"Four--five," he counted. "That is enough."
But The Parrot"s big grip closed quietly around his wrist at the last offering and pinioned him and held him helpless.
"No, it is not enough. Now I will take the rest. Ha, wise man! Have I fooled you at last?"
There was no chance to struggle, and Dubosc did not try, only stayed smiling up at him, waiting.
Perroquet took the bottle.
"The best man wins," he remarked. "Eh, my zig? A bright notion--of yours. The--best--"
His lips moved, but no sound issued. A look of the most intense surprise spread upon his round face. He stood swaying a moment, and collapsed like a huge hinged toy when the string is cut.
Dubosc stooped and caught the bottle again, looking down at his big adversary, who sprawled in brief convulsion and lay still, a bluish sc.u.m oozing between his teeth....
"Yes, the best man wins," repeated the doctor, and laughed as he in turn raised the flask for a draft.
"The best wins!" echoed a voice in his ear.
Fenayrou, writhing up and striking like a wounded snake, drove the knife home between his shoulders.
The bottle fell and rolled to the middle of the platform, and there, while each strove vainly to reach it, it poured out its treasure in a tiny stream that trickled away and was lost.
It may have been minutes or hours later--for time has no count in emptiness--when next a sound proceeded from that frail slip of a raft, hung like a mote between sea and sky. It was a phrase of song, a wandering strain in half tones and fluted accidentals, not unmelodious.
The black Canaque was singing. He sang without emotion or effort, quite casually and softly to himself. So he might sing by his forest hut to ease some hour of idleness. Clasping his knees and gazing out into s.p.a.ce, untroubled, unmoved, enigmatic to the end, he sang--he sang.
And, after all, the ship came.
She came in a manner befitting the sauciest little tops"l schooner between Nukahiva and the Pelews--as her owner often averred and none but the envious denied--in a manner worthy, too, of that able Captain Jean Guibert, the merriest little scamp that ever cleaned a pearl bank or snapped a cargo of labor from a scowling coast. Before the first whiff out of the west came the _Pet.i.te Suzanne_, curtsying and skipping along with a flash of white frill by her forefoot, and brought up startled and stood shaking her skirts and keeping herself quite daintily to windward.
"And "ere they are sure enough, by dam!" said the polyglot Captain Jean in the language of commerce and profanity. "Zose pa.s.sengers for us, hey?
They been here all the time, not ten mile off--I bet you, Marteau. Ain"t it "ell? What you zink, my gar?"
His second, a tall and excessively bony individual of gloomy outlook, handed back the gla.s.ses.
"More bad luck. I never approved of this job. And now--see?--we have had our voyage for nothing. What misfortune!"
"Marteau, if that good Saint Pierre gives you some day a gold "arp still you would holler bad luck--bad job!" retorted Captain Jean. "Do I "ire you to stand zere and cry about ze luck? Get a boat over, and quicker zan zat!"
M. Marteau aroused himself sufficiently to take command of the boat"s crew that presently dropped away to investigate....
"It is even as I thought," he called up from the quarter when he returned with his report. "I told you how it would be, Captain Jean."
"Hey?" cried the captain, bouncing at the rail. "Have you got zose pa.s.sengers yet, _enfant de salaud_?"
"I have not," said Marteau in the tone of lugubrious triumph. There was nothing in the world that could have pleased him quite so much as this chance to prove Captain Jean the loser on a venture. "We are too late.
Bad luck, bad luck--that calm. What misfortune! They are all dead!"
"Will you mind your business?" shouted the skipper.
"But still, the gentlemen are dead--"
"What is zat to me? All ze better, they will cost nozing to feed."
"But how--"
"Hogsheads, my gar," said Captain Jean paternally. "Zose hogsheads in the afterhold. Fill them nicely with brine, and zere we are!" And, having drawn all possible satisfaction from the other"s amazement, he sprang the nub of his joke with a grin. "Ze gentlemen"s pa.s.sage is all paid, Marteau. Before we left Sydney, Marteau. I contrac" to bring back three escape" convicts, and so by "ell I do--in pickle! And now if you"ll kindly get zose pa.s.sengers aboard like I said an" bozzer less about ze G.o.ddam luck, I be much oblige". Also, zere is no green on my eye, Marteau, and you can dam" well smoke it!"
Marteau recovered himself with difficulty in time to recall another trifling detail. "There is a fourth man on board that raft, Captain Jean. He is a Canaque--still alive. What shall we do with him?"
"A Canaque?" snapped Captain Jean. "A Canaque! I had no word in my contrac" about any Canaque.... Leave him zere.... He is only a dam"
n.i.g.g.e.r. He"ll do well enough where he is."
And Captain Jean was right, perfectly right, for while the _Pet.i.te Suzanne_ was taking aboard her grisly cargo the wind freshened from the west, and just about the time she was shaping away for Australia the "dam" n.i.g.g.e.r" spread his own sail of panda.n.u.s leaves and twirled his own helm of niaouli wood and headed the catamaran eastward, back toward New Caledonia.
Feeling somewhat dry after his exertion, he plucked at random from the platform a hollow reed with a sharp end and, stretching himself at full length in his accustomed place at the stern, he thrust the reed down into one of the bladders underneath and drank his fill of sweet water....
He had a dozen such storage bladders remaining, built into the floats at intervals above the water line--quite enough to last him safely home again.
[Ill.u.s.tration:
_A Rex Ingram--Metro Picture._
_Where the Pavement Ends._
A SCENE FROM THE PHOTOPLAY.]
THE LOST G.o.d
Prophets have cried out in print, no man regarding, and saints have been known to write their autobiographies, and even angels are credited now and then with revealing most curious matters in language quite plain and ungrammatical. But I have seen the diary of an authentic G.o.d who once went to and fro on the earth and in the waters underneath.
His record is the Book of Jim Albro, and he made it at Barange Bay, which is Papua, which is the end of the back of beyond and a bit farther yet; the great, dark, and smiling land that no white man has ever yet gripped as a conqueror, where anything can happen that you would care to believe and many things that you never would. He neglected to copyright it himself. The chances of his returning to claim it are apparently remote. And Jeckol says that fiction is stranger than truth anyhow, and pays better. So I shall feel quite safe in making free of that remarkable work, just as Jim Albro set it down with a leaden bullet on some strips of bark and left it for those who came after to find....
In his very blackest hour Jim Albro must have known that somebody would come after him, some time. Somebody always did come after him, no matter how far and to what desperate chance his trail might lead. He was that kind. All his days he never lacked the friend to hunt him up and to pack him home when he was helpless, to pay his bills or to bail him out at need. One of those irresistible rascals born to a soft place near the world"s heart, whose worst follies serve only to endear them, whose wildest errors are accepted as the manifestation of an engaging caprice, while they go on serenely drawing blank checks against destiny!
It is odd that he should have had to settle up in the end unaided, cut off from all help, completely isolated--and yet with the savor of popular admiration still rising about him, amid the continued applause of a mult.i.tude....
"A chap like Albro can"t simply drop out of sight, like you or me might," said Cap"n Bartlet, thoughtfully. "He"s filled too much s.p.a.ce and pulled through too many sc.r.a.pes. He"s had his way too often with men and devils--and women too."
We were strung along the rail on the after-deck of the little _Aurora Bird_, as she began to grope her pa.s.sage through the barrier reef, a silent lot. Talk had been cheap enough on the long stretch up the Coral Sea, when every possible theory of Albro"s fate, and the fate of his three white shipmates and their native crew, had been thrashed to weariness. But now suspense held us all by the throat, for we were come at last to Barange, the falling-off place.
And something else held us--I could call it a spell and not be so far wrong. The lazy airs offsh.o.r.e bore down to us the scent that is like nothing else in the world, of rotting jungle and teeming soil; of poisonous, lush green, and rare, sleepy blossoms, heavy with death and ardent with a fierce vitality. This is the breath of Papua, stirring warm on her lips, that none who has known between loathing and desire can ever forget. Many men have known it, traders, pearlers, recruiters, gold hunters, and eagerly have sought to know more and have died seeking. There she lies, the last enigma, guarding her secrets still behind her savage coasts and the fringe of her untracked forests--the black sphinx of the seas, lovely, vast, and cruel.