The Project Gutenberg eBook of Maehoe
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Title: Maehoe
Author: Murray Leinster
Illustrator: John Fleming Gould
Release date: January 16, 2025 [eBook #75120]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: Danger Trail, Inc, 1929
Credits: Roger Frank and Sue Clark
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAEHOE ***
[Illustration: He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a
rib was broken.]
MAEHOE
By Murray Leinster
A brutal white, a faithful black, and Fear act out their
part in this drama of the Solomon Islands.
The wicked flee when no man pursueth.--Proverbs 28:1
This is the story of Gleason and Maehoe and of Fear, who makes a bad
third in any company. Henderson doesn’t really count, because he died
of black-water fever some three weeks after Gleason met him. And old
Sunaku--he was killed, later, when a British warship shelled his
village for trying to cut off a trading schooner--is a very minor
character. All you really have to remember is that Maehoe desired,
passionately, to become a member of the Native Constabulary Force of
the Solomon Islands Protectorate, and that Henderson was entirely too
fond of one Biblical quotation.
Gleason had no idea of the triangular relationship he was entering
when he landed his whaleboat on the shingle beach below Henderson’s
house and staggered through the surf supported by his four surviving
paddlers. He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a rib
was broken--it hurt excruciatingly as one of his boat-boys helped him
up the beach--and he was a mass of minor wounds and bruises.
The four boat-boys were in at least as bad a case. A particularly
filthy rag about the arm of one of them was stained unpleasantly by
the wound made by an irregularly shaped slug fired at close range. A
trade gas-pipe gun had fired the slug as part of its charge of half a
handful of assorted hardware. Another of the boys--they were To Ba’ita
boys, from the north of Malaita--was limping with a gaping hole in his
leg. The other two were merely slashed, cut, pounded, scratched, and
generally battered, as the survivors of the defeated side in the
nastiest kind of jungle fighting are so very apt to be. Those injuries
had come about when Gleason was trying to rob a devil-devil house of
its trophies for strictly commercial reasons. The whole tale would be
unpleasant. But he had gotten caught in a jungle path and he and his
boat-boys had to fight nearly two miles to get back to the water. The
boys, being from north Malaita, rated as potential long pig in south
Malaita, and fought like demons to get away. Gleason got away with
them by a miracle, but he lost his schooner, and after Henderson
patched him up he was very unphilosophic about the affair.
He gave Henderson an entirely fictitious account of his misfortune,
redounding much to the discredit of the Sunaku mentioned a little
while back. And for days he lived in terror lest Sunaku send a raiding
party after him.
* * * * *
Henderson laughed at that idea. He had a houseboy, one Maehoe, who had
told him truthfully that Sunaku had a _tabu_ laid upon his ever
passing Cape Kini on a war-party. A _tabu_, you know, is a sort of
ceremonial prohibition, a jinx, a talismanic warning against ever
having anything to do with the thing _tabued_. It differs for every
man; it is laid upon him by the devil-devil doctor; and it may range
from a totemic prohibition against eating the flesh of his
name-animal--this sort of _tabu_ is given a new-born infant on those
mornings when the devil-devil doctor is feeling low and devoid of
originality--to warnings of dire disaster if he ever happens to speak
to one of his maternal second cousins when the moon is new. Not very
reasonable things, those _tabus_, but absolutely binding and
frequently convenient--as in this case.
Henderson had picked out his island as a site for a copra plantation
after learning about Sunaku’s tabu. It made him safe, because nobody
else wanted to poach on Sunaku’s territory and Sunaku wouldn’t raid
himself. Henderson was as safe as, he felt, so seeing Gleason full of
terror he tried to laugh him out of it.
“The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” he would quote maliciously.
“Your boys sweated blood for a good ten miles after Sunaku gave up the
chase. One of them is likely to run up his toes, by the way, Gleason.
I give him rum and he gets better. I stop it, and he gets worse.
Dammit, I wish he’d make up his mind before he drinks all the
trade-rum in stock.” To which Gleason replied unpleasantly that he did
not give a hoot in hell whether the boy died or not. Gleason was still
weak, though growing stronger, and Henderson didn’t see that he was
crazy with envy of a man who was safe and prosperous and ought to turn
out rich when his newly planted coconut trees came into bearing.
“Your nerves are bad, Gleason,” Henderson would tell him tolerantly,
and add, grinning, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But there’s
no use staying in a blue funk. Cheer up!”
He would march on his way, whistling, while Gleason ground his teeth.
Henderson had a kid back in school in England, and he had it figured
out that he would be a rich man just about the time a lot of money
would mean a great deal to a girl. He had it all planned out how he’d
spend his money and have a wonderful time buying frocks for her and so
on, and taking her about the Continent.
But that hasn’t anything to do with Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.
* * * * *
Maehoe was the head houseboy at Henderson’s--the boy who’d found out
about Sunaku’s personal and private _tabu_. He rather attached himself
to Gleason while Gleason was getting well. His costume consisted of an
immaculate, rather short white jacket and a gee-string, and he had at
some time past discarded a nose-plug and several ear-ornaments in
token of his ambition to become a member of the Native Constabulary of
the Solomon Islands Protectorate. If Gleason had been otherwise he
might have been amused by Maehoe.
A round and frizzy head of hair would appear above the flooring of the
veranda. It would be followed by a not particularly high forehead, the
dark-brown and invincibly sad eyes of the Malaita bushboy, and then a
wide, flat, very black nose with a dangling strip of cartilage where
the nose-plug had been removed on Maehoe’s adoption of civilization.
There would follow, then, in quick succession a wide and beaming grin,
a thick and corded neck, an absolutely immaculate white drill jacket,
and lean and gnarly brown legs--astoundingly long and very
naked-looking--with many scars from the scratches of thorns and
underbrush. Last of all, wide, splay feet, with each and every toe
prehensile, would step up on the veranda, and Maehoe would beam more
widely still and say in a hushed voice:
“I fetch’m one-fella peg, Sar?”
Gleason generally took the peg. But he did not humor Maehoe by
listening to a description of the glories of the Native Constabulary
Force of the Solomon Islands Protectorate, delivered with a vast gusto
in an amazing beche-de-mer agglomeration of supposedly English
syllables. Maehoe had been refused for the constabulary for some
reason he could never fathom, but hopefully anticipated a reversal of
the refusal at some future time. Henderson had promised to speak in
his favor, and Henderson listened to him now and again, wherefore he
worshipped Henderson and served him with an honesty that in a Malaita
bushboy was superhuman.
But Gleason hated him cordially, especially after a certain morning
when he felt a little stronger and tried to walk about a bit.
Henderson was inland, swearing at a labor gang that was clearing more
land for the planting of yet more coconut trees. Gleason walked down
to the beach, looked nervously at Cape Kini--he was always a little
nervous about Sunaku--and went aimlessly over toward the barrack
sheds, and there he suddenly heard a voice talking in English behind a
bush.
Gleason moved suspiciously to where he could look. He saw Maehoe going
through apparently aimless evolutions--now here, saying something, and
now there, replying. It was seconds before he realized that Maehoe was
practising. He was imitating his master and Gleason with great
solemnity and for his own personal pleasure.
“The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” announced Maehoe solemnly,
maltreating the words in a fashion no possible print could reproduce.
“Your boys sweated blood for good ten miles after Sunaku gave up
chase. One them likely turn up toes, Gleason--”
He went on with a vast solemnity duplicating Henderson’s speech and
even his intonation with a surprising fidelity. Gleason watched
suspiciously. Maehoe finished with Henderson’s lines, his face shining
with pleasure, and went over to a spot from where he solemnly swore in
Gleason’s own terms that he did not give a hoot in hell whether the
boy died or not. And then he returned and solemnly repeated, “Your
nerves bad, Gleason. The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But no use
staying in blue funk. Cherrup.”
He beamed at his own exactitude and wiped the sweat off his face,
happy. He considered, and set about going soberly over the whole
business again.
* * * * *
Gleason walked away, shaking with the fretful sort of rage that a
white man sometimes feels in the Solomons. It comes of too much fever,
too many pegs, and too much brooding. Gleason should have laughed,
instead of thinking savagely of innumerable forms of insult Maehoe’s
private diversion seemed to him to constitute. Or he could have done
as Henderson did when he told him about it. Henderson chuckled for
half an hour and devised a speech full of incredible words and
involved phrases, which he repeated after that whenever he could be
sure Maehoe was listening. And Henderson tried to eavesdrop and
discover Maehoe struggling with the new and to him unpronounceable
words.
He did not succeed. Henderson came down with black-water fever about
three days later, and in a week he was dead.
While he was ill, though, Gleason saw one other side of Maehoe that
eventually led to the triangular drama of Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.
It was the plantation boys, of course. Gleason should have taken them
in hand when Henderson went flat on his back, and kept the vice
sweated out of them. Idleness is not good for anybody, and especially
for recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation. These boys were
bushboys, from salt water villages, and two days of idleness gave them
time to remember much devilment and speculate hopefully on more.
Two days after Henderson developed black-water fever, Gleason’s four
paddlers came shivering to the house and begged to be allowed to stay
there. They were To Ba’ita boys, and the labor gangs were south
Malaita men.
“’M fella boy talk too damn much _Pau_ talk,” their leader explained
fearfully to Gleason. “I think’m _kai-kai_ ’m To Ba’ita boy plenty
damn quick.”
Gleason chewed at his nails. The thing to do, of course, was strap on
an extra revolver and go over to the barrack sheds and fill each
several and separate man with an unholy fear. It could be done
especially with the four paddlers to guard his back. Three of them
were strong enough to fight, anyhow.
Gleason did not. He assigned sleeping quarters to his men underneath
the house, and went and took a peg. During the next hour or so he took
several more. And he fretfully stopped Maehoe, who was about to give
Henderson quinine. Quinine is almost a specific for ordinary fevers,
but it is rank poison in black-water.
Next day--three days after Henderson went down--there was a tumult
down at the store-shed. A houseboy fired off a rifle and fled. A knot
of scared figures plunged for the bush and vanished. They’d tried to
loot the store.
And when recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation try to loot
the storehouse, it is then time for any white man who wants to keep
his head on his shoulders to take some action. The proper and approved
action--though it is strictly unlawful--is to flog every man who may
conceivably be suspected of the attempt. And it is a very good idea to
knock the others about a bit and generally act as if you are fairly
itching for them to try to rush you. And of course, thereafter you
must work them until they drop in their tracks--bullying them the
while--and make their lives a burden to them for some time to come.
Loving kindness is not understood or appreciated by salt water boys
who contemplate the ownership of a white man’s head with a yearning
wistfulness.
But Gleason had a chill, which may or may not have been the sort of
chill that comes from a blue funk on top of a fever-racked system.
Gleason did nothing whatever except go in half a dozen times to see if
Henderson was getting over his delirium with prospects of being able
to get up. And he stopped Maehoe from giving him quinine. He was just
in time.
The thing was that Sunaku had scared Gleason down to the marrow of his
soul. A timid man either gets out of the Solomons or he doesn’t last
long. Gleason had become timid. He had lost his nerve because of the
exceeding narrowness of his escape from Sunaku.
* * * * *
In consequence, when on the fourth day of Henderson’s illness the
inhabitants of the barrack sheds were observed to be talking
excitedly, Gleason went and took a peg. When, later, they vanished
suddenly, he went and took a couple more. In justice to him, it should
also be remarked that during the next hour he stopped Maehoe for the
fiftieth time from giving Henderson quinine.
But at two o’clock in the afternoon Gleason’s fear of Maehoe began.
The plantation boys had actually tried to rush the house.
A howl from Gleason’s four paddlers underneath the house was warning.
Dark figures with improvised clubs were racing across the
house-clearing, yelling. A few knives were in evidence, and many
tools, and at least one flint-lock pistol smuggled painstakingly
through the entire recruiting process and hidden in somebody’s
barrack-box.
Gleason started shooting in a panic. He dropped one--two--three of
them. His four paddlers swarmed up, gray with fear and frenziedly
ready to fight. The wave of frizzy-haired, nose-plugged caricatures of
humanity came on, screeching. Gleason shot crazily.
And Maehoe came out on the veranda with a box of dynamite in his hands
and one of Henderson’s cheroots between his teeth. He hadn’t told
Gleason about fusing the dynamite. Gleason would have stopped him, not
trusting natives with civilized weapons.
[Illustration: Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a
fuse-end, and flung it.]
Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a fuse-end, and flung
it. Before the stick went off he had flung another. With a handful of
sticks in his hand, he ran around the veranda lighting fuses as he ran
and flinging the dynamite down among the attackers.
The sticks made an awful racket when they went off. The house rocked
from the detonations. Then the veranda floor lifted and shook. The
dynamite box jolted from the floor a full six inches, coming down with
a terrific crash. Gleason’s four paddlers howled and dived over the
railing. But the dynamite did not go off and Gleason’s courage came
back suddenly. He began to shoot with steadier hands, putting bullets
in black backs that were running away again. And it may be that the
howls that followed the explosions helped to steady his hands.
There was a final detonation and a last chorus of screams. Maehoe came
back. He saw Gleason, full of courage now, firing vengefully at
fleeing figures. Maehoe went inside the house. A moment later Gleason
heard him blubbering.
Henderson had heard the shooting and the screams. The sound had
penetrated even his delirium. He had gotten up and tried to come out
with a revolver in his hand. He hadn’t quite made it. Maehoe was
lifting him back to his bunk.
Fifteen minutes later Maehoe came out again, wearing his immaculate
white drill jacket and his gee-string and nothing else except a
cheroot between his teeth. He was sobbing softly to himself and his
eyes were fixed. He took a double handful of dynamite sticks from the
box and went on down into the bush, his gnarly, lean brown legs
astonishingly prominent below the white jacket.
Five minutes later Gleason heard a dynamite stick go off. Screams
followed it. Ten minutes more, and another went off. And then, for an
hour, at odd and irregular intervals there came the crisp, crackling
detonations of dynamite, curiously echoed among the tree trunks.
Usually, after an explosion, there were howls and outcries.
Then Maehoe came back. His white drill jacket was stained with blood.
He limped a little, and there was a monstrous bruise on one temple
where a flung club had nearly downed him.
He looked at Gleason with dumb agony in his eyes, in the sort of dull
apathy which comes over a bushboy after he has gone into a frenzy akin
to hysteria, has done a lot of damage, and has accomplished nothing.
“Fella marster go die plenty damn quick,” he said dully. “No got
one-fella _mane ni ha’a mauria_. No fetch ’em stuff _puru puru_. Fella
marster go die plenty damn quick.”
He went into the house with dragging steps, leaving Gleason biting at
his finger-ends. Maehoe thought Henderson was dying because there was
no doctor and he hadn’t been given the stuff from the bottle--quinine.
The dynamite and his hysterical hunting of his fellow bushboys had
been for the purpose of working off the rage and despair that filled
him.
And Gleason, with the hair raising on his head, began to wonder what
Maehoe would do when Henderson died. He would blame it all on Gleason
for preventing his giving Henderson quinine. And Gleason began to feel
a rather horrible fear.
* * * * *
When Maehoe desperately got out the medicine bottle that afternoon and
stared dumbly at Gleason, begging for permission to administer the
medicine that had made Henderson well of other fevers, Gleason
shivered and went out of the room. He was afraid to stop Maehoe again.
And that night, because he knew Henderson was going to die, Gleason
ran away in his whaleboat. He took his own four paddlers and four of
the houseboys, whom he impressed into service by flourishing a
revolver. Maehoe knew nothing of his departure. He was hovering over
Henderson’s bunk, dumbly miserable, waiting for signs of improvement
in Henderson’s condition from the quinine. And quinine is, of course,
rank poison in black-water fever.
And that was that. Gleason should have gotten away nicely. He should
have made Uras Cove in about four days. There is a missionary there,
and unregenerate persons have convinced the neighboring tribesmen that
the particularly potent devils of the white men will consume the
vitals, bit by bit, of any man who harms a hair of his head--of which
conviction, however, the missionary is wholly ignorant. Gleason would
have been safe with him until a trading schooner came along.
But news travels fast in the bush. All that had gone on on Henderson’s
island since Gleason’s landing and before, was known for an
astonishing distance along the mainland. And with astonishing speed
that news was kept up to date. No white man knows how news does travel
in the bush, but it goes, and when it is news of a white man unarmed
or unnerved or ill there are innumerable bepainted, befrizzed and
tattooed young warriors who inspect their weapons and dream high
dreams.
So when Gleason’s whaleboat blundered into a belated fishing-canoe
some ten miles to the northwest of Henderson’s place, there was an
instant reaction. The fishing-canoe challenged. A To Ba’ita boy
answered. There was excited chatter in the fishing-canoe, caused by
his foreign manner of speech. Gleason warned it off in a white man’s
curt voice. And the fishing-canoe fled.
That opened the second act of the drama of Gleason and Maehoe and
Fear.
* * * * *
Five minutes after the fishing-canoe had vanished into utter darkness,
a few puffs of wind came from nowhere. Gleason had a sail hoisted and
prepared to beat his way up to the northwest. The boat was intended
for surf work and was a clumsy sailer, but would make better time
under sail than with unskilled oarsmen. The puffs of wind continued,
enough to tease him with the hope of a steady breeze at any minute,
but not enough to make much headway. It was utterly dark. A long, oily
swell came from offshore and pounded dully on the beach--where there
was a beach--and gurgled among mangrove roots where there was none.
There was a thin film of cloud overhead, just enough to obscure most
of the stars and make the world abysmally dark and to make the boat
seem hideously and horribly alone.
Then, from a little distance behind, there arose a dull and monotonous
throbbing thunder. Devil-devil drums, sending out a general call for
any devils that might be in the neighborhood to call at the
devil-devil house and receive instruction. Lights appeared, racing
about the village that housed the drums. Great flaring flambeaux sent
pin points of reflected light dancing upon the distant smooth swells.
There were yells and howls, and there was much activity ashore. Two
long war-boats--_la’os_--were being slid down into the dark water.
They went swiftly into the outer darkness, beyond the shore. A white
man had been sighted in a whaleboat. A To Ba’ita boy had answered a
challenge. The white man had warned the fishing-canoe off instead of
cursing it or desiring to trade with it. Therefore it was the _mane
maala_, the wounded man from Henderson’s.
The news went swiftly through the bush. The puffs of wind died down.
The whaleboat fell off from her course and rocked and rolled soggily
in the long smooth swells. Gleason began to feel little prickles at
the base of his skull. He was being hunted.
His paddlers were at work again, trying to use their unaccustomed oars
silently, when there came through the night a second dull and distant
booming. Far ahead this was, and it meant that another village was
awake and preparing to scour the surface of the sea in its greater
war canoes. Treasure was afloat. A white man’s head, and the white man
proven not invulnerable nor over-dangerous. And it seemed to Gleason,
sweating suddenly from terror, that he heard yet other drums, more
distant still.
All the dark coast began to boom with drums, both before and behind
the whaleboat. The drums, of course, were summoning the local devils
to be sent to raise hell with Gleason until the war-boats found him.
This sound tactical use of devils is universal in the Solomons. And
every village launched its boats, and every boat hunted for Gleason
with a panting enthusiasm, and Gleason went into the bluest of blue
funks.
He drove his boatmen, whimpering with terror, straight for the shore
and apparently for the very stronghold of his enemies. The sensible
thing would have been to stand out for the open sea. But one of
Henderson’s boat-boys kept Gleason’s panic from being altogether
suicide.
* * * * *
All night long the devil-devil drums beat on, and all night long the
smoky fires flared in devil-devil houses, and all night long the
war-boats hunted tirelessly. The news spread farther and yet farther
as the night wore on, until all the coast was awake and aware of what
was going on, and all the coast was joining in the hunt. But Gleason
was not caught.
When the gray dawn spread across the open sea, there was no dancing
speck afloat that could not be identified as an authentic Malaita
craft upon its unlawful occasion. Gleason had vanished.
But that same gray dawn filtered down through mangrove leaves upon
him. One of the houseboys had panted directions for a little streamlet
he knew of. It oozed its way sluggishly out between unbroken banks of
mangroves, and there was no village beside it. More, when the
whaleboat pulled into it the mangroves were found to stretch their
branches thirty or forty feet beyond the edge of the mud and to dip
their farther ends unpleasantly into the stagnant, stinking stream.
The whaleboat had been drawn far in beneath those branches, and its
sides bedecked with green. It was thoroughly hidden.
But Gleason still shook with fear, though the filtering pale light
seemed to take away some of the menace of the drums. Birds, too,
awaking in the branches overhead, seemed to drown out a little of
their rumbling threat. And as the mistiness of dawn faded into the
colorful light of early morning, one by one the devil-devil drums
ceased their booming.
But the mangrove mud stank noisomely, and little, many-times-deflected
ripples from the outer surf sucked and gurgled among the tangled
roots. The smell of mangrove mud filled his nostrils, and he waited to
be discovered.
Crouched in the whaleboat, the paddlers and Gleason alike stared
fearfully about them. The sun rose higher in the heavens. Mosquitoes
swarmed about them. The soft and indefinite humming noise of a sunlit
jungle arose to the high heavens. And all the coast was busy, looking
to see where the white man might have hid.
Toward noon, Gleason saw one warrior. He came down to the water’s edge
nearly half a mile upstream, where perhaps the mangroves gave place to
a more wholesome growth. He saw him plainly. White circles of
moistened lime had been daubed about his eyes. His hair was whitened
with the same stuff. His ear-lobes had been stretched incredibly to
hold a pleasing assortment of variegated knick-knacks, from a brass
curtain ring to slender pig bones which projected at varied angles
from his head.
He stood in plain sight for a long time, peering up and down the
stream. Even his reflection was mirror-like on the upper water. But he
did not move from the spot where he had first appeared. Mangrove
swamps remain untrod, even on such occasions as this. Leaving aside
the incredible toil traveling in them would entail, and the very real
danger of being swallowed up entire, there are such things as mangrove
ulcers which came from mangrove mud upon a man’s bare leg.
The warrior peered here and there and everywhere in silence, while
Gleason eyed him in stark panic. Suddenly he went depressedly back
into the jungle without any sign of interest or triumph, and Gleason
nearly whimpered in relief. The drooping branches outside the boat had
hidden it effectively.
* * * * *
But all that long, hot, malodorous afternoon he abode in fear. A canoe
might slip into the stream at any instant. And the report of a single
firearm, or the yell of a single man, would bring swarming hordes of
warriors....
At dusk, Gleason’s heart stopped. A canoe did come in. It came in very
softly and very quietly. There were four paddlers and one man sitting
in the stern. This was in the short, abruptly ending twilight of the
tropics. Gleason saw the canoe pass by not more than twenty yards
away. Beneath the dropping mangrove roots the whaleboat was not seen,
but there was enough light left for Gleason to recognize the man in
the stern despite new and barbaric ornamentation. It was Maehoe.
He gazed behind him and seemed satisfied. And suddenly he brought up
something from the bottom of the canoe and slipped it on. It was an
immaculate white drill jacket. And he removed certain ornaments from
about his ears and nose, and wiped the lime-streaks from about his
eyes, and spoke to his paddlers.
Gleason could piece out the words from his knowledge of the _Pau_
dialect. But before this he had swung his revolver on the four
houseboys he had impressed into service. With his eyes wild and
staring, he warned them voicelessly that at their first word he would
kill them. The words he pieced together of Maehoe’s talk increased his
terror.
Maehoe had his own paddlers under a bond of fear. Henderson’s revolver
was in his hand. And Maehoe was demanding if this was surely the
waterway that one of the houseboys with Gleason knew of. A man
answered, trembling, that it was. Maehoe ordered the paddlers to go on
upstream.
His white drill jacket dwindled to a speck which--so rapidly did the
twilight deepen--was already no more than a gray blur when he vanished
past the spot where the warrior had been seen that forenoon. Gleason
did not wait for the further deepening of the night. In a racked
whisper he ordered his paddlers to clear the whaleboat of the branches
that had decked it and to make for the open sea once more.
Sheer horror was almost paralyzing Gleason now. The whaleboat lifted
to the first of the ocean swells and made for far offshore. Night
rolled across the face of the sea and swallowed up all the world. The
whaleboat headed due north, for the open water beyond the coast.
But a dull booming set up behind it. Almost instantly the booming was
duplicated to the right and to the left. The whaleboat had been seen
before night hid it.
There followed a nightmare of terror. Three times in the next two
hours the war canoes went swiftly on past the whaleboat, with paddles
splashing in the haste of the paddlers. Once Gleason saw the dim
outline of a horrible carved prow with the wide, white-ringed eyes of
the god that was its figurehead. Once a four-man canoe blundered slap
into the whaleboat and Gleason sobbed as the spurting flames of his
revolver split the darkness, and sobbed again as a swimming man from
the overturned canoe screeched horribly when the paddlers beat him
away from the gunwale with their oar-blades.
The whaleboat turned back for the shore, then. It headed at a
panic-stricken rate in the direction of Henderson’s island plantation.
That was the last course it would be expected to take, because safety
for Gleason lay no nearer than Uras Cove to the northwest. And
Gleason, sick with terror in the stem, heard the rushing war-boats
streaking for the site of the combat and heard them yelling to one
another before they scattered to hunt again.
Of Maehoe he heard nothing. He knew, however, that that questing
person had doffed his white jacket and had replaced a nose-plug in the
cartilage between his nostrils, and had redecorated his distended
ear-lobes with divers gruesome ornaments and was in the thick of the
hunt. Maehoe was a native of this part of the world. He was not safe,
of course, among the man-hunters of another village than his own, but,
armed as he was, and with a white man afloat being hunted by war-boats
from half a dozen villages, he would be ignored until the greater game
was captured.
Dodging, drifting shadows, sweating alike with exertion and with fear,
those in the whaleboat made but little progress. They reached the
shingle beach of the plantation island two hours before dawn. By
daybreak the whaleboat was hidden. During the day Gleason saw the
still smoking ruins of the house and the store. He did not see where
Henderson was buried, of course. Maehoe would have attended to the
hiding of that burial place. A white man’s head is a white man’s head,
however it be come by, and Maehoe on deserting the plantation would
take precautions lest his late master provide a trophy for some
devil-devil house ashore.
Maehoe came back. A canoe became visible not later than five o’clock
in the afternoon, paddling steadily and openly along the sea. Its
occupants were plainly savage; befrizzed, bepainted, and going about
the business of paddling with the calm practicality of the salt-water
boy.
The canoe drove up to the shingle beach and landed. The man in the
stem shepherded the others before him--Gleason saw a glint of metal in
his hand--up among the trees. Out of sight of the water, that man
donned a white drill jacket and moved on, still driving the others
before him. Gleason saw gnarly and lean and astoundingly naked-looking
legs beneath the white jacket. Three times before sunset and darkness
he caught a glimpse of white among the trees, moving about as if
looking for signs that Gleason had returned to the ruins.
Gleason cursed himself in a whisper for having had the courage to go
and look. A white man’s boot-tracks in fresh ashes would show clearly.
When darkness fell and he saw a flambeau lighted, and saw it moving
steadily as if Maehoe had at last found his trail and was following it
by torchlight, Gleason cursed hysterically.
He drove his paddlers to their work once more. He dared not attempt to
make Uras Cove again. All the coast was up and hunting him. The
best--the only chance for him was to head southwest, heading past
Sunaku’s territory for Maramasike Pass, across it, and to the mission
at Saa.
He struck out on the course as darkness settled down upon the ocean
and all the world. And half an hour later, with the dull
reverberations of many drums dying away below the horizon, one of the
paddlers panted.
“Marster! One-fella _irora_!”
Gleason strained his ears and heard it. It was following!
* * * * *
Utter blackness lay over all the world. To the right there was the
long, low pestilential coast where Sunaku held sway, where any white
man was fair game and Gleason would be prized more than most. To the
left was open sea, from which only swells came rolling in unendingly.
Ahead was emptiness. Behind was the dull rumble of devil-devil drums
in half a dozen villages whose warriors were hunting Gleason--and,
nearer, the splashing paddles of a canoe. By the splashings and the
tempo, the paddlers were weary to exhaustion. But the canoe drew
steadily nearer.
Gleason swung off his course and cursed his men in a whisper. He let
the boat rock and roll in the darkness without a paddle lifted, and
the following canoe went on past. And then the whaleboat sped on
toward the shore to resume its course.
But presently the dreary splashing of paddles in the hands of
exhausted men sounded once more in the darkness. A voice called,
startlingly close. Maehoe’s voice. In a frenzy, Gleason shot at it.
And that shot was heard on shore.
In half an hour the heavens were echoing the dull, monotonous booming
of a devil-devil drum ahead, and word was passing through the bush in
the mysterious fashion of bush-wireless, of Gleason’s presence and his
new course. And, of course, the sea was swarming with hunting
war-boats.
* * * * *
Once, before dawn, Gleason had to fight. He got away by a miracle, but
with only four paddlers left, and he had a fresh wound in his side and
was literally mad with fear. A land breeze was blowing now and the
whaleboat crept along under sail because four men could not handle it.
It was so close to the shore that the splashing of waves among the
mangrove roots was plainly audible. Also audible were certain
hunting-cries upon the water. And--and this was the thing that crazed
Gleason--in the whaleboat’s wake and growing nearer with desperate
slowness there was the sound of paddles being dipped by exhausted,
driven men.
When in fine irony the whaleboat grounded on the sandspit beyond Cape
Kini and the sail cracked thunderously, Gleason sobbed. His remaining
paddlers waited in apathetic despair. He saw the shore looming up
darker and more forbidding than even the sea, and the whaleboat lifted
giddily and crashed again on the sandbank, and a voice sounded behind
him, nearer than the cries of the hunting war-boats....
Gleason splashed over the side, shaking in terror. He ran blindly,
fighting the swells that tried to trip him, gasping hoarsely in sheer
panic, fighting his way to the beach. There was little or no surf. The
swells oozed up on the steeply slanting beach and retreated almost
soundlessly. Gleason fought his way clear of them and plunged into
the dark trees, sobbing as he ran. He tripped and fell and picked
himself up, and ran and tripped and fell again.
The sound of the distant devil-devil drum filled him with horror. He
ran on hysterically. He was still running at dawn, when the drum
slowed up and stopped. And when the sun rolled up overhead Gleason was
three miles inland, shaking, with his revolvers naked in his hands,
staring wildly all about him.
He was up among the foothills of the inner mountains, by the bank of a
swiftly flowing little stream. He was many days’ journey from the
nearest white man, in the territory of the one native chief who would
pay most lavishly for his head. Jungle surrounded him on every side.
In that jungle, as soon as the deserted whaleboat was found, there
would be eager hunting-parties searching....
Gleason wept hysterically. He raved. He very probably prayed. And very
suddenly he slept, for the first time in two nights and two days.
* * * * *
He slept, it may be, for two hours. No more. There was a crackling of
underbrush and a rustling of leaves. Gleason woke in a cold panic and
stared with glassy eyes. He saw long, gnarly legs, astoundingly
naked-looking, moving beneath a trailing cloud of foliage. Gleason’s
revolver came up, held stiffly in a hand of ice.
He saw a frizzy, rounded head. A not particularly high forehead. The
invincibly sad, dark-brown eyes of the Malaita bushboy. A wide, flat,
and very black nose with a strip of dangling cartilage where Maehoe
had discarded a nose-plug on his adoption of civilization.
Maehoe stepped forward, looking at footprints in the mud at the
stream’s edge. He had a revolver in his hand, and there was a package
strapped about his waist from which projected the ends of half a dozen
dynamite sticks, all fused and ready. He stepped into the stream, to
cross.
In pure hysterical rage, Gleason shot him, knowing that the shot would
be heard and would bring Sunaku’s warriors eagerly to the spot.
[Illustration: Gleason raised his weapon to shoot again.]
Maehoe collapsed in the stream. He wallowed feebly in the water, then
summoned superhuman strength and crawled ashore. Dead-white and rigid,
Gleason raised his weapon to shoot again.
“One-fella marster,” gasped Maehoe, “he say fetch ’m one-fella Gleason
’m guns, ’m dynamite. Tell ’m shoot hell out of bushboy an’ give
plantation money ’m one-fella white Mary _pore_.”
He struggled to hand over his bundle. Gleason gagged. Henderson had
told Maehoe to give Gleason the guns and the dynamite and to ask him
to quell the boys and sell his plantation and send the money to his
daughter. This was what Maehoe had chased him for! This was what--“
“’M go away plenty damn quick,” gasped Maehoe, shoving the bundle
toward Gleason. “’M bad fella bushboy come. I shoot, all same
one-fella Native Constabulary....”
Gleason took the bundle in stiff fingers. Gleason’s eyes were glassy.
Maehoe grinned at him, a pain-racked, desperate grin.
“Your nerves bad, Gleason,” he pronounced in a swagger, in Henderson’s
own identical tones. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But no use
staying in blue funk. Cherrup.”
And then he raised his revolver feebly as Gleason heard a crackling in
the underbrush some little distance away. He thought he heard the
pattering of feet.
He was right. He did.
* * * * *
Gleason fled. He fumbled with the dynamite sticks. They were wet. The
dynamite was useless. He flung it aside. He plucked at the revolver
shells. Wrong! For Maehoe had the revolver, and was essaying to hold
off the pursuing bushboys as a desirous member of the Native
Constabulary Force of the Solomon Island Protectorate should do. But
Maehoe was dead before the first bushboy appeared.
An arrow slithered across the way before Gleason. It missed him by
inches only. He snapped a shot from his own weapon and panted on. He
saw a hideous face, tattooed out of all semblance of humanity, with
goggle-like circles painted in white about its eyes. It vanished before
he could fire. He saw another, and another....
Gleason began to scream. He emptied his revolvers and had no more
shells. He flung the useless things aside and began to run. And
suddenly he was laughing. Henderson had said, “The wicked flee when no
man pursueth.” He’d repeated it and re-repeated it until it became a
tiresome saw. Henderson was wrong.
Gleason howled with hysterical laughter as he fled like a deer from
the men who hunted him earnestly. Even Maehoe had quoted the thing at
him. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” But they were wrong, now.
He was fleeing, all right, but men were pursuing him. The jungle was
full of the noise of the chase. Men were pursuing him, all right....
And they caught him.
[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the February 1929 issue
of _Adventure Trails_ magazine.]
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