," the Commissioner replied. "I will teach Somo law. I hope that no accidents will occur. I hope that no life will be lost on either side. I know, however, that I shall recover Captain Van Horn"s head, and his mate Borckman"s, and bring them back to Tulagi for Christian burial. I know that I shall get old Bashti by the scruff of the neck and sit him down while I pump law and square-dealing into him. Of course ... "
The Commissioner, ascetic-looking, an Oxford graduate, narrow-shouldered and elderly, tired-eyed and bespectacled like the scholar he was, like the scientist he was, shrugged his shoulders. "Of course, if they are not amenable to reason, there may be trouble, and some of them and some of us will get hurt. But, one way or the other, the conclusion will be the same. Old Bashti will learn that it is expedient to maintain white men"s heads on their shoulders."