Memorial Library
William Boulton Dixon 1915
PTLT. !5!*T BR!GADE FA.
KILLED IN ACTION
NEAR THIAUCOURT FRANCE
OCTOBER I7TP 1918





IN
DARK PLACES


WHERE THE
PAVEMENT ENDS
BY JOHN RUSSELL
1 think Whtrt tht favsmsnt Ends is the
best book of short tales by any debutant
since Kipling's Plain TmUi
—SIR ARTHUR COHAN DOYLE.
Mr. Russell has been compared with Mi.
Conrad. This Is together a compliment
and an injustice. To me he It a wholly
Individual artist held in the grip of the
savage emotions of the South Seas, Inflamed
with their colour, bound by their combina-
tion of ferocity and sweetness.
—W. L, GEO RGB.


IN
DARK PLACES
by
JOHN RUSSELL
Of tailing that**, ond bick'ning thadtws dlr$,
And airy Ungual that tyllablt men,i namst
On tandt and tbsrst and dutrt wildtrnatut. . . .*
COMUS

NEW YORK
ALFRED • A • KNOPF
1923


COPYBIOHT, 1923, BY JOHN RUSSELL
PublUhed, April, tHB
dH>«l»Illf. unit printed t» At Vail-BMm Co., BIH§*§Mtn. N. 7.
Paper tvnishoi by W. r. Etterliwfon i Co.. New York.
Bound 6* H. U olB EttaU. Xew Ymt.
XANrTAOTVBID IN THE CNITID STATES 01 AM«BIOA


To
CURRIMBHOY
511010





CONTENTS
The Colour of the East ^ 3
The Pagan S / 23
The One-Eyed Dev1l / 48
^The B1rd of Parad1se^ 71
Mc Keon's Graft v' , g6
The Wreck on Del1verance >S i1o
The D1gger -•' . 136
The Slaver / 158
/'
Jonah V 185
The W1nn1ng Hand 222
The W1tch Woman Si 242
One Drop of Moonsh1ne '* 268





IN
DARK PLACES.





THE COLOUR OF THE EAST
IN an upper apartment of a certain house already-
astir with the evening's regular business—in a very
private apartment, just above the rear entrance—the
gentleman from Macao arrived quite noiselessly, popping
between the curtains and startling a wordless cry from
the woman who sat waiting for him there, alone.
"A mackerel!" was his announcement, given in the
Portuguese-Chinese dialect. "Sweet poppy of mine, I
have caught one big mackerel at last! Fat as butter.
He will be here tonight, and tomorrow—we eat!" he
said, with a click of teeth.
The woman quailed before the almost insane flicker ire
his gaze, the tiger-look of that polite, catlike, brilliantly-
smiling little individual.
"You are bringing somebody—to me?"
She was young enough to have been a girl not so long
ago, was still girlish and lovely under the lamplight—
slight and dark, with hair and lashes that would have
made her envied anywhere, with the rich warmth of skia
that shames mere white. But she bore the stamp of half-
race. The mark which stands for base metal to a
heartless white man's world, always, though the soul
within be unalloyed from God's own mint. Asiatic and
European, and neither the one nor the other, she wore a
spangled, jet-sewn gown that was only imitation; and the
room itself made counterfeit setting for her—a cheap
3


4 IN DARK PLACES
drawing-room gone wrong, with garish carpets and
tattered, faded velveteen hangings at doors and windows.
"Somebody for me?" she faltered.
"Somebody for you!" he mimicked, with contained
savagery. "No—nobody for you, little flowerlet. Rest
easy. This time it is another kind of fool. Saints, what
a fool! A young one with the milk on his lip. He
would not give a penny for you. But you will snare him
for me."
"How, then?"
He caught her wrist in his small, steely grip.
"Listen! In a little while comes this idiot to play at Li
Chwan's tables, inside. You will be there, as always.
You will get the seat next to him, and before he loses all
his stake, see to it that you coax him in here for a moment.
Save your tears for that. Somehow, somehow, you bring
him to this room."
"Li Chwan will beat me."
"The devils in hell fly away with Li Chwan! Lock
that door between if he follows; I need but the tenth
part of an instant. Tonight is our great good fortune
—comprehend that. This stranger has money—much,
much money—to be so easily come by. I saw it. In a
fat purse. Therefore attend me well.
"You bring him here. You cajole him with what tale
you like. You lead him over by this window." He
swept aside the curtain that covered an exit upon the
balcony. "You push him against the hangings, if you
can, to make them bulge a little—thus. Ah, ha! I will
be ready—fear not—in hiding just behind. Then you
hold him only long enough to give me true aim. . . .
Understood?"


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST J
She was staring dully past him through the broken
slats, down, down, at the water below, where its tide
lapped the pilings, and a vagrant ray of light shone
zigzag.
"And you?" she asked mechanically.
But when she lifted her weary glance, she found him
already fingering a ten-inch Japanese knife—testing the
beautifully polished blade.
"Men Dens!" she screamed. "Not that!"
He struck her across the mouth as she fell to her
knees. "Be silent, thou! There is no evidence. There
shall be no evidence at all. No one saw me with him.
None shall see me. He, a stranger—a chance tourist,
without friends—he comes to Li Chwan's to gamble.
Next morning, the police find him in the bay— Who is
he? Who knows? Who cares?"
"I will know!" she gasped. "If you drag me into this
last infamy—"
"Well?" The gentleman from Macao took hold of her
and began interrogatively to probe the soft hollows of
her neck above the shoulder-blade—the spot where a
dirk goes safe home. "Ah-ha? Wouldst betray me—
thinkest thou? Couldst keep such treachery in thy
heart—thinkest thou?" Pressing with his finger tips
smoothly and deftly by some infernal skill, of a sudden
he brought her grovelling.
As she writhed at his feet in agony, swiftly she made
a snatch at his armed fist—drew it to her in despairing
effort to bury the blade in her bosom.
Quite expertly and playfully, he hit her between the
eyes.
. "Sweet honey-flower! Little marigold blossom! I


* IN DARK PLACES
think not, I think not!" he purred—and smiled more bril-
liantly than ever. . . .
So, altogether, it might truly be said that attractions
-and amusements were thoroughly well provided against
the visit of Camberwell, that eager young explorer, when
he came to the fan-tan den of Li Chwan some time
afterward, to continue his inquiry for local colour.
Purple and saffron had been Camberwell's first notion
of it. He saw it so the day he crossed the equator, that
line which always seems, somehow, as if it ought to run
the other way—much less of a boundary between North
and South than it is between West and East. They
cried the news in the smoking-room, and he ran out on
,deck under a stormy sky more than half expecting to find
an actual mark ruled straight over sea, as it had been
in his school geography. And, sure enough, the sun
showed for a moment just then through the clouds and
paved a glorious threshold.
After that he could hardly curb his impatience while
the steamer wandered among antipodean ports which in-
terested him not at all—transplanted bits of white man's
country where people talked in his own tongue and al-
most with his own twang. But presently they headed
back on a long westerly slant, and one morning at dawn
they made their landfall. Camberwell stood forward in
the bows, and as the mists parted before him he seemed
to be flying in through successive opening gates, each
more wonderful—the first, "jasper; the second, sapphire;
the third, a chalcedony; the fourth, an emerald . . . and
the street of the city was pure gold, as it were trans-
parent glass." Those flaming old words came to mind—


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 7
from Revelations, weren't they? It was all one reve-
lation to him, the goal for which he had yearned, a fairy-
tale come true—the dazzling, the gorgeous, the veritable
East.
Since the earliest time he could remember, Camberwell
had been looking to this moment. He was the type of
chap—more common than might be thought in a drab
world—that dreams and that lives in dreams of those
strange foreign parts, while destiny mostly holds the
balance true with a trip between home and business twice
a day. By the ordinary dispensation, he should have
gone on dreaming, a little more dimly and dingily, until
the bulge of a bank-account or the horse-power of ani
automobile became the only potent figures in illusion-
But Camberwell had the luck.
Before he was too old to care for dreams, or too dull
to have any worth while, a certain forgotten aunt decided
to assume the role of Providence and left him a very
compact little sum in tangible cash.
A month later he had taken his inheritance, his leave
of doting relatives, an expensive tropical travel-outfit,
and the first vessel he could catch for realms of poly-
chrome romance.
She was a cramped and insectivorous craft, somewhat
underburthened for the size of her contract, one would
have thought—"five months' cruise; view the marvels of
the Orient." But she meant the Argo and the royal yacht
and all the caravels of Columbus to Camberwell. She
was only going to swing the lesser circle of the Pacific,
with a few brief stops at obvious ports. But Camberwell
asked nothing better; he was on the rainbow route at
last. The morning of his arrival, he adorned himself in,


8 IN DARK PLACES
his new silk suit, striped like an awning, and his new sun-
hat, shaped like a fireman's helmet, and his buckskin shoes
and his washable tie, and the cummerbund he had bought
from the barber and the pugree the steward had sold him,
and with his cane in one hand and his little guide-book
in the other, he stood armed to sally forth like a modern
conquistador the moment the gangway should be lowered.
"Mister, I'm going to do this town, and I'm going to do
it good!" Thus he, exulting, informed the second officer
as the vessel .nosed a way toward her anchorage.
Mr. Davison turned a wooden, bluntly-moustached vis-
age. Mr. Davison began to inspect the phenomenon
slowly and casually, beginning at his feet. . . . He rec-
ognized Camberwell's general purpose and significance off
hand. There is a certain detachment about the rank of
second officer that seems highly favourable to cynic obser-
vation—perhaps it is so with the second at any job—
and the observations of this particular second concern-
ing and appertaining to the genus globe-trotter had been
precise and acrid. He had a crisp retort ready when his
glance came as high as Camberwell's own.
Now there was nothing about Camberwell to strike the
beholder with architectural awe. He was just a well-
made youngster of his sort, fresh and jimp, with some of
his boyishness laundered into shining assurance by pre-
mature business training. But he did have rather re-
markable eyes. Perhaps his dreams had something to
do with them. In an undistinguished face, they were
easily his best feature—wide and "seeing" eyes, unwaver-
ing, clear and clean as new pearl buttons—the kind of
eyes that older folk linger on to retrieve some glint of
their own youth. They surprised Davison. When he


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 9
met them full, he forgot what he had meant to say and
changed involuntarily to an answering grin.
"How much of it are you going to do?"
"All of it," asserted Camberwell.
"You've got only until tomorrow morning."
"I know. But a fellow who's been waiting for a thing
twenty-four years can sample a whole lot in twenty-four
hours. That's me!"
Davison considered him.
"And what do you think you're after, sir?"
"Truth," said Camberwell promptly as if nothing could
be simpler. "I want the essence of this strange place and
these strange people. I want to understand it. I want to
grab it for myself. I want— By gum!"
They were fairly in the roadstead now, where the city
lay left and right. With its jumble of minarets and pa-
godas, of spires and domes as various as its faiths, it
swam over its own reflection in the flood of the morning,
detached, suspended like a mirage—a vision of incredible
enchantment that burst upon Camberwell all at once.
"Look!" he cried. "That's it—that's what I came for!
I want to get that."
"Yes?" said Davison, encouraging.
"By George! I knew it was bound to be splendid. But
this—just look at the colour, Mister Mate!"
"Yes," agreed Davison, not unappreciative himself.
"Yes. When that chap up-stairs begins splashing his
lights all over the shop he does get some queer effects—
no mistake. Though you'd have to keep looking a goodish
while to learn the half of his combination."
"Maybe," said Camberwell. "But, d'you know," he
breathed in hushed enthusiasm, "I believe it's got some


1o IN DARK PLACES
one combination. What? If a man were only keen
enough to catch it—and wouldn't it be great if he could!
Something vital and vivid to knock you on the spot so
you'd say right off—There, that means the East!' And
I'm going to try, I'm sure going to try. I'll pass up no
chance trying to get at it. Look now! How it seems.
. . . You never saw a combination to beat that in your
born days!"
Davison was doing some thinking.
"It'll seem something else in five minutes," he observed.
"See here, sir, I couldn't go about to warn you at all—
you being a passenger. I wouldn't presume." There
spoke the professional stiffly. "And of course you're
keyed up for your first Oriental port—natural, too.
But, after all, y'know, it's not a Thousand and
Second Arabian night. After all, it's only a huge great
city, and not over sanitary, neither—" He hesitated,
until Camberwell drew him with an amiable nod.
"A city like any other city, really," he went on. "Col-
ours? My word, yes—every blooming colour. Twenty
different races in a heap. But as for the truth of 'em—"
He shook his head—a wise head, tinged with grey. "You
couldn't ever dig it up. And if you did, you wouldn't
much care for it; and likely it'd turn out to be a lie, any-
how.
"You see, sir, the nearest you or me can come to these
people is—they're people. The good ones good enough,
and most of 'em very well in their way—and a few of
'em rotten bad, I mean. The same as London, or 'Frisco,
or Naples, or anywhere on earth. But these are rather
worse—they've had more practice. And for a stranger
in a strange place, as you put it yourself, what he's got to


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST u
remember; there's some regions and some kinds of truth
he wants to leave strictly on one side. They may be
pretty, but they ain't healthy."
Thus spoke the cynic when once well warmed out of his
cynicism, all for the sake of the wide, unwary eyes of
youth. And he had the usual reward. Youth jovially
slapped him on the back.
"Fine stuff, oY man! Now do me a last favour be-
fore I start, and I'll forgive you the rest. Those
regions—that address you've got in mind—whereabouts,
hey? . . . Just point 'em out as they lay, will you?"
So, in the end, Camberwell went on toward his vision
with a laugh and jest, undeterred, as it was inevitable he
should have done. He went ashore by the first sampan
to leave the ship's side, waving an airy hand toward a
wooden-jawed second officer who gazed after him from
the rail. He went along like the babes in the song, to see
what he could see. And he saw—truly—several things.
Through the early steps of that pilgrimage he pro-
ceeded in a state of emotion for which he was hardly to
be blamed. All explorers have shared it in some degree,
and certainly the East is still the East, with a few features
of its own never wholly appropriated to the comic-opera
stage. . . .
The colours were there—they were there beyond all
whooping! Brown, of course—faces and bodies lemon
brown, coffee brown, apple brown, chocolate brown.
Each separate figure leaped to the eye with some radiant
spurt—kerchiefs of vermilion, of ochre, of aquamarine;
assorted head-dresses in raw magenta, slate, salmon,
robin's egg and grass-green; skirts and sashes in the odd-


12 IN DARK PLACES
est rich tints, oldrose and olive, apricot and cinnamon;
the silver-embroidered cap of a babe, the yolk-yellow
robe of a pongee, the vehement scarlet belt and badge of
a muslin-clad chuprassy—bands and whorls, dots and
patches of colour, as if the whole palette had been wasted
abroad with one gigantic spatter-brush. Camberwell
went blinking and hurrying through it all, random-footed
and random-minded as well.
"I must remember this!" gloated Camberwell, and tried
to make sure of it, clicking the mental camera furiously.
But the folk swept him on and each vista blotted out
the one that went before and made it seem poor and
meagre and altogether insignificant.
How on earth was a man to remember anything, any
one aspect, when another was always shifting in—equally
surprising and equally true? The best he could do was
to clutch his guide-book the tighter, and blink the faster,
and mop his bewildered, beaming face in a heat that
waxed about him like a steam-bath and go tearing on
—seeing, still seeing. . . .
A mad sort of pilgrimage, and before evening it had
led him the extended round. To the bazaars and the
forts and the race-course. To the Chinese millionaire's—
an immense carven glove-box in cinnabar, lamp-black and
chrome. To the Mohammedan mosque—a wedding-
cake of frosty white, and the Hindu temple—a birth-
day-cake of pink icing. Finally, to the municipal gardens,
where fantastic vegetation from the most expensive hot-
houses in the world had been recklessly heaped right out-
doors to display every tinge, wash, stain, tincture, or com-
plexion that man ever named, and many more they


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 13
never could—every blooming colour, as Davison had
said.
"This is it I" decided Camberwell, again and again. But
how was a fellow to choose?
And when, at last, the seeker after truth took refuge in
a big open-faced hotel by the Bunder—hot, tired, dry and
dusty—happy, but somehow baffled, satiated but yet un-
satisfied—when he called for refreshment in a broad, dim
bar of tables and pillars and swaying punkahs where
"Manhatcoktail" and "Thos. Collins; 1 Dol." lent an er-
ratic familiarity to the decorations—by one of those co-
incidental errors that triumph over any studied irony—lo!
—a stupid Goaboy waiter set out before him the wrong
glass—a thin finger-depth of variegated sparkling liquor.
"Pousse-cafe!" exploded Camberwell then. "Half way
around the world to find this! . . . Pousse-cafe?"
He turned with a human impulse to divide at large the
inestimable humour of it; with the same gesture he flung
open his well-crammed wallet to make payment. And
that was the precise moment at which he met the inquir-
ing, brilliant smile of the little gentleman from Macao.
The little gentleman from Macao occupied the adjoining
table. It was wholly natural for him to reply with win-
ning and easy politeness. "Pardon," he said. "Is your
order wrong by the steward? Maybe I can do a service.
If you allow me"
He appeared to be only some casual merchant, clerk, or
agent of the port. With his suit of spotless drill and low-
brimmed Panama, with his languid glance and pruned
moustache like tiny leeches on his lip, there was nothing
to set him apart in the class of resident local whites and


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 15
But nobody could have noticed the order he gave, nor how
he gave it; from across the bar nobody could have sus-
pected him of taking any interest in the visitor. Only,
after the fresh drink had been brought—
"'Ow you like that?"
"Great!" The stuff looked exactly like liquid topaz,
tasted exactly as topaz ought to taste—delicate, keen, and
pungent. "It's great!" admitted Camberwell, sipping.
Only then, the gentleman from Macao leaned a trifle
closer. "And about these amusement'. These att-raction
you speak of. Maybe I could 'elp you also. Suppose,
now," he went on, in a voice of infinite suggestion,
"suppose you go see a lid'l dance—eh? Mu-sic—danc-
ers. Very special—very different indeed! ... A lid'l
sing-song "He stopped, for the visitor had drawn
back.
"Thanks," said Camberwell, without offence. "That's
not quite what I'm after."
"No?" exclaimed the gentleman from Macao, and it
was his turn to ask, as Davison had asked before him:
"No! But what is it you are after?"
So again, for the second time since dawn, Camber-
well had to give account of himself in the East.
"The dope," he said simply. "Just the true dope. I
want what this place can show—the inwardness, the
meaning, the colour. I want the colour of it, right I"
he cried, with a sort of passion, and shook his head.
"I've been looking and looking all day," he added whim-
sically. "But I haven't found it yet—not to be sure."
And again, in his turn, the gentleman from Macao
searched CamberweH's face—just as Davison had done—
met Camberwell's eyes, those rather remarkable eyes.


16 IN DARK PLACES
Whatever he saw there, he made no sign to declare; per-
haps could not have told any better than the second officer.
The fact remains he adjusted to it with even greater
celerity.
"Ah-ha! Yes,"—he nodded—"I onderstan'. But 'ave
you ever reflect' to yourself," he offered, leaning still
closer until his teeth glistened, " 'ave you reflect' 'ow these
dope of yours change? If you so want the colour, the
true colour—eh, what ?—why not go look at night-time?"
Camberwell sat up. There was a pleasant tingling in
his veins; his fatigue and disappointment had lifted like
fog from a channel. All the eagerness and the brightness
of his dreams came back with a rush. As a pilgrim re-
inspired he turned to the quest once more.
"By George! It's a fact. I still have the night, haven't
I? Mister, you're a wiz! If you happen to keep that
address on you—the region, the whereabouts"
A minute later, the gentleman from Macao had taken
himself and his unfailing smile elsewhere, had vanished,
leaving a card behind him on the table with the polite,
murmured direction:
"Tell any 'rickshaw-man."
And while Camberwell read the jotted number, he
chuckled aloud:
"Too bad about the one the mate wouldn't give me!
. . . Wonder if this is the same!"
As a matter of fact, it was the same—geographically
a district, a section, a public place. A famous place, in
its way. Moreover, if he could only have known by
some clairvoyance, it was that identical place elsewhere
toward which that obliging informant of his, who had
just proved the trick of smoothness so admirably, was


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 17
even then gliding away through the clogged purlieus of
the city and the sticky tropic night—inconspicuous as
ever, keeping to the shadow and the unfrequented path,
moving like a sleek thing of prey which runs before to
prepare its ambush.
Camberwell came in condition to enjoy it, to enjoy
almost anything, thanks to the topaz drink and the mum-
my-faced Goaboy, who must have had some talent, too,
for Camberwell was accurately and scientifically within
the penultimate limit. How he reached the main en-
trance, how he braved the portals of that famous place
where angels certainly fear to tread, he could never have
told; but in good time he tipped the grinning doorkeeper
a gold piece and bashed his sun-helmet over the celestial
head, hung his cane on a joss, shook hands with a Can-
tonese hatchet-man—the Oriental equivalent of a bouncer
—elbowed through as choice a gang of cut-throats and
half-caste outcasts as ever gathered between Hakodate and
Suez, yanked a chair from under the worst of them, of-
fered it to the nearest scared nine de salon and stood in
to play. Easily. With complete enjoyment. . . .
For the colours were there. It was just as his casual
little friend had said—the colours were there—mellowed
and deepened in the night-time: hot and bright and swing-
ing round him now with the most entrancing gyrations.
Seagreen on the table-top—tiny twinkles of brass cash
under the banker's pale yellow fingers. The bronze of in-
tent faces, the gamboge and citrine of downward-flaring
lamps, the amethyst drift of smoke. Puce and mauve
and maroon among the clustered players. Turquoise and
violet and crimson among the dresses of the women. He


18 IN DARK PLACES
liked them all. He liked them better as he won and won.
And that was easy, too. You shoved your bet on one
of the four numbers, and then they counted your number
from the bowl and gave you white banknotes to match
your greenish bills. ... At least, they did at first. Easy!
With that little nina to help you pick up the profits,
whispering and nudging at you in the most kindly fash-
ion, waiting upon you with her great soft, tender glance.
Really an awfully pretty girl—young too. Though he
could not understand why there should be tear-drops
caught in her lashes like a dew on a flower. Unless,
perhaps, she was crying for him because he had begun
to lose.
He plunged the heavier, to reassure her. He lost.
. . . Crying for the luck, was she? Charming girl, al-
ways plucking at his sleeve for some reason! But he
would show her how well he could do this town in the
night-time. He plunged. . . . And he lost. Plunged
again, until, in an unmeasured interval and from
an unmeasured distance, her sharp, urgent message fil-
tered through his dazed senses.
"Come a-way; come a-way—quick. There is danger
—danger—danger I"
He rallied to that call and tried to follow her through
the crowd as she edged out. But it was not so easy this
way—not nearly so easy to leave Li Chwan's as to enter
it. Arms were put out to impede them. A muttering
rose here and there. But they had reached the edge of
the throng, the threshold of another apartment, before a
moonfaced Chinaman came bustling up, chattered angrily
at the girl and snatched her back toward him.
Camberwell drove a fist to the jaw with a gesture so


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 19
natural as to be almost unconscious—abolished that China-
man, sent him tumbling and clawing while the girl
slammed a door and leaned there atremble.
"You said—some danger?" queried Camberwell
gravely, surprised to find how slowly the words and
thoughts came.
"Foah you—foah you!" she cried, prettier than ever in
her distress. "I did try to make you go a-way. I tried!
Now you are caught!"
He got the idea dimly. He looked round him. They
were alone in a sort of closed alcove with heavy hangings
all about the walls, and at the far side the curtains of two
windows. The girl seemed to be looking toward the
windows with a strained face. She led him a step or two,
and stopped, and wrung her hands. A smart blow fell
upon the door. Voices were babbling inside there. The
house was up against them. A perception common to all
trapped creatures reached Camberwell.
"There must be a way out of this."
"Yes—but you can never get to it!"
"Show me, please. Which side?"
Again she led him a few steps, toward the far corner
of the room, and again she stopped and held him back.
They had to pass the second window if they were going to
move any further. The girl held to him with stiffened
fingers while a tattoo struck the door. She could not turn
either way.
"Why?" she cried, despairing, "Oah, why did you ever
come 'ere? You 'ave lost your money; you got no money
for it!" In fact the wallet he still kept in his hand was
sadly shrunken. "Didn' you know on-lee bad an' wicked
come to such a place? What you come after, you?"


20 INDARKPLACES
He regarded her, and, by the solemn logic of drink, it
seemed to him that she meant a legitimate question. She
was so very pretty—so troubled and fearful for him, but
brave and true, too. So like any right kind of girl to
whom a man can and should tell these matters.
For the third time within his twenty-four hours, the
explorer through strange foreign parts explained himself
in all good faith.
"Well, I tell you," he said, swaying; "y'know—I wanted
to buy some little things to take home with me. I wanted
some little presents for my—my mother and sisters,
y'know. Kimonos or shawls or things. And I thought—
I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could only get the right
colours? . . . Colours, good colours—I love 'em, and I
wanted—the true colour of the East to bring back.
That's all. But of course," he added mournfully, show-
ing the wallet, "I can't do it now."
Then it was the turn of the half-caste girl to look into
his face and his eyes—the rather remarkable eyes of
Camberwell—and she looked, long and deep, from her
agony of despair and life-weariness.
"'Mother' ?" she breathed. "'Sisters'—you 'ave? An'
you can speak of them 'ere?" He nodded, unvexed.
"Boy!" she said, with something like a sob. "You—you
boy from far a-way! You have the clean heart—the
sweet heart!" She caught him closer. "Do not re-
member me—never, never think of me a'gain. But
now—will you on-lee kiss me once bifor' you go?"
Well, she looked the sort of girl one kisses. And, be-
sides, having asked
He drew the back of his hand across his mouth. Her
own was quite close, quite tempting. They were stand-


THE COLOUR OF THE EAST 21
ing by the window. But in the long moment while she
clung to him and their lips met, she swung him round,
so that she leaned among the curtains herself.
A thundering assault fell upon the door, and at the same
time she thrust him away from her so violently that he
staggered toward the far corner and almost fell, literally,
down the well of the rear staircase that guided him to
the street. . . .
There the second officer met him, wandering in the un-
profitable dawn, and picked him up with a great roar
of relief.
"Thank God, Mr. Camberwell, sir! I've been looking
all about for you. You gave me a fright, I can tell
you. I was feared you might be over here in this here
gambling-hole on the next block. A tough place! The
police raided it last night, and it seems they caught a little
murdering yellow rat of a Macao Portugee"
Camberwell stopped him.
"Never mind any of that. I don't care. The only
thing I want to know is when the ship sails."
"On the tide, sir—half-an-hour."
"Come along then, won't you?"
"Why, sir?" was Davison's query. "Have you had
enough of this queer port and these queer people?"
"Yes," said the student of local colour. "Yes; I've
had enough. Let's go!"
As they started along the water-front he rubbed his
lips surreptitiously, as a man will do, on the back of his
hand. And when he looked, there was a red smear.
Red! That was the final discovery of Camberwell in the
Far East. Red. The colour of life, everywhere the


22 IN DARK PLACES
same. Just common red. In a sudden brusque gesture
of distaste and disillusion, he scrubbed it off with his
handkerchief. . . . For he thought, and he went on think-
ing, and he always would think, that the stuff was nothing
but rouge.


24 IN DARK PLACES
HENRY GORDON SHOESMITH
b. Scotland 1847 d- Vitongo, Sept. 6, 1898
"Every man's work shall be made manifest."
1. COR. Ill
And underneath lay the original trader of Vitongo—
the tough old, far-wandering Scot who had founded home
and family and fortune in this restful island nook; who
had been brought to his last rest treacherously and terribly
—slain by an unknown hand.
"Unknown," be it said at once, in the official sense only;
for no person had ever been tried for the deed. "Un-
proven" would be more nearly exact; for in private talk,
the murderer had been charged, tried and condemned long
since. Some hundreds of folk in the Aana district of
Upolo could have told how Henry Gordon met his death in
the disordered days of Tri-Partite government, when men
died without formality and law was weak in the land.
Some dozens of old-timers along the coast from Apia
town could have stated the case and the quarrel nearly
enough. . . . They could have, but they did not; the na-
tives because of native caution; the whites because of
white policy. It was really nobody's business unless it
was young Henry's business. And
"Tu'u ia mo paga," said Henry; which means, it is
nothing, it is forgotten—it should not count. He climbed
ashore and sat shaking the wet from his straight black
hair and gleaming in the sun like a bronzed merman.
"Eighteen year, tha's awful long time," said Henry of
Vitongo.


THEPAGAN 2$
His cousin Gordon scowled down at him.
"A long time don't change the fact. If you was a man,
Henry Shoesmith—the 'alf of a man!"
"Ah, tha's it," smiled Henry quietly, without malice.
"Tha's why—eh? I am only 'alf a man beside you." A
neat way of recalling that Gordon's mother had married a
white; wherefore Gordon was a quarter-caste, college-
taught in New Zealand, and wore celluloid collars and
satin ties and altogether comported himself with the dom-
inant race. Wherefore Gordon despised a second cousin
who preferred to live Samoan fashion—camping on an
open veranda while real carpets and red curtains and
pink lace doilies went to rack and ruin inside his neglected
house, and never wearing so much as a pair of pants
when he could help it.
"Tu'u ia mo paga," repeated Henry.
The other bit his lip. It was his vehement annoyance
that this graceless young scamp should have fallen into
the best part of the Shoesmith possessions. It was al-
most equally annoying that the scamp should care so
little to augment those holdings, to deploy them with
social gestures—or even to protect them, as appeared.
"List'n to me," he said, severely. "Everybody knows
who killed your father. Everybody knows it was the
same h-wicked, h-wicked man who is trying to thieve
away the rest of your land now!"
Henry pillowed himself on the warm sand and con-
tinued to smile indolently out across the smiling bay.
"He will do it, too—unless you fight. He has bought
up all the notes of your foolish borrowings in Apia and
raised the amount by tricks and false claims. Oh-h, a


26 INDARKPLACES
cunning d-hevil! It was so easy how he robbed and
killed your father. 'Ave you forgotten?" Gordon's
voice fell a sinister note. . . . "Your father had loaned
him much money. They went together one night to drink.
Afterwards, somebody—somebody—rode a white horse
from Mulifanua in the dark and cut your father's throat
as he slept, and thieved all those papers of those loans!
Eh? And now this same man comes again to r-r-rob
you. Only this time he does not need to use a knife . . .
Henry Shoesmith!" Gordon called upon him. "Henry
Shoesmith; do you remember that knife?"
Something like a cloud passed over Henry's face;
something like a shudder took him, as when a damp wind
turns the bread fruit leaf. Did he not remember that
knife? It was the substance of every evil vision he had
had from childhood. He always saw it as it hung over
his father's bed—a Malay kris, really, though Henry
never knew it as such; one of the relics the shrewd old
trader had gathered in his travels before he settled down
as an island patriarch; a thing with a wavy blade and a
handle set in coloured stones that glittered—glittered
dreadfully. He always saw it glittering through a red
mist since the morning when, as a mere toddler, he had
been first to discover the tragedy.
"List'n. I know where that knife is kep'! I know
three men in Apia who have seen it. The stones are
very valu-able, and Joranson needs money again, as he
did before. ... He has tried to sell it—Joranson the
Dane!"
Still Henry made no response.
"You could find that knife if you searched on board
his trading cutter. ... If you dared!" said Gordon, with


THEPAGAN 27
a spurt of anger. "Hoh! But you do not dare. Even
when Tito is waiting there for you. A beau-tiful girl
is Tito—the daughter of Joranson. She fears 'im, and
every night he beats her with a bamboo stick. She is
only waiting for some strong man to take her away from
him. But she will not wait long for you when she knows
you are a coward I"
Henry sat up at last. "I am not a coward," he said,
stung into full-throated native speech. "I am sprung
from the seed of Alipia Nailetai—'Alipia Who Died in
the Sea.' He was a great chief of Samoa, and Samoans
are not cowards!"
"Samoans are not cowards, but thou knowest what
white folks say of them? They are quit-ters," returned
Gordon, bitterly. "They will not fight. They quit!
They can not carry through anything, even in their own
defence. . . . And so it is with thee, who art no Samoan.
What art thou? Only a fish-man and a fool. Only
swimming and joking and idling while thy blood-enemy
goes unslain and unpunished!"
"It is not for a Samoan to have a blood-enemy. It is
not the custom of the country to slay anybody."
"It is the custom to ask justice! Only as nearest of
kin you must ask the court yourself. . . . Come now,
Henry, let me take your case," pleaded Gordon. "We
can so easy prove that Joranson did it, and we can leave
the killing to the English judge. He will 'ave Joranson
'anged by the neck. And then you can marry Tito—and
Joranson's cutter and all that is Joranson's will be
yours!" he added eagerly.
Henry lay back on the beach again with one arm thrown
over to shade his brow. But while he regarded the im-


28 INDARKPLACES
portunate visitor, in the pooled depths of his eyes ran a
tiny flickering light which might have recalled—which
did recall—the temper of that able Scotch trader, his
father.
"Gor-don Shoesmith," he said, slowly, "go away. You
are smart-man and lawyer-man. You are thinking if
anything 'appens to me you will be next to own Vitongo
—eh? And any'ow if you stir up bloody row you make
me fight to keep Vitongo for you—eh? List'n. I am
maybe fool but I am not damn fool! Go away, Gordon
Shoesmith."
So Gordon went, swearing aspirated oaths as he
mounted his rattletrap cart, and slashing his flea-bitten
pony as he turned back towards his own plantation.
Henry watched him go, and Henry laughed. He would
have liked to keep on laughing. But after a while the
laughter failed. All very well to check a meddlesome
schemer; all very well to postpone a troublesome issue in
true Samoan style with a handy proverb, saying it was
naught—it was forgotten—it did not count. But the
trouble which had been making for him pretty much since
his birth would not banish so readily on this critical
morning of his twenty-third year. . . .
Henry of Vitongo was that curious modern product—
seldom noticed—the man midway East and West, whose
heritage swings between two pasts as wide apart as the
poles. It was a remarkable share in the heritage, and the
world's indirect tribute to a noble native race, that as a
half-caste of Samoa he need never be ashamed of it.
Pride of race is so rare with mixed bloods; still rarer
when granted by white to dark. Only among descend-


THEPAGAN 29
ants of certain American Indian tribes, of the Maoris and
kindred Polynesian branches through the Islands, will
you find such pride held and acknowledged. And this
was Henry's.
Not but he knew well enough the ways of a saddle-
tinted society—like Gordon and Gordon's womenfolk,
who anxiously aped the manners of a money-making
middle class. Not but he saw Shoesmiths and Smollets
and Schmidts—offspring of beachcombing adventurers in
the last century—established now and vastly concerned
with a quaint parade of high heels and ormolu clocks and
afternoon teas. But he also knew in this same society
how carefully the old Samoan names were remembered
and honoured; how closely the old Samoan link still held.
Even Gordon, with a sophisticated taste in neckwear
and lawsuits—even Gordon himself claimed an ancient
chief's title through a famous taupo, his grandam, and
never dreamed of denying his island origin or the island
speech.
The difference with Henry was that he had no call to
be a Shoesmith at all. To these striving relatives of his
many things seemed essential; invitations at Government
House, land and profits and the tricks of commerce. To
Henry nothing in life seemed important except the living.
It always had been so with him. Since his orphaned
boyhood he had been a scandal to his kind. In his school
days at the Marist Mission he had offered a sad problem
to those earnest saints who shed a pale cast of culture
on the riotous tropics. The best swimmer and cricketer,
the quickest hand with net and bonito boat, he never had
felt a really vital concern in compound percentage, the
rule of three and the "Book of Sacred Gems." ... As


30 IN DARK PLACES
sheerly a matter of feeling as when Brother Leo used to
catch him playing truant with garlanded madcaps at the
jumping-rock—used to shake an angry ringer at the elfin
face and explode a six-barrelled German word which sig-
nified, in approximate meaning, a "throw-back."
"That is what you are, Henry Shoesmith. You belong
a gentleman—no ?—with a fine home and a trading store.
And you act as a little pagan. Ach, such conduct dis-
pleasing to the good God; you should blush for yourself!"
Brother Leo intended no jest. It hardly occurred to
him that a skin like sun-gilded fruit does not show a
blush in the sight of the good God. But otherwise
Brother Leo had hit the truth. Henry of Vitongo was
a born pagan.
To ride the breaker, to chase the rainbow fish, to be-
guile the hours, nourished at nature's ripe breast and
sleeping there without doubt or care—no books had
taught him this; no books could teach him better. The
casual villages in each shining bay—the bee-hive houses
without walls or doors like the open, simple lives of their
indwellers—they were home to him, and homelike and
kindly were the scents of hearth and thatch and freshly-
plucked masoo'i, of cocoanut shell fires and new cocoa-
nut oil, headier than any musk.
He loved the equal days and the long, long moon-lit
nights that pass to merriment and choric song, the dron-
ing organ of the reef and the cymballing of the palm-
fronds. He loved every impact that set him in his
ordained environment—the salted lash of spray, driving
wind and rain like hammers from the sky: the breath-
taking, bubble-poised send of a frail canoe: the cleaving
triumph of a deep-sea dive: saffron dawns and cool pur-


THE PAGAN 31
pie dusks and quivering fierce noons on a coral shore.
And the folk—his mother's sweet-voiced, sweet-eyed
folk, with the port of demi-gods and the souls of trusting
children—fated, of course, and condemned ultimately to
vanish from a white man's world as surely as soft metal
in an acid bath, but unvexed and unresenting: accepting
the white man's religion and the white man's governance
with the rest of the white man's deadly contact, but still
at heart unchanged since a golden, olden age: neither
labouring, owning nor coveting: harming none, envying
none and hating nobody—these Henry loved, too, and
lovingly understood.
All of which was harmless enough, to be sure—all of
which involved nothing worse than the talk and the scan-
dal aforesaid—to the fateful moment when he learned
that he loved, and hopelessly loved, pretty Tito Joran-
son. . . .
"A beautiful girl is Tito, the daughter of Joranson the
Dane. Every night he beats her with a bamboo stick.
She only waits for a strong man."
Well, whatever any one might say or think of it, Henry
certainly had done his best to qualify.
Had he not enlarged Vitongo store at reckless cost?
Had he not plunged with a bold financial gesture on three
trading ventures to Savaii? Had he not mortgaged and
borrowed right and left in order to gamble disastrously
in copra and cocoa—all at Joranson's own cunning sug-
gestion and all for the single purpose of proving himself
a strong man and a gentleman by every half-caste stand-
ard and a worthy candidate for a son-in-law?
His effort had failed. It had worse than failed, for


32 INDARKPLACES
Joranson was coming this very night to demand a settle-
ment. Henry dreaded it. How terribly he dreaded
it, only one could have guessed who had ingrained in his
make-up the obscure inhibitions of Polynesia—primitive
without savagery—wise without wisdom; the people who
do not fight: "they can not carry through anything, even
in their own behalf." Here and now he was going to
have to meet the crisis of his life—to square life and love
somehow with the reputed murderer of his father!
Such was the case of Henry Shoesmith on this particu-
lar morning of his twenty-third year.
It was not a good case, but it offered no escape by his
own lights and limitations. Neither by compound per-
centage. Nor yet by the "Book of Sacred Gems." And
finally it drove him out of his dreams into making some
sort of a show for himself. . . .
He hurried to the big house. He donned a pair of
dove-grey pants. He laid out a shirt with pearl buttons.
Better still; from a battered cowhide trunk he unearthed
old yellow shoes, a jacket of black alpaca and a vener-
able silk waistcoat sprigged with forget-me-nots. Once
he had scrubbed away the mildew and tucked up the
sleeves and nearly strangled himself with a collar button
and had set a warped straw hat to top the glory, he felt
like an armoured knight; very gentlemanly, indeed.
Theii he marched over to the store where he relieved his
Niue-boy clerk and sold three yards of calico for a total
profit of ten pence ha'-penny and felt himself a business
man.
The moral uplift sustained him all day long. Until
swift tropic night began to pour in against the land.
Until a lantern on Joranson's cutter cocked its baleful


THEPAGAN 33
and expectant eye at him across Vitongo Bay. Until he
crept down cautiously to avoid his dear cousin Gordon—
who doubtless would be watching and spying somewhere
among the palm-trees—and paddled out in his little out-
rigger proa on the dappling phosphorescence of the
lagoon to achieve his destiny.
Tito was waiting for him. Somehow he had been sure
that Tito would be waiting and he was glad, though in-
wardly quaking. In a way this encounter was worse
than the prospect of his ordeal with Joranson, for a half-
caste courtship is hedged with infinite ceremony and he
never actually had addressed a dozen words to his lady-
love. He could see her gown as a lighter patch there on
the forward deck. So he put on his shoes—instruments
of torture which he had saved to the last moment—and
climbed aboard over the cutter's rail.
"A-good even' to you, Miss Joranson."
"A-good even', Mis-ter Shoesmith."
He swept off his hat with a flourish. She made him a
courtesy in the grand manner of the saddle-tinted aris-
tocracy. But both of them rather spoiled the effect by
turning an anxious glance towards the after cabin, where
their common ogre sat alone at his dinner. Their voices
were hushed.
"I did not fin' you at the pi'ture theatre las' Thursday
night," began Henry politely.
"No. Tha' was the same n-ight the dance of the La-
dies' Tuina Club," returned Tito primly.
As a matter of fact, Henry had not gone to the picture
theatre; neither had Tito gone to the dance. These
were company conventions, to which they desperately
clung.


34 IN DARK PLACES
"Business 'as been good today," observed Henry, fan-
ning himself. "Copra is up again. I think there will
be much money in the villages this season."
"Yes. And much gay time' in Apia," agreed Tito.
"Two weddings will be soon—and a christen' parry."
As a matter of fact business and parties were equally
far from them; but they were saying the proper things.
Out on the broad horizon grew a faint halo, luminous
with coming moonlight. It made a background for Tito's
fillet-bound head. Higher yet hung two quivering points
of radiance. Henry thought they must be fireflies caught
in the dusky web of her hair. Then he saw they were
stars, and presently, as a wonderful and very dear and
very intimate revelation, they showed him her face.
A flawless face; of a beauty that would have matched
a Reni Madonna—the soft, rich, almost Latin beauty of
her type. Henry knew its loveliness. But now as he
looked down at the tremulous mouth, the glorious great
eyes uplifted and dwelling in his by the starlight—now
in a dizzy sweep of tenderness he knew something else;
her wistful appeal; her trouble that answered his own
trouble—the same timid and passionate longing clouded
with the same complex of doubts and misgivings and im-
posed restraints possessed each of them.
She wore a tight frock of some pink stuff. On her
arms, smooth and firm as copper cast as flesh, and over
her superb shoulders, she had tied a woolly shawl. By
one ear dangled a bunch of ribbon, and she went mincing
in ballroom slippers—velvet with jet trimmings—the kind
that knock about all the shelves of the Pacific in job-lot
consignments for the Colonial trade. Her whole splen-
did body, made for sun and freedom and the embrace of


THEPAGAN 35
cresting seas, had been pinched and frilled and tricked out
in a pathetic attempt at fashion.
And with sudden enlightenment Henry recognized the
pathos—not, as another might have done, the absurdity, of
it; suddenly this girl who had seemed an unattainable
mystery seemed a mystery no more. She was so de-
lightfully embarrassed; so exquisitely uncomfortable—it
thrilled him. . . . Surely her feet must hurt even worse
than his own!
For Tito herself was just another product. She,
too, had been taken as a child from her native mother
and run through a mission. She, too, had submitted to
the ideals of some gloomy suburb half a world away—
like West Ham, perhaps, or Dulwich, or wherever the
good sisters of the Papautu Girls' School hail from; had
struggled with the rule of three and tried to find com-
pensation for living in an earthly paradise by the "Book
of Sacred Gems." And she had not made much more
of it than Henry Shoesmith. He was aware of that at
once, by voice and eye and the throb of a woman's breast
—things not taught in missions. . . . Surely, some time
or other, somebody must have called her a little pagan,
too!
"Tito I" he cried, and would have reached to her.
But his collar button nipped him in time. After all, it
is hard to discard a gentlemanly training; he had come
braced and belted in such gentlemanly style. . . .
"Miss Joran-son," he corrected. "You look aroun' this
place—eh?" He swept a stiff arm over the bay. "From
shore to shore is Vitongo. You know?"
"Yes," she said, innocently. "Yes, Mis-ter Shoesmith.
I know. Vitongo."


J IN DARK PLACES
"You like it?"
"Yes," she said. "Oh, yes, Mis-ter Shoesmith. It is
very pretty. And very es'pensive."
"It give me gr-reat pleasure," he stammered, "if you
will accept per invoice ... I mean—if you will do me
the 'onour. ..." With choking eagerness he tried to
capture an eligible half-caste formula. "Dear Miss Jo-
ran-son; list'n. All this is mine. This plantation; with
a fine 'ome and a trading store. I own Vitongo my-
self"
"Like hell you do!"
The words fell upon them with the force of a club.
They started apart. And there at the hatchway of the
little cabin stood their ogre; the white man—th5 inevi-
table white man who always has appeared in just that
manner to the gentler peoples of the earth, who always
does stand at the hatchway—grim and masterful.
"I heard you, Henry. I been waiting for you. Come
inside here and cool off." His voice grated on the
humorous note more compelling than any threat. Tito
he passed over without a glance. At the first turn of his
big hand, she vanished aft like a wraith. "Henry," he
repeated, with formidable pleasantry, "don't be back-
ward, my boy. Did I not tell you to come in here? . . .
You're late."
Joranson was one of those figures that have made the
South Sea the last far-flung, picturesque frontier. In the
old days they possessed it with the missionary, step for
step. The missionary sought the bewildered souls of
black and brown men. The pioneer sought their labour
and their lands. The one set up a paralysing system of


THEPAGAN 37
morality, while the other cashed in. Together, pioneer
and missionary farmed the helpless island world—and few
had come off better than Joranson. Blackbirder, gin-
seller, gun-runner; he had tried most ways of scoundrel-
ism in season. If he had died in that lawless period he
might have become almost legendary, like the pirate
Bully Hayes, whose disciple he had been. But he sur-
vived. And he survived because he was far-sighted as
he was ruthless. •
Joranson the Dane, they called him. The name had
lost its original meaning; the man himself had long since
moulded to the prevailing trader type, Colonial in speech
and Yankee in oath. And this very adaptability was the
line of his success. His early rivals were dead—Shoe-
smiths and Smollets and Schmidts with whom he had
played the old frontier game of fraud and violence as it
used to be played. They were gone, and—"eighteen
years, that's an awful long time." He seldom needed a
weapon nowadays; he preferred a court order. He no
longer beat the native over the head and sold him into
slavery; he gave him credit and sold him into debt. And
occasionally, when luck was kind, he caught some shift-
less heir of one of his former foes and squeezed the life
out of him with a very special satisfaction.
As in the case of Henry Shoesmith.
"You was saying you owned something; and I was say-
ing you did, nix.". . . Powerful—built on a huge, loose
scaffolding of bone and muscle—he was still in steel-hard
condition. Only his grey hair and his grey face betrayed
him. He had a face gridironed like a devil's, and slitted
eyes with a cold spark in them.
"You'll find it by these papers, Henry," he remarked,


38 IN DARK PLACES
as he tossed out a sheaf of documents on the tiny cabin
table. "You don't own nothing. Them notes of yours
went to protest, d'y' see? All you got to do is sign y'r
assets to me ... All assets," he added amiably.
Henry gasped.
"You mean—Vitongo?"
"The whole outfit."
"Vitongo!"
"What t'hell else did you expect?"
Henry could hardly have told; but even with Gordon's
warning he never had expected this. He never had
thought of Vitongo itself as a piece of property—some-
thing you buy and sell. Vitongo was the land—his birth-
place; the soil to which he belonged. ... It stunned him.
He wanted to resist. Doubtless the papers had been
juggled—perhaps actually falsified, as Gordon had said.
But he could not tell how or where. He wanted to
charge the other with his treachery; he wanted to deal or
to dicker or to bargain somehow for his heart's desire.
These were the things he might have learned in school,
if he had been capable of it. But he had not learned.
Uncounted centuries debarred him. He was the man
of colour, and against him -stood the white man, armed
with the white man's power and backed by the white man's
code. He was the predestined victim. He had no choice
but to obey, in a sort of helpless trance. Meanwhile
Joranson continued to enjoy himself. It made a rare
moment for Joranson, this neat turn which was also the
triumph of his ancient feud. "I don't mind telling you."
he said once, with infernal geniality, "I ought'a had the
place long ago. Your father beat me out of it. But I


THEPAGAN 39
notice such crooked doings have a way of coming straight.
. . . Sign y'r name right there, Henry—on the line."
And again:
"You'll understand there ain't a holy chanst for you,
Henry. Not a chanst. I been too blame' careful.
There'll be no pickings left over. Not even for that
smart blackmailing cousin of yours—Gordon. I got Mr.
Gordon stopped—don't you worry!" Which information,
oddly enough, gave poor Henry a fleeting touch of com-
fort in the midst of his misery.
But the worst was at the last. When the business was
done, when the name had been signed, Joranson slipped
the mask a little. "That'll be all, Henry. Just one thing
while you go." He bent a look on the boy like chill
lightning. "Just one point. You got a hell of a nerve
hanging around that kid of mine. Oh, I seen y'; and you
drop it, d'y' hear?—or I'll skin you alive. She'll fetch
a white husband any time, that girl—and by God, I'll have
no more tar-brush in my family. . . . Now you clear!"
Henry cleared. With that glance piercing his shoulder
blades, with that final insult in his ears, he scuttled up
the after companion and stumbled on deck.
And there Tito met him again.
Out to seaward the moon had swung high, the swell-
ing moon of Samoan nights, like a vast, golden bread-
fruit in the sky. It gave light—light to show off silks
and satins and tricked-out finery and mincing steps, per-
haps—plenty of light for grand manners. But Henry
did not think of them; and neither, somehow, did Tito.
She met him at once; her hands fluttering towards his,


40 IN DARK PLACES
her lips breathing broken little phrases of pity. He
reached to her, and this time—collar button or no collar
button—this time he did not draw away.
"Tito, Tito !" he whispered, with the appeal of
shame and suffering.
"I know," she soothed. "I know—I know. I was lis-
tening. But do not weep." Unconsciously they had
spoken in their liquid native tongue, made for love and
the low murmur of love, soft as the call of wild pigeons
in the mating season. "Nay, weep not. I can not bear
that!"
Again he saw her face, so near to his, and again came
to him the glory and the wonder of woman, loved and
loving—the amazing revelation of it.
"You heard? Then it is also known to you that I
have nothing any more, Tito. No house. No planta-
tion. I am a beggar. I do not remember if I have even
any claim on the clan of my dead mother. Perhaps her
village would give me a home in charity. . . . But that
is all."
"I know," she repeated. "It makes no change. We
have ourselves—thou and I." Very different was her
speech now; very different its simple message which
struck back to the ultimate sources. "No harm is done
to us while we both live. Only tell me where you will go
for shelter and what you mean to do. Be quick—be-
fore he stirs!"
Henry looked down the ladder. The ogre was busied
below at something. He looked to sea. The cutter had
been anchored just inside the passage of the reef, in
deep water; it was quiet outside—only an easy rolling of
ground-swell. Last he looked towards the land; its shore


THE PAGAN 41
a thin strip of silver a quarter mile off; its shoulders
rising in a great silvered sweep from height to height,
by crag and jungle and forest to the star-tipped basaltic
peaks above. . . . "Would you seek me out, then?
Would you follow?" he questioned eagerly.
"Perhaps." She smiled a little, shyly. "But I would
be sure you are safe."
With one arm he caught her close to him. They did
not kiss; that caress, unknown to the East, is still a
curious invention of the West. But he felt the heat of
her heart against his, tripping twice as fast as his own—
a marvellous fact. "Turn your eyes to Vitongo, yonder,"
he said. "Do you see the shape of that big candlenut
tree on the hill? . . . No. Not beside my house. Away
to the right. Do you see the cloud of its many blossoms
—pale and clustering?"
"Yes," she answered, near his cheek.
"Up past that tree runs a ravine. It is wild and rocky
and overgrown. Few have ever climbed it. But I know
the path, and up beyond the palms—beyond the taro and
the banana groves—is a flat place in the mountain-side.
There as a child I once built me a little fale for a play-
house; a hut—hidden among the vines. There one is
always safe."
"Yes."
"Nobody comes so far. Nobody can ever find us.
We can live on the sweet mountain fruits and water in
the brook, taking nothing that belongs to any one—stay-
ing all to ourselves—thou and I." Very different was
this courtship; very different the offer he made. "Tito—
let us go there!"
"Now ... r


42 IN DARK PLACES
He nodded.
"But my father would kill us! He would see us going."
She gestured forward where Henry's proa was tied, past
the forward cabin hatch. "He will stop us!"
"I do not mean that way."
"How then?"
He pointed across the bay. She drew a quick breath as
she understood. "There may be sharks!"
"What do we care for sharks—we two?" he demanded.
An instant they clung—while the splendour of the
thought gained and glowed in them—while they waited,
palpitant, on the urge of it. Came a warning sound
from the cabin. Henry gripped the neckband of his
expensive shirt. Tito's arm slid free with a start of rip-
ping stuffs . . .
"Make haste!"
Alas for the true ladies of Papautu School; also, alas
for the prim young gentlemen of the Marist Mission!
Alas for high heels and waistcoats sprigged with forget-
me-nots; for ribbons and shawls and frills and fal-lals and
the dove-grey suitings of fashion—and once more alas
for the polite teachings of West Ham, the uplift of the
rule of three and the "Book of Sacred Gems" and many
other things so very, very essential to morals and im-
ported propriety. . . . All forgotten. All abandoned
within three seconds!
Only the moon was witness, with unveiled face. But
the moon was a Samoan moon; the mellowest, most toler-
ant and kindly scamp of a moon—quite used to beaming
on youth and lovers since a golden, olden age. It stared
with all its might on Vitongo Bay and never blushed at
all.


THE PAGAN 43
But perhaps, with a certain whimsy, perhaps it might
have smiled to see those two youngsters kicking free so
earnestly and eagerly—emerging from their finery at last,
a pair of superb, silver-bronze chrysalides, clad in their
own native garb—Henry with his kilted lava-lava and
Tito with her dainty ahu! . . . Thereafter, it had a part-
ing glimpse of them for just a wink as they stood hand
in hand at the cutter's stern—ere they went overboard
into the warm yielding sea.
The clean, double scoop of their dive raised a startled
challenge behind them. Followed hasty footsteps upon
the ladder and presently one comprehensive roar of rage
exploded over Vitongo. From the rail Joranson made out
their two dark heads, surging for shore. His dinghy
still lay on deck, but he did not wait to launch it. Darting
down through the cabin, he came forward at a jump and
cut the lashing of Henry's outrigger canoe. The fugi-
tives were hardly a hundred feet to the good when he
began to dig out. Few persons had ever succeeded in
getting much of a lead on Joranson.
When the pursuer dashed into their wake, Henry
dropped back to cover the retreat. But he need not have
bothered. Joranson wanted something he could hit soon
and hit hard; Joranson took after him first of all. The
proa bore down on Henry in hissing spurts of foam and
the opening of that affray was a vicious swipe with a
paddle.
Henry ducked—came up out of reach. Joranson
whirled like a water-beetle and struck again, and again.
Henry slipped from under. This was sport for a fisher-
man. He could have played it all night. Each time he


44 IN DARK PLACES
drew the chase farther aside from Tito. It kept him
cheered to think that Tito was drawing away with every
stroke. . . . But there was very little cheer next instant
to encounter Tito herself gliding back almost into his
arms. To find their whole plan defeated. To hear her
despairing cry: "The sharks, Henry! . . . The sharks
are come! Look out for the sharks!"
Between them and the belted dark there passed a phan-
tom—the merest phosphorescent presence through the
water. No mistaking that lean, long ghost. No mistak-
ing the cruel wedge of a fin that gleamed at the same
time inshore from them. Joranson spied it almost as soon
as they did, and his jubilant bellow confirmed it. Here
was the sort of amusement that suited Joranson—the
sort of punishment he might have planned himself. He
dropped his paddle and got to his feet, and as Henry
instinctively lifted Tito towards the proa for support and
escape from the greater terror, he slashed at them.
Bleeding, stupefied, Henry blinked up at him. Joran-
son held a singular object. He had a weapon in his fist;
a thing with a wavy blade and a hilt set in coloured
stones that glittered—glittered dreadfully above them.
Henry saw it. Henry knew it. It was the substance of
every evil dream he had had since childhood—it was the
Malay kris with which Henry Gordon Shoesmith had been
slain . . . ! And at the same time beyond the looming
figure of the murderer—over yonder on Vitongo shore, be-
tween the jungle and the lagoon—at the same time he saw
a marble shaft like a pallid, accusing finger in the moon-
light; the tomb of Henry Gordon Shoesmith on which was
graven, as he knew so well, the letters of that prophetic
epitaph


THE PAGAN 45
"Every man's work shall be made manifest."
"Keep off, I tell you! By God, you try your tar-
brush tricks on me—try 'em in hell!" With horrible
mirth, Joranson slashed once more.
And then it happened; as it was bound to happen.
Something snapped in Henry's breast. Some pent re-
serve seemed to burst and to flood through every vein—
some secret spring of his being. He stiffened in the
water, tense and tingling, and in a voice which might have
recalled—which did recall the temper of that tough old
Scotch trader, his father:
"Damn you, Joranson, you big white murdering devil,"
he said evenly, without a trace of accent. "I'm going to
get you!"
laying hold on the proa's thwart, he threw his whole
strength backward and simply spilled the little craft over,
outrigger and all. Joranson felt himself going. With a
snarl he drove at Henry's throat, point foremost. Henry
warded. They met, locked and went under in a spangled
smother. The rest was convulsion.
The two went reeling through a dim immensity; three
fathoms deep where the shadowy corals lay; back to the
surface in a furious spatter of sea-fire. As they rose,
Henry called to Tito to take to the wrecked canoe. He
had a glimpse of her clinging there—safe. After that he
gave himself to the job on hand—exultantly.
With his right arm he hung about the enemy's neck.
With the other he fended. He did not strike a blow. He
did not need to. All he required was the knife, the pledge
of destiny and of victory with which—once he had won
it, once he had wrested it from Joranson's failing grip—
he could meet and scatter a dozen sharks. . . .


46 INDARKPLACES
Gordon was there to greet them. Naturally, Gordon
was there, vehemently excited from his long, spying vigil
on Vitongo strand. "Wat was it? Wat 'appened?" he
cried. His sharp little eyes roved from Henry to Tito
in stricken astonishment as they stepped ashore, dripping,
from the righted proa. "I 'eard something. Where is
Joranson? Did you 'ave an accident?"
"Yes," said Henry, quietly. "An accident. The
sharks, you understand. ..."
"You mean they got 'im! Joranson . . .?" Gordon's
tone rose to a squeal of dismay. "But in that case—but
if that is so !" He saw all his schemes ruined—all
his hopes of Vitongo overwhelmed in Henry's incredible
good fortune. "Ah, no—no," he added, suspiciously.
"You let 'im drown. You will 'ave to explain."
Henry smiled. Having done his best to be a half-
caste that memorable night—having actually been a white
man for a brief, tremendous moment—he was now, and
at last, and for time to come, a Samoan. With a con-
temptuous gesture, he flicked the Malay kris into the
sand at Gordon's feet. The quarter-caste snatched it
up and clutched it to him . . . "It is very valu-able!"
he panted.
"Keep it," said Henry, thereby sealing the silence of
this smart, blackmailing cousin of his for ever.
"But still what are you going to do?" whined Gordon.
"We must lay information of some kin'."
"Perhaps," said Henry of Vitongo. "Tomorrow is
time enough. For tonight—tu'u ia mo paga." With the
girl he turned away. Already they had put aside all
troublesome issues; already they were heading back into
the night where the soft cymballing of palm-fronds made


THEPAGAN 47
bridal music and pigeons murmured sleepy love notes
under the accomplice moon. "TWu ia mo paga," said
Henry, which means it is forgotten—it should not count.
He laughed; she laughed; there was only laughter in
their hearts as they went, his arm about her waist—not
towards the house—not towards the store—but away to
the right; where the candlenut tree and its clustering
blossoms showed the way to the wild ravine—two frank
and unabashed pagans together.


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL
HE came out of mystery and he tarried for a
while on Leper's Island before he went back
to his own place in a great storm of wind. So
the natives will tell you to this day, and their tale grows
wondrous with the sulphur and brimstone of Melanesian
superstWon. They still call him the One-Eyed Devil.
They still venerate the name. Strange that the fate of
"Duke" Forsayth, with his singular gifts and his single
damning flaw, should have become a legend to teach little
black children in the far, wild Archipelago of the New
Hebrides I . . . . He would have appreciated that himself
as the last irony of a career no less ironic than pitiful, and
very pitiful too.
I recall how he landed there among us at Frank Geary's
trading-station and Orana's village.
My employer had been off on his yearly trip to Sydney
and civilization and I had come down on the beach to
welcome him home to the back-lots of barbarism. Not
idly, either. We had news for him; bad news of certain
old-time foes and neighbours to the eastward—a whole
pack of war-painted black hell-hounds loose again on the
head-hunt for a scourge and a terror in the narrow seas.
Orana stood by my side to bear me out with local rumours
and to join in anxious council.
But Geary had news of his own. "I've brung along a
48


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 49
friend of yours, Carterton," he hailed from the surf-boat.
And as he hopped nimbly ashore he added: "Leastways
he claims so in his sober moments. Though I won't be
sure. It's blame' few such moments I've had with him,
and you can lay to it!"
I stared down into the boat, but could see no one
except the grinning shipboys until they caught and ran her
high through the wash. When presently there upheaved,
there bulged forth, there arose and stepped out upon the
sand a portly and majestic figure—an overbearing figure
with an eye that flashed into mine the glittering ray of
the morning. It cost me a wrench of incredulous mem-
ory before I recognized that fat man and his famous, in-
separable monocle.
"Forsayth ... !" I cried, then.
He regarded me with the urbane affability of a Prime
Minister. He wore the eye-glass, as he always had worn
it, in his right eye. The left eye habitually drooped a
trifle, I fancy: was altogether a lesser, an inferior and
now I try to picture it, rather a sinister eye. But nobody
ever thought of that. Under the gleam of the monocle
nobody ever thought of anything else or looked any
deeper. Did I say he was blue-eyed? He was; and be-
hind its lens—round and high-powered—the blue shone
cerulean: true, serene and limpid as the sky.
I am telling you this at once so that you may under-
stand the man's personal impact, and why Orana ex-
claimed aloud in awe at the mere sight of him, and why
for my own part I hardly questioned the strangeness of
his presence here at the lost ends of the earth while he
gathered my hand in a vast grip.


50 INDARKPLACES
"Ah, Catterwaul—" his old shop name for me when
I did the police court notes under his brilliant editor-
ship of the Sydney Argus. "Ah, Catterwaul—my dear
fellow!" he boomed, in his great rolling voice. "Have
you covered that assignment yet?"
He remembered. It was more than four years since
I had walked out of the Argus office one night on some
routine errand or other, had fallen foul of brusque dis-
illusion which lies in wait for the literary tinker and had
grabbed the skirts of Destiny and a cook's billet aboard
an island trading-schooner. I never had been back again.
I never was any account on the Argus anyway. Re-
markable he should remember! . . . And yet, somehow,
it did not seem so remarkable. Beneath such an eye, one
expected such infallibility.
That was Forsayth's effect.
However, I shook hands with him as I say: too im-
pressed, too flattered actually, to make any reply worth
quoting. But Geary was there, taking it all in. Geary
cocked his head like a quick-eared terrier. You see, he
had had some five weeks already of this overpowering
company.
"Forsayth?" he repeated, with a snort. "So that's the
latest? 'Forsayth'. Huh, b'God! ']amts J. Ailsa
Craig' was the last true title you swore me to, only yes-
tiddy!"
"Did I indeed?" It reminded you of the swinging of
a fourteen-inch gun, smooth and assured—a fourteen-
inch gun with a monocle for a tampion—as he turned on
Geary.
"But I always admire the Craig so much—don't you?"
inquired Forsayth, mellifluous. "And consider, my dear


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 51
sir. Whenever a name is really needed, consider the
possibilities. 'Mr. Fujiyama'—eh?—for a fugitive. Or
'Mount Elias,' by way of an alias! . . . Capital!"
With practised courtesy, suddenly his palm shot out
and closed on Orana's, beside me.
"And whom have we here?"
Now Orana was a chief and a gentleman and a wise
old sort. But he never before had encountered a man
in a monocle. For that matter, probably Forsayth never
before had encountered a man in a sooty skin, a breech
clout and a brass curtain ring through the tip of his nose.
The result was curious, memorable—in a sense, historic.
Forsayth smiled benign:
"As I live! Old Graven-Image himself. One of our
crowd, I perceive. Sir, I am delighted to know you.
Sir, you have a simplicity of manner and appearance I
shall hope to cherish if not to imitate!"
At which point he made his distinctive imposing ges-
ture. . . . Nipping the eye-glass between finger and
thumb, he screwed it into place with a half-twist and a
truly terrific glitter. Thereby absolutely completing the
appalled subjugation of the simple savage.
From that instant his status was fixed: from that in-
stant he was the One-Eyed Devil. If Geary and I had
not been there Orana would have worshipped him upon
the spot. I am certain of that, and equally certain that
Forsayth knew it quite well himself as he beamed benevo-
lent.
"And now, friends. Fellows and fellow comedians,
we mark the occasion festive. With 'shout and revelry,
tipsy dance and jollity'—let's all adjourn to Pitt Street.
What say? And get some of Tom Green's keel-row rum.


52 IN DARK PLACES
Catterwaul—like a good chap—if you'll just hail a
taxi—"
He moved clear of the boat by which he had been
leaning. He gave an eloquent wave. He took a gen-
erous step: swayed, crumpled all at once and fell flat
on his face. At least he would have gone flat if Geary
had not nabbed him in time. . . .
"Good Lord!" I gasped. "What—what's wrong with
him?"
"Nothing," snapped Geary. "He's only drunk."
It seemed a heartless thing to say. And brutal. The
man had had a touch of sun, or something.
"Don't I know?" said Geary.
But I could not think it.
"Of course you can't think it," said Geary.
But he had not looked so in the least.
"Of course he don't look so," retorted Geary. "That's
the fact about him! That's how he must ha' been able
to get along—nobody ever believin' it: nobody ever
thinkin' he looked so—until he come to a smash. But I
been shipmates with this here phenomenal friend of yours
all the way up from Sydney, and you can see for yourself:
he's just a plain loafer and he's just plain drunk!"
And it was true. Angels might have wept, or demi-
gods, to view that Olympian form. He lay in a crapu-
lous heap. His clothes were a ragged ruin. While the
shipboys gathered him up and carted him away toward
the station with the rest of the dunnage, no doubt he
retained a fluency—no doubt in his marvellous mind that
splendid continuity ran on. But it was like the snapping
of a spell. Once the monocled eye had ceased to hold me
hypnotized I had to admit the fact about Forsayth.


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 53
Though even then, Geary hesitated.
He stayed watching the helpless bulk as it went sag-
ging up-hill among the carriers, with the oddest wry look
on him. Abruptly he asked: "Have you got the stuff
safe?"
"It's all in the store-room," I answered.
Even then, I say, he had doubts: and natural enough.
You see, Forsayth was the first outside visitor ever to
enter our palisaded gates. And in the store-room under-
neath we kept our treasured secret—the trove we had been
hoarding for our final clean-up when the market was ripe
—twenty thousand pounds worth of precious coral. . . .
I read his thought. "It's your own fault: what did you
bring him for?" I ventured. And so brought down on
myself the grievance of weeks.
"Fault? My fault: huh, b'God! That's good. If
you'd keep your itchy fingers off a pen we'd never been
bothered with him at all. D'you remember that blame'
silly piece you signed and dated and sent down to a
Sydney paper coupl'a months ago? All about the Heb-
rides and the cannibals and the lovely volcanoes and
such? . . ." Alas for the weakness of a literary tinker!
"There's where he got his cue, of course. He come
aboard the schooner in Sydney Harbor the midnight be-
fore I started back. Said he was broke. Said he was
your long-lost brother. Said he was pinin' away for a
sight of the cannibals and the rest. You know how it
is when a man comes begging a passage," said poor
Geary. "A white man—and a man with a front like
that!
"Anyhow: dammit. Here he is and here he's got to
stay, I s'pose—till Johnson's cutter calls around from


54 INDARKPLACES
Vila, anyway. And you can put in the afternoon study-
ing what in hell we're going to do with him meanwhile!"
Well, it made a problem. Perhaps you will need to
consider the problem it did make.
Life in the New Hebrides—life anywhere in the big
black belt of the South Seas—is a great sifter-down of
human values. When you pass in a London street,
among swarms of men, you care very little: they mean
next to nothing: they might all be cheats or cowards and
you would not be wrung, you would take your hearty
breakfast as usual. But if just one of that crowd should
pop up before you on a lonely beach where the reefs
thunder to a burning sky, where your world lies between a
rim of horizon and a curve of hostile hills, and sea and
land are sick with heat and fever, rotten with death,
breathing an alien vitality unknown and unknowable—
in such case you would care a great deal. You would
take a most anxious interest in that man: one of your own
breed of people: his qualities and his capacities would be
questions of prime import.
By the same token the black belt is no place for a
doubtful guest. There is too high a forfeit on social er-
ror. There is too much dark society running loose with a
cultivated taste in smoked heads—you have to tread too
carefully among pitfalls of primitive, bloody-minded
treachery and double dealing. And if your companion be
weak or warped or undependable for any reason you are
likely to feel it—though it may be the last thing you do
feel on earth. . . .
As it happened, Geary himself had occasion to preach
this very text no later than that very afternoon to a long,


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 55
spindly, shark-mouthed rascal of a Caledonian half-caste.
Raoul was his misbegotten name: from Noumea. He
had been overseeing one of our plantations down the
coast and had come in to make report. But a blackboy
of his crew fainted at the oar, and when Geary chanced
to notice he found the boy's back cut to festered ribbons.
From that point, step by step he uncovered a tale of mis-
treatment and exploitation, starved and slave-driven la-
bour and general deviltry that narrowed his glance slit-
wise above his terrier jaw. So he went in search of
M. Raoul, whom he met skulking about the inner com-
pound near the sleeping-quarters, where he had no pos-
sible business to be. Raoul's explanation was to fiddle
with his rifle. Whereupon Geary stretched him, went
over his accounts and paid him off in full: and presently
stretched him again outside the gate, with a closed fist
this time.
"You're a disgrace to your convict father," he in-
formed the lowering scoundrel, who snarled but kept his
hands empty. "He was bad, but white—and you with a
half of his blood putting the whole of us to shame! It's
the likes of you gets the likes of us hung to dry in the
canoe-house—all our work wasted. Ain't you got no
pride with them pants? B'God, you don't deserve to
wear 'em. Go back amongst the woolly-heads and the
man-eaters: it's where you belong!"
The upshot was that Raoul took to the bush, and
though I approved, as duty-bound I put in a warning.
"There's the one chap we had who savees the dialects
in the eastern islands," I reminded Geary. "He can go
to the man-eaters, if he wants. These salt-water hellions
from Tambo Lagoon—'plenty he savee them.' He was


56 IN DARK PLACE,?
over there last month before they broke out. Orana says
he's the only trader ever slept at Tambo and came away
alive."
And I went on to tell what I had meant to tell him
first-off: how the dreaded pirates from the Lagoon were
reported raiding in our direction.
"Are you figgerin' he might draw 'em down on us?"
"I'll let you do the figuring," I returned, and added
bluntly: "He was with us the day we found that coral."
Geary looked at me and I looked at Geary, in his glow
of wrath and racial emotion. A good little man was
Geary; I never met a juster man. I guessed what was
on the tip of his tongue to ask: how our latest recruit
would shape with all this: how far we would be able to
trust the visitor who had come calling himself my friend.
But he said nothing. It was later when we sat for an
evening smoke in the arbour—only then, and quietly, that
he resumed the mystery of Forsayth:
"How close did you use' to know this monocle guy?"
Well, I had been puzzling the answer myself for some
hours and was no nearer any clearness.
As a matter of fact, in the sense of an intimate I never
had known him at all. My best remembrance of him
was the way he used to surge into the Argus office among
us with that same booming speech and manner—that
identical all-seeing eye.
We thought him a great man. We saw him fortu-
nate. The Argus was only one of his ventures, a prop
for interests vaguely vast and profitable. He kept some
fast horses, a yacht and a villa at Mosman: gave bache-
lor affairs at the Australia: patronized the visiting


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 57
nobility and hectored the government: took a clever radi-
cal tone on business and politics and regularly pervaded
Tattersall's and Randwick in topper and frock-coat—in a
word, seemed altogether a popular success in the Sydney
fashion. So far as I knew he might still have been doing
these things. To his present case—what crisis he had
run since then: what fatal mishap he had sustained to
land him here and now a broken wanderer among the
islands—I had no clue. . . . Unless perhaps it might lie
in the speculative and sporting line he took—which how-
ever is very much Sydney-fashion too.
"He's come a buster," was Geary's summing-up.
"It must have been something big in the way of bus-
ters," I said. "He was going strong when I left."
"That's nothing against him. He has license to do at
least one big bust," declared Geary.
"Any kind of a bust?"
"So long as he hurt none worse than himself."
"Any kind of a man?"
"So long as he wouldn't play off on a pal," said Geary,
stoutly, "yes. There's hope for anybody, and you can
lay to it!" Curious to hear him entering a plea for the
fellow, really. But that was Geary every time: with a
human tolerance as wide as his human pride was fierce
and partisan. "You've seen some pretty decent loafers
yourself, Catterton."
"I've seen some pretty sad ones, likewise."
"Well, what's your notion about the bloke?" he cried.
"What do you want to do?"
"I want to give him a chance," I said.
"Why—dammit, of course. A chance! You arguin',


58 INDARKPLACES
contrary, word-jugglin' Woolloomooloo-Yank: of course
we'll give him his chance. It's what I mean. And I'm
goin' to begin tomorrow by locking away the gin!"
Though he might have spared himself the precaution,
for gin was not the trouble with Forsayth.
We were aware of that next morning when he rose
bright and brisk. He took his plunge with us. He took
his coffee straight. He even took care to order his rusty
tweeds into some sort of jauntiness, and with a bamboo
cane and the monocle focussed like a headlight, he set
off in the cheerfully announced intention of "doing the
town."
This was the beginning of that singular episode, sub-
sequently to pass into song and story: the incarnation of
the One-Eyed Devil. . . .
It is possible he had had some previous inkling of what
was in store for him. I sometimes think he must have.
It is certain we had none. You see, neither Geary nor
myself fully estimated the registry of Forsayth and For-
sayth's eye-glass on the native mind. Which goes to
show that whenever you think you have learned about
natives you need to gather in a fathom or two of slack.
At all events, the thing was sprung upon us. We had
witnessed the conversion of Orana—we were now to wit-
ness the ascension of a first-class deity to his own god-
head.
The village was awake and waiting for him, it ap-
peared. The chief received him as he would not have
received royalty. As well as we could judge when we
came abreast of a stupefying situation—as far as we
could make out, I say, he tendered Forsayth his honours


60 IN DARK PLACES
drink, I find, but good for that dark taste. A-hem! My
dear—a little more of the same if you please: and less
head to it. Thanks so much." And as the damsel
obeyed his gesture and filled the dripping cocoanut-shell
he favoured us with a most amazing grin. "Not bad, eh?
Imagine her among the charmers at Usher's or the Em-
pire. What?"
We were hardly in condition to reply. The vision of
that stately, sullen-lidded, coppery Juno in her grass-
girdle serving cheer as a bar-maid was surely no more
fantastic than this visible Jove before us. But Forsayth
carried it off like the first of a hierarchy. One can fancy
how he must have enjoyed watching our faces as he
leaned back luxuriously and twisted the monocle into
place.
"Capital! . . . Meantime, Mr. Geary—meantime we
have affairs of state to consider, it seems. What's all
this I hear about bad niggers on the rampage? You're
expecting a row, they tell me. Man dear, rows are my
specialty. I told you so at Sydney—didn't I ?—I told you
I felt a congenial urge to these cannibals." He beamed
on us. "Now just you let me know whatever help you
require from old Graven-Image. I think we can arrange
it for you. Quite easily."
Geary blinked and shook himself together. It was
perfectly true: if the black wolves from Tambo came
down on us we would be wanting help, sure enough.
Ordinarily our local braves would prefer their usual cau-
tion—with a jungled mountain-side for cover it was al-
ways cheaper to run than to fight. By subtle arts and
the pressure of our ancient alliance, however, he had
hoped to enlist a war-party for service inside the stockade.


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 61
And now to have all his diplomacy ravelled out at a
stroke! . . . He eyed Orana reproachfully. But Orana
had no eyes for him. He only eyed the One-Eyed Devil
—who smiled.
"My dear sir, you hesitate. You needn't. If I've a
sort of natural hold over chaps like these—excellent folk,
too, though this be die de mer English they talk proves a
bit crude—but if I have, through experience, we'll say,
or personality—" He waved a hand blandly. "—is
it strange I should exploit it? A man takes advantage
where he finds it here below. You do. We all do. . . .
Can you blame me?"
It occurred to me to wonder how well in his undated
past he had applied that rule, how often he had guided it
to such conquests of men and matters before he took to
the islands. He would need to have been very master-
ful and very clear-sighted with it, I thought. As master-
ful and as clear-sighted as he seemed just now while he
drew Orana's sheet of ceremony over his rags like a
toga:
"Don't worry about those fighting-men, Geary. I'll
produce 'em on time. Fact is, the old josser has volun-
teered 'em already. We'll discuss the details later."
And so he dismissed us. Affably, but unmistakably:
with condescension. There was nothing for us but to
leave, and we did—in silence through the silent village.
Until Geary ripped an oath. . . . B'God, he could not
understand it.
"Of course you can't," I said.
B'God, he could not see how Forsayth had managed.
"Of course you can't," I said. "That's how he must
have been going on all his life. Nobody ever understand-


62 INDARKPLACES
ing: nobody ever seeing how he managed—till he missed
a trick somewhere. . . You noticed Raoul?"
"Raoul!"
"Lurking about the croton bushes behind the fale.
Very likely that explains the particular trick. Very
likely M. Raoul's been advising our friend and teaching
him all the local ropes."
Geary swung around to squint grimly through the sun-
shine. Once the mesmerizing monocle had been lifted
from him he had a better view. He pondered, terrier-
like.
"I don't care," he decided. "You say you used to
think him a great man. He is a great man. To play up
to his chance this way! . . . I don't care what he's done."
Such was his deliberate verdict on Forsayth: a verdict
he was going to hang on to with all the whimsical loyalty
of his nature—up to the very last.
There befell that same day a lull of calm weather with
a low-lying haze over the sea, just the weather for scout-
ing. In his swiftest outrigger canoe manned by his pet
crew of blackboys Geary put out to eastward. Far and
wide the tiny craft went hovering as a frigate-bird
hovers along the reefs—darting in here and there for ob-
servation, scanning the lanes and lagoons and fetching
home a full crop of news which he brought ashore next
morning.
"Met up with Mclntyre's schooner in Nor'east Bay.
Got word of the Tambo lot; they're at Tumeru—ten mile
off. Mac stopped at Vila and collected our mail for us."
A pause, while we watched the boys bear the proa to
the boat-shed. He had something more to tell. He was


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 63
grimmer and more like a terrier than ever as he told
it:
"Mac went aboard Johnson's cutter in Vila harbour.
Johnson's got two passengers with him. Detectives.
From Sydney. They come direct by B. P. steamer—and
they're headed here!" ... I looked away from Geary
and Geary looked away from me. ... "I don't care," he
repeated, defiantly. "The Hebrides is the slippiest place
in the world to do a bunk from. They needn't ever catch
him. They got no warrant over us. We'll give him his
chance. We'll keep on giving him his chance—whoever
and whatever he might ha' been!"
And yet again, and a third time, he was due to declare
it. This happened the night when the Tambo raiders
arrived. . . . For they did arrive.
They came on the heels of a storm that foreran the
monsoon—a night of driven scud and slashing rain squalls
through the hot dark: a Hebrides night long to be remem-
bered. Not because of our perils, so much. Not because
the fiends took a running start under lee of an islet off-
shore and tried to ride us down the wind and were more
than half-way across before we picked them out—the
spidery, dim shapes of their outriggers straddling the
grey foam ridges. None of these things were so very
unusual: the stabbing bark of our Winchesters and the
echoing howl of Sniders as our native allies loosed from
the hip: the sleet of soft-nosed lead with which we combed
the combers: the ease with which we turned the first at-
tack—the heat and hurry and wet confusion behind our
copra-bags and palisades where we shouted and exulted at
that quick repulse. We had lived such nights before and
with luck might reasonably expect to live more of


64 IN DARK PLACES
them. . . . But this night was epic: it belonged to For-
sayth.
From dusk a great booming voice held the fort. For
hours an overbearing fat man loomed among us and went
surging from point to point—an image of cheerful war
in rain-soaked tweeds, roaring with confident energy,
keeping all hands to the mark. It was wonderful to see
how Orana's men took orders from him. Indifferent
shots and indifferent fighters they might be: they could
be led. Under his inspired leadership they fought be-
yond the daring of excited devil-worshippers. They
trusted him. We trusted him. Everybody trusted him.
There was never any doubt who commanded inside
Geary's station. Who but the One-Eyed Devil?
And that was why, along about midnight when tension
had slackened, when the straits were clear and the place
seemed safe—that was why Geary and I laid off for a
while in the arbour, the native hut we had built at the
inner rise of our promontory for a keep and a look-out.
On a bench under the lamps lay scattered the Sydney
mail: kindness of Mclntyre two days since. You can
imagine we had had little time for month-old papers, but
now from the first idly-opened cover the type sprang out
at us—front page of the Sydney Morning Herald:
AN INTERESTING OCCURRENCE
I suppose if Judgment Day is ever chronicled it will be
an interesting occurrence in the Sydney Morning Herald.
However, the tale ran below:
Swindler Forsayth escapes—financial bandit at
large—police are seeking 'rich-quick' editor, who


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 65
won confidence of thousands—crash of looted
firms brings ruin to many homes—daring ma-
nipulation—associates and public equally deceived
by versatile thief—his mysterious disappearance.
So there it was: our next discovery regarding Forsayth.
We read it through, the whole startling exposure of cold-
blooded chicanery and betrayal—the false heights and the
criminal depths of his career before he landed among us:
his "buster." We read it without a word spoken until a
rustling at the slats made us turn.
"All safe for the night! They'll not come again, I'm
certain sure. Catterton, my dear boy—and you, Geary—
better get your rest. You've both been up nearly forty-
eight hours. But I'm wide-awake as ever." For an in-
stant the glittering eyes lingered on us where we stood
with the paper outspread. "'Virtue can still see to do
what virtue would'—that's me!" observed Forsayth, with
his own mellifluous chuckle. "I claim the first watch, you
fellows."
He was gone, and presently Geary folded the page with
a solemn gesture. "I don't care," he said, once more. "I
don't givadam. This is the Hebrides. If Johnson's pas-
sengers show here they'll get no satisfaction out'a me, and
you can lay to it. Dammit—he's took his chance, ain't
he!"
Well, what would you have said? Would it seem he
had taken his chance: a man who had filled such parts,
and one that squared the rest after all? I thought so.
It was the thought I sunk to sleep with. ... It was the
thought I woke with two hours later to a sudden smashing
uproar.


66 INDARKPLACES
Hell was loose—guns were going and men were howling
all about me as I groped my way giddily to my post by
the gate. It stood wide! The fiends had come again
right enough—on the beach side this time. Geary scur-
ried out just ahead of me, a revolver in either fist, herd-
ing his boat-boys to meet the rush. I saw them spread
and skirmish, saw their spitting red flashes left and right
and answering streaks of flame from the palms close by—
too close!—heard Geary sing out to me to lend a hand
for something or somebody—and turned to clasp a huge,
unwieldy bulk that collapsed against me from the side of
the wall. . . . Forsayth!
Somehow I dragged him in before our sortie-party re-
treated and swung the bars safe. Somehow I managed
to get him to the compound: to the arbour. He must
have passed in my arms, for he never spoke—never moved
after I eased him to the bench and propped a cushion
under his head.
I was still standing dazedly beside him an unmeasured
interval afterward when Geary returned, dripping and
powder-stained. The station had fallen quiet. The sec-
ond attempt had been met and parried in the very nick,
as quickly as the first. His nod told me our black foes
were gone with the storm and the darkness: and gone now
for good. He joined me by the bench, and the word that
had been drumming in my mind—through the bewilder-
ment and the pity that had me half-choked, the same
word came to my hps:
"He took his chance!"
Geary said nothing.
"He's dead. . . . Shot through the right breast!"
.Still Geary said nothing.


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 67
"He must have been in the gate and caught their first
fire. He did—Geary!—he did take his chance!"
There was no bewilderment on my employer's face, nor
any pity: I never had seen such a face on him—hard as
flint and grey as the dawn that began to steal through
the arbour slats. "Yes," he answered at last. "Least-
ways, he tried to take it. . . . It was him opened the gate.
And the store-room; he had that open too. And our coral
—broken out and ready. And the boat-shed—with the
surf-boat all loaded and provisioned!"
I stared at Geary and Geary stared at me.
"You mean—!"
"I mean he was just going to cut our throats—him
and Raoul outside leadin' the niggers. I mean they'd
fixed it between 'em to loot our pile and make their geta-
way—partners with the Tambo lot! . . . Raoul—yes. I
got that gent, anyhow. He's dead out yonder where he
brought their proas ashore. And this one's dead here—
must ha' missed seeing 'em as they crep' up and got his-
self plugged by his own black friends: and pretty blame"
lucky for us!"
But I simply couldn't believe it.
"Of course you can't believe it. Ain't you got that
point about him yet? Going on all these years—nobody
ever guessin' what he was—nobody ever seein' past his
shiny front. . . . And a filthy fraud all the time!"
From Forsayth's belt he snatched the bunch of keys
that always hung over his bed and held them up, the proof
of crawling treachery, as he might have held a snake.
"Look at him!" he cried. "Only look at him, Catter-
ton. A renegade. A cheat that played off on his own
pals and his own colour—a traitor to every living soul that


68 IN DARK PLACES
had truck with him! . . . My God, where's the excuse
for such—that's what I want to know. Not for Forsayth.
To hell with Forsayth! But for the human race: for you
and me: for men—for white men. . . . How could he do
it ?— How could he? A man like that with an eye like
that! . . . Awful, Carterton!"
And it was so. This was the Hebrides, where human
value counts. This was the black belt where a white
man is a white man and you depend on him as such. It
was a terrible and an incredible thing. There he lay—a
majestic presence-^-with the light of the lamps flooding
down over him and his eye still wide open and fixed upon
us: the monocle still gripped in place. That wonderful
«ye, blue, serene and infallible—benignant as the sky. . . .
I could see well enough how Geary's whole pride and faith
were shaken. You must see well enough why the little
fellow wrung his hands, and why for my own part I
moved away toward the front of the hut and frowned
out over the lagoon and the sea, where the first streak of
another Hebrides day was showing.
"Here comes Johnson's cutter—working in for anchor-
age," I said, presently. "You'd better be studying what
disposal you want to make of him."
As if to prompt his answer, the pandanus curtains
parted and there strode in the stately figure of Letelesa—
Orana's magnificent dusky daughter. She came and stood
beside Forsayth on his catafalque.
It occurred to me then to wonder how often in his
chequered past he had made such conquests: how many
women had regarded him with the love and worship
of our coppery princess—whose trust and whose people
he would have betrayed like all the rest.


THE ONE-EYED DEVIL 69
"This fella man, him great fella man—great fella mars-
ter," she pronounced, as she bowed her head and gave the
gesture of grief. "This fella devil-devil—him big fella
devil-devil. . . . Mata Punie—Devil with the One-Eye!"
She was gone: and Geary, turning from the slats where
he had joined me, went over by the bench again, where
presently—and strangely—I heard him begin to laugh,
with the oddest catch of breath.
"So that's it!" he said, in an altered voice. "By God—
that is it! . . . Catterton—" He wheeled on me. "Get
out there to Johnson's cutter as fast as you blame' well
can and yank those two detectives ashore. They can have
him. They can take him, and welcome—box him up and
ship him away before any of Orana's folk know where
he's gone. . . . Dammit: we'll give him that last chance
of his!"
It seemed heartless. And brutal. I could only blink
as he pointed, as I followed his rigid finger, as I regarded
the recumbent form: and there . . .
The monocle was gone!
"She nipped it!" cried Geary. "Letelesa—she nipped
it herself. Took it for a fetish—for a momento. You
heard what she called him. The One-Eyed Devil! . . .
Well, so he was and so he shall be. We'll give him his
chance—to be remembered. The One-Eyed Devil: for
ever. . . . Look at him. Only look at him now! D'you
see?"
I looked, and I saw. Once the gleaming lens had been
displaced we both saw the truth—our final discovery con-
cerning Forsayth. And Geary gave a laugh from his
terrier jaw—grim, perhaps, but one that brought the whole
mystery to a jest: the grimmest kind of a jest, perhaps,


70 INDARKPLACES
but a human basis for sanity and tolerance—a laugh that
held something very like a sob of relief.
"Blind—d'you see? Always was and always would
ha' been. One side of him blind—the side that always
missed a trick, that brought him to smash in the end. The
side where he was shot. Poor devil, with his wonderful
blue eye!" Gently he put out a hand and pitifully he
closed that eye. "Oh, poor—poor devil! . . . Only glass.
. . . Only a glass eye, after all I"


THE BIRD OF PARADISE
S you come east through the Archipelago you
hear talk of rice and coffee and tobacco. And,
Ji keeping on, you learn of pepper and benzoin and
tin and copra in separate lingos, each different and curious
after its kind. But if you still hold your eastward way
along the Line you will come at last to a port where they
trade in birds of paradise and count by the skins of orange
and emerald and the little kingbird that looks like a red-
hot cinder dropping from the sky—and this is the most
curious talk of all.
So it was with Andrew Harben, travelling out of t .
west and counting that day lost whose low descending
sun saw him twice in the same place. He went questing
across the degrees of latitude until he came to the Spice
Islands, and there, at the ancient town of Ternate, they
showed him into a room that flamed with colours, as if all
the rainbows of the seas had been caught and graded and
hung up for sale.
"These are the birds of paradise," they told him, "the
shyest and rarest of all creatures. And their cost will
average so much, and their quality such and such, and the
market is rising and the crop short."
Andrew Harben looked and listened.
"I have come to the right place," he said. "Here is the
trade for me. You can have your boxes and bales and


72 INDARKPLACES
billets. But to snare a feathered poem and to gain a fair
profit on living jewels—this is a business that should be
worth the time and the trouble."
So he called for the fat Dutch half-caste that owned the
shop and put it to him.
"Which is the prize bird of the lot?"
"Z' Superb is very scarce," said Jan Van Bol, "and also
z' Red Magnificent and z' Epimaque. And I do not get
more zan two dozen of zees yellow twelve-wires in a year.
I will make you a bargain."
"It's not your price to sell I want," said Andrew Har-
ben, "but to buy."
"You have birds for me to buy?" blinked Van Bol.
"Not yet. But I will have. I'm just arranging the law
of supply and demand ahead of time, which is the es-
sence of economy. What do you think?"
The merchant ran his eye up the height of Andrew Har-
ben and along the breadth of him.
"I zink maybe you might kill five-six islanders before
zey get your head. With good luck. But in ze end you
would make a very handsome decoration on z' canoe
house. Also—z' sun is very hot today."
"I thank you for your honest expressions," said Andrew
Harben. "But I cut my teeth long ago, and I'm neither
crazy nor drunk. I'm worth a hundred pounds cash and
twelve stone stripped, and I'm looking to invest it all on
a worthy venture. . . . Now go ahead and tell me about
the birds."
Jan Van Bol observed him again, and because of some-
thing he saw in the cool grey eyes, it may be, or because
he was truly a courteous gentleman, he explained more
carefully how paradise skins come from the remotest


74 'INDARKPLACES
ings. We don't go sailing after fountains of youth nor
mountains of ruby any more, nor yet the land of the
whangdoodle."
"No?" smiled Van Bol. "And yet you have travelled
so far yourself."
"I'm not looking for fairy tales."
"Ah! Well, I zought you might be a man who has seen
enough to know z' fairy tale is A B C to z' truth."
Andrew Harben sat frowning out over the harbour,
where the junks and proas go toddling in and out all day,
manned with crews of many races, bound for obscure ports
on unguessed errands, just as they toddled in the time
when Rameses kept the westernmost outpost, and as they
will toddle still when the rest of the world has all been
civilized into wearing frock coats.
"What is the story—the legend?"
"Zere is none. Why should zere be? You have over-
passed z' places where everybody is nicely labelled and z'
neighbours call z' police if zey do not know all your busi-
ness. Here are islands—zousands of zem—hid away
among reefs and currents you shall find on no chart.
And here are peoples—hundred zousands—whose ways
and doings and secrets you shall read in no report.
Somewhere, somewhere is an island where lives z' pur-
ple bird of paradise. Nobody can say better zan zat."
"Show me one," said Andrew Harben.
Then Jan Van Bol brought a sandalwood chest, and
opened it jealously and set it before his visitor. And
Andrew Harben looked down into a bursting bomb of
plumage, brilliant as a firework. The bird was mounted,
and might itself have been the size of a sparrow. Its
breast was laid with tiny gold plates, deepening to


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 75
bronze, and from that centre flared great tufts of ribbon
feathers, deep purple at the base and rippling up brighter
and more bright to a blazing magneta—a veritable pas-
sion in colour.
Andrew Harben winked and shut down the lid.
"I will find that island," he said quickly. "And I
will bring you a boatload of these skins."
The merchant laughed and took the chest in his arms
again. "No, no. It is only a fairy story. I wished to
amuse you; we see few travellers here. Besides—do
you know?—z' bird of paradise is z' shyest and wild-
est of all creatures."
"Thanks," said Andrew Harben. "I heard all that be-
fore. And now about getting a passage to Waigiu.
Where could I pick up a small cutter, seaworthy but
cheap?"
Some three months later Andrew Harben made an-
other stop in his eastward journeying. But he had no
choice of it, and he could not have told his whereabouts
within the dab of his thumb on a map. He was surely
beyond the Moluccas, and probably near Gilolo Strait,
and vaguely to the north of Dampier. For further
directions he could refer only to the currents and the
winds that had spun his little craft like a whip-top—
currents swift as a mill-race and winds fitful as a woman's
temper. He had seen various natives and many shores,
and had visited a few, dodging spears and shipwreck
with equal fortune. But this time a howling gale drove
him all night through a nest of narrow, basaltic islets,
where the waters lifted snarling from rows and rows
of long black teeth, and at last he struck.


76 INDARKPLACES
He came ashore in the morning on a bit of rough
beach strewn with basalt cobbles, and had all he could
do to drag himself out of the wash before he should
be ground among them. When he woke again the sun
was beating on his head and a great bull voice was
beating in his ears.
A man stood over him, a huge, bearded man belted
in a simple cincture and burned all over to the shade
of an old meerschaum pipe. His eyes were like blue
china buttons, and his hair hung lank as marline, bleached
a rusty red and shingled right round. "Get up!" he
cried at Andrew Harben, immediately adding: "And
what t' hell are you doing here?"
Andrew Harben stared in disbelief, but the amazing
apparition kicked him painfully with a bare foot as hard
as a hoof.
"Will you answer, before I stamp your ribs in?"
Andrew Harben was starved and bruised, wrung by
fever, and with no more pith in his limbs than so much
kelp. "What kind of an answer can I make?" he hic-
cuped.
"Poor enough, I do believe," agreed the other, thrust-
ing a lip at him. "A likely looking pirate! Are there
any more of y'? There's no wreck on the reef that I
could see."
"None. I came alone."
"You came? Then you meant to come. Answer
quick and don't stop to lie!"
Andrew Harben had no hint which way to take this
white savage. He spoke of his voyage as a trading trip,
and the other questioned him sharply, with a black scowl
of suspicion.


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 77
"Trading?" he echoed at last. "I've a good notion
what kind of trading. You're one of these fortune
hunters eh? Let any man find a quiet spot to his lik-
ing, with perhaps a private plum of his own, and next
thing all the beachcombing loafers in the four oceans
are crowding him. Yes, if 'twas on the Pole itself. I'll
tell you now, I been expecting some one of your kind.
I been waiting for you."
"You have the advantage of me there," said Andrew
Harben politely.
"Aye," nodded the big man, in grim scorn. "You
should have brought along a company, and maybe a
machine-gun or two. Why, man, did you think you
could cut out this island by your little lonely? . . . The
likes of you?"
"If I knew more about it I could say better."
"You'll know more in due time. To be sure, I was
going to break your neck first off. 'Twas the king so
ordered, but the high judge put in a plea and the court
has just decided to keep you alive by way of having
a bit of fun."
He had a most unpleasant grin.
"Who are all these people?" asked Andrew Harben,
wondering what strange tribe he had fallen in with.
"Me," said the other. "O'Ryan."
"Orion!" repeated Andrew Harben faintly, and con-
sidered if his mind were going, while a tag-end of school-
boy fable flickered in bewildered memory:
"Begirt with many a biasing star
Stood the great giant Algebar,
Orion, hunter of the beast—"


78 INDARKPLACES
"Any relation to the Pleiades?"
"Jim O'Ryan, late second mate on the schooner Merry
Friend, wrecked on this island December 19th, three
years ago," said the big man simply. "And no relation
to anything else on earth. I'm not wanted east nor west,
so you need sniff after no crime, if that's what you mean.
This is my island, by all right. You're nothing but a
sneaking trespasser, and you'd best be civil if you know
what's good for you."
So he took Andrew Harben and slung him under one
arm. This was easier than it would have been three
months before, because Andrew Harben had lost forty
pounds of his twelve stone and his ribs stuck out in
a rack.
They climbed the beach and a hill beyond to a little
clearing in the lush tropic growth, where stood a house
very neatly built of bamboos. Before the wide veranda
sat a girl with two long, smooth black braids framing
her brown face, and clothed in one gorgeous purple gar-
ment that hung at a shoulder and clung across her breast.
She stared at the appearance of Andrew Harben with
slow amazement, and he stared back with a special vivid
sensation of his own. For the purple garment on that
girl, cunningly sewed and joined, was made all of bird
skins, of paradise bird skins, of those same imperial
paradise bird skins which he had come so far to find.
The smooth grain of the feathers ran down slantwise,
each separate skin like a little spreading golden bubble
on the sweep of glorious colour, and the edge turned up
in a soft froth of the brightest tail ribbons. Some three
hundred parts had gone to the making of the piece, and


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 79
there could be nothing else like it in the world—not
cloaks of ermine nor coronation robes—and here he saw
it worn by a chit of a wild thing on a lost isle by Gilolo.
Such was the first thought of Andrew Harben, for a
native woman is only a native woman; but a dress like
this was a fortune, and it was only when she stood
up and looked him in the face that he fairly saw the
girl herself. And then he saw that the beauty of the
garment was no more than a fitting garb for beauty of
the flesh, and so the lesser after all. . . .
She was brown of Malay type, but the delicate rose
tint of brown, and her little red mouth was crisp cut as a
flower. In those jet eyes under sharp and arching brows
there smouldered secret embers of emotion, now veiled as
by smoke, now darting quick lights, and her whole lithe
body was vibrant, like that of the bird she simulated, with
the spring and exuberance of life. She spoke, and some-
thing seemed to reach down and grip a chord of
strings inside Andrew Harben and set them singing all
at once. He did not care what she said—though that
was curious enough—but only that she should go on in
her quaint, slid speech that had the. quaintest exotic
charm.
"Then you did not bury them all!" she cried, and
gazed at Andrew Harben, where he stood limp beside the
big man, as at a thing out of nature.
O'Ryan gave a bark of laughter.
"You did tell me long ago you buried them—every
one," she said, with one little hand, like a fluted shell,
pressed hard to her breast.
"How d'you know I didn't dig this lad up again?"
asked O'Ryan, amused at her agitation. "Who d'you


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 81
had no idea I was bringing a present that would strike
your fancy so close. Well, well"
He twisted her around and peered down into her
eyes, and while he was thus absorbed Andrew Harben
set up a small diversion on his own account. As An-
drew Harben saw it, the girl had come to his rescue
against a common despot, and his duty was now plain
to do the gallant thing. So he gathered himself together
and made an earnest attempt to brain the big man with
a half-burned stake from the fire. O'Ryan turned to
this second surprise with a joyous bellow of relief, and
put aside his feeble pass and hit him square with a fist
the size and colour of a smoked ham. He spun away
across the clearing and went down and stayed down.
"Again!" offered O'Ryan. "Oh, man, that was good.
Try again. The first fair wallop I've had on the end of
my arm for three years—let alone the niggers, that never
would stand fair. Will y' fight, then?"
"I can't," choked Andrew Harben and the last thing
he heard was the girl's eager pleading:
"Don't spoil him. Do not take him away from me.
I will be very angry"
And that was the beginning of the romance of Andrew
Harben on the island of the bird of paradise, which was
singular in its way, but no more than many things that
come to pass in quite ordinary fashion among those for-
gotten corners of the seas. For a time he was very sick,
having suffered much in his search. The two, man and
woman, nursed him through with every care, and when
he was able to be about once more he had an explanation


82 INDARKPLACES
with Jim O'Ryan, who squatted beside him like a mon-
strously muscled Buddha, smoking from a carved nut.
"You're only a thieving buccaneer," began the big man
thoughtfully, "and I misdoubt you'll ever understand
what I have to say or what manner of folk you have to
deal with. How should you? You came to this wild
and lovely garden of mine to rob it for dirty gain, and
you stink of cities and people and marts of trade. But
me—Jim O'Ryan—I left all that long ago, and I found
my little Eden here as you see it, and so I mean to keep
it while I live. D'you think how much chance you have
of ever getting away again with the secret?"
Andrew Harben held the air of listening, but behind
his lids he was quietly taking stock of weight and height
and reach. It was borne upon him that at his best he
would never be able to stand toe to toe against such a
giant. . . .
"This is the island you were seeking," O'Ryan went
on, "as well I know. The purple birds are here. Sorry
and bitter sorry am I that ever I traded one of those
pretty skins to bring hungry devils like yourself sniff-
ing and smelling for the place. But what could I do?
I had to have knives and tobacco and the like, and the
Bajaus would take nothing else.
"Meanwhile, you have added a fresh interest to local
politics, and why should I deny it? My real mistake
was not cracking your neck first off, as I meant, and
more's the pity, because after N'goma had laid eyes on
your foxy mug, why, then it was too late, d'you see?
Yes, that was my error. I forgot the child had seen no
other man but me for years and so by nature she took
this notion to you as a sort of new toy—heaven mend


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 83
her taste!—being no wiser. As she might have said in
another place—'Jim, dear, my heart is broke entirely
for that bit of a poodle dog yonder.'
"Now, I do not know what your domestic experience
may have been," he added with perfect gravity, "but it
is in my mind that a woman must be allowed her whims
to the possible limit, otherwise squally weather and storm
signals. Therefore, and because I'm all for peace my-
self, I will let you live, such as you are, and N'goma
shall have her poodle. Are you not grateful?"
Andrew Harben was busied with rather different sen-
timents, but said nothing.
"But," continued the other over a monitory pipe stem,
"but you will get poor pickings hereabouts. You may
have a great idea of your own wickedness and a good
conceit of yourself—and I hope you have, for you shall
be brought very low. I owe that to N'goma. I have
warned her what you want and what manner of a thief
of the world you are, and she does not believe me, the
innocent. She looks on you as something grand. Well,
then, she'll know better as she sees you shown up and
put in your proper place. . . . 'Tis always certain that
Eve will agree with Adam in due time that the serpent is
a dirty scut! . . .
"One more thing. There is no gun on this island,
and whenever you want to kill me you'll have to try
with your hands. You can try, and I can smash the face
of you again, and so on. It will be poor sport but some
consolation, maybe."
"And what else can I do?" asked Andrew Harben.
"Why, such jobs as I set you," chuckled O'Ryan.
"There's much to be done in the way of public improve-


84 IN DARK PLACES
ments. You'll be a fine figure of a genteel adventurer
digging drains or suchlike."
Andrew Harben revolted.
"Do you think you can keep me as a slave?" he
cried, springing up.
"Aye, that's just what I think!" roared O'Ryan, bulk-
ing over him with sudden exultant violence. Deliberately
he raised his fist and knocked the other across the clear-
ing again like a bag of rags. "For slave is what you
shall be till you prove yourself a better man than me,
d'you see?"
And he had his way of it in the end, for that is what
Andrew Harben became—slave to a great brute of a
white castaway and to a little, purple-clad witch of a
brown girl with eyes as dark as dusk and beautiful as
the dawn.
Under the side of a black, volcanic cliff the ground
fell sharply to a deep ravine all fringed with vines and
thorny creepers and the climbing arum with its poison-
ous red fruits. Here O'Ryan dropped Andrew Harben
like a bear in a pit, and made him a little hut and gave
him a wooden spade and a bucket and bade him clear a
small, reluctant spring that took its rise under the rock.
And here Andrew Harben toiled and sweated day by
day. At noon N'goma brought his food and lowered it
in a basket and then would sit and talk with him, perched
at the brink, and Andrew Harben would stand in the
slippery clay and gaze up at her, unattainable. This
was O'Ryan's scheme to meet her fancy for the new
toy.
In her talks she told Andrew Harben all her simple


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 85
story. Her parents had been native servants to an Eng-
lish missionary in Gilolo who had taken passage for Sala-
wati with his household aboard the ill-fated trading
schooner Merry Friend. When the craft was wrecked in
the west monsoon Jim O'Ryan bore her safe through
the surf, and of all the ship's company only these two
came ashore alive. They found the island uninhabited,
but rich in fruits and sago palm. It suited them—pre-
sumably it suited some deep, unsatisfied instinct in the
sailor; the girl was merely his at command. They built
a house, they set up the domestic hearth together, and
there they had since lived the familiar idyl of primitive
content. Through three years she had seen no other
human creature except the woolly Bajaus, the sea gipsies,
that coasted once a year to trade for skins. And even
these explorers never dared set foot on the island, having
had their lesson once for all at the hands of O'Ryan—
B'sar, the Mighty One—whom they feared as a great
devil-devil and lord of the storm.
"But have you never wished to get away—to go out
into the big world?" demanded Andrew Harben.
"No," she said hesitantly. "B'sar did tell me all about
it, many times."
He marvelled what pictures of life and men that rude
wanderer of the ports had thus drawn for the instruc-
tion of such a companion.
"It is all trade and noise and crowded places. There
is not enough food or room to breathe, and so the people
are always stealing and lying and fighting to take away
something from each other. It is only to work and
sleep and fight and die. Nobody has honesty or honour,
and if they knew of us they would take ours away . . .


86 INDARKPLACES
No—I do not wish to, and B'sar he never will go out
there again."
"Then he owns you," said Andrew Harben, frowning.
"He is the master," she answered. She called it
"masther" in her soft, sliding speech, with the strangest
touch of brogue.
Now, Andrew Harben had known many women and
many different kinds, and this was a woman of almost
incredible simplicity. It should have been easy to follow
up the emotional shock of his arrival and her childlike
wonder that never could have enough of gazing on him.
But he found the most unexpected difficulties. She
seemed to have no knowledge of the merest formulas
of the game.
"Do you love him?"
"What is that?" she asked, wrinkling her brow at him
over the leafy creeper by which she clung. "Sometimes
I comb his beard. I would like to comb yours. You
have such a pretty yellow beard—all curly. When you
were sleeping I did comb it, so soft and curly—Daari!"
She brought out his name in delighted discovery; she
had never been able to make anything of his own.
"Daari is what I shall call you. Is it not pretty? In
my own talk it means white. You are so white on your
skin, not like B'sar. Daari—Daari I"
She called to him and stretched her little hands down,
and he could only swear at his helplessness.
"Say that you hate him then," he begged. "Does he
beat you? Does he treat you cruelly?"
"Sometimes," she nodded, pursing up her tiny lips with
a laugh behind them. "When I am bad."
"Then you must hate him," he explained earnestly.


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 87
"Words. You talk such funny words, Daari. Love
—hate—I cannot see these things. . . . Only I am N'goma
and he if B'sar."
"He must have taught you. You say he has taught
you everything."
"Yes, I do know, but I do not understand. What
use are so many and so hard words?"
"If I could get out of here some dark night—and
you could help me—I might show you."
She drew back, frightened. "Oh, no, Daari. He put
you here!"
"I saw you fight against him yourself."
"Yes—yes, for you," she cried, with the lights leaping
in her eyes. "I wished so much to have you, and I was
so afraid he would put you with those dead sailors he
did bury after the wreck. Oh, Daari—I did think you
were one of those sailors in the ground. How could
I know?" The rounded purple figure shrank and
quivered among the fronds, but presently came trickling
laughter as her face peeped out at him again. "But
you are not. You are alive! Oh, I am glad!"
"I might as well be buried as sunk in this hole," he
answered bitterly.
But she did not hearken at first to any hint of escape,
and she seemed quite satisfied to have saved him whole,
and to smile and to chatter with him now. He met
only an exasperating innocence, so different from the
facile coquetry he had been led to hope. She did not
know the meaning of a grievance, nor of treachery,
deceit, nor lawless desire. He had to start at the begin-
ning. ... It was curious wooing.
"Listen, N'goma! Do you know really why I came?


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 89
O'Ryan, who attended to that congenial task at all hours,
dropping down a knotted rope from the top of the cliff
like a huge ape. . . .
"Well, my piratin' squireen," he would greet the other,
"and how is the luck today? Have you dug any gold or
precious stones from that rock? By Joe, you're not
worth your keep. Call yourself a fortune hunter, and
you handle a shovel no brisker than that? Dig into it,
y' lazy scowbanker!"
It was then his custom on the least excuse or none at
all to knock Andrew Harben headlong with a full swing on
the jaw, an operation in which he took recondite and un-
wearied delight.
"Will y' fight?" he offered.
But Andrew Harben, with the surge of madness in his
throat, lay still in the clay and said nothing, biding his
time.
One day he discovered a singular fact. N'goma could
read the written word. O'Ryan had schooled her after
a fashion to beguile their solitude. He used the only book
they possessed. And that book was the log of the Merry
Friend. There could be no sort of doubt about it: she
recited whole passages from the voyage of their ill-fated
schooner—up to the very day of December when the
wreck occurred.
When Andrew Harben learned that he felt in truth as
Satan must have felt at finding the seed of evil knowledge
in another paradise, for he knew the log would give him
latitude and longitude near enough and the complete key
to O'Ryan's secret.
Until finally he persuaded this innocent Eve. "Only
drop the rope and leave it hanging after B'sar is gone,"


go IN DARK PLACES
he pleaded. "Such a little thing to do for me. I can
meet you in the starlight, N'goma. You will bring the
book and I will teach you many wonderful things which
your master has never taught you! But these I must
whisper—whisper with my lips against your ear. Won't
you let me free to be your new teacher, N'goma?"
She wavered, she yielded, and when Andrew Harben
was alone he smiled, recalling, it may be, some of those
many other women he had known. And presently he
laid hold of the vine beside his hut so that it snapped in
his grasp. Whereupon he felt himself a man once more,
and sprang to the waiting rope and climbed up from the
pit, ready to make his trial.
It was close upon nightfall when he came out at the
rim of the island. Ke moved along the shore towards
the cobbled beach until at a sheer turn he came suddenly
upon N'goma where she sat, chin in hand, gazing to
seaward, a solitary blot of full-hearted colour against the
fading glow of the west. He crept up on the rock be-
side her so that she was not aware of him until his
shoulder touched her. "You have come out," she
breathed. "He will kill you!"
"Perhaps," said Andrew Harben. "But it's worth the
chance."
"I did do a very bad thing to listen to you—to let you
out. I was a bad girl. B'sar would not like it. Why
did you make me?"
There were tears on her cheek as he drew her to him.
She lay tense and resistant in his arms, and through the
feathered garment so warm and velvet sleek he could
feel the pulsing of her body. "My little wild bird"
He lured her with murmured trifles that to him were


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 91
only the common coin of such traffic, but to her must
have been all tokens new and wonderful.
Her fingers lingered upon him in shy caress. "A boat
is down there by the lagoon—your boat. It is ready.
You will go back to your world again, Daari—before the
master knows!"
"Presently," said Andrew Harben. "We'll travel to-
gether, N'goma."
She shook her head and shunned the west. "I cannot.
What should I do among those many places and those
many people? Here is my home. . . . And besides, here
is B'sar!"
"You would have me, N'goma."
She regarded him with veiled, feminine gaze. "Yes, I
would like to have you for always—so. A man strange
and different—to see and to talk with." She sighed.
"You must hurry now, before he gets you!"
"Presently," smiled Andrew Harben. "Have you
brought me that book—that log of the Merry Friend?"
She felt in her bosom, and—joy!—produced a little
ragged, water-stained volume.
"But there is no time to teach me all those wonderful
things," she said, innocently, and watched with wide eyes
while he knotted it safe in his sash. "Why do you want
the little book?"
Andrew Harben stood over her, exultant.
"Because now I can always find your paradise again!
We'll strip it, N'goma—a gay time we'll have on the pro-
ceeds, you and I. And what I won't teach you won't
be worth the knowing. . . . I've won!" His hold tight-
ened, he caught her to him and kissed her: the rude seal
of ownership and of triumph. As he released her, sud-
/


92 INDARKPLACES
denly from just behind them broke a great, bellowing
voice, calling her name. "Go down by the boat. Wait
for me there," he gave his curt command, and turned and
strode inland.
The two men met by firelight in the clearing.
"You—?" rumbled O'Ryan, astounded.
"I'm here for that fight," said Andrew Harben.
"By way of suicide?"
"By way of settlement. It's true I came seeking your
treasure, O'Ryan, and now it's mine and I'm ready to
take it, for I will share with nobody!"
For roof they had the vast tropic night and for ring
the sea, and when at last they came together the long
breakers on the reef rolled in plaudits, but no living thing
saw the great fight between Jim O'Ryan and Andrew
Harben on that unmarked island of the Gilolo Strait for
the purple bird of paradise.
It was short and cyclonic. Andrew Harben did not
try to avoid the rush, only dodging a fist and ducking in
under and closing so that O'Ryan clipped him about the
ribs. The other would have held him there, but he forced
a back heel, and they went to the ground in a tangle. He
needed no better opening for those few tricks he had
so sedulously practised on the jungle vine. . . .
He used only his thumb and the edge of his hand,
swordwise, and he aimed for the armpit, the tendon be-
low the ear, and the nerves of the upper arm. O'Ryan
did not know the guard for those deadly jabs, made with
the speed of a lashing snake. He writhed in agony and
spun around, unaware of the grip on his wrist until it
was forced back and back and his own weight snapped the
bone.


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 93
They staggered up, and the big man's right arm hung
collapsed. But he charged again, trumpeting his wrath so
that the night was stunned with it. Andrew Harben
dropped to meet him on one knee, catching his broken
arm. He whirled in mid-air and pitched forward, and
the whole giant bulk of him crashed sprawling on the
point of the shoulder and crumpled and lay very still.
Almost at the same instant appeared N'goma.
The darkness seemed to part as a curtain to let her
through, and she was there, a slender column of purple
like an incandescence. Hard-breathed and shaken as he
was, with the red mist of battle still upon him, Andrew
Harben saw and hailed her—the reward, the gage of
victory.
"I win! N'goma I have won!"
He came to her with opened arms.
Before he could touch her, without any warning a
knife flashed high in her hand, and only his wincing
instinctive start struck it aside from his breast. But
the glitter of the blade was not more daunting than her
fury of grief as she flung past him and threw herself
upon the outstretched body of Jim O'Ryan. "You have
killed him! Killed the master. . . . Oh, kill me—kill me
too!"
She caught the victim in her young arms, murmuring
broken endearments, fondling the big head, lavishing
every extravagance of devotion and remorse.
"What's this? What's come to you?" stammered
Andrew Harben, in the very phrase of O'Ryan himself.
"N'goma"
Her face was the lovely mask of anger.
"He is my man!" she cried. "My man to me. Who


94 IN DARK PLACES
are you to kill my man? Because I did like to play and
smile—because I was bad and a fool just that little,
you think I would give him for you? Get away—get
away!"
She turned back to her man, her mate, her master—
the abiding fact.
Never had she seemed more desirable, this woman to
whom Andrew Harben had thought to teach the meaning
of love and hate. The lees of his fighting wrath were
stirred again, and clouded up to his brain. There was
none to hold him back now. He had adventured and
striven and fought to have his single right to her, that
graceful creature. Yes, and his right to the one glorious
purple garment that covered her. It was worth a king's
ransom, and here it only served as cloak for the provoca-
tive brown beauty of a native girl. He caught her up and
laid one hot hand on the feathered drapery to strip it quite
from her
She saw his meaning, and did not flinch. She had
learned by now that O'Ryan was not dead nor likely to
die, and she looked at the victor with a level flame from
her big eyes. "So that is what you wanted," she said
in slow and biting speech. "B'sar did tell me you were
only a thief! You came for the skins, and the rest was
all a lie. Steal them, then! Here am I, without help.
Take what you want, and then go back where you came
from and tell them you have won the bird of paradise
—you wicked, wicked white man!"
She stood there, secure in her measure of him as Eve
must have been of Satan, agreeing with Adam that the
serpent is no gentleman. Actually, she leaned against his
breast, seeming to offer herself in sheer contempt and fear-


THE BIRD OF PARADISE 95
lessness: with her hands upon him: shaking him with her
wrath.
And Andrew Harben drew back from her, overborne.
Andrew Harben, who had known many women of many
kinds, felt baffled and abashed before this wild one whose
emotions should have been so easy, whose ways should
have been so simple—and were, perhaps, though inscru-
table still. . . .
It may have been a month later when he made the
ancient port of Ternate in the Spice Islands once more.
He was westward bound, on the back track, where Jan
Van Bol greeted him eagerly.
"Here you are again!" he cried. "Ah-hah, you bring
your head at least! Well—do you know anyzing about
z' bird of paradise?"
"Yes," said Andrew Harben, solemnly. "I know that
the bird of paradise is the rarest and slyest of living
creatures."
"Ah?" blinked the half-caste. "And what was z' rest
you learned?"
Then Andrew Harben grimaced, remembering what he
had learned, and lost: remembering the bitter moment
beyond Gilolo Strait when he found the log-book of the
Merry Friend gone from his sash—that he himself had
been robbed with subtle gesture and incredible feminine
cunning of his pride, his knowledge and his revenge, after
all.
"The rest," said Andrew Harben, "was a fairy tale."


Mc KEON'S GRAFT

c KEON and the melancholy engine-driver
swung the final shipment in through the door
of the combined freight and baggage car.
"Es 'heavy," complained the engine-driver in his lu-
gubrious English, looking reproachfully at the clumsy box.
"Es wort' extra—to carry of that kind between our
'ands."
"Go on now, Esteban," growled Mc Keon. "Be satis-
fied with your graft, can't you? And get steam on that
old tea-kettle." He tossed a lone, lean mail sack in before
making all fast.
The few ragged loungers who squatted in the dust
and rolled interminable cigarettes out of that newspaper
which every ribald visitor of the West Coast knows as
the "Yell of the People" looked on with languid inter-
est.- It was well known to them that the tossing of the
mail sack was the signal for departure. Serior Mc
Keon always performed the ceremony with the mail sack
when he was just about to abandon his duties as station
agent, shipping clerk, postmaster, and freight handler,
and assume those of conductor, brakeman, and express
messenger. And there would be no other train for
forty-eight hours.
Mc Keon walked to the forward step and gave the
signal. A doleful shriek from the whistle responded as
96


McKEON'S GRAFT 97
the locomotive and two cars, with rattle and clank, stag-
gered out across the plateau. Ticket pad and punch in
hand, Mc Keon stood in the doorway, looking over his
collection of passengers from under bushy brows with
calculating eye.
The usual crowd, apparently. Small planters from
the unhealthy shores of Buenaventura, small tradesmen
from the plateau villages, itinerant gold-washers, chance
workers in the mines, riff-raff of the mountains and the
cattle plains, a motley earful, hazed with cigarette smoke
and chattering dialects.
Mc Keon strolled down the aisle, marking the faces,
nodding slightly to an acquaintance here and there. In-
stinctively he graded his fares, from the coffee coloured
mixtures of negro and Indian to the lemon-hued mesti-
zos. And as he marked he scowled.
Tints, as racial emblems, had no significance for Mc
Keon. He owned no prejudice between shades. But in
one weighty particular he was concerned with the com-
plexion of the patrons of the road. It had direct bear-
ing upon his profit from the trip. It was a busi-
ness consideration. And apparently luck was not with
him this day. He noted an undue preponderance of
lighter skins. That meant, naturally, more passengers
who could not be bluffed with safety into paying twice
the legal fare, more difficulty in fixing arbitrary freight
rates, and less reward for a hard-working functionary
like himself.
He was still gauging the possibilities when he came to
the rear of the car and a face showed out of the smoke
veil that had no part in the prevailing colour scheme. A
young man stood on the platform between the cars. A


98 IN DARK PLACES
little man, and white—not only white, but pink, with a
blue eye that twinkled engagingly.
Mc Keon regarded him with casual interest, noting
the riding suit of ducks that managed to fit so jauntily
and the brand-new Stetson that set so snappily upon him.
"How're you, con?" he inquired, with ready address.
"If it's all the same to you, guess I'll ride outside. I'm
not good on mixed flavours, and it's too various in there.
. . . Fine bunch of assorted ruffians you carry."
Mc Keon nodded. "Prospectin'?" he inquired.
"Silver," returned the other. "Just came down
through the mountains. Got through without a knife
in my back, by luck." He shivered and laughed. "You
don't see many Americans this way, do you?"
"Not a dozen a year."
"Like the job?"
Mc Keon twitched his shoulders.
"Gotta like it," was his laconic answer.
He slouched back into the car and began to collect.
The stranger leaned in the doorway to watch him.
It was worth while to watch Mc Keon in pursuit of
his profession. Tall, raw-boned, hard-eyed and bearded,
he towered like a giant among the natives. Money he
took and money he returned—sometimes. Tickets he
punched and distributed, to some. But always without
argument, imperturbable, deliberate.
Shrill protests fell to silence before that slow glance.
Expostulate hands ceased to gesture at the shift of those
big shoulders. There were few who grumbled after he
had dealt with them. He proceeded by a masterful sys-
tem of his own, did Mc Keon, based on his knowledge


McKEON'S GRAFT 99
of the people. And the men who might have made dif-
ficulty, recognized residents of the valley, had no cause
to do so.
Only once was the transaction brisk enough to inter-
rupt the chatter and hum of talk through the car.
At the end section nearest the door sat four men in
rough mountain garb, hardy citizens, who had cumbered
the aisle with their knapsacks.
"This is freight, senores," announced Mc Keon, calmly.
And he proceeded to fix a price on the knapsacks.
One of the group, a thick, heavy-jawed individual,
built like a weight-lifter, objected vigorously, giving
Mc Keon eye for eye, as if testing him. "Are you, then,
sole owner of this road?" he demanded. "Must all give
money as you ask? . . . Mother of God—and what if we
will not pay?"
Mc Keon gathered the bell rope casually in his hand.
"The senores are at liberty to walk down, with their
burdens," he answered. "I am told the walking is ex-
cellent, and very good for the health."
The senores subsided and paid, murmuring one to the
other.
When Mc Keon returned to the middle platform the
prospector was waiting for him with a gold piece. Mc
Keon took the money and returned him the proper
change on his fare. But he did not take the trouble to
punch a ticket. The prospector noted that detail with
a whimsical smile.
"Pretty profitable business," he observed.
"So-so," returned Mc Keon, undisturbed. "I've seen
it better."
The train had jolted over the break of the plateau,


loo INDARKPLACES
winding down through natural gorges of the descent
towards the coast. The locomotive went plunging and
holding like a stubborn little mule with its ears laid back
and its feet braced for bumps. Mc Keon whirled the
wheel on the primitive hand brakes to lighten its task
and passed into the rear car.
The stranger followed him uninvited. There, amid
piles of miscellaneous freight, bags of mineral specimens
and stacks of hides, Mc Keon established himself on the
clumsy wooden box at which Esteban had complained
and began to charge a black pipe. The prospector,
smiling and ingenuous, sat opposite on a fruit crate.
It was hot. At the side they had glimpses of tawny
rock wall and boulder-strewn slopes, bare and hideous,
quivering in the vivid sun. The car swayed and pounded
beneath them. The labouring of the exhaust, thrown
back against the cut, hammered in their ears.
"You got good nerve, handling that outfit," remarked
the prospector, raising his voice against the racket.
"Ever had any trouble?"
"What trouble would I have?"
"Oh, I don't know. They look like pretty tough
customers—some of them."
Mc Keon twitched his shoulders and puffed slowly.
"Ain't civilized enough yet for that kind of trouble.
They're only spiggoties."
The prospector shivered and smiled. "Seems to me
I'd put it the other way," he commented. "They' re too
civilized. They carry knives. ... By the way," he
added, "who owns this line?"
"Company up at Bogota."


Mc KEON'S GRAFT 101
"Paying any dividends?"
"Sure. It handles all the goods that go into the
province. And it owns the platinum mines."
"How about its passenger business?"
Mc Keon consulted his ticket pad.
"Fifteen fare, this trip."
"That's what you might call a fair division," remarked
the prospector quizzically. "You chuck the money up
and all that hangs on the bell rope belongs to the com-
pany!"
Mc Keon only nodded. The prospector gazed his ad-
miration. There was no swagger, on the other hand, no
hesitation about the tall conductor's admission.
"Don't they kick?"
"Who, the company? Why should they? They
make it pay thirty per cent. And what else would they
expect? A guy's gotta live. And that blame' engineer
he's got to have his rake-off."
"What's the wage?"
"Ten a week—Mex."
"Well—a good many could manage to live on that
down here," said the prospector, brightly.
Mc Keon turned a slow glance on him.
"A good many ain't got a youngster at school back
in the States they got to plan and save for," he returned.
"Oh," said the prospector, and fell silent, sobered.
The doorway was darkened.
Three of the passengers were balancing across the
platform and crowding through into the freight car.
They were three of the group who had made the outcry
about the knapsacks. Apparently they were not pre-
pared to see the prospector. They hesitated an instant.


102 INDARKPLACES
Then, one of them, he of the heavy jaw, thrust to the
front and addressed Mc Keon without preamble.
"Concerning the price you charged us for our blankets,
senor," he said. "We have decided to discuss it further."
It was a throaty voice, purring and forceful.
Mc Keon looked the three over. They stood close to-
gether, the speaker a little in advance. Squat, solid-
built, swarthy customers all: of the mountain type of gold
seeker and adventurer. Men of their hands—after the
Spanish fashion—not to be despised in any argument,
particularly the spokesman. But the glint under Mc
Keon's bushy brows made no concession.
"The senores know what they can do," he drawled,
tamping the coal in his pipe. "The other car is for pas-
sengers," he added.
His manner and his reply were provocative. There
was a grim smile on the spokesman's lips as he flung
out an expressive hand. "Pardon. We came to dis-
cuss," he said. "Is it permitted to ask the senor how
much of that tariff he forced us to pay will be turned in
to the company?"
The prospector, standing by, had a curious impression
that the man's grievance, the supposed indignation of
them all, rang false. The three pairs of eyes had come to
rest on Mc Keon, fixed and luminous with expectancy.
The prospector had a distinct feeling of suspense, of hid-
den significance, of suppressed excitement. Mc Keon's
insult had not drawn a spark from them, fired with in-
justice as they had pretended to be.
Mc Keon laid his pipe beside him and rested his huge
hands on his knees. The speaker met his gaze squarely.
"If it is further permitted," he went on rapidly, "we


104 IN DARK PLACES
Mc Keon had drawn back a short step, still staring.
The heel of his boot came in sharp contact with the
clumsy box from which he had risen.
The leader of the group nodded and grinned.
"This sefior here," he said, indicating the prospector,
who sat listening, open-mouthed and wide-eyed, "there
is no reason why he should remain. Shall we invite him
to the other car while we further discuss that fifty—
that fifty thousand pesos, sefior?"
Mc Keon stood as one dazed, but he shook his head.
"So be it," continued the other. "He can at least do
us no harm. Meanwhile—because we have not time to
lose—are we right concerning the fifty pesos? Tell us
that, sefior."
"And if you are?" queried Mc Keon slowly.
"Ah—if we are, you will doubtless accept our offer."
"Your offer—?"
The leader pointed to the box at Mc Keon's feet.
"You have the substance of it there," he smiled.
"Five hundred pounds of platina. . . . Six months' prod-
uct of the mines. . . . We know. We have waited.
Did they think no one would ever learn of their innocent
box and what it held? Did they think wise ones would
never reach these places? Truly—it is too simple.
And platina sells itself now at seven hundred pesos the
pound."
Mc Keon was breathing slow, deep breaths.
"You want me to join you!"
"Precisely. And the price equals the profits of one
thousand journeys like this. Paid into your hand. It
is as safe—look you—as easy, as to pocket your fifty.
The plan is made. A certain steamer will meet us at


McKEON'S GRAFT 105
a certain point on the coast. Within two hours. We
are here. We are gone. We are rich!"
Mc Keon put out a hand against the side of the car
to steady himself. He slipped unconsciously into English,
speaking thickly. "And y' thought, because I was
plugging away at my own little graft—"
"Pardon—"
"I would say—what exactly do you desire me to do?"
"You can make it much easier for us, that is all.
Join us, and all we must do is to tranship at Buena-
ventura. You shall also come on the steamer, quite
safely to escape. . . . This should suit your taste, sefior
of the fifty pesos."
"Oh, I shall come on the steamer?" repeated Mc Keon,
quietly. "Shall I—?"
And he sprang like a hungry panther.
He had his long, corded arms cradling for the leader's
body when something flashed blue in the light and
darted forward. The Spaniard held the long barrel
jammed against his middle. Mc Keon checked in full
career, with the muzzle pressing into his flesh, and his
hands stayed.
The other two had drawn knives. At mere sight of
the naked blades the poor little prospector doubled up
with a squeal of terror and collapsed among the stacks
of hides.
The leader smiled.
"It is a pity you are not supplied with arms, sefior," he
purred throatily. "You are sudden. Jose—" he called,
"To your post! Unloose the engine. It is to be that
way."
Over the heads of the group Mc Keon was aware of


106 IN DARK PLACES
the fourth bandit at work between the cars. A coupling
pin clanked. The fourth man sprang to the passenger
coach, a revolver gleaming in his fist. Presently there
was a gap, rapidly widening as the two who had shown
knives tightened the brake wheel on the baggage car.
A hubbub of voices rose against the lessening pound
of the locomotive. Mc Keon had a glimpse of the fourth
man standing in the coach doorway, weapon levelled, and
the startled, bobbing faces of the passengers inside.
"That is Jose," explained the leader, smiling. "He
accompanies your engineer down the road some little
distance. Far enough so that none shall witness what
direction we take. You understand? Meanwhile—we
have our knapsacks outside, and they are empty and
spacious enough to hold all our fortune. See how
foolish you were, sefior. It would have been so much
easier had you joined us. Now, simply, we shall have
to reach the coast by walking, as you recommended.
And as to you—"
He smiled.
Mc Keon took in the situation deliberately. He nodded
and backed stiffly away from the end of the revolver,
hands still up, leaving the narrow passage between him-
self and his captor. The car had lumbered to a stop
under the pressure of hand brakes.
"It appears, senor, that you were right," he said
resignedly. "Truly I did not believe that you could be so
swift with a pistol."
The leader was immensely gratified, in some odd
criminal way. His smile widened upon his teeth.
"Ah—you must not think that in your country alone
is practised the art. We also have the trick of it . . .


Mc KEON'S GRAFT 107
Tito," he added, aside, "tie me up that little fowl who
flutters there among the hides—the sainted mother
knows we will be gentle with him. And, Paulo—do the
same by our friend of the fifty pesos here while I keep
him contented."
Tito stepped obediently from the platform through
the doorway. The leader, unthinking in his vanity, al-
lowed him to step past the end of the revolver.
Once more Mc Keon leaped. And this time he hud-
dled the unfortunate Tito before him like a bag of salt.
The revolver barked twice. Tito screamed, and was
trampled under foot as Mc Keon snaked a hand through
the struggle and gripped the armed wrist. Interlocked,
Mc Keon and the leader caromed across the end of the.
car through drifting smoke and a bitter scent of scorched
clothing, each straining for the instant advantage.
"Paulo!" gasped the leader. "Paulo!"
Mc Keon whirled his man off his feet and stumbled
backward just in time to escape the ripping stab of
Paulo's knife as the bandit crept from behind.
It was madness then, in that single car, hung among
the foothills of the Andes in the empty quivering sun-
light. By matching the agility, the speed of the two,
Mc Keon kept just ahead, battering from side to side of
the narrow space like a demon unchained.
The leader crushed his chest with one mighty arm,
thrusting his thigh at every foothold for a straight throw.
The man had a body and limbs like iron. Once the
twisting wrist levered around as Mc Keon slipped, and
he felt the sting of the gunpowder on his cheek when
the gun spat again. And it was this opponent who


108 IN DARK PLACES
must be hustled and hurried as a barrier and a guard
against the prowling, deadly knife.
"Paulo!" gurgled the leader. . . .
But mostly they fought in silence—silence save for
the heave and wheeze of painful breath, and always the
whimpering moan of the little prospector, cowering
among the hides and watching the glittering knife with
eyes of helpless horror.
Again and again that darting blade bit to the blood.
But Mc Keon, squirming and dodging, never weakened.
He had striven for the thumb lock since the start, work-
ing his huge, bony hand slowly—slowly, around the thick
neck. And now, with thumb half bitten through, he
had it.
For the tenth time the three living went down in a
tangle with the body on the floor. And this time they
did not rise. The leader's face was purple. His lips
writhed, but no sound came. Mc Keon was pressing
home.
Paulo half lifted and wiped the sweat from his blinded
eyes. Bracing, he took distance.
An upflung foot caught him on the side of the jaw,
and with rattling teeth he yelped and folded backward.
Mc Keon worked around until he had a knee on the
broad chest of the leader. The revolver came away
from the flaccid grip as he wrenched at it. He struck
with the butt—once and again. . . .
The prospector crawled out of the hides and sat star-
ing stupidly at the shambles. Gone were his healthy
pink and his twinkling look. He turned a wild glance up
at the ghastly red ruin of a man who leaned against the
side of the car beside the box of platinum.


McKEON'S GRAFT 109
"You did it!" he mouthed. "You did it all yourself!"
Mc Keon was in rags, scored and crimson-slashed.
But his eyes glinted under the brows with hard
lights.
The prospector began to laugh, close to hysteria.
"Man," he cried, "I've got to tell! I'm no prospector.
I'm the railroad—part of it. American firm. Just
bought out your Bogota crowd. Reorganization—ex-
tension—and all that. They sent me down to find out
who was doing the petty grafting hereabouts!"
Mc Keon regarded him, dully.
"I've got my report," babbled the little man. "Oh, yes.
I have it—a clean bill for any man who can fight like
that!"
He caught at his lip to still it. Then burst out.
"But still I don't see," he whimpered. "How could
you do it? How? . . . How could you find the nerve,
and the strength, and the will? And why? . . . Fifty
thousand pesos!"
"The spigotty devils!" answered Mc Keon, heavily.
"They wanted to rob the company!"


THE WRECK ON DELIVERANCE
IWAS with Jennie May out there, at the end of the
earth. I know the story of that wreck on Deliver-
ance Island which has remained for press and pub-
lic only the vaguest tragedy. You will remember the
brief despatch that went trickling by cable weeks after-
wards. You must recall with what sense of wondering
bereavement it came to thousands everywhere that the
greatest singing voice of our time had been stilled sud-
denly and obscurely in some far corner of the Southern
Seas.
To those thousands, to all who in the past had seen
and heard and adored and who now have lost her for
ever, I would offer a last glimpse to seal their mem-
ories; to show how their loss was my own infinite gain—
unworthy though I was, and am—and to close on an
intimate human note the brilliant capriccio of her career.
I think there never could have been much of an in-
timate element about that career. How many among the
multitudes she enthralled had a notion of the suffering,
the tumultuous revolt, the stoic endurance, the weakness
and the strength, with which she fought it through?
The people closest about her were equally deceived.
Her gift was too high, her beauty too resplendent. She
seemed a fleck of star-dust flashing to celestial music.
no


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 1ll
Truly she was no more than the woman Jennie May—
that ethereal, that divine queen of song; but for me and
for always Jennie May—in pain and loneliness, and
pride and great fear.
What pain and what fear I had learned too well dur-
ing our ten days together aboard the Zierikzee, the
wretched little Dutch-Indian trader on which, through a
fateful delay and error in sailing dates, her company
pulled out of Batavia to make the next lap of its grand
globe-trotting tour. . . .
I was the ship's doctor, you see. I had had a guess of
her trouble and her need. Soon after leaving port we
met a heavy break of the monsoon, and went blundering
farther and farther astray among the mazy currents
between Flores and Torres. And while the others were
busy bemoaning themselves and their discomforts and
their terrors in that storm-tossed tub, I had Jennie May
in my care.
That was my privilege; almost intolerable, and yet the
one happiness of my shattered life. I hugged it to my-
self. It sufficed for me throughout the ten days. It
must have sufficed to the end, I must have continued
without hope and without vision, in a lethargy of wor-
ship, and grief, and impotence—certainly I should never
have seen the least chance of saving her—if it had not
been for Rafael Logroscino. Let me say so at once;
Logroscino was the moving factor in our great adventure.
He took hold, he imposed himself quite suddenly the
very last day of all, just before dawn. I was coming
from Jennie May's cabin; he had been waiting near by,
it seemed. He caught me as I tottered on deck and
stopped me there against the house, just where the


112 IN DARK PLACES
open porthole of the prima-donna's cabin gave a thin
yellow gleam.
"What have you been doing to her?" he demanded,
under his hard-held breath.
Now, this fellow had no claim or share at all so far
as I was concerned. He was one of the opera company
—a highly important figure in his line, no doubt, and a
popular idol in I knew not how many continents—but a
passenger aboard the Zierikzee—nothing more.
I had seen him, hovering about. I had been aware
of him, a bull-necked big lump of a man, a sort of fat
stage pirate in mustachios and gaudy silk suits; how he
kept an uneasy, scowling watch on me while the rest of
them prayed and wept in the tiny saloon. And I hated
him vaguely for his size, for his handsome face, bold
and theatrical, and .because I divined some repressed and
passionate drama in his silent devotion to Jennie May—
I hated him most of all because he had known her, had
been with her, through the earlier months of their tour.
But his utter remoteness from the facts struck me with
a wry humour. The misery and exaltation in which I
had been living during the voyage had brought me just
short of hysteria, anyway. So I let him have what he
asked.
"I've been keeping her under drugs," I said.
He gave a violent gesture, but stilled himself with a
glance at the open port.
"She will not hear," I said. "She is drugged now."
"Why?" he cried. "What for?"
"She is dying," I answered.
You see, I had told no one; there was none to tell.
And she had never told—perhaps for the same reason.


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 113
When her reserves had failed, when she had finally given
up amid the disorder and dismay of this voyage, even
then her only confidante, her gaunt Andalusian maid,
Elena, had clung to the habit of despairing secrecy; we
three had met the crisis alone, day by day, cut off from
everything in the dizzy, creaking little cabin.
It was the measure of that secrecy, in which she had
enwrapped herself so long, that at first Logroscino was
merely stricken incredulous. His theatrical gesture an-
noyed me.
"Man, I wish I'd had your chance!" I flung at him,
for I would have no mercy on him now; my bitterness
rose up in me. "Where were your eyes a year ago—six
months ago? Any kind of a surgeon could have saved
her then—yes: one month ago it might have been tried."
"Saved"
"By the Waldeyer operation."
"Operation!"
"You might have forced it somehow. You might have
insisted—rallied her friends—lent her the courage she
lacked. The last needful drop of courage! . . . She
was precious to you?"
His amazement gave assent.
"Then, by Heaven, you should have carried her
through!"
"How?" he gasped. "For why?"
"Because she couldn't face the thing by herself. Be-
cause—every one has a limit of strength, where his
heart's tide runs from him like water from a rock—
where he stands to be wrecked. Don't you know it?
And hers was this—a treachery in the flesh against her
radiant soul, and horror of the knife. . . . Good heavens,


114 INDARKPLACES
she was ill enough at Batavia. I saw her once only—
the day she collapsed in the concert-hall. But I knew.
The truth was written on her face. She's gone on be-
lieving herself under sentence. And now, with the fever
and this damned slamming about—God help us, she is!
And you never guessed, you big, blind fool!"
He made a sound like a duellist taken under the rib.
"But still," he stammered, "but still—are you quite
sure you're right? . . . What kin' of a surgeon are
you?"
And I laughed.
"No kind at all—that's the fact. Once upon a time
I may have been. You might find my name in the Brit-
ish and Colonial M.D.—back volumes. With some
fancy letters tacked on for a tail, perhaps. But since
I've been knocking about the islands I can't remember
very well. You see, it's two years since I dared so
much as practise on a nigger."
"Christo!" he breathed.
"Well, these plantation niggers are valuable. And
after you've made one or two mistakes"
He looked me over in the dim glow, through the fly-
ing spindrift. He saw a lean twist of a chap in a piti-
ful uniform, worn and rusted, with a dab of red wool
on the sleeve as badge of rank. He saw a hand that
wavered as I raised it, eyes that were strained and a trifle
bloodshot, and a face that more or less resembled, I have
been led to believe, the face of a minor devil who has
grilled too long. And he began to understand, for he
went pale and rigid.
He interested me. I already sensed the course our


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 115
curious rivalry was to take. I wanted to instruct him. I
wanted to show this overfed fellow, this interpreter of
strutting and tinkling romance, just how far he had
travelled from his footlights.
"But you dared practise on her!" he rumbled at last
"I've eased her pain. Be glad of it!"
"But why should you have been the one"
"The choice was not between me and somebody else,"
I retorted. "It was between me and nobody. Old con-
demned yachts in the cheap-jack trade like the Zierikzee
are as likely to carry a milliner as a doctor. This is
none of your floating hotels on the North Atlantic!
There never was a doctor on board until I got the berth.
Of course, Van Goor—once he found what I was after—
he made it a paying concession!"
"Who?"
"The captain. He'd sell his teeth for cash in hand."
"Ha! An' he sold you"
"This billet, don't you see? This uniform! Official
standing on his rotten old craft—the only introduction
I could hope to get—a discredited outcast of my
trade. . . . Well, I won't say it's not been worth the
price."
The veins stood in shiny whips on his forehead.
"All this you did to be near—Jennie May!"
"Yes."
"You never saw her before Batavia?"
"No."
"But you meant to get an' see her?"
"Yes."
"An' here she's been lying helpless under your cursed
drugs"


n6 INDARKPLACES
"Ten days"
It was then the fellow surprised me. Next instant I
saw the tilting deck below and the sharp-toothed seas—
how close they ran along the rail. In his grip I knew
the real power of him like the shock of an unsuspected
current. And when his palm came pressing over my
heart and his eyes peering fiercely into mine for some
recondite diagnosis of his own, when he dropped me,
bruised and shaken, and drew a great breath—I knew
better.
"You are right!" He tossed me that assurance like
a fee—or a tip. "I been both blind an' a fool. You
know why? For letting you—any one—get nearer to
her than myself. An' now you bring an' you start up
these terrible doubts!"
He beat his huge fists together.
"But wait a bit. One more fact I mus' have to set
my mind. Look! . . . Here we stand on this ship—you
an' me, an' this case between us. Now where are we,
any'ow? Where on the map would we be? And where-
abouts from the nearest big doctor—the nearest sure
man?"
"You mean—a man you could trust?" I asked bit-
terly.
He nodded, and I pointed out through the night and
the smother, no longer hopeful of making him under-
stand anything much, except stage directions.
"Over yonder lies Papua. You never heard of it?
You wouldn't. It's the true dark continent—the only
unexplored space left between the seven seas—the last
mystery; as far removed from all you ever saw or im-
agined as hell from nursery rhyme."


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 117
"Are there any doctors?" demanded Logroscino, un-
deterred.
"Yes." It was my turn to squirm. "A few. Big
men. I ought to know; I tried to be one of them, hold-
ing fast by their duty and their vision. Old Dr. Jan
Kluit, he's the nearest. Unless we're completely lost,
the first land hereaway should be Deliverance, a rock
off the south shore, and up a river somewhere beyond
you'd find him, tending the souls and the bodies of
nameless man-eating tribes. Further back, at the Dutch
post of Merauke, are two more—Greeg and Van Lennep
—giving their lives to fight jungle diseases. Mean-
while, farther on, of course, there's Thursday Island—
the port we're due to reach tomorrow—with a tiny hos-
pital of its own where they do wonderful work"
"And doctors?"
"I'm trying to tell you so."
"Then I think," he decided, "I can dismiss you till
we arrive there."
I stared at him.
"It has been my mistake to leave Miss May alone,"
he said, bending down at me, "but I am not so blind an'
foolish but what I, too, have read her face. Yes, I saw
'ow she kept to herself. Yes, I saw her troubled, dis-
satisfied, secret. I was willing; it pleased me. I
thought it was on my account; I thought it was only my
love—strong an' resistless—which she would not hear,
which she put away from her yet awhile. Why? . . .
Because she was so hungry for love herself, and still
frighten' like a little bird. Therefore I left her alone,
an' I bided—always quiet an' quiet—for my time to come,
as it must come. As it must. Listen!


n8 IN DARK PLACES
"For what you tell me now of her danger, that may
be true or not true. I cannot question, though, 'oly
saints above, 'ow should I believe it? But one thing be
sure, I am on guard from this minute. I take charge
—comprehend that! She belong' to me, for our grand
triumph, for our so glorious destiny together! And I
no longer care to have her in the 'ands of a man who
says himself he is not to be trust'. You love her?"
It was my turn to yield some assent.
"With what kind of love?" he cried. '"What use 'as
it been? I take her away from a weakling like you—
sour an' broken, an' maybe a liar as well. Courage, you
speak of? Courage to carry her through? I have it—
the courage."
"Too late."
"Not for me!" He struck his great breast. "Crawl
an' whine as you like, wit' your coward spirit. But me,
while any harm you say threatens, my only thought would
be, I go about to save Jennie May!"
Well, there you have Rafael Logroscino, as I discov-
ered him thus far. He shamed me. Between a hope-
less impulse to laugh and a heightened detestation, I en-
vied him. Immensely. The creature swelled with en-
ergy, confidence, resolution—all the heroic virtues—all
the virtues I lacked. And it came to me how, by con-
ceiving himself always in the centre of the stage and
meeting life in this character of a romantic superman,
he must have gained wealth, fame, success—just about
all he desired, anywhere. Certainly he had made short
work of me, had found his balance in this grim and
urgent business with very little instruction of mine,


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 119
with no more difficulty than a gesturing basso in the
third act.
"I'd like to see that," I answered unsteadily. "I want
to see how you acquit yourself when we get to Thursday
Island."
But, as it happened, we were due for a speedier test—
one of those moments when human destinies are shaken
up like dice in a box—and I was soon to learn the value
of that muscular and practical romanticist in a way be-
yond all dreaming. . . .
Of course I did not see him at Thursday Island; the
Zierikzee was never to reach Thursday Island. The cur-
rents and her worn old engines and Van Goor himself—
that huckstering navigator—all combined to betray her.
We were still facing each other when she staggered into
the reef. We heard its welcoming arms clip her keel,
and felt the shock of its monstrous embrace, and for
a time after that we neither heard nor felt anything
more, I think.
Somehow I managed to crawl to the companion. Pas-
sengers, lascars, Chinese coolie stokers were presently
swarming from below, and fighting up and out by that
passage in a black panic. It was luck that I reached
Jennie May's cabin before the rush caught me, and
squeezed myself past the door which had jammed in its
frame.
The place was just as I had left it. Fortunately, the
vessel on its new slant lay over to our side, and by the
dim glow of the candle-lamp, swung wide in its gimbals,
I found the dear figure I sought on the outer berth, mo-
tionless and relaxed under its soft draperies, quite un-
disturbed. Elena, too, had stayed stolidly by. I met


120 INDARKPLACES
her level eyes where she stood braced against the bulk-
head, impassive—a grenadier of a woman—clicking her
beads with military rhythm.
"Do we sink?" she asked simply.
As a matter of fact, I was sailor enough—once I had my
bearings a bit—to be assured of a very different disaster.
The reef held us; the weather had moderated with a
shifting wind, and we must still be somewhere near the
lane of traffic. All those babblers might have spared them-
selves the infernal row they were raising outside. By
every chance they were condemned to nothing worse
than the thrills of a rescue within some few days—
four or five, I believe, as it turned out. But you see
how it was with us. . . . For her—for Jennie May—
there could be no question of days.
"Better if we did!" I answered, when the truth came
home to me, and beat my fists together as Logroscino
had done. "We're hung up on the rocks for slow tor-
ture, and now—now we'll never know but what that fat
fool might have been right after alll"
Elena returned to her beads; no doubt she thought
me quite mad. But you will fathom that cry of mine,
perhaps—had the fellow not dominated everything—even
my hopelessness? I dropped by the berth and clung
there, listening to the senseless uproar on the decks, and
watching the grimy morning light grow in at the port-
hole; and chiefly I wondered at Logroscino.
One thing he had said: "Because she was so hungry
for love herself, and yet frightened as a bird."
It seemed appalling to me, it seemed to cancel my last
advantage against him, that he should have known so


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 121
well as to know that. I loathed his knowing—and al-
most forgave him all the rest for it. I wholly distrusted,
I wanted desperately to believe, that vigorous opera
singer. And the discovery I waited upon—the only sus-
pense left me through the interval—was what my next
sight of him would reveal; how he had met this catas-
trophe, what gesture he had found to fit it, and what
hope he could offer now.
I cannot say how long I continued to wait, but there
came at last an end to our vigil, when the door flew
suddenly inward, as if shouldered from its hinges, and
a big voice filled the cabin like a muted organ-pipe, and
—I had my answer. . . .
"Were is that detestable little medico chap?"
At the threshold appeared Logroscino himself, loom-
ing gigantic in the tilted opening.
"You! Come 'ere! I need you again. Get up out of
that an' tell me—what was it you said about a surgeon
jus' now? A Dutch surgeon on the land—the nearest
one? Is it up a river he lives, did you say?"
I could only nod at him.
"You know which river? . . . Think!"
"Yes."
"You could fin' that river?"
"Maybe."
"You ever been up that river?"
"Part way—Kluit took me."
"Ha! And 'ow far might he be—your Kluit?"
"How far from where?" I gasped.
"'Ow far from that rock on the south shore?"
"Fifty miles—more or less."


124 INDARKPLACES
A queer lot they looked—a huddle of figures in sketchy
garments of incredible tints, a background of staring
faces in sad need of rouge or the razor—a kind of dor-
mitory chorus. And angry! No mistake about their
anger. These pampered folk from crowds and cities—
hustle them half a world away and cast them up in
rag-tag on a savage isle, and still they must fret for
precedence. All they could see was Jennie May being
taken somewhere or other while they were left behind—
a piece of rank favouritism; and I believe they had made
up their minds to stop us—until Logroscino arrived
among them.
That made an entry for him, you can imagine—such
a moment as he might have chosen. He had thrown off
his jacket to give play to bulging chest and thews. In
a pink shirt, plastered upon him by the rain, a woven
Roman sash about his ample waist, with his bristling
hair and mustachios and his chiselled, dark frown, he
was more than ever the figure of romance—brigand or
pirate.
And for a galley to receive us overside, rising and
falling at the foot of the lowered gangway, rode one of
the ship's largest cutters!
To do Van Goor justice, he could keep a bargain;
perhaps it suited his penny-paring nature with an ironic
humour to keep this wild bargain most lavishly. It cost
him nothing, you see. The Zierikzee was a loss—in-
sured, I go bail—and he simply had sacked her fore and
aft to furnish us, had stripped her of all her few com-
forts—the faded relics of her ancient yachting days.
His brown-limbed lascars once more in hand, like
attendant buccaneers in their blue dungarees and turban


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 125
kerchiefs, were busy transferring our loot. I saw tat-
tered velvet cushions go flying aboard, and armfuls of
mats and ragged divan covers and stained yellow cur-
tains of silk, and one old flaming plum-coloured brocade
from the saloon table, to be an awning for us. And
there were supplies in sacks and hampers, with water-
tins and bread-bags and padded Japanese quilts, a com-
pass, netting and tarpaulins, and I know not what be-
side, continually more wonderful.
But one thing I did know. When it was done, when
the little red-and-white striped lug-sail had been hoisted,
fluttering, and the last lascar had leapt clear, and waved
to us from the lower grating; when some scream of
circling sea-birds overhead had startled me from my
daze, and some sigh or movement from the precious bur-
den in my arms had brought me back to tragic reality
again—then I knew, all phantasy and conjuring aside,
how completely we had passed into the control of Logros-
cino—as if, in truth, we had been what we simulated
there—his helpless captives of a freebooting raid.
He knew it, too.
Just before we started, at a protesting outbreak of the
assembled chorus, suddenly he threw up a compact fist
of steel that glittered chill lights. . . .
"Stan' away from that ladder I" he commanded, exult-
ing, from behind a big revolver.
Of the voyage, of our subsequent wanderings that
morning from the point of Deliverance Island over to
Kluit's river and so inland—Logroscino and Elena and
I on our quest with Jennie May—there is little to be set
down here. Not but I might give at length a log of ad-


126 IN DARK PLACES
ventures; not but our efforts, our perils, made a strange
and an anxious tale.
We had come to Papua, and up among the mangroves
and the sloughs and tangled forest depths of that vast
mystery no intruder goes lightly, or takes any dull or
unenlivened journey. The fact is I was too obsessed
with our own tangle, too tensely concerned with the
mystery of human relation aboard our little craft, so that
sweat and struggle and bodily ordeal were nothing to
me—as they remain the least part of my story now.
You are to picture us, then, slowly working our way
into the heart of a tropic wilderness, first across a great
bay where we nearly swamped, and later when we fought
the tide-rips among unlikely bars and drifting tree-trunks,
and afterwards in the flood mouth of the river itself.
There the sun blazed out and smote us with white
lances and dried the salt on our lips while we toiled at
the sweeps in an air gone dead and noxious as the fumes
of a poison vat. All that time Jennie May lay still and
sleeping, under the stolid watch of Elena, forward by the
mast in such shelter as we could devise, like a queen—
some lovely, unhappy queen reft away and fallen to poor
estate, nested amid dilapidated finery in her barge—with
whom we fled. And all that time, you will conceive, my
hate and mounting dread of Logroscino strove with an
abject gratitude towards him.
It was the arrogance of his triumph and his strength
I feared now, and we had no sooner run the inner bar
than he loosed his inevitable gesture.
"What did I tol' you?" he cried. "Did I say I could
carry her through?"
"Yes," I murmured.


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 127
"Did I take her—ha? Did I show who she belong to?"
"Yes."
He gave a great laugh that rang over the waters and
left me for a while; but I knew—I felt—what was com-
ing. No such easy applause would satisfy him.
"Be sure you take the right turn," he challenged not
long afterwards. "Are you guiding us straight to Dr.
Kluit?"
"I am doing my best."
The cutter had just entered a broader reach, where
the sprawling stream branched. I swung her lug over on
the other tack to catch a slant of wind—incidentally,
to shut out the sight of his complacence. But he per-
sisted.
"I want to be certain we make that missionary sta-
tion today."
"We ought to."
He came aft to lean on his oar and look down at me.
"An' when we do—what of your doubts an' trem-
blings then? Mind, I take no count of them—except I
got a big score piled up against you for starting them.
But when we do fin' this surgeon, you admit—I can see
it—even you are ready to admit he can make all right
wit' her again?"
"It seems so now," I said. "Yes, there is a chance."
"Ah-ha!" he cried, and struck his chest. "Thanks to
me?"
"Yes," I said humbly, raging against him. "Yes-
thanks to you."
It was true, and the inner sense of defeat under which
I had lain for two years, which had been my singular,
and special torment since I had known Jennie May, beat


128 INDARKPLACES
me down and down. There was a chance to save her—
happily, happily!—and by that very fact my own worth-
lessness and ineptitude were convicted all over again. . . .
Logroscino spared me not a single turn of the screw.
"I knew it," he said; and in his ineffable assurance
he favoured me with his philosophy of life. "I never
'ave believe' she could be so ill like you said. To be lost
to me? 'Oly saints, it could not 'appen! Nothing like
that can 'appen to a man who knows and takes what he
wants—always, everywhere; the world is not arrange' so.
Do you see?"
He made me—he made me see it as he said—as a
great stage upon which sturdy, confident actors went
trampling about: picturesque and detestable figures, ruth-
less and fat-witted figures to critical poor devils like me,
unable to withstand them: but always successfully, always
to the desired climax and the reward.
"To prove it to you," he added, with a flash of teeth,
with a jabbing finger—"to prove it, when we reach the
station I mean to 'ave this surgeon missionary solve all
the difficulty at once. ... I mean to marry Jennie May!"
Well, it was only the thing I had been waiting and
shrinking to hear. He could do it, of course. He could
do it—I had not the least doubt. Who was to prevent,
who to resist him? The game was in his hands—ab-
solutely.
After that for an unmeasured space I laboured blindly.
We crawled on up the river. It grew narrower as we
progressed, and divided again among the coiled mangrove
roots and impenetrable thickets, under arcades of looping
lianas. I held a course that seemed familiar, drawing


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 129
steadily nearer to the moment when—at the best—Jennie
May would be saved, and finally lost to me.
But Logroscino was not content with labouring or
with winning; there came a moment when he threw down
his oar.
"I am tired," he said, with his arrogant grin. "Why
should I work so long as I 'ave you? You can row—
it is all you are fit for—an' I shall sit 'ere an' take pay
for all the trouble you have caused me today."
And that was inevitable, too, that he should have con-
firmed his power with contempt and mockery.
"One thing I can tell you," he observed as he settled
back among the cushions. "You are j'alous, little man."
I could only blink.
"You are j'alous," he taunted. "An' I wonder 'ow you
make up with that j'alousy—what? Would you deny
this chance to her? Would you wish her back where you
'ad her with your cursed drugs—under sentence, as you
said—an' so keep me from saving Jennie May? . . . Was
it her life you wanted mos' to guard, or only Jennie May
for yourself? Come! 'Ow you feel about it?"
"I am glad!" I choked. "Glad I"
Strange, the workings of the heart, for in my gladness
I writhed, and such a hatred of that clumsy giant came
over me as put a blackness on the sun.
One more exchange I recall between us, and that the
last of all.
I do not know how far we had made into the maw
of Papua—I never did know—but it was afternoon, when
the shadows grew mercifully long and screened us some-
what from the deathly heat, that we came into a snarl of


130 IN DARK PLACES
channels altogether new and puzzling. I had already be-
gun to suspect I might have missed the route back at
the first turning. Moreover, I fancied several times that
I heard the distant throb of a drum like a small pulse in
my ear—the high-pitched hour-glass drums of the savage
delta tribes.
With these fresh anxieties in mind, I toiled for the
middle of the stream, where a breeze promised once
more, meaning to head past a certain point of dead trees
to get my bearings.
And what must Logroscino do but choose the juncture
to sting me with a final gibe.
"Tribes?" he repeated lazily, after I had spoken to him.
"What tribes? Bah! I believe in your tribes like I be-
lieve in your other bugbears! Little chap—you know?
—I am still very curious of you. What kind of a man
are you, any'ow—such a timid coward at everything?
What could you do, suppose there were tribes aroun'—
what could you do to save Jennie May?"
Well, something snapped within me then. You will
remember how much I had endured, the striving, the
grovelling, the utter despair. Let him who has never
been the failure to somebody's success, who has never
had the quick torn out of his soul by the large and healthy
hand of some triumphant romanticist, let him wonder
at me when I say I gave up, with all my miserable life
to this minute before me.
"Nothing," I admitted. "I could do nothing. I am
nothing—only the shell of a man. Look at me. . . . See
here, my hand, how palsied. See this face, the lines and
scars in it. And my eyes, if you want to know how
deep, deep I've gone out of the light.


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 131
"I'm a wreck, a sunken shell. Two years and
more ago it happened. I had everything a man could
want—honour, skill, reputation, and one day I went on
the rocks. I failed at an operation, I lost my nerve, and
it cost the life of the patient as surely as if I had mur-
dered him! Drugs, of course. Drugs did it, and from
that day I was broken—the helpless victim of drugs.
"I tried to get my hold on life again—frantically. I
came out here to these islands meaning to start again
with a clear vision among the pioneers. No use. I be-
came a wanderer, an outcast, daily falling into lower
practice, daily more hopeless. Until I saw Jennie May,
like the last, last gleam of a star in the midnight of my
life. ...
"You can mock me as you like, but it's an easy victory.
Because I tell you I never had any hope of winning
Jennie May! I never was your rival—never dared lift
my thoughts so far. Only that perhaps I might be of use.
It's all I ask now—if you'll keep your confounded blun-
dering touch off me! It's all I ever asked: that maybe,
after she's lost her voice—if she ever did get the opera-
tion in time—why, maybe she might still have need of
me to serve her."
I dropped in the stern-sheets, exhausted by my out-
burst; but Logroscino raised himself out of the cushions
like a startled bull from a wallow.
"What's this? Lose her voice! 'Ow you mean—lose
her voice? By what?"
"By the Waldeyer operation—the throat operation," I
answered.
"Throat!" he cried. "Throat!" he added in a scream.
"It is her throat?"


132 IN DARK PLACES
"You must have known."
"No!" he gasped, gone ashen-faced. "No, I never!
. . . 'Oly saints above, it can't be! Not—her singing
voice?"
"If Kluit is in time to save her at all," I said dully,
"she'll never sing again, of course."
None of us moved or spoke for some minutes—I sup-
pose we were all in our several ways too racked and
buffeted by emotions. Meanwhile, the cutter was sail-
ing on up the river by no one's direction, in the merest
flaw of wind. Not until she had borne us well past the
point of dead trees, not until she had stolen well into the
next stretch, were any of us aware of the trap we had
entered. I chanced to look up then—to see the banks
on both sides lined with gleaming, bronzed forms against
the grey-columned forest, gathering swiftly above and
below, waiting purposely and regarding silently, till the
quick staccato drums began to throb.
I sprang up, stricken, and turned towards Logroscino
for help, for orders; but it was not the figure of Logros-
cino, or anything like it, that stood forward beside the
mast.
"Doctor!" said a voice—and the mellow silver music
of it! "Doctor!"
Jennie May—she! Jennie May herself. Looking at
me, very quiet and steady and wide-eyed. Speaking to
me, very gently.
For a moment I was too bewildered. The only thing
between heaven and earth I could think of was Logros-
cino, who had disappeared in the most unaccountable man-
ner—wiped out—erased!


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 133
"Where's—where's he gone?" I stammered.
The slightest casual turn of a hand sent my startled'
glance to detect that late tremendous basso, all but effaced
in a pile of our yellow silk curtains, huddled and nerve-
less.
"He's reached the point, hasn't he," she asked, "where
his courage went from him, like a tide from a rock?"
The miracle of her, standing there! The glory of her!
She wore a soft, full, and clinging robe like white samite;
a weft of crimson veil stuff about her neck, and falling
thence over her bosom. She was pallid, but firm-
lipped. . . .
"But mine has come back to me," she added.
I caught up all too slowly.
"You heard!" I breathed.
"Everything—lying in the berth. I did not take that
last potion of yours, you see. I wanted to be able to
think—of myself, a little; of you, and what I had learned
of you. It was well. ... I am ready now."
I could not grasp it.
"I am ready," she repeated, unfaltering. "You have
your—your surgical things? . . . Now you can try that
service for me—if you will."
"You mean"
"Yes; you are the man I can trust."
"You want me"
"Yes; to go about to save Jennie May"—with a little
whimsical smile that steadied reeling heart and brain.
"But look!" I pointed to the crowded banks. "Too
late!"
"No," she said. "Not for you—not for me, perhaps.
Not for us both, God willing!" She swept the lines of


134 IN DARK PLACES
savage, attentive, magnificently natural figures that stared
at her, immobile now. "And as for these, they are
people, I think. I have held them before; I am never
to hold them again, no matter what comes of it. . . . But
I believe I can hold them now, while you make ready."
With a gesture, slow and stately and beautiful, with a
little lift of chin, she faced her audience—her last. You
have seen her, you have heard—the same divine person,
the same incomparable voice, in the same great part that
made her fame. Easily, with full, true tones, she began
to sing.
The sinking sun sent great shafts of saffron and gold,
barred with purple shadows, athwart our drifting craft.
The wind had failed, and the stream, taking its will un-
opposed, began to bear us slowly down towards the sea
,again—away from that glass-paved amphitheatre, away
from those ranks of fortunate folk who stood to listen
to Jennie May, who listened and listened, transfixed,
awed, enravished.
In death's name
I drew to him now,
Beheld how he seemed
And heard what he- said:
'Till I knew the hero's
Need—his grief he gave me.
So it runs, very nearly in this meaning. . . . And,
later. ... I had to pause in my narrative here to ask
my wife the words of that second song, with which
she closed her final public performance:


WRECK ON DELIVERANCE 135
When once the gods
Like wind are gone—
Not goods nor gold,
Nor greatness of gods,
Nor house nor land,
Nor lordly life
Holds you—nothing but love!
So she sang; so she sang, while Elena and I—unpack-
ing, preparing, making ready our floating hospital—while
we went about to save, as we did save, the life of Jennie
May.


THE DIGGER 137
For presently he jammed his big fists in his pockets and
lurched away from the door he had been about to enter;
and, as he went, his sullen face was darker and more
sullen than ever—gridironed, like the faces of the
damned.
Inside the bar, Ma Burke disposed of Nonnie with a
slap and of Stanwick with a crisp comment in passing.
"That barmy, bone-idle beggar! I wish't you'd rule
him out of the house, pa. I tell you he's a bad 'un; he'll
go off his chump for good one of these days."
Pa Burke, on duty, merely smiled the smile of pro-
fessional tolerance and set out glasses for his three early
customers. But Subinspector Hill took up the matter.
He was a conscientious young officer—always ready to
take up matters, always trim and earnest. . . .
"If Mrs. Burke wants to lay a complaint, I'm bound to
consider it," he observed. "I must say I've had an eye
on this Stanwick chap for some months."
A little clerk from the Native Office sniffed in protest.
"Don't be so confounded energetic, Hill. The fellow
isn't worth making a case of. He's just a loafer and a
liar. Crapulous. Rather amusing at times."
"Perhaps. But the sun and the drink do get these
queer characters, you know, and Stanwick—he's worse.
He ought to be shipped out of the Islands as a police
precaution. I've warned him. Matter of fact, only the
other day I tried to make him take passage home to
Australia by the next Navua. Surly dog! He wanted
to fight me."
"All noise and bluff."
"Maybe. But he is an ugly, great brute, you know.
And he does make people uneasy with his mysterious


138 IN DARK PLACES
prowlings and his wild talk of treasure and such. I don't
blame Mrs. Burke myself. The man's wrong. He's
dangerous. He's—he's not human, somehow."
At this point, the third customer gave signs of cu-
riosity. He was only a tourist, but he had learned the
proper signal. Whereat Pa Burke was quick to oblige.
"What, sir? The big bloke as just went by? Yes,
sir—that's the one we're talkin' about. A real study, if
you ain't met'im yet. 'E's our Fiji minin'expert. Fact!
Been layin' up for a wet lately, before 'e starts out after
another fortun', all amongst them dead volcanoes."
And as the tourist's curiosity proved solvent, the ge-
nial publican continued to expand the humour of it—serv-
ing a head of local gossip with his cheer.
"Minin' for what? Why, minin' for gold—to be sure!
That's right, sir—gold in Fiji. Eh? Well, of course.
But you want to 'ear 'im tell it hisself. And you want
to see 'im when he comes back from one of his pros-
pects. My Colonial oath, but he does take a rare rough
spree of it back in the hills! And the yarns 'e'll spin.
And the maps 'e'll show. Most interestin'."
"All fakery," sniffed the clerk.
"Well now, there's this about Digger Stanwick: once
'e raises a grub-stake 'e do drag it. Eh? You can't
say as much for many loafers, can you? Suppose some
flat loans him a few quid today, tomorrow he'll be off
on another picnic with 'is billy-can and 'is shovel. And
he's been doin' that for years. Over the 'ole bloomin'
Fiji. Why, just yonder, in Viti Levu, he must 'a' seen
places where no other white man ever stepped—'way up
inside .to them mountains of the moon, where the old
Fiji gods and devils live—a 'ell of a country!


THE DIGGER 139
"And can't 'e talk Fijian, though. Mister, you get
him nicely ginned, and he'll sling you the chat like a
born native. Oh, 'e's worth listen' at!"
"As any crazy man might be," put in the subinspector.
"That's the meaning."
"As any natural liar might be," corrected the clerk.
"Stanwick means nothing."
"Well, maybe you're both right," said Pa diplomati-
cally. "But I dunno. This is the Islands, where any-
thing can happen as you'd ever believe, and much as you
never would. A queer place is the Islands. There's
sense even to this bloomin' beach-comber. 'E mostly
gets all 'e needs, and 'e does no work. What more could
you arsk?"
And having so far held his audience, he proceeded to
bind it over for possible profit.
"Eh? You'd like to meet him? O' course you can
meet him, sir. Just make yourself comfortable in the
back room. 'E's sure to be around for his usuals some-
time this mornm'."
But the promised entertainment failed to materialize
for Stanwick was not around for his usuals that morning,
or the next morning, or for many mornings thereafter.
He had vanished from Levuka. Returning to his obscure
lodgings, he had packed his billy-can and his shovel and
the rest of his meagre outfit, had crossed in a native canoe
to the mainland of Viti Levu and had laid a course once
more for the back country—that "'ell of a country" to
which his steps had tended so often.
When he made his big strike at last, he was some-
where in the barren mountains above the source of the


THE DIGGER 141
dripping jungle and hard-wood forest and the bare breasts
of the lower range, he had climbed into a gully between
two cliffs. And here, by a thread of water on a cuplike
ledge, he had found it.
A pocket—a compact, small treasure-house in the gravel.
Doubtless the age-old deposit from some vein decom-
posed in the rains; probably the only remaining catch of
some fortuitous riffle, for all the way up he had followed
no clearer clue than occasional stray flakes familiar to
him on many a useless prospect.
These were the sane, mechanical details of his dis-
covery. An effect of the sunset decreed just then that
the moment should be visibly clothed for him with its
own crude and violent significance. Already he had
washed out a measure of wealth—already he had collected
a double handful of lumps and sediment, incredibly
pure—when a dying beam shot a bank of mist
below to westward and flooded the ravine with
colour.
On either side, the glistening grey-red and grey-blue
crags took streaks of citrine and of saffron. An incan-
descence poured about him. The brook itself ran yellow-
molten, and the bits of gold in his grasp gave off dart-
ing rays with the stab of lighthouse lenses. To one in
Stanwick's condition, it seemed as if air and land and sky
had kindled together to expose him.
With a cry of fear and greed he flung himself into the
stream. The iron resolution which had carried him to
the limit of endurance gave way. He grubbed, he scrab-
bled, tearing at the precious soil, whimpering with eager
noises in his throat. He was still grovelling in the muck,
he was still all asprawl and defenceless at the instant, at


142 IN DARK PLACES
the precise event to which his overwrought nerves had
strained—a click of pebbles and a padded footfall.
And he started back from the apparition of the
Native. . . .
Somehow, then or later, Stanwick never saw him very
clearly. Twilight had faded like the fall of a gauze
drop. Gliding so quietly from the dusk, he appeared, and
he remained, a presence more or less impersonal to the
gold-seeker's gold-blinded vision.
But he was a Fijian—magnificently tall and muscled,
the tint of bronzed mahogany. He wore only a strip of
ancient tappa cloth of zigzag figure, very rare in these
days—the kilted sulu which is the garb of his people,
the carefully tended high mop of hair which serves as
their only ornament. Otherwise, there was nothing about
him to set him apart—no mark of rank or distinction.
He was just a native—a specimen of a folk long since
missioned, policed and subdued to be the wards of a
British Crown Colony. There he stayed and gave greet-
ing.
"Sa yadra, na turaga."
Like a wild animal cornered upon its prey, Stanwick
squatted and glared at him. A gust of helpless rage
took the gold-digger. For here was disaster—the one
mishap he most had dreaded.
Every Islander knew the meaning of gold. Every Is-
lander must have heard fabulous tales of yellow sand and
Stanwick's own repeated quest of it season by season.
And if he had had any doubt
"Savinaka, saka," the intruder went on in his tinkling
Island speech. "Well done, sir. Very well done in-
deed, saka. I see you have found the right spot."


THE DIGGER 143
Here was disaster. Had he been a white man, he might
have been silenced, he might have been bribed or cajoled.
But a native, by his nature, by his very simplicity, was
hound to give the show away—was bound to start his
village chattering and to set in motion the whole hated
machinery of Native Office and police and mining law
which exists for the protection of sovereign right and the
ruin of poor pioneers.
"Who are you?" demanded Stanwick.
"Taleya is my name, saka."
"Whence do you come?"
"I stay in these hills."
Night swept up the canon on the wings of the mist.
It covered Stanwick's tigerish crouch and evil stare as
he waited. He had a sense of ambush. But he had a
sense of impotence, too. There was a traitor in his
veins
Years before, at the outset of his rambling on the gold-
trail, he had nearly died one season among the reeking
heats of Woodlark Island from a terrible siege of jungle-
fever. The poison had never left him; whenever his
strength was sapped, it threatened to cut him down.
Right through his recent stress he had been sickening for
it. By crowning ill luck, if vertigo and hammer-pulse
meant anything, he was due for another attack now!
Meanwhile, he controlled his trembling limbs and dis-
sembled his voice to gruff friendliness.
"Come closer. Where have I met you?"
The native approached until he stood in the shallow
runlet.
"You never have met me, saka. Few men have met
me—to remember afterward."


THE DIGGER 145
He lay in a sheltered nook of the cliff, apparently warm
and safe, stripped of his wet rags, wrapped in his own
blanket. A tiny fire sparkled near by. His few camp-
articles had been neatly ranged, and just beyond—making
himself quite at home—there sat the Native. When Stan-
wick opened his eyes, they encountered the regard of
those other eyes, luminous and inscrutable. He would
have struggled up to renew the argument. But he was
too weak.
Again he returned to a different wakening—a period
of detachment when the mind seemed to brood like a
eagle, seeing all things sharp and clear, with the clarity
of a view through the wrong end of a telescope. It
appeared entirely natural that he and the Native should
collogue together on this suspended plane. It appeared
entirely natural that the Native should question him with
the naive inquisitiveness of a native, and that he should
answer in this lofty truce, calmly and exactly. . . .
"Tell me, saka, the way of your life—what manner of
man you have been."
Stanwick told. Actually, he gave account of himself,
as such accounts are given at such moments—the tale
of his gold-hunt, the travail, the sacrifice, the mockery
and at length the great and critical achievement.
"Tell me now, saka, the loves you have known. How
have you fared in passion and devotion, how in those
tender snares that wring the heart?"
Stanwick told. With the fluency of delirium, he re-
called his dead past and his one romance—the story of
the winsome, fair-haired Australian girl whom he had
wooed and won and lost, all within a year, long ago.
Taleya listened and nodded.


146 IN DARK PLACES
"Tell me once more, saka. Tell what remains to do
you credit on earth. Something besides this treasure of
yours."
And Stanwick told even that.
"I've a child—somewhere."
"A child?"
"There was one."
"Na luvena! Savinaka, saka," said Taleya softly, in
the tone of compliment. "You are fortunate. This is
happiness. This is the pledge for a man that he be hon-
ourably considered when he is gone. This is the duty
and the fulfilment of a man."
But Stanwick's brow knitted with his effort at thought.
"A girl. A baby girl," he muttered. "I left her in
Sydney—d'y'see?—with her mother's folk. What would
I do with her? Queer! She must be six or seven now.
I've never seen her since—a little girl baby."
Whereupon the hollow in the hills filled with mourn-
ful echoes.
"A woi! A woi—woi! Your child—your own flesh
to you! You left your daughter in the hut of a stranger!
You have forgotten—you never cherished her—a little
baby girl, saka! And you came here seeking Wai-ni-
ndula? You think yourself fit for the Water of Solace!
O sobo! A woi—woi—woi!"
His third respite was different still, and the strangest
of all.
It was a dawn amid storm. A mountain dawn—a Fiji
dawn—the sort of fantastic scene-shif^mg which would
have justified Pa Burke for ever with regard to that " 'ell
of a country." The rainy season had broken in a hurri-


148 IN DARK PLACES
like tusking boars of the forest. The Native gave no
ground; he stayed to wrestle silently, defending as best
he might. But Stanwick clipped him by waist and throat.
All the ferocity of his life-time's purpose concentrated
here and now. All the bitterness and brutality. All the
urge of an implacable will. . . .
The mountains shook beneath their trampling feet.
Boulders spun and rocked about them. Winds and waters
howled, and overhead the cohorts of the storm clamoured
in vast applause. But Stanwick was only intent on drag-
ging down, on ripping and smashing and destroying the
last thing, the last single obstacle between himself and
his desire.
That was the way he fought, bone and claw and fang.
He fought ravening. Until he got the better of a double
breaststroke. Until he plucked his paralysed adversary
off balance and caught him in the neck-lock. Deliberately
he set one knee to him as a man does to a stubborn branch.
He was wrenching backward, he was bending every
ounce of murderous force he could summon when a line
of white fire struck out of darkness. Lightning looped
over his head as a gigantic whip; the splitting crack of
it sent him staggering—dazzled and half stunned—to the
very verge of Wai-ni-ndula.
Taleya sagged from his grip. Taleya's fading eyes
lingered on his in a gaze of profound and terrible re-
proach. He thrust the limp form away. While it fell,
it appeared to dissolve; its hurtling limbs appeared to
melt with the brook in magic evanishment. At the same
instant, day came like the lifting of a screen; sunrise
shot the bank of cloud and tempest to eastward and flushed


THE DIGGER 149
the canon with hell-hearted colour. To one in Stan-
wick's condition, it was as if land and air and sky had
flared up together to blazon the stain and the knowledge
of his guilt.
With a cry of horror he shrank from the dispensa-
tion. Pausing only to snatch up his scanty bundle of
equipment, to remove the few traces of his presence there-
abouts, he dropped down the ravine in frantic flight.
Through clearing mists and lessening tumult above and
about him through the hollow hill, he seemed to hear the
echo of the echo of a wind-harp—sweet and compelling,
haunting and pursuing. And as the wretched man fled,
he gave no thought either to his hatred, or to his thirst,
or to the precious treasure he left behind him.
The next time Digger Stanwick was seen in the water-
front town of Levuka, he made rather a notable occasion
of it.
Again this happened to be a fine, bright tropical morn-
ing. Again this chanced upon the hour when daily rou-
tine is always formally launched and libated at the bar
of the Polynesian Hotel. Subinspector Hill was there.
The little clerk from the Native Office was there, and, by
passing coincidence, the tourist—that same tourist whose
curiosity, together with the genial ministrations of Pa
Burke, had kept him lingering on the isle. Four words
were spoken, four nods exchanged. Four elbows were
just about lifting in solemn rite.
That was the moment when a figure drifted into the
doorway, whereat all four gentlemen promptly choked
with one accord and set their glasses down.
They had reason—in view of the phenomenon. They


150 INDARKPLACES
had better reason presently, for the phenomenon came
lurching and shuffling into the room and planted himself
squarely in front of Hill.
"I give up, Inspector!"
Surely the toughest specimen of a beach-comber ever
seen in the Poly's respectable precincts! He wore a gir-
dle of rags. For the rest, he looked as if he had been
put through a mangle. His skin was scored and slashed
and blistered; his ribs showed in a rack. But from the
stubble on his sunken cheeks he glowered out defiantly.
He still had the capacity for some potent, mastering emo-
tion.
"I've come in," he announced.
"Stanwick!" the officer exclaimed.
"Ay," returned Stanwick grimly. "That's who. And
I've come to give up. I'm giving myself up, d'y' hear?
For God's sake, get the stringers on me!" With a move-
ment of impatience—a movement, too, of curious eager-
ness and relief—he offered his naked wrists.
The Subinspector considered him.
"You mean the handcuffs? I haven't them by me.
What do you want 'em for?"
"For me, o' course. To land me in clink—what else?
I can't stand no more. I want it over!"
"You mean—you're asking arrest?" A conscientious
young officer was Subinspector Hill, always precise and
careful. "I'm bound to warn you, my man. Whatever
you choose to say might be used against you. Outside
of that, what's all the fuss about?"
Stanwick drew a tortured breath. He may have balked
a bit for the last stride; he may have measured the ir-
retrievable result. But he plunged on:


THE DIGGER 151
"I done it. I killed that nigger! And I found my
gold!" he added in the same gasp. "I found my gold
mine!"
So he gave his confession. Once started, he poured it
out hotly, swiftly, in a passionate flood. From his be-
ginning as a gold-digger to his finish as a murderer—
the whole sequence.
"I knew it could never be hid. And s' help me, once
I understood what I'd done, I didn't want to hide it.
I'm through!" he cried. "I give up. What sort of a
ruddy trade is this I've spent my life for? Look here
what comes of it! Look here what it's brought me to!"
Shaken with his own eloquence, he held up two hideous
and blackened paws, and the audience winced—enthralled.
"Now go ahead and hang me! Bring on your Native Of-
fice and your police and your laws. What do I care?
What more can you do to me? Digger Stanwick—he's
done! Only count this much to him: He killed his
man; but he found his gold mine—he found his blasted
gold mine!"
He rose to that hoarse roar of triumph. He made an
end and stood with heaving chest—not without pride,
not without a certain dignity. He made an end and
waited—braced for what must befall.
And nothing befell. . . .
He waited—and he waited. Over Levuka and the
water-front had settled the drowsy heat of mid-morn-
ing. Away in the rear premises somewhere, Ma Burke
was making cheerful clatter with a pail. Inside the bar-
room it was very quiet. Some one sighed. Some one
coughed. After a while the Subinspector cleared his
throat.


152 INDARKPLACES
"You killed a man—and you found your gold-mine,"
he repeated, politely. "Did you, indeed?" And picked
up his abandoned drink and finished it.
Whereupon they all picked up their drinks and finished
them. Whereupon Pa Burke, ready as ever to oblige,
filled the glasses again. Whereupon all four leaned com-
fortably against the bar and regarded Stanwick in silence,
with an air of spacious, sophisticated attention worse than
contempt. And nothing befell.
That was the way it reached him; that was the way it
was borne in on the gold-digger as the supreme impact
of his ordeal—that nobody believed him
Often enough he had been regarded so. Often enough
his yarns had been greeted by just such spells of silence
and just such qualified interest; and he had laughed at
the fools. But he did not laugh now. With the grim
truth pressing on him, with the terrific yarn he had to
tell, he did not laugh this time. He turned from one to
another, confused, with queer, jerky gestures, with queer,
baffled attempts at speech.
It was the little clerk from the Native Office who fi-
nally took him in hand. He had rather a reputation as a
quiz, and he fastened on Stanwick with the zest of a
shrewd counsel. He conducted that remarkable exam-
ination.
"Tell, me, Digger," he began; "tell me—whereabouts
do you say this affair of yours was staged?"
Stanwick told him.
"Oh! Somewhere on the range above the Rewa River?
I see. Couldn't place the exact spot? Hm. Couldn't
be sure of ever finding it again? No; I suppose not.


THE DIGGER 153
Well—tell me this: What do you say the nigger looked
like?"
Stanwick told him.
Hm. Some kind of a buli, you believe? Can't describe
him very well? Can't state what village he hailed from?
Well—one more question: What date did your massa-
cre happen? . . . How many days ago?"
Stanwick was able to answer that.
"It's now the twenty-third, ain't it? I been camp-
ing in the woods—lost and taking easy stages—since the
fifteenth. Eight days"
"Eight days?" repeated the clerk. "Good! Now, Dig-
ger, listen carefully. Inspector Hill and I are just back
from the Rewa ourselves. We visited all that region
officially. We were working on the annual census re-
port. We left there three days ago." His thin smile held
Stanwick impaled like a beetle on a pin. "So here's the
verdict for you, Digger. There is no such place as you
mention, so far as any knowledge goes. There is no such
person as your alleged victim in any of those villages—
never has been. And there's no single individual of any
rank, size, sex or description missing or unaccounted for
in that whole district. If there were, we'd have learned
it to a positive dead certainty. D'you understand? . . .
We took the census three days ago!"
Stanwick grunted, as if some one had taken him under
the midriff.
"But—but I got his name!" he stammered. "'Taleya.'
he called himself. And the place is called 'Wai-ni-
ndula.'"
The clerk gave a sudden incredulous snort. "What's


154 INDARKPLACES
that? Taleya? Taleya! And Wai-ni-ndula! Oh, ho!
Oh, ho! Why didn't you say so before?" He turned to
the others with a grin that asked them to share the amaz-
ing jest. "Our friend becomes quite convincing now,"
he observed. "Quite convincing! He appeals—you
heard him—to that old, old Fijian folk-tale about the
Water of Solace. You must know it, all of you; it's the
best of the native legends, handed down from days when
they had a real religious system of their own. It relates
how every soul on its last journey toward the Land of
Shades comes at length to a certain fabled brook, Wai-
ni-ndula. How there it must face the Angel of Death
—the Dismisser. Taleya is his name, and to him it must
give account of itself and its lifetime—whether all duties
have been fulfilled on earth—whether it be worthy. And
how, finally, it must wrestle with the angel in a trial of
strength.
"If the soul be conquered, well and good; it is then
permitted to partake of the Water of Solace—just like
Water of Lethe, you know, in the Greek fable—which
erases all memory and makes it fit for paradise. But
if the soul should conquer Taleya—being strong in evil,
you see—then—then the soul must come back to earth
to take up its burden anew—back from Wai-ni-ndula.
Like our friend, the Digger, here!"
He swung round on Stanwick.
"You've had jungle-fever," he said sharply. "It's a
mighty good thing for you you had sense enough not
to take a drink while it was on. Do you know that if
you had tasted water you would have died?" He lapsed
to a sniff of frank indignation. "But, good heavens,


THE DIGGER 155
man alive, how did you ever have the nerve to try such
a scheme? On us! What made you think you could
cash in on us with such a yarn? It might do for a new
chum. But nobody here is likely to loan you a quid or
take any stock in your blasted gold mine, Digger."
He wound up in mere scorn. Stanwick stayed stupid
and blinking, swaying in his tracks. One glimmer re-
mained to the derelict—one impulse. Singling out the
Subinspector, he thrust his wrists at him as before, still
offering himself with mechanical insistence.
"You mean—you mean you ain't going to believe it?"
he babbled. "You mean you won't arrest me?"
"Of course not!" rapped that serious-minded young
man, with a frown of distaste. "But I'll advise you,
Stanwick," he added, "as I have before, to quit this pros-
pecting game. It's doing you no good, and it's no sort
of place for you at all—the back country."
"That 'ell of a country," murmured Pa Burke, "where
the old Fiji gods and devils live!"
"You mean—I'm free?" gasped Stanwick.
"Of course you are!" returned the Subinspector,
shortly. "Free as air!"
Then the others in the Poly barroom were privileged to
see, if they could have understood, the collapse of a man's
implacable will. The prop of a lifetime's greed dropped
away from him—all his savagery, all his bitterness and
brutality, all the secret pride and secret strength of selfish-
ness which had sustained him through the years. He still
bore a face gridironed like the faces of the damned—but
this was the face of one who had been damned and


156 INDARKPLACES
brought back, to be blessed again, perhaps—perhaps.
He turned on them all a great, round, unseeing stare,
spun on his heels and went reeling out.
The others shared a comprehensive nod.
"Just plain crazy," was Hill's comment.
"Just plain liar," corrected the clerk.
Pa Burke groaned in a kind of ecstasy.
"I dunno. I dunno," he said. "Maybe you're both
right. But can't 'e sling them yarns, though? Can't
'e talk? Didn't I say so, mister?" He appealed to the
tourist. "Didn't I tell you 'e'd be worth listenin' at?"
He was still exclaiming when the Subinspector, who
had hurried after Stanwick on a sudden thought, came
tramping back to rejoin them.
"One good thing," announced Hill, with crisp satisfac-
tion: "I got him to promise he'd leave tomorrow on
the Navua. I offered him passage myself. I thought
it was proper—as a police precaution. It seems the
fellow's got a family in Sydney—a kid, anyway. He's
going home."
"And passage paid!" chuckled Pa. "My Colonial oath
—there's the Islands for you! Anything can happen in
the Islands. Look at this bloomin' beach-comber! 'E
gets what 'e wants when 'e wants it, and 'e don't 'ave to
pay! Now, what more could you arsk?"
That was the moment when a sudden screaming smote
upon their ears.
"Nonnie!" cried Ma Burke from the bar window.
"Nonnie—Nonnie! Where are you?" Her voice had the
shrill note of alarm. It startled them and drew them
hastily behind her whisking skirts. But as they crowded
out the side entrance, they met a sight that checked


THE DIGGER 157
them and hushed them all at once in a wondering group.
At the far border of the Poly's courtyard, on a strip
of lawn below the hedge, little Nonnie Burke—aged
seven—lay fast asleep, with her head pillowed on her arm
like a dreaming cherub. And beside her, with clasped
hands and head bowed upon his chest, knelt Digger
Stanwick. There he knelt, oblivious, and rocked and
crooned to himself very gently. An old Fijian chant
was the cradle-song he chose—a chant of grief, but
of yearning, too, and of hope—very low and soft, very
sweet and haunting, like the echo of a wind-harp.
"A woi! A woi—woi!" breathed Digger Stanwick.
"A child! A little girl—a little baby girl! 0 sobo! O
sobo! . . . A woi—woi—woi!"
Sunlight played through a breadfruit tree overhead,
and one ray touched the tumbled curls to a golden nimbus;
and as the gold-digger looked down at it, he had found
his gold—and his cheeks were wet with tears.


THE SLAVER
SHE had learned her trade before the American
War. And again before the Brazilian emancipa-
tion of '71 she had drifted back to the same hate-
ful traffic until driven by stress of weather or British
cruisers to try the West Coast, where she took refuge
with her last cargo among the mangrove swamps of the
Guayas. So the legend ran. It was certain that she was
very old, and had served many unsavoury masters; as
a smuggler, a river pirate, and a convict hulk. Her
last owner was a Babahoyo planter, who patched her
up as a cacao barge, drank himself to death in her cabin
one night, and left her to rot at his rotting wharf.
Since that she had been shunned, for ships are like folks,
their ill repute grows sinister with age.
And ships are like folks, too, in that they move through
wide courses with the fatality of drama—each following
a destiny to an appointed end, edifying, pitiful, or dis-
astrous. . . .
Her ribs were oak, but her heart was evil. No man
can check her far wanderings, nor the lawless ladings she
bore, but she knew Porto Bango and Mana and Palmas
and the shames of Amelia Island, and the slave depots of
Barataria and San Paulo. Stranded in the slime of the
bayou, she seemed to have reached her proper berth at
last, given up for ever to solitude and tropic decay.
1s8


THE SLAVER 159
Until another day came when she burst her cerements
and put forth into the world again on a final venture,
and this was the manner of it:
Early one rainy season occurred the famous gold dis-
covery on the western shoulders of Chimborazo, where
a sheep herder lost his flock and found riches in the
sudden spate of a mountain stream. It drew to Ecuador
some scores of those rovers on the outskirts that seek,
that eternally and hungrily have sought the fat chance
and the easy profit.
Early in April a first consignment of gold-dust was
ready for transport from the diggings to the coast. The
gold came down through the foothills on mule-back, and
at the head of navigation was transported to a little stern-
wheel river steamer under guard for the run to Guaya-
quil. ... It never reached Guayaquil, and the river
steamer was never seen again, nor any of the crew, nor
the guard. But four of the passengers—men who had
passed that way as prospectors a month before, and were
then returning empty-handed, continued their journey
down the Babahoyo to the Guayas. And the gold-dust
went with them.
Under a tinted twilight when the narrow lane of sky
and its mirrored image showed like strips of mother-of-
pearl between massed banks of foliage, the peace of the
bayou was troubled. A small canoe might have been
observed to thread the passage towards the old cacao
wharf. Those aboard of it were under some urgency,
and indeed the craft was ready to swamp with them; they
had to bail as they paddled. At a bend they came in
sudden sight of the little schooner.


THE SLAVER 161
No trace of George, who seemed to have been mis-
laid.
'"Oh, once he wa-as his mother's pride,
And his fa-ther's hope and joy.
But now where is that orphing boy?"
sang the tall man.
"George!" they bawled in chorus, and the jungle gave
them back the word until an illuminating sentence floated
up, "Drunk, an' asleep down there!"
"Let 'im sink," advised Chrispim bitterly, but Brewer
climbed down again and rescued a limp and dripping
form.
"Let him sink," it muttered. "Let me sink. I'd—
I'd rather sink. I shot two of 'em swimming away, and
they made bubbles—red bubbles in the water. . . . Are
you sure we sunk 'em all?"
"You sit down and shake yourself together," growled
Brewer. "One drink, mind—no more."
Chrispim struck a light and the lantern threw them
into a ring. They were a scraggy lot, types all more or
less recognizable of the tramp. Much romance is woven
about such men without much improving the model,
which is generally sordid and abject, given to lesser out-
lawry at home and in outlandish parts to cadging on
consuls and to selling the repute and authority of their
white skins. In stained and tattered drill, variously
booted, belted, and armed, these four achieved a certain
swagger. But it was only achieved, and their flushed
faces and wide gestures betrayed the kind of heartening
they had had for a job beyond their natural compass.


162 INDARKPLACES
Only Brewer, their leader, came nearest the tough
breed of buccaneer times. He had been a Key West
wrecker, a poacher among the Pearl Islands, an engineer
in the Colombian Navy—drifter and ne'er-do-well.
Ruddy skin and strong white teeth, an open and bold
expression, gave him an appearance of genial force until
it was seen that his eyes were too full and too far apart,
his features thickened by the stamp of abnormality.
Such as he was, he supplied the drive and the imagina-
tion for this exploit, and straightway he had found
a handspike and set to making busy clatter at the
pump.
"She'll do," he hailed. "Dig into this now, you lads
We'll have her afloat in an hour!"
The others made no move, and presently he came
back to stand over them, gathering each eye with his
own menacing blue sparkle.
"Look here; if any of you has a fancy to settle down
in this country, he can move ashore. Only he's got to
choose quick. D'y' think that river craft ain't goin' to
be missed tomorrow at Guayaquil, and a reg'lar bee's-
nest of saddle-coloured policemen turned loose to hunt
all hands?"
"Me—I'm done," said Chrispim sulkily.
"We're all done," echoed the tall man. He called him-
self Charlie Dibdin, "Singing Charlie," but as he was
apt on occasion and quite solemnly to substitute Sulli-
van or even Tom Moore the name was hardly an identi-
fication. A bone-built clothes-horse of a man with a
stringy yellow moustache and gridironed face, he con-
trived just now to appear half sober after a fashion of
his own.


THE SLAVER 163
"Perhaps you don't know how done we are," he
pleaded. "It's been—it's been a hefty day's work."
He wiped his mouth with a dirty, clawlike hand that
shook. "We'd sooner rest a bit."
"And the whole crowd of us as good as standin' on
the drop this minute," was Brewer's comment, made
without heat. "Or maybe it won't be hanging," he
added. "They use the garrotte in some places still,
don't they— the iron collar that drives a spike through
the back of your neck? ... Or a mud wall and a firin'
squad."
The others stirred uneasily.
"Wha's the use to pump tha' dam' river in an' out
again?" demanded Chrispim. "The ship is rotten."
"And I tell you the ship is sound as a dollar—rebuilt
only three year ago. I know; I heard all about her at
Babahoyo. She's been tended to and kep' part dry.
That pump's in first-class order. Will y' help?"
"Tell George," suggested Chrispim; but George, sit-
ting apart, stupid with fever and exhaustion, paid no
heed. He was the youngest of them, scarcely more
than a boy.
Brewer considered them one by one, the poor material
with which he had to work. In their brief partnership
they had had no showdown yet, no test of dominance.
He went about it without unnecessary violence.
"I give you a minute or so to make up your minds and
then I'll help the crew of y' to shore!"
They stared up at him where he stood smiling a little
with the pump-bar fisted, his revolver bulging at his hip.
After all they had been through that day it seemed
monstrous to them that he should be so vigorous, so de-


164 IN DARK PLACES
termined; that nothing should have touched this stocky,
arch-chested rogue—not rum nor weariness nor hor-
ror.
"Oh?" snarled Chrispim rousing. "And wha' would
we be doing?"
"You can take your shares of the dust; they're all
correct in the leather bags," said Brewer amiably.
"This is no strong-arm play. Only I know when I'm
lucky, and tonight is my get-away, understand? It's
a great summer resort hereabouts, isn't it? You'd like
it, Charlie, without your rum. And George—he'd be
comfortable hidin' in a swamp. There's an old planta-
tion back somewhere. Vacant, they tell me, except
for devils and night walkers and such." He swung
round on the stout one. "You wouldn't be at all lone-
some, Chris."
He struck at tautened nerves, particularly with an
eye to Chrispim. This follower was capable of trouble,
but Brewer had the measure of him—a scullion by his
trade, a Porto Santo Portuguese, dull and malignant, who
had lost among galleys and waterfront kitchens almost
the last trace of his origin save a streak of the gross
island superstition.
"Devils?" he stammered.
"Forest devils, the natives say. It looks a proper
home for 'em among these queer places—what?"
They saw only the dim archways of the trees opening
on black vaults about them, but while they looked they
harkened. Hard-bitten gang as they might be, certain
cries still tingled in their ears, certain echoes they must


166 INDARKPLACES
So at the last they were all waiting for Chrispim. He
stayed half-kneeling, but there was no defiance about
him now; it had dropped from him with his grip from
the haft of his knife. Under his breath he called some
forgotten saint, and his face, turned upward in the
splash of yellow lantern light, was awed and stricken.
And following his gaze, they could see what he saw—
the stubby foretop of the vessel lined sharp against the
fading sky. It made a sign above them there to speed
their voyage, an omen—like a cross, as it might have been
—or like the frame of a gallows, if they cared to take it
so. "Sagrada Familial" he mumbled. "If only we don'
carry none of them devils alon' wit' us I"
No man saw her go. At midnight the weather broke
with seasonable tropic rains. About that hour the Jorgu-
ina must have passed Guayaquil, hugging the Duran
shore. Some scraps of canvas quickened her pace on
the wet and rising gusts; she fled like a ragged wraith,
slipping down the roadstead where a few hazy lights
still showed. It was close on dawn before she found
another inlet among the mangroves where she could lie up
in hiding, and her crew, drenched and stupefied, could
fall asleep on her sopping deck. . . .
Brewer awoke to find the sun standing high, glowing
through the jungle like the hot spot in a crown sheet.
With genial impulse, he kicked the others into conscious-
ness and indulged a moment of pride—quite pardonable.
Everything had shaped according to his plan, it seemed.
The worst of their dangers were now behind them.
They owned a light little craft, and they knew whom to
thank for that. Their supplies, looted from the river


THE SLAVER 167
steamer, were good for a week. As soon as they cleared
the river mouth he proposed to navigate the coast to-
wards Colombia.
"And if I can't buy anything we need in them parts,
from a governor to an alibi," he concluded, "I've forgot
how to spell me name!"
Thus far exultation carried him before he marked that
the rest were not responding. They sat with haggard
faces, listless, silent.
Brewer looked them over and laughed without sym-
pathy.
"Gentlemen o' leisure," he observed, "Ain't you be-
ginnin' pretty early? I tell you straight, you get no
pamperin' on any ship with me! It don't go—under-
stand? Once we're through, you can snivel all you like,
but till we are—you jump. Get that?"
They roused themselves languidly, but when they sat
to breakfast on the hatch a little later he sprang his first
bomb-shell of surprise.
"Say, who th' hell's the funny bloke around here?" he
began gruffly. "Where's George?"
"Faith, have you lost that youngster again?" inquired
Dibdin. "Why don't you tie him up?"
"I'll tie him fast enough if he had a hand in this,"
declared Brewer; and as they blinked he added: "One
of them bags of gold-dust is gone!"
Here was a word to jolt them out of lethargy.
"I left 'em atop of the transom there last night—four
of 'em, in plain sight. You can see for yourselves—only
three left! And, by jiminy, if you lads been playin' any
tricks among you"
Chrispim rose like a prodded buffalo.


THESLAVER , 169
It was, undeniably—a leather sack like a plump sau-
sage, weighing some thirty pounds and worth possibly
ten thousand dollars.
"A blame' queer thing if we can't find it on this coffin
of a schooner."
So they started their search of the Jorguina. She had
been pretty well stripped of small gear; they made quick
work of her bare cabin. In the forward bulkhead a
low open panel gave entrance down a pair of steps on
the hold. They stood peering into that obscure cavern,
dank and ill-smelling, floored with rotted remnants of
planking and roofed in black shadow. On either side
they descried a narrow shelf running the length like a
continuous bunk, and Brewer rattled a set of rusty
shackles bolted to a beam.
"Slave quarters. See that? They used to pack 'em
in spoon fashion, by layers."
"Do you mean—niggers?"
"I heard so in Babahoyo. She's been a tough bird in
her time, this old ship." Brewer's tone became grimly
speculative. "How many black souls must ha' passed
out through this panel? Wastage, hey? Starved or
diseased or cut up with whips to keep the others quiet.
Quite a merry little hell down here—what? They used
to howl, I guess—they mostly will. 'Member how that
stoker on the steamer yelled when you caught him
through the ribs, Charlie? He was a nigger. And the
one Chris got jumpin' from the pilot-house? . . . What's
bitin' you now?" Dibdin had drawn back from the foul
exhalation of the bilge. "Lost your nerve?"
"You can search the damned ship for all o' me," said


170 IN DARK PLACES
Charlie irritably. "And stow your gab, can't you?"
Brewer stood aside for Chrispim, but the flabby
fellow, without Dibdin's distaste, showed no eagerness
about entering.
"You go?" he offered.
Brewer himself shook his head with a twisted hint of
a smile.
"I'm just as willin' to leave it to anybody else. ... So
we're even all again, and take your choice of the crook—
eh? None of us seems to care if he never sees the place
—or anythin' in it."
They climbed back to the deck and hunted forward.
The main hatch, drifted with dead vegetation, had plainly
not been disturbed for years. And when they came to
the tiny hood to the foc's'le, the only remaining spot for
a possible hiding-place, they found its doors barred fast
without latch or key. Whereat Brewer, with a stray
freak of fantasy that now and then caught him, was
moved to knock.
"Hello, below!" he called.
A hollow reverberation under their feet was the an-
swer that drove home the mystery upon them, and while
they turned aft again they had each an odd impulse to go
tiptoe, with roving glance. And again, and rather differ-
ently, they were aware of the vessel as an entity, as a
presence, with the curious air of personality that houses
and ships long deserted can take, somehow suspect and
doubtful. She had secrets. She had known men like
them and crimes like theirs in her wicked past—had out-
lived them all. Beneath her scars and tatters they sensed
something malevolent and mysterious, a spirit persisting


THE SLAVER 171
on the memory of old wrongs, still uncancelled, unsatis-
fied.
"Well," said Brewer at length, as they stood by the
transom, "I guess we'll every one take his own share to
keep by him, won't we? . . . Too bad George should ha'
dropped his bit, ain't it?"
"Careless of him, I call it," said Dibdin.
They settled the incident on that basis.
The second night gave them some hours of starlight, by
which they made all speed, with a pair of clumsy sweeps,
so that dawn saw them crossing the river bar thirty-five
miles below Guayaquil. They had passed few craft, and
those only at a distance, and when Brewer laid his course
to avoid Puna Island and the deep water port they could
count themselves well clear of any pursuit. Before they
slept again they were comfortably headed to open
sea.
The second day Charlie Dibdin awoke a poorer man by
some ten thousand dollars. . . .
There was a possibly humorous aspect to the fact. He
first became aware of it at the foot of the cabin stairs,
where he had slid to rest, following sundry convivial
visits to the bottle. His treasure, as he quite remem-
bered, had been safely in his possession at the time; since
when it had evaporated, seemingly. But the wrath of
that gaunt derelict, with his shaking hands and burned-
out eyes, was no piece of pleasantry.
"Sing about it," advised Chrispim, grinning like an
ape. "It don' sound so good w'en you talk."
Dibdin cursed him in a spurt of acid fury until Brewer
cut across and drew the fire.


172 INDARKPLACES
"Will you make me quit? Will you check me?"
Even then Dibdin had a manner with him, a military set
to his thin shoulders. "Do you hear me say my gold is
stolen—the price of my wading in this ruddy mess?
Faith, there'll be more than a word to it before the pair
of you rob me so easy I"
But here Chrispim set up a diversion. It developed
that the Portuguese kept an unaccountable commodity
about him which he called his honour, and which he now
considered to have been abraded. This thief would not
be called a thief; he came lurching to the assault. The
other drew out to meet him. Weapons glittered in the
sun—
"—Or banked," Brewer was repeating. He had
tripped them both on a long roll of the ship as the neatest
way of enforcing attention. "Stolen or banked, I tell
you. You're a rude little man, Charlie. . . . Here's your
dust back. And now apologize and cool off."
Dibdin stared at the bag that had been thrust into his
hands.
"This isn't mine!"
"No," said Brewer, sneering, "it's mine; but we aim
to pay across the counter if you're goin' to raise such a
holler. This is no time for scrappin'. I'm satisfied to
keep the bank with all deposits, you see. . . . Why, you
poor, blame' fools, how would you guess anybody could
get away with anything out here?"
They had only to blink over the rail to know what he
meant. The coast was no more than a line in the east;
the Jorguina swung to the broad rhythm of the Pacific.
Quite docilely, almost stealthily, as if a lashed helm and
some shreds of rig were all the favours she could have


THE SLAVER 173
asked, she had borne them into big waters. Their world
had narrowed to her single hull.
It was a world where strange things happened.
Charlie and the Portuguese, discovering a community
of interest, agreed to stand watch and watch between
them in the cabin that night. To make it less tedious
they broached from stock a second jug of rum.
"'There's a sweet little cherub that sits up aloft
To keep watch for the life of poor Jack.'"
So Dibdin melodiously declared; but there could have
been little watching done, for at daybreak the two came
stumbling out in a furious tangle—their two remaining
bags had disappeared with the rest!
The wind had freshened; they found Brewer already at
the wheel, oddly subdued and constrained, a set-faced
figure in the morning light. He took the news very
quietly.
"Gone, is it? Well, that makes a clean sweep—what?"
"Yes, and I want somebody smashed for it!" cried
Dibdin, swinging to a stay, white-faced, trembling.
"Take your pick and name your pleasure," returned
Brewer, in curt abstraction.
"Is that all you can say?"
"Why, no—I can say that gold is still aboard this
ship. Where else would it be? I ain't worryin'. As
to who's been stackin' it up for us I dunno', and I wish
him joy of the amusement until this blasted voyage is
over and time comes to collect."
"Somebody did it."
"Somebody," agreed Brewer. "Maybe it was Chris
here; he looks guilty. Or you yourself, Charlie. Maybe


174 INDARKPLACES
it was me. Maybe," he added, "it was somebody—or
somethin'—else."
"George!" suggested Chrispim.
"Where is George," demanded Dibdin, "anyway?"
"A question," answered Brewer, with one of his
twisted smiles. "But you needn't fret. Wherever he
is he hasn't taken the dust with him."
And when they went below to investigate, the others
felt quite reassured on that point—for George was
dead.
He was dead in rather a remarkable way. Stretched
in the one bunk, from which, apparently, he had never
risen, he resembled a thing of wax somewhat melted and
run together, or a mummy partly dried. He had
shrunken so that he was scarcely to be recognized. And
over his bare chest, his limbs and neck, even his face,
appeared a rash of small red spots—a stippling of the
skin like the prints of bloody finger tips. Except for
those marks his flesh was colourless. . . .
They were huddled aft a little later.
"You knew of this?" asked Dibdin, when he could
speak.
Brewer nodded.
"I saw him."
"W-what is it?" Dibdin held out his arm and ex-
hibited three red spots above the wrist. On inspection
they showed like light bruises, the kind that might be
made with a vaccination lancet or in shaving too close
with a sharp razor, as if the skin had been scraped to
the capillaries. "I'm covered with it, and so is Chris.
And we can't—by Jove, we can hardly stand, Brewer!"
In fact, with the shock of this awakening their weak-


176 INDARKPLACES
"It's them devils we brought alon' wit' us. . . . D' ship
is a devil ship, an' that's all about it!"
And so it came to seem in the dreary hours that fol-
lowed. Favourable winds were the rule; they had sel-
dom to do more than to steer by the sun or a glimpse
of the coast. The old slaver held steadily on her course,
bearing those men with their burden of guilt and fear,
and mutual distrust, to some destination that grew dim-
mer and more remote as they yearned for it. Their
anxieties were so baffling, so much a part of the gloom
and mystery that surrounded her. They came to hate
her like a living thing, a malicious harpy of the sea who
had put herself in their path, had lured and trapped them
as her prey. . . .
One result of the tension was another search below.
Singing Charlie Dibdin kept off the rum. Perhaps his
thoughts ran clearer. Along about noon he managed to
force the foc's'le entrance, and while a strong sunlight
flooded the hatchway to venture through the parts unex-
plored. He saw only what they had seen before, bare
boards and filth underfoot and massed shadows above,
fore and aft.
"Been changin' your private bank?" challenged Brewer,
on his return.
"I had a notion I might find yours," retorted Dibdin.
"You seemed so very clever in scaring us away."
"Maybe I wanted to stand you off," suggested Brewer,
with a glint of teeth, "so you wouldn't be in no hurry to
look in the right place."
"That's just what I thought! Faith, I don't know
but it's just what I think! And this bally mystification,


THE SLAVER 179
weakening in the grip of a monstrous assailant, and had
awakened at last in darkness to a vivid persistence of the
illusion.
"He was all over me!" he gasped. "I fight wit' him,
so! I twis', I turn. No good. He pulls me down,
down—heavy. I faint; I holler, an' then—I wake. And
he is there! Somet'ing—some dam' t'ing is there, I
tell you; all live an' hangin' on me. All—all over me! . . .
D'devils! . . . D'devils!"
There was a little light conversation aboard the Jor-
guina that morning, but when the two survivors had
done their graveyard task, had freed themselves of
an intolerable presence by sending the Portuguese to
join George astern, they considered each other for a
space.
Dibdin was in a bad way. Brewer, with a face like
a skull, had reserves more nearly adequate.
"I guess we'll take that tip about keepin' all hatches
fast, won't we?" he drawled. "I reckon we got no par-
ticular use for anythin' that happens to be locked up
inside this old hooker—at this time, hey?"
Charlie's gesture, if not surrender, was tribute.
"The treasure? Good Heaven, are you still able to
keep up that game? I'm—I'm wondering how we're ever
going to sleep again on the cursed craft! . . . 'For in that
sleep,' he added under his breath, 'what dreams may
come!'"
Thereafter he crawled away forward. His instinct
was to hide; he made himself a shelter among the rub-
bish by the foc's'le, where he took his share of food and
stayed. Whether he slept or not was no knowing. But


180 IN DARK PLACES
Brewer—of the buccaneer breed—Brewer never closed
an eye throughout the rest of their ordeal. It became the
story of the endurance of that indomitable man.
He had called for four more days.
Their start from the bayou had been made on a Friday;
George's death fixed a date at Monday. From Tuesday
night until late Thursday afternoon he remained at the
wheel. . . .
The Jorguina sailed on. The weather continued fair;
the sea, a ring where none intruded, wherein they hung
enchanted save for heave and send, the crush of foam
alongside, the continuous small voices of hull and rigging.
She sailed on, but Brewer took no chances. Issue was
joined at last between the man and the ship; the one
solidly watchful and masterful, the other nursing a ma-
lign and hidden power under her battened hatches—
each, as it might have seemed, biding a secret purpose and
a moment of reckoning.
Towards evening of Thursday, when the sun had filled
the great bowl of the sky with a crimson flood, they raised
far over to eastward a certain headland like the shadow
of* a knotted fist. At sight of it Brewer threw off the
drowsiness that bowed him and became instantly alert.
Various vocal rumours earlier in the day had indicated
that Singing Charlie was consoling himself with the rum
again, but Brewer had not seen him for hours. Peering
along the deck and under the sails, he failed to place him
now. Though puzzled for a time, he presently lashed the
helm, left his post, and, moving pad-foot here and there,
began his preparations.
From their looted stock he selected all weapons, ammu-


THE SLAVER 181
nition, bags of biscuit and cassava meal, utensils—such
as might be useful in a rough country. These he bore
aft from the transom and the main hatch to the taffrail,
where he stacked them. Once or twice he paused to
sniff curiously at the air, detecting an unusual quality, a
haziness. He even looked for signs of storm, and swept
the placid horizon before he stopped to cast loose a rope
just under his hand.
"Brewer!"
Charlie Dibdin had fallen away to the frame of a man.
Ginging there beside the mainmast, he was like some
rickety toy that sags on its strings, a ghastly white and
spotted apparition. But the rum had been his servant
for once; rum, or emotion, had rallied him to the strang-
est nervous elation.
"Brewer!" he cried. "I've found—I've found
out"
Brewer made an abrupt movement.
"—what's wrong with the ship!" Dibdin went on be-
tween a gulp and a giggle. "I've been down below again.
Inside. Through the foc's'le. I meant to sink her, she
haunted me so!" He showed a smoking torch of tarred
oakum. "Faith, I meant to sink her and the whole
cursed outfit. And I started to before I saw—I
saw"
He stopped, open-mouthed. The stack of supplies by
the taffrail had caught his glance, and from that it quick-
ened on Brewer.
"I say, you weren't going to skip?"
"I mean to," said Brewer.
Swift suspicion struck a very different note from
Singing Charlie.


182 IN DARK PLACES
"Without me?"
The other nodded.
"And the—the bank? By Jove, you'd never go with-
out it; never tell me you would. You were doing us,
after all! . . . You've got the gold, too?"
"It's just here," said Brewer amiably, "where it's been
right along—fattened up from time to time."
He held up the loosened bight of rope and pointed
below and astern—at an inconspicuous canoe littered
with rubbish which had been trailing behind the schooner
from the start, to which none of his companions had
ever given a thought.
This was Mr. Brewer's little triumph. After the un-
expected strain his success had cost him, he could have
wished it this way. It was such a climax as the ab-
normal conceit of the criminal savours with greatest
zest, the dramatic gesture of the double-cross. He
savoured it, and none the less when the hammer of Dib-
din's revolver clicked twice—thrice.
"That's all," he said, grinning sideways. "I never did
have no use for you chaps; I thought I'd show you up
a bit while I was cornerin' the dust. I was goin' to take
you along till you worked the craft hereabouts for me
and then let you kill each other off, y' see. It would ha'
been fun, only this blame' old schooner begun cuttin' in
with her blame' plague spots and her ghosts of dead
niggers"
He drew the canoe alongside and, mounting the rail,
began to make fast to a stay: a stout and vigorous figure
blotted black against the west, too much interested in
self-appreciation to notice the ominous haze that had
been thickening about the Jorguma's deck.


THE SLAVER 183
Dibdin had sunk upon the transom, in a state of ap-
parent collapse, staring at him.
"Go on," jeered Brewer, "you and what you found!
I've beat the old ship with all her tricks, and I've beat you
for the stake—forty thousand dollars' worth. Kind of
slick, hey? Kind of easy—what? ... As easy as pickin'
cartridges from the gun of a military gent when he's
drunk I"
"Yes," said Dibdin, "it's a fair do!"
With the word his right hand dipped back over his
shoulder and shot forward. Something like a great
dragon-fly flashed at the target offered by the squab-
armed silhouette. It struck in the side of the throat—
Chrispim's knife. . . .
Brewer's start almost threw him backward, and as he
caught at the stay to save himself, the towline slipped
from his grasp. With violent effort he recovered, drew
his revolver, and emptied it into Dibdin on the transom,
point-blank.
Then he tried to retrieve the canoe. The schooner had
moved ahead—he missed it. The gap widened. He
fumbled at his wound; with an oath whipped out his
kerchief and wrapped it about his neck, ran aft,
and lowered himself and found the little canoe with his
feet.
Meanwhile, the writhing form on the transom had
struggled to the after-break. Just as Brewer bobbed up
overside from the canoe and climbed clumsily aboard
again with the towrope, Dibdin reached the bolted cabin
doors and threw them open. . . .
A great pent cloud of smoke and heat burst out from
below, and through it and with it another and a darker


JONAH
WHEN first he was seen on Baliang he wore
one leg of a pair of trousers and two weeks'
growth of bristly grey beard and little of
anything else. In this scant but patriarchal attire he
appeared at the Rev. David Colhoun's evening service,
where he fluttered the faithful Gilbert Islanders with
mixed emotions. They peeped between their devotional
fingers and shuddered at the shameless stranger who
issued from the saffron sunset, somewhere behind the
spiky line of the mission jackf ruit trees.
The Rev. David Colhoun was not pleased.
Truly, he had learned to bear with chance profane in-
terruptions. The chapel had been a pagan speak-house
in the old time and was still no more than a roof set on
posts, free to the four winds. Too often he had had
to lament an error of zeal in setting up his Eben-
ezer here on the seats of the ancient gods—a fitting spot
but unfortunately conspicuous, commanding an excellent
view of cock-fights in the garden and high jinks among
the ungodly on the beach. But he had made quite sure
throughout this particular service that for once he need
fear no counter distractions, that for once he held his
flock at anxious, even painful, attention.
For a terror dwelt on Baliang. License and pillage
had ruled the peaceful isle all day, and rum had flowed
185


188 IN DARK PLACES
out of sight "He grinned again. "Well? Hadn't
you better be rid of us—soon?"
"Not a single hand shall you take from this island
if I can prevent, and I think I can!"
"You mean they'll mind what you say? Oh, I know—
paternal highchiefship and such. But how if we kidnap
'em anyway, and the women, too—and kick your silly
mission into the sea after? Who's to prevent that, old
Hell-an'-Glory. . . .?"
Then Colhoun had drawn himself to his height, fight-
ing down the quiver of loathing and despair.
"I mean there's still law in the Gilberts, which you
mightn't think. See now. You touch a single black
boy and you run slap against the Government. Unlicensed
recruiting—ord'nance of eighteen hunner eighty-seven.
Aye, y've heerd o' that! I could howl from now to
Halifax about the rest—my little treasury you've looted,
the ruined wark o' peace and faith, the poor, savage
people sunk again in hate and fear and doubt.
"But you violate eighteen eighty-seven and I'll have a
gunboat on your track inside two weeks. So much I
can promise—God be thank'it!—through Butaritari.
There's one due there now. You'll find hard hiding in the
Archipelago, you and your schooner."
"You know her?"—glancing quickly out over the la-
goon where his craft lay at anchor.
The missionary had played his trump.
"A many folks know her well enough that never saw
the cut of her jib before—no, nor wanted to again.
Blackbirder, gin-peddler, gun-runner, terror o' the
beaches; it's been common gossip on the trade routes


1go IN DARK PLACES
scious for the first time of the place and the presence he
had invaded, he sidled to the end of a bench and dropped
there.
Colhoun's nervous hand caught up the suspense and
cast it dramatically into his renewed petition:
". . . And Thou knowest, O Lord, how sorely we are
smitten by the oppressors within our gates. Yea, they
rage against us in their wickedness and there is no help.
Just see how they've stolen all our yams and sweet po-
tatoes and three pigs, not to mention McGuire's goods,
and also our poor hoard of riches, even the pearls o' the
mission—which Thou knowest, Lord, were not cherished
up in pridefu'ness but only to build a new church and ad-
vance Thy kingdom among us. We pray for justice.
Do Thou deal faithfully with them, every one, thieves
and transgressors that waste these fair islands and turn
the hearts of the unhappy people away from Thee.
Justice upon the spoilers we ask, O Lord. Amen!"
He finished in a fervour that whipped the colour to
his grey cheek. The congregation recognized, perhaps,
one word in ten—it is not easy to pray extempore in the
Gilbert Island tongue—but they caught his drift quite
well. The shed hummed to their responses and they
drew aside from the stranger the hem of their garments
—such as wore enough—rough as the hair shirts of the
saints, which had graduated along with their footgear
from the slop chests of chance traders and whalers.
Earnestly then, with simple eagerness that lent a sud-
den authentic dignity and pathos to the effort, they lifted
their voices in the final hymn. Children of the sun, to
whom the white man's religion, like his shoes and his
liquor, his crime and his codes, his strange brutalities


JONAH 191
and his difficult mercies, was all a quarter-comprehended
mystery; bewildered, sullen, half-tamed, they could put
their hearts at least into his songs, being song and uni-
versal. So they followed their pastor as he had taught
them, stumbling the hard meaning, perhaps, but finding
a subtler truth, bravely one and all:
D'o Hum-res hosts of mi-dy foes
D'o 'earth and hell my way op-pose,
'E save-ly leads me still a-lon',
'Es lov'n k-ind-'ess, oh 'ow stron'.
'Es lov'n k-ind-'ess, 'Es lov'n k-ind-'ess,.
'Es lov'n k-ind-'ess, oh 'ow stron'I
Thereafter under the benediction they broke up, hur-
rying away each man of them to bar his hut and lie hid
until morning.
"Amen!" they murmured one to another, to complete
the rite as they understood it. "Ah—men! Amen!"
A shifting of shadows and they were gone, dispersed
into the russet dusk, and had left the chapel empty-—
empty save for Colhoun and the lone visitor who sat on
the end of a bench and who echoed curiously, tentatively,
to himself in a dry whisper:
"Amen! Amen!" . . .
The Rev. David stepped down the aisle and spoke over
at him. "What do you want?"
The man lifted a face like the shell of a nut, as brown
and weather-beaten. "Who—me? Nothin' much, Mis-
ter, and no offence. I take it you're the lad as does the
reg'ler missionaryin' here, ain't you?"
His voice was low and husky and yet in other ways


192 IN DARK PLACES
he hardly met the clergyman's rather academic concept of
the spirituous as opposed to the spiritual state.
"This is my mission, yes. My church."
He turned his slow gaze around.
"An honest-t'-God church? What? It don't look it."
"It was consecrated by a bishop," said the Rev. David,
quite sharply, for he was touchy on the point.
"Bishop—eh?" The other seemed to extract an ob-
scure satisfaction from the title. "Well, that makes it
churchier, don't it? Mister, I been looking for a real
church and a real preacher. I come a long ways lookin'."
But Colhoun still had no thought beyond the royster-
ers of the Galloway Lass.
"Then you'd better go back again," he said, as he ad-
vanced by the bench. "There's naught for such as you
in this holy place. You'd best go back among your own
crew."
The stranger glanced up.
"That's so," he said, thoughtfully. "Yes, that's so,
too, but I don't believe I will. It mightn't be healthy.
As far as I c'n figger they're most at the bottom of the
sea."
The Rev. David had the belated and shocked perception
of a mistake. By the fading light he saw one who was
certainly no roysterer now, who could not have been
these many days, for he was drawn like a used lard
bladder. His lips were raw with salt cracks, at knee and
breast and elbow he had been nearly flayed. Exposure
had blackened and thinned and scored him to a carbo-
nado, sun-cooked, the more sadly that he had once been
high of flesh, if any might judge—a thick, rolling, bull-


194 INDARKPLACES
"We'll waive the fee," said Colhoun, more gently than
he had yet spoken. "This once."
"I aim to pay for pilotage," returned the other, simply.
"D'y' reckon you could take the job on trust?"
Colhoun sat suddenly beside him.
"I've almost forgotten how to trust any white man.
But you try me."
The stranger was silent a space.
"Mister, it comes hard to me to holler for help and
I dunno' quite how to put the case, bein' rough and tough
and not in your line. But one thing I'll make bold.
About these here natives—Gilbert Islanders, we'll say,
like your own—I want to ask you something that may
sound queer."
"Well?" said Colhoun, marvelling.
"Well—here's you whose business is good works for
the black heathen, I believe, and here's me that never
give them a thought except at so much per head, you
might say. And what I want to know is this: Has a
nigger got a soul?"
The west had faded until it spread as a dull and angry
wash with the silhouettes of the palms thrown up against
it in vivid splashes of ink. Somewhere along the inland
line of the lagoon a little dart of fire struck out and
stayed, and then another—kindly hearth lights of this
dim island world. Colhoun sat gazing out at them and
after the first reaction of surprise and suspicion had
passed he found himself wondering. He wondered, as
a man sometimes must, whether it was possible after all
to justify at any such stark challenge those ultimate be-
liefs that were all his life and all his hope.


JONAH 195
The skipper of the Galloway Lass had put something
like this to him at their first meeting, in the bitter inter-
view when he paid the ransom of Baliang—in mockery,
of course. . . .
"So these are the far-famed pearls of the mission,"
that sinister individual had said, while he weighed the
fine fibre bag contemptuously in his hand. "Your haul,
hey? Since you've bossed the roost? Is that the best
you could wring from three hundred lively natives?"
"They were not wrung," Colhoun had replied, with
contained passion. "You'll never understand—how
should you?—but every pearl of them a' is a precious
token from some poor groping savage who scarcely knew
his Redeemer's name, and yet was moved by the spirit
warking divinely in him to make that free gift o' love
and service."
"To the needy missionary."
"To the needy cause! It was to be our little triumph -
the church, the school, the books—one sure and lasting
beacon in the dark places."
And the poacher had laughed in low scorn.
"All this for a gang of bony crocodilians that would
be roasting each other tomorrow, or cave your head if
they dared? Aw hell, Reverence! Have you got the
face to tell me the nigger has any place in the scheme of
things except to be sweated for what graft is in it?
Spirit? What kind of spirit?"—grinning at him. "Did
you ever see a black ghost?" . . .
Sitting there beside him on the beach the castaway
listened in silence while Colhoun made his brief answer,
speaking as was given him to speak in that moment, and


198 INDARKPLACES
man of my crew, white or black, should have been the
sacrifice. For what had they done compared with me?
And yet I buried them, the few I could find of 'em after,
in the coral sand by the water's edge. . . . They'd been
shot to pieces as they lay"
"At Mele!"
"Aye, at Mele. Whilst I was away at Vatu looking
for that native trader, d'y' see? Dead they are—but I'm
alive and here. And why this should be, and whether
I've come to the right place or not, I'll leave for you to
judge as knows so well the ways of Providence over
men—black and white together. Listen, now."
And Colhoun could not choose but obey.
"I landed on Vatu along in the afternoon. It's a com-
fortable little atoll. You know the kind of thing you'd
expect: all bird-cage houses and feather-duster palms,
smoke risin', girls a-singin', the fishers at their nets, the
prow-builders tap-tappin' and the pigs and kids tangled
everywhere: especially kids. Well, I walked up from
the lagoon and there wasn't a living creature in sight,
nor any trace of the same.
"It looked queer; the boats were gone from the beach,
the curing-sheds were empty. Thinks I, maybe every-
body's off on a big canoe festival, or elseway, and so I
squatted in the shade till they should please to come
home again. The only comp'ny I had was the trade
wind pipin' along the sand and a scrap of a rag tied in
front of a house just there—a taboo sign, as it might be
—flutterin' and.flutterin' and the lonesomest thing in the
world to watch. . . .
"After a while I got that notion you get of somebody


JONAH
201
And why? 'Father b'long me plenty too much sick,' he
says. Because there was nobody else to look after his
old man as was dyin' all alone in that house."
The speaker stopped and Colhoun was left to gaze
into the blank of the night. The Rev. David had lived
too long in the far corners, among the despised and ex-
ploited races of the earth, to get quite promptly in tune
with this white man's peculiar note.
"But the boy was doomed," he cried. "Surely you
should have seen that!"
"As you say, Mister," returned the other. "I saw that
quite well—for I nursed him the three days and nights."
The Rev. David sat very still in the darkness.
"I been a good deal amongst niggers in my time," re-
sumed the stranger. "A nigger has always been a nig-
ger to me, black or brown or pipe-coloured. If he had
any common, homely troubles and feelin's of his own
I can't say I ever knew nor cared tuppence; I don't say
I would again. But that little kid now—he was different.
"Somehow it took me fair under the belt to find that
kid that way in the dead island, doin' his bit so ready
and yet so eager for an odd toy to play with, too—like
anybody's youngster would be. Maybe it was the chipper
grin of him. Or maybe his nerve standin' me off with
the gun, and him no bigger than the barrel of it, so small
and brave and sassy. Or maybe because he was just a
boy. I dunno'. I never had none of my own. Any-
ways
"He was sickenin' for it himself, of course, and even
whilst he sat up there in the tree a-cussin' of me the
fever was on him. But I couldn't coax him down. He


202 IN DARK PLACES
was leary of white men, and perhaps he had reason.
His father had been one of those divers, you see. Not
a step would he come until I thought to walk away into
his house and then he came fast enough, all hands to
repel boarders. He wasn't goin' to have nobody else
touch his old man—not him! But he needn't a' worried.
His old man was dead. . . .
"I think he must a' gone off his chump a bit after that.
Leastways he never seemed rightly to know what had
happened, only lay kind of stupid; sometimes scared-like
and beggin' me for to go away and not steal any poor
Kanaka boys—sometimes bold enough and laughin' or
singin' a little, most pitiful to hear. Come night-time I
made shift to get him away to a clean hut and a decent
bed, carrying him in my arms, and later the fever lifted
off his brain somewhat. And then what does he do but
ask for his father! I tell you, I had to lie quick, but
he was smart and caught me up and blame' heavy weather
I made when I tried to quiet him. Toys he wouldn't look
at no more; nor yet games didn't hold his sick-boy fancy.
But stories, now!"
"Stories?" echoed Colhoun, for the other had checked
on a sound like a stifled oath. "What kind of stories?"
"What kind would you think?'" came the harsh re-
sponse. "It seems a tramp missionary passing by Vatu
had once preached from the white man's Book. That
was the only kind of story he'd ever heard, and that was
the only kind he wanted. He remembered the Book,
bein' full of most wonderful matters. He remembered.
"'You fella white man,' he says, all raspy in his little
throat, 'you fella white man savee speak'm good fella
talk. Savee speak'm Bibley talk. Plenty devil-devil.


JONAH 203
Plenty fight. Plenty good fella talk altogether. S'pose
you speak'm me that good fella Bibley talk, me like'm too
much!'
"Bible stories, d'y' see, Mister? He called for 'em.
There he lay in the light of the lamp with the red flush
on his sunken brown cheek and his eyes so bright and
eager. He was dyin', and he wanted Bible stories.
And me—me, I didn't know any!"
"Ah!" breathed Colhoun, at the pain in that voice.
"Mister, he was just a kid. Is there any chance for
such—can you tell me? A nigger kid, but he'd done one
of those things that make a man different from a beast
on two legs. Would you say he had any rightful chance
of comin' through safe? Because I couldn't give him
none. . . . He was goin' to clear, that little chap, and he
needed his sailin' directions. There was my time to a'
helped him with the good words. And I couldn't—I
couldn't—I couldn't give 'em him."
"Not the few that count?" whispered Colhoun.
"How should I know, Mister—what counts? Who
was I to know? He asked for Bible talk, and the only
single blame' thing I could tell him"
"Well?"
"D'y' want to know? Jonah! Aye, it sounds like a
poor sort of jest, don't it now? But it wasn't to him, nor
yet to me—worse luck!—nor to me. I told him the story
of Jonah. Not as you would likely tell it, and how far
off from what's writ in the Book I'd be afraid to think.
But he liked it. He made me tell him over and over. In
those three days and nights, while I was tendin' of him
the best I could and wonderin' every minute why the boat
didn't come and thinkin' of the medicines I might a' got


JONAH 205
c'n see what luck or likelihood would ever remain for a
man with a story like mine. It's done, and I'm done,
and that's all."
Across the lagoon there leapt to view a burning thatch,
sudden as an explosion. The smoky flare struck a path
on the water, showed up the black spars of the schooner
like the black bars of a garret and flooded the chapel with
infernal radiance.
"Never think it," said the Rev. David standing and
swaying in a rapt renewal of faith. "Never believe it!
Heaven's purpose does not fail us so. Is yon little
brave brown child to have died in vain? I tell you as
certain as his reward, as certain as his glorious salvation,
so certain sure the wrath to come upon all whose strength
has been the curse of the weak and the helpless! Out of
your own mouth—shall they not answer? Yea, whoso-
ever and wheresoever they be—even as that man below
whom I fear no longer for a' his wicked triumphs—even
as he must answer in due time—even as Cap'n J. Jeffrey
o' the Galloway Lass!"
He swung around with a gesture, but the place on the
bench beside him was empty. Blinking perplexedly in
the lurid glow he pawed about the shadows. And there
he found an inert huddle of flesh and rags that had
slipped to the floor against a post. The castaway had
collapsed.
Among the barred huts where they crouched wakeful
through the long, hot hours that night it was the natural
if somewhat heterodox belief of the dusky brethren that
powers of darkness had come to an issue over Baliang.
Plainly the old lawless gods were looking for trouble.


206 IN DARK PLACES
First they had sent the thieving ship. Then the naked
stranger out of the depths. Then sack and tumult amid
the flames of McGuire's store and the little hand-guns
that spit death like winking. These portents all men had
seen and of others was no lack: the hollower and more
ominous drone of the reef; a plaintive piping of night-
birds in the bush; a certain weight and tension on the
air, pervasive, oppressive, as if the outer chinks of space
had been stuffed.
And now let the missionary look to with his big
fella God Mahrster of whom he preached so engagingly—
let him look to it right well. If his prayers should fail
and the ship be kept weather-bound as a further scourge
upon them they had not forgotten how their fighting fore-
fathers could deal with pirates. Perhaps the old ways
and the old gods were best after all. They waited to
know, with a shark tooth club in more than one restless
brown fist. . . .
Meanwhile the pearl-poaching skipper of the Gal-
loway Lass was doing his own waiting, by his own be-
liefs, and pacing the schooner's deck like a big caged cat.
His little rum party at the expense of the absent trader
had been quite successful and he had improved it to mend
a badly shaken authority. But he wanted to be gone, he
had all a highwayman's furious eagerness to be gone,
and delays still clogged his purpose. For one thing, that
same rum party had left him hardly a man still able to
wobble on two pins.
"And besides, there's somethin' making," observed for
perhaps the tenth time the lank youth who had served
as mate. "Somethin' making and you can take your
colonial oath. Feel that air?" He wet a bony fore-


JONAH 209
"Bright lad," came the chuckle. "And I'll nobble
yours, drunk or sober, if you give me any of your lip.
Why, you poor tripe, you don't suppose I'll let go now I
got my teeth into the fat? Do I look the sort to let a
gang of yellow-livered dock wallopers turn me off?
Frightened, are you? You'll be worse frightened before
I'm done. This cruise goes through, weather or wind,
or crew as may be. It goes through—and all heaven nor
hell can't stop me, and you can take your colonial oath
to that!"
Prompt as at a cue there rose a sudden hail from over-
side that brought them both round, tensed.
"What's there?" called the skipper.
"Cap'n," came a voice. "Cap'n"—quiet and myste-
rious out of the leaden gloom that foreruns the dawn.
"Have you room for an extra hand, Cap'n? Here's a man
to work his passage."
"A man? . . . What kind of a man?"
"A white man—an able man."
They stared down at the squat, chunky littie bulk that
heaved itself by the rail.
"And what kind of a passage?"
"Anywheres at all, so long as it's off this ruddy
beach," was the calm reply. The visitor drove a little
dugout under with the spurn of his foot and climbed
confidently. "I just heard there was a ship here. Wher-
ever you're goin' is the place for me. And if you want
to catch this tide—there's a whiff of breeze stirring
now. Come aboard, sir," he added, as he stood on
deck.
Then the skipper threw back his head and laughed
wide over the water, for it was true, a warm breath


JONAH 211
handed and anyhow, her decks a sloven litter of filth,
loose cordage and empty bottles. All about her main
hatch was strewn a mess of rotting pearl shell, and here
and there lay an out-sprawled figure—as if these too had
been left to yield some potential gem only through cor-
ruption. Their faces showed putty-white with soot-
ringed eyes, sly and cruel. Strange types for an island
craft, fitter for the docks of Darling Harbour where the
Newcastle collier coves swarm up to settle scores with
lumps of coal slung in their greasy sweat-rags. At an-
other time they must have been formidable enough. But
their leader made short work of them now as he chiv-
vied them out.
One shambling rough who tried to rush him round the
corner of the house was tripped and allowed to fall
against a fist like a bollard. The knife of another went
flying from his hand and himself into the scuppers. A
third yelled unhappily as a bucket of sea water washed
him from his dreams. Until at last the sodden half-
dozen had been kicked more or less awake to a state of
dazed submission.
"And you're the lot that was going to do me!" ob-
served the skipper, slowly. "Swine!"
Straddling wide-legged on the deck, looking down from
knotted black brows and lowered lids, he passed them in
contemptuous review. His wet shirt clung sheer upon
hairy hide and corded thews. He seemed to bulk against
the sullen sky, to swell in his triumph. And there he
made his defiance of them: of chance, of events, of all
checks and bars—the unconquered embodiment of evil
and evil will.
"I'm speaking to you," he said. "This cruise goes


JONAH 213
talk against the wind until his chief impatiently called
the nearest hand to the wheel and stepped over.
"I said: where'd you shift it?" piped Gunny.
"Shift what?"
"The aneroid."
The skipper dived past into the cabin and presently
returning took him softly by the neck and pulled him
backward.
"If you did that !" he began.
But Gunny's fluttering lids covered no secret this time.
"My Gaw, wot should I do it for? I come to look
like you said—and the thing ain't there! That's all I
know."
The skipper reflected darkly.
"Who else has been down here?"
But the mate had seen no one and they were left to
puzzle the theft with all its sinister possibilities.
"If anybody thinks he can make me turn back that
way he's due for a shock," said the pearl-poacher.
They had more to puzzle them ere long. The morning
retreated to a sullen twilight with a sky as low as a smoky
ceiling and lost even the coppery tint that falsely had
brightened it. The schooner was running a waste that
seemed smeared with plumbago, in which the waves
ranged disorderly like a huddling crowd with up-flung
caps that fell always behind to windward. Far and clear
of all weather breaks in the coral group she had now
to labour the great ground swell and she met it but
sluggishly. Too sluggishly. They learned why when
Gunny, despatched on another errand, came staggering
aft with the sounding rod.
"A foot an' a half," he cried. "And makin' fast!"


JONAH 217
rusty blacks whereof the coat was buttoned straight to the
chin—the unmistakable sign of a clergyman the world
around.
"By Gaw, it's a livin' curse any'ow!" cried Gunny with
a crack of cruel laughter. "'E's the cove that 'ad the
wheel a while back, the one that worked this dirty game
on us. And a preacher after all to scuttle a ship! Halle-
lujah!"
The murmur took another note as the crew surged in,
but it was the skipper himself, leaving Gunny at the
wheel, who thrust them aside and leaped to the lower
shrouds.
"What are you doing in those slops, my lad?" he asked
pleasantly. "Never tell me it's your trade."
The man above stood there with tag-ends of the gar-
ments flapping about him in the wind.
"No," he said. "They was loaned to me."
"Ah? What for?"
"To wear aboard this craft."
"And what for that?"
"So I could wreck her," said the stranger, calmly.
He stayed looking down at them, the ring of upturned
faces, savage with hate and superstitious dread: down
on the heaving decks and the whole devoted fabric of
the vessel, and spoke:
"So I could bring you to answer. For Baliang—for
Mele—for Vatu—for all crimes and all the wrong you
done in those islands and meant to do. For my men you
killed, my ship you stole—for the sake of all the poor
souls, black and white, against your score. And answer
you will. You'll never find that leak, for one thing—I
know the poor old girl too well, you see—and for an-


218 IN DARK PLACES
other, the riggin's all cut and slashed. . . . Your piratin'
cruise is ended here, you big, bloody-handed murderer,
for you and all your outfit!"
The crew swarmed at him in a snarling pack.
"Chuck 'im over! Stash 'im—drown'd 'im!"
The skipper took a step on the shrouds, looking up,
and his teeth were bared to the gums.
"Will you come down?" he purred in his throat.
The other did not stir.
"Well," grinned the skipper, "I'll be most highly
pleased to fetch you." And he began to climb.
He was part way up with one hand reaching for a
ratline when the vessel swung over on the next deep
swell—and in that instant the man above merely dropped
on him. Dropped like a blotchy black spider from a
web, to his shoulders, about his neck, and wrenched him
away in the impact. The two bodies fell grappled to-
gether, struck the channels with a shock that quivered
through the ship, bounded off into the sea—and dis-
appeared. . . .
Not finally. The condemned crew of the Galloway
Lass had one more glimpse of that deadly struggle, the
last, dim adumbration of its closing gesture. Gunny in-
stinctively had put the wheel down and as the schooner
hung in the eye of the wind with a shivering of reef-
points and a pounding plaint of boom-tackles, they
stared off to leeward and astern. Through the smother
they discerned a huge bulky body floating half submerged,
low and rolling in the grey spume. And there they pres-
ently saw, or seemed to see, two figures rise to a footing,
giant and pigmy, and meet. But the pigmy must some-
how have gained a decisive weapon, for he struck from


JONAH 219
a raised arm and the one that fell was the giant. . . .
Then a great black shadow as of brooding wings swept
through the upper air, the wind leaped shouting down,
and they saw no more.
When next he arrived on Baliang he wore the garb of
modesty, still sopping from the sea but quite complete,
and he carried a short, steel-tipped lance on which he
bore as a staff. In this pilgrim guise he stumbled a
painful and laborious way up the beach among the jack-
fruit trees, many times pausing, leaving an errant track
in the coral sand, but at length appearing in the strong
morning light at the site of the Rev. David Colhoun's
late mission.
There was nothing left of that consecrated chapel but
a few of the posts, leaning crazily, and a bench or two
on which were listlessly grouped some few of the elder
brethren. The rest of the structure had been blown to
straws. The rest of the congregation had suffered a
dispersion from grace almost as wide. And the Rev.
David himself was making his final plea and one without
hope for a beaten cause, when he was aware that he had
lost the attention of his audience.
Entered to him and to them the stranger, and while
they gazed at him with bulging eyes, dropped heavily on
the end of a bench. . . .
"You—!" gasped the Rev. David. "Man alive—how
on earth did you get back here?"
The stranger raised a face seamed and drawn.
"Who—me?" he said dully. "Easy enough. There
was a whale—" He swayed and would have fallen but
that Colhoun took him about the shoulders. "A whale,"


220 INDARKPLACES
he said. "You remember? It's in the story, ain't it,
Mister? Only this one was dead, with the harpoon and
the rope still to him."
"You came ashore on a dead whale!"
"Like Jonah. Leastways as he might have done, for
that was the way it happened to me—you'll find mine out
there on the reefs, what's left. You mind the way of
it? 'Now the word of the Lord come unto Jonah,' it
says. 'Now the word of the Lord come unto Jonah.'
And it certainly did, Mister, because that's me."
"How?" said Colhoun, pityingly. He feared to see a
trouble in the blue eyes, but they were bright and clear,
only very, very weary.
"Aye—Jonah. For so I am, and so I was christened,
and Cap'n Jonah Jeffrey of the Galloway Lass is what
I've been these many years. And by the same token I
have to thank you, too, Mister, and to pay"
He braced his failing strength with an effort and fum-
bling in the breast of his coat drew out a little
double-ended bag of fine coconut fibre that made the
faintest tinkling music as he placed it in the pastor's
hand.
"I aim to pay for pilotage, if you ain't forgot."
"The pearls!" cried Colhoun. "The pearls o' the mis-
sion!"
"And now you'll be buildin' that church, won't you?
An honest-t'-God church, as you meant? And maybe—
maybe a school for the little kids as well—what? To
teach 'em. To teach the little nigger kids, Mister, that
never had no chance and never knew no better, and give
'em what they need—the books and the stories and the
good words"


THE WINNING HAND
TENNISON was a gambler. When a coral reef
pared the keel plate off the Evelyn Bird and
she sank in three minutes somewhere near the
Howick Isles one rough black night, he preferred to lay
his own private bet on a chicken-coop. The Evelyn's
boats were few and old, and the 'Evelyn's people were
hurried, and together they disappeared in the dark and
the smother like things sponged from a slate. But the
chicken-coop came ashore right side with care.
Tennison was a gambler. He sat up on the little naked
islet to which he had been tossed, and like a last player
left lonely by the departed crowd, he watched a new day
dawn over an expanse swept clean as green baize, where
the sun showed in the semblance of a great yellow poker-
chip. ... It was well for Tennison then that he long
had been a gambler, trained to the grim philosophy of
his trade.
At midnight aboard the Evelyn his chances had
seemed bright and rosy. Five hours before, he had
had his clutches on a fortune. He had staged a little
flutter with a promising subject—the wildish son of a
millionaire shipowner and acting purser in charge of the
Evelyn's strong-room. He had brought about the said
flutter by cautious approaches during their leisurely
coasting cruise. He had seen the stakes at last run high
222


224 IN DARK PLACES
land. Under its lights, hazed with companionable smoke,
between its stout bulkheads and worn, yellowed naval fur-
niture of berth and locker, they were as safely guarded as
voyagers well could be. Rattling rain and spray on the
skylight, heave and tilt of the vessel, a quiver now and then
as her screw flipped up in a heavy sea—such intimations
of outer storm merely heightened their zest, further stimu-
lated by sundry tall drinks and betting progressively
taller, until they came naturally to the stage of moist eye
and loose tongue, the harvest-time for wary workers.
"I'm away!" announced McMurtrie, a gross, cheerful
soul with a head like a tanned lard-bladder. "I take
cover," he said, rapping for a pass. "Blast this pair o'
mine! It ain't 'elped 'em once tonight, and I won't stand
a raise on 'em now—not in no table-stake game. For
Gor's sake, Mr. Bird, sir—pass that bottle, will you?
Per'aps there's a drop o' luck somewhere."
Fraley sat next to him, opposite Tennison, where his
handsome, boyish face was framed against the rectangle
of the strong-room doors. With the least involuntary
start he lifted his eyes from the hand at which he had
been staring.
"What d'you say, McMurtrie? Luck?" he echoed,
and laughed in the nervous note that ran through their
talk like the tinkle of a triangle. "I don't believe so, but
we'll see."
Carefully he edged his cards, anchored them under a
sovereign, then caught up the bottle and shook it. There
might have been a third of the contents left, but he slung
it aside to the padded couch and slid out of his seat.
"Just wait a second, won't you?"
Now, there was nothing actually irregular in the fact


THE WINNING HAND 225
that he had left the Evelyn's strong-room standing open.
On her coastal run of some thousands of miles between
horn and horn of the Australian continent, from Wynd-
ham clear around to Port Kennedy, she did some oc-
casional carrying of special, valuable cargo. But this
trip she had landed her last insured packages at Broad-
mount and her last mail-bags at Cooktown, and she would
take no more shipments before Thursday Island.
Officially speaking, that strong-room was empty—just
a steel-walled cubicle, six by four by eight feet high.
Unofficially, of course, the officer in charge was free to
use it for his own casual purposes as he might see fit—
and so he did use it. By an amiable whim, as appeared,
he kept his private stock there.
During the evening Fraley had thrice gone rummaging
inside. Three times he had issued with fresh supplies
of good cheer. And this time again he played the gen-
erous host. The squeak of a cork-screw, the plop of a
cork, and presently he returned—amiable as ever. No-
body made any remark. Nobody took any particular
notice—nobody, that is to say, except the watchful
Mr. Tennison, who noticed everything by system, who
glimpsed in this interval, as he had in each preceding
interval, the gleam of a red-lacquered cash-box slipped
swiftly from its slot in the wall-safe and the gesture of
fuitive, nimble, thievish fingers.
"Try that, Mac." Fraley set out the new flask with a
flourish. "Much good it'll do you!" he added.
"'Ow do you mean, Mr. Bird?"
"Well, they say there's never any help for the wicked,"
giggled Fraley, in the comic vein of whisky-and-soda.
,He sucked at a cigarette, resumed his cards, and ran them


228 IN DARK PLACES
—the little nob in the tight black coat, talking to that
flash youngster in purser's uniform? Get 'em?"
Tenn looked. He saw the youngster, who struck him
as chiefly young, lanky, and ill at ease. And apart from
the throng he saw a rugged, white-haired little figure—a
striking figure, he thought, the picture of a pioneer auto-
crat, but saddened like an old granite rock, scarred with
sorrows.
"That's Matthew Bird—the richest shipowner in this
country! He's got this tub and plenty more, making his
millions. And that kid's his no-good son, Fraley. Tenn,
there's your capital for you!"
"Which way?"
"Why, the young 'un's sailing along with you this trip,
understand. . . . Mean to say you've never heard o'
Fraley Bird?"
"No," said Tennison.
"He's a no-good kid—soft as suet. Everybody knows
it except his father. I reckon he knows, too, only he
won't believe it. Common story, eh? But wait. It seems
this gay young bloke went shy on the firm—all the same
as embezzled. He ought to be in Darlinghurst Gaol now.
Best if he was."
"How much did he pinch?"
"Seven-fifty."
Tennison's lips tightened. "Piker! Why, that's just
the size of my own measly pile. Can this be a hunch?
What more about papa's darling?"
"Well, the son of Matthew Bird don't go to prison,
you can bet—else where's the good of coin? Likely it
comes hard on the old man, but he just buys the case off


THE WINNING HAND 231
They drew; Tenn discovered that he had caught an-
other knave to the one behind his three aces.
"I'm in for all I've got!" He thrust his last remaining
notes to the centre. He had ventured every penny he
possessed in the world. "Table stakes for a call!"
Fraley on his part was afraid to look.
After all, he was only a boy. While he sat with the
unseen card under his shaking fingers, the thump of
the screw must have measured each thick heart beat for
him; through the yellow haze of the electrics he must
have had a vision of guilt and fear easily imagined—as
easily as the boy's story of fool mistakes which had
brought him to this pass. He was paying for some of
them in his instant of agony. He had forgotten his
swagger. His lip sagged with the burnt-out cigarette.
Sweat-curls stood at his temples. To lose now meant the
smash of everything for him. To win—whatever lesser
flaws a moralist might have picked in the title—to win
meant definite release, return of the stolen funds, his
name saved, his record cleared.
Meanwhile no twist of that ordeal escaped the keen
vision of Mr. Tennison; and no ethical consideration
troubled his serene soul; he simply waited to collect. Be-
ing the type he was, of no adversary could he have been
more scornful. He knew this rich man's son for a
weakling, for a timorous crook who dabbled at crime
like a pickpocket, for a pampered waster who had made a
wretched mess of life and who sought to dodge the con-
sequence at others' expense. By his standard here was
rightful prey within the risks of the game. The game
had never showed him mercy. Short of an impossibility,


THE WINNING HAND 235
hidden use, as if for ages its mysteries had been in prep-
aration here. Tennison paused. That is to say, he
paused long enough to make sure no stray sovereigns were
lying about. Whereupon he caught a toe-hold on the edge
and shot ahead between the doors of the strong-room.
He swam into greenish dusk—a mere dispersed phos-
phorescence guided him to his next goal, the interior wall-
safe at the far side. He made it smartly, and staying
himself by the knobs, sought the right-hand slot. In his
fist he carried a short-bladed jackknife, his only weapon,
which he had brought along for forcing that slot if need
should be. But it was open—it still stood open as his late
adversary had left it. Deliberately he pulled out the red-
lacquered cash-box, lifted the lid, reached inside and
searched. . . . The box was empty.
He turned to rise—and met Fraley Bird!
No mistaking the apparition that floated so quietly
beside him, no mistaking the lanky form, the pallid, boyish
features. Fraley Bird himself—the weakling and waster
who had been trapped in his last frantic effort, who had
had the nerve to stay and to pay the whole price, after all.
His drowned face had slipped back of evil knowledge,
back of terror and desperation, to the innocence of child-
hood—such innocence as a rugged old martinet of a fa-
ther must have treasured in memory. His manner was
calm enough now in the dignity of youth and of death,
never to be strained again by guilt, by falsehood, by folly.
His sightless eyes looked into Tennison's with level re-
gard, with unfathomable scrutiny as the gambler closed
in and grappled him.
For Tennison did just that—unhesitating, undeterred


THE WINNING HAND 237
tion what, but something tough as leather and elusive as
spider webbing fastened upon him and drew him down-
ward with gentle, insinuating force. He leaped away
from it through the water in a spasm of all his muscles,
in a revolt of outraged flesh. It clung. Instinctively he
struck to free himself. His arm, too, became enmeshed.
And when he lifted it, he brought up in the green twi-
light a nest of squirming, dripping tentacles, loathsomely
adhesive and active! He tried to hurl them off. He
could as easily have detached a part of himself. He
slashed at them with the knife. They offered no tangible
resistance. But they would not loosen.
The cap of horror was that for minutes he had no
name for it, could not place it as reality. He was like
a man overtaken by the monstrous fictions of a dream.
He seemed to be floundering deeper in a net—an elastic
and multiplied net with an unimaginable life to itself.
Only when he plucked a chill, resistant mass and with
frenetic strength tore it apart like orange pulp, had he
some perception that these things were actual creatures;
he knew, as one dimly knows a more hideous fact
through hideous delirium, that he had fallen among the
ravening rock-squid of the reef. Them he had disturbed
at their dreadful meal. They clustered in their num-
bers.
Like the sins of a reckoning, like bad thoughts, ill
deeds, like all devils of hate, greed and cruelty made mani-
fest, they swarmed, they weighed upon him, they hung
upon him. He sliced a slimy ganglion to ribbons. Singly
they were no such formidable opponents; but more came,
and he was burdened with the money belt. A snaky
cord whipped about his loins, another about his thighs.


THE WINNING HAND 239
He took it. It served for a brace. It served for a point
of support by which he could drag himself down through
the top of the doorway, to the cabin, to the electric fixtures,
to the coaming—and so to the hatch, where he came surg-
ing out, breathless, half choked, but still alive to finish his
fight on fair terms in the blessed open air and sunshine.
When Tennison came to again from the stupor of ex-
haustion he was lying stretched like a rock-dried sprat
on a shelf of that same little islet somewhere near the
Howick Group. But this time he had plenty of company.
He awoke to a hum of voices and a shuffle of feet, and
blinked up at a ring of kindly, excited folk gathering
about him—blinked with bewilderment as he recognized
the gross, bald cheeriness of McMurtrie, and even the
insignificant nondescript from Lightning Ridge, cluck-
ing in sympathy.
"'Ow you feeling now, Term?"
Tenn sat fairly up.
"Good-oh!" bellowed Mac, and nearly spilled a flask all
over him in an access of generous emotion. "I knew
you wouldn't flop—not just as we're winding up the
neatest little rescue you ever see!"
Tennison made some sound.
"What? Pretty nigh. Yonder's the Aurora Bird—
sister ship. She picked up our boats at daybreak. All
present and correct except you and that young purser
chap. Oh, a dinkum rescue! 'Ere's you—'struth, a
hard do you must 'a' had of it the night long! And as
for Fraley Bird, why, it seems there's a chance"
Somebody dropped a silencing word; all eyes turned


240 INDARKPLACES
across the glittering inshore strip toward the spot where,
with small boats whisking about her like fussy attend-
ants and the Aurora nosing up inquiringly outside, the
wreck of the Evelyn lay aslant.
"Not now," observed a bearded officer presently, at
the reading of some signal. "No chance now. They've
found him!" And by the tone everybody knew the
answer.
"It's going to be rough on the old man," was the
added brief comment.
Tennison, groping back to sanity through his dizziness,
had an instant's vivid vision of just how rough it was
going to be, had a mental glimpse of that stiff, white-
haired figure as he had seen it on the Sydney pier—a
little granite rock of a man scarred with sorrows, whose
rigidity under this crowning sorrow he could picture,
whose stark, pioneer, eye-for-eye and penny-for-penny
rectitude he himself—being the type he was—could un-
derstand completely.
"Well, anyway," McMurtrie was saying, soberly,
"counting Fraley Bird out, the rest of us did pretty well
for ourselves."
"Yes," agreed Tennison. "Yes—but Fraley Bird did
better."
"'Ow do you mean?" asked Mac.
Already Tennison had unbuckled the money-belt from
about his waist. He opened the flap. He shook out
the contents of water-soaked bank-notes—sheaves of
them. He passed the lot to the officer standing by.
"Ship's cash," he explained, cryptically. "And the
purser's own private account. I took charge of 'em.


THE WINNING HAND 241
You do the same until you turn 'em over—d'you see?
—to old man Bird himself. Complete, I think, he'll find
them when he checks up the papers."
From among the wet mass of bills something fell
out into his palm. He stared at it, a hard-crumpled
little wad of pasteboard. Slowly he spread it out into
its five separate parts, flattened each on the stone, sep-
arately.
"That's a good hand," remarked Mac.
Tennison had been a gambler; he also had been a
square gambler—he never welched on any of his debts.
"It's a good hand," he assented. "It's the winning
hand. It beats me!" he drawled, grimly.
And he arranged it in order of the cards to get the
full effect—Fraley's cards, the cards he had filled on a
draw at the very instant the ship struck—the ten, knave
queen, king and ace of hearts.


THE WITCH WOMAN
WHEN young Mr. Spicer stood up before his
Broomie Street Congregation one night and
told them how the call had come to him to go
forth into the dark places, he found that moment
the most inspiring of his career. He pleaded the wail
of the heathen: "these our poor erring brethren—fash-
ioned in the same image with ourselves." His pale, lean
cheek took the glow of fervent faith, until certain sisters
regarded him with regretful interest and a secret sigh
against this great gain to the cause of the missionary ef-
fort. So they waited upon him with limpid eyes and much
grave discourse anent the supply of pants for the pagans.
. . . There was real compensation already to being de-
voted as a martyr in those old familiar meeting-rooms,
where the dim gas lights and the spunky littie stove and
the mild enthusiasm of sober-sided saints quite warmly
outdid the seasonal Glasgow chill.
When young Mr. Spicer stood to meet his future flock
on Malolo one morning some months later, things were
different. A blinding white shore, a ripply blue lagoon, a
scowling wall of jungle and a line of smoky hills beyond:
no movement but the quivering of the palm fronds, no
sound but the roaring of the reef—this was the spot and
this was his welcome. An ardent welcome, if that were
all, by reason of the heat—smiting in lances, buffeting
242


THE WITCH WOMAN 343
back from the rocks, striking through boot leathers from
the coral strand. But he found little inspiration and less
compensation under that hostile sunshine: a stiff, frock-
coated figure, very lonely and very, very far from Glas-
gow.
Just how far, some others could have measured even
better than Mr. Spicer. Safely out of spearshot the
boat crew of the trading schooner that had brought him
lingered on their oars with hopeful grins. ... "I reckon
hell go game at that," observed the mate to the recruiter.
"I reckon he will," returned the recruiter to the mate.
"I never seen one weaken yet."
For they knew something of missionaries—queer, dour,
unprofitable psalm-singers, whose brave record on the
blood-stained coasts of Tanna and Aneityum had won
nevertheless the grudging respect of their kind.
"Likely old Faimungo'll plug him from the bush out
o' hand" predicted the mate to the recruiter.
"Likely he won't," retorted the recruiter to the mate.
"Faimungo's been blame' short of ammunition since he
cut off that barkentine Lark two years ago and got his vil-
lage shelled. A kauri club's plenty fatal anyway."
For they knew something of Malolo, as well. What
blackbirder and semi-pirate through all the fierce New
Hebrides did not know Malolo—worst island in the group
—which so jealously guarded its isolation, which so suc-
cessfully held the high hand of primal ferocity over
lawless cupidity, of killing-stone and poisoned dart over
Colt and Winchester and even the one-pounders of an
occasional punitive gunboat?
They had no particular ill-will against this particular
psalm-singer: they had merely the interested assurance


246 IN DARK PLACES
stepped in to grab the victim on either side while his
son, Miaki, slid along the water's edge with a knotted
kauri club.
It was borne upon Mr. Spicer then that he was close
to the martyrdom he had courted. An enviable reward,
no doubt; the reward of Bishop Patteson, of Williams
and Harris and other glorious pioneers whose steps he
followed; but one which had been easier to contemplate
from half a world away—and just now unexpectedly
distasteful.
Not that he cringed from it, either. Not in ordinary
meaning. Not from fear. Those cynical witnesses out-
side by the reef were right; Mr. Spicer was no coward.
Threat and peril and the grim front of death—he could
have met them all unflinchingly. . . . What he could
not meet so well because he had never foreseen it—
the thing that set his skin to crawling, that turned him
sick and faint in his strong young Glasgow soul—was
an absolutely uncontrollable repulsion.
At the touch, at the contact of these loathly creatures
he spun around and shook them shuddering off. "Take
care!" he quavered. "Men of Malolo, you are watched.
Look up. There—! Up there sits One who watches.
He knows I come for no harm, only to help your people.
If you slay me He will be very angry!"
The formula worked. When you already own a pan-
theon of some hundreds of gods—mostly malevolent—
when you believe that every stick and stone and tree
harbours a blood drinking deity, you do not lightly offend
a new one; even if you have just heard of him for the
first time. They looked. The monkey faces lifted. In-


250 IN DARK PLACES
foreign-taught witch women. From his fastness pres-
ently issued a warning that Noukamara only bided his
time; some day he would come down to wipe out the
upstart—to wipe out Faimungo's whole village, while
he was at it, to do a first-rate job for the sake of the
lesson and an old time grudge.
Hence the civic anxieties of Faimungo. Hence his nat-
ural eagerness to lay hold of a strengthening fetish in
the shape of Mr. Spicer's head. Hence, finally, the
rescue of Mr. Spicer himself, whose assistance as a live
priest seemed somewhat likelier than his value as a dead
relic to the more informed and travelled mind of Fiji
Mary.
She made her point while they were climbing through
a coconut grove together.
"S'pose you savee pray," she advised him with charm-
ing simplicity, "you pray like hell!"
Mr. Spicer, stumbling blindly beside her, grasped the
language better than the spirit.
"Then you—why, you must be a mission girl!" he
stammered. "Are you from Aneityum? Are you a
friend to the missionaries?"
"Huh! No damn fella friend, me. More better me
like'm kai-kai (eat) all them white fella altogether!"
Which declared her normal opinion of his race with a
snap that made him jump. . . . But the next moment
they came out at the fringe of the grove by the village
street. Like a queen who shows her dominion, she
stopped him there.
"You see this fella place?" she began. "All us
fella kanaka here, we plenty fright. My word, we


THE WITCH WOMAN 251
too much fright this time along one big fella devil.
Noukamara, that fella name belong him. That fella
Noukamara he big fella devil walk about mountain. He
too much cross along us. He plenty no good along us.
You savee?"
Mr. Spicer did his best.
"All right. S'pose you pray, you missi'nally. S'pose
you sing out along that fella God belong you. S'pose
you make'm that fella Noukamara plenty strong fella
bad luck. Good fella! Plenty long time you stop.
Plenty us fella come listen along you. Plenty us fella
come catch'm that lotu (religion) belong you. . . . What
you say?"
Mr. Spicer understood, at least, that she was mak-
ing him an offer—fair enough. The offer of reprieve,
alliance and a knock-down congregation in return for
his aid against some common foe!
Dazedly he looked out over the prospect so strangely
opened to him, where probably no other white man had
ever trod. He saw its bee-hive huts and its chicken-
coop runways; he saw its totems that leered with a
monstrous welcome and its ovens that smoked with a
sinister hospitality—all the uncomprehended detail of
its unimaginable life. Just before him, like presiding
imps, he saw two naked cannibal kiddies who played in
the dust and trundled for a toy a smooth-worn skull.
When he blinked again Fiji Mary was smiling cu-
riously into his face. "You fright?" she murmured.
Now Mr. Spicer's manly beauty at best was rather an
austere sort, and just then was considerably spent
and haggard. Yet Fiji Mary must have discovered
something in it. Perhaps his very weakness intrigued


THE WITCH WOMAN 253
take him, and—this might have seemed a miracle itself—
he was always sure of dusky auditors who sat and spat
and chewed betel-nut and heard the sermon as stolidly
as so many pewholders.
He had all he would ever need as a saver of souls;
all he could possibly require as a great missionary to
the heathen—everything except a single soul saved;
everything except a belief in his mission! . . .
He sat looking down over the village. All after-
noon the huts had resounded with funeral clamour.
Drums and voices carried a monotonous droning
lament. Now as he listened there rose the sudden
shrill scream of a woman's terror, so haunting, so hope-
less, that it crisped every nerve in his body and brought
him wincing around toward Fiji Mary.
"The tale is true, then! Faimungo—he means to kill
these three wives of his dead brother?"
She nodded.
"But how?" demanded Mr. Spicer.
She gestured.
"To—to strangle them!" gasped Mr. Spicer. "But
why? . . . Why!"
She put out a shapely hand, palm up. It was custom
by the ancient code. A chief had died in Faimungo's
house. "Every time one fella chief he finish, all them fella
wife belong him they catch'm finish too."
"Crimes and abominations!" groaned Mr. Spicer.
"Mebbe," agreed Fiji Mary. With a glance at the aged
reprobate who stood propped on his rifle before them,
grinning his royal simian grin, she added: "Sometime


056 INDARKPLACES
Glasgow Missionary Society and the Congregation of
Broomie Street.
"Effective from date, I resign my charge. It is my inten-
tion to leave the island by the first trading vessel to touch)
these parts—the same which will forward this letter. Quit-
ting my mission work for ever. The thing is impossible.
Our hope of making converts from the Malolese, black-
skinned and black-hearted. Impossible. You were fools to
send me with vain imaginings—and I was a fool to come—"
Outside it had fallen almost dark. The sun had sunk
in a wrack of tumbled clouds, purple and dull scarlet,
with one saffron streak like the edge of a burning ember.
A wind was up over the sea forerunning the change in
the monsoon now long past due, but brought no relief
from muggy, oppressive heat. The vast diapason of the
reef ran hollower and more insistent. And there was a
sudden note above it—above the moaning wind and the
metallic clashing of the palms—some infernal outbreak
near-by that made Mr. Spicer pause a moment. He
frowned and whipped away a stinging wink of sweat.
'"A sinful nation—laden with iniquity, a seed of evil-
doers'—even so they might be dealt with. But these are
devils. These are brutes and beasts and lower than the
beasts. Yea, 'your new moons and your appointed feasts
my soul hateth—your hands are full of blood.'"
The racket grew and mounted; shouts and smashing
Snider-rifle shots; a chatter of tom-toms and the boom-
ing of a big war-drum that Mr. Spicer had never heard
before. ... A belated gleam seemed to flash across his
bamboo window grille to light him on his final spurt:


258 IN DARK PLACES
tered; already their thatches were festooned with flames
while the naked mountaineers, gigantic and fearful in
feathered head-dresses, went a-hunting.
It was the immediate chapter of Mr. Spicer's fate that
many should perish then and there under his eyes—men
and women whose salt he had eaten, children who had
crawled about his doorstep. Old Faimungo himself was
overtaken at the thicket, spitted like a shoat, and went
down grinning a diabolic but philosophic grin. Miaki
died in the forefront with the young men, and others be-
side—without any notable flourish, perhaps; without re-
membered heroism; but in defence of their homes, and,
such as they were, Mr. Spicer's own parishioners, every
one of them. Chiefs with whom he had collogued and
visited. Servants that had brought him food and run
his errands. Helpers that had hewn and wrought and
laboured more or less helpfully at his building of Malolo
Station. Black people. Ugly people. Crude and diffi-
cult and savage people. But—such as they were—his
people; identified with him; taken into his fretful care
and interest these three months.
He knew them. They had been neighbours of his.
He knew how this one laughed and lazied and that one
sulked and worked, and a third was a kindly father.
He could tell the troubles of such and the plagues of an-
other, and which was afflicted with boils and which with
mothers-in-law. He could name their names! ... He
would have been less a man had he not choked up with
surging, swift, partisan anger to see them harried like
quail to cover—to see them wholesale clubbed and speared
by these terrible strangers.
Meanwhile—his Mission. . . .


THE WITCH WOMAN 259
He no longer owned a Mission. When he looked be-
hind him—lo!—the little hill was crowned with one blaz-
ing spire. His house, his chapel, his few poor goods and
furnishings—his very frock-coat of office; everything he
possessed in the wide world except the slippers and the
cotton sleeping-suit he stood in; all the results of all his
strivings—lost for ever! He clenched his fists. But he
had no leisure to groan about it.
In saving him this time, Fiji Mary had saved him
without word of authority. She herself ran the first
risk; she herself was coveted political spoil. As the gang
that had fired the station swept over in sight of them, pres-
ently a bubbling howl announced their discovery.
They were cornered.
"My word," observed Fiji Mary, succinctly, "them
fella knock'm seven bells outa us!"
While they cut through the hedge together she paused
in her stride to nip up a cache she had left there—a
sizable, brass-bound box. Even then in some tag-end of
thought Mr. Spicer wondered why she should burden
herself with her trade chest. But she led on between the
converging lines that leaped to head them off.
At the very jungle's verge remained a single hut, half-
destroyed, still burning. As they came past it, she
swerved. "You get along bush, Missi!" With a thrust
she sent him staggering aside, down the steep chute of a
pig-run. "You get to hell along bush—along scrub,
Missi I" she called. Herself, she sprang straight for the
glowing crate of flame. And three jumps and three split
seconds later her invaluable conjure box exploded a clap
of dynamite which gave the pursuers something else to
think about, and gave their quarry the start he needed.


*6o INDARKPLACES
So that was the way Mr. Spicer went out into the
swamp and the wilderness; a homeless fugitive. The
promised storm broke soon afterward. Lightning played
like spattered yolks on the sky and the rain and up-ripped
spray drove inland. Trees crashed in the forest, and up
in the hills the old gods talked. Altogether they offered
an excellent occasion for getting "to hell along scrub";
the which Mr. Spicer did.
By the time he had waded to the neck through the
smellful ooze-beds—had been torn with thorns and
tripped with trailing lianas, had shed his slippers and
most of his sleeping-suit together with the skin of both
shins—by that time he had learned many more surprising
things. Probably they were things familiar to any pro-
genitor of his in the silurian slime, but for ages forgotten.
The squall passed. The moon sailed out with a ray
that bathed the island in fantasy. Steaming, troublous
scents of the jungle enveloped him. They may have had
something to do with his final impulse—but he himself
must have endured what he had endured, must have loosed
his inhibitions in a moral revolt, witnessed loss and mas-
sacre, sustained fury, bitterness and the ultimate bed-rock
chances, to achieve it. He gained firmer ground, and it
stayed with him. He flitted up the ridge, and it still grew
-on him like a hot and heady stimulant as he went rang-
ing—not to seek cover, not to continue in useless flight—
but circling on his track—around toward the village by
the bay.
And in due course of destiny he came out again
at the rear of mission hill and the enemy camp;
there to meet with Noukamara. Who else? He had
no plan. He had no weapon. But he was fit. He


THE WITCH WOMAN 261
had the strong young heart to match the strong young
soul, and he had had enough of martyrdom.
He went to meet "that fella Noukamara. . . ." The
murderer, the scourge! It was he who had wiped out
the mission.
Seven feet tall and four thick would have been about
the measure in the moonlight of Malolo's devil-chief.
A great dandy he was. He wore his top-knot erect, with
a parrot-wing for aigret. On his chest he carried locket-
wise the double tusks of a wild pig, and a pig's tail in
either ear. Legs and arms were cuffed with turtle shell
that bound his muscles like rings on so many coiling black
snakes. He had a war club and bone-tipped javelin.
But he was not using them just then. He seemed other-
wise much occupied—in strutting and prancing—in parad-
ing the might and magnificence of Noukamara all by his
lonesome.
But Mr. Spicer knew, somehow, that no male creature
acts in any such peacock fashion without some one partic-
ular reason. Instinctively he looked around for her. . . .
She was there, among the misty shadows.
"Missi!"
She saw him as soon as he moved into the little glade.
She turned to him at once, oiled and bedecked and be-
flowered. Her bosom glistened with chains of shells and
bright seeds. Her glorious hair had been combed to a
coppery nimbus, all sweetened and crisped with the wild
orange. "Missi—Missi!" she said innocently, and her
eyes shone on him like pools of soft starlight. "My savee
you come. My savee plenty you come back!" she said
joyously.
Whether he believed her or not . . . what she was up


262 INDARKPLACES
to in that secluded spot . . . what age-old arts of co-
quetry s,he had designed or employed to save herself—
questions that remain with the obscurities of that wonder-
ful night. Questions as futile as to ask how Mr. Spicer
would have done without her and how quickly he would
have perished in tweaking Noukamara's nose, or what-
ever else he meant to do.
But he was aware of her at last—warm, living, ripe-
breasted, breathing a rare perfume. He was aware of
her. For when Noukamara spied him and roared in
jealousy he drew close to her, and closer, and stepped
before her.
Then into his palm Fiji Mary slipped a curious object;
a polished splinter a foot and a half long, somewhat the
size and shape of a scythe-sharpener—exquisitely rounded
and chisel-edged. It was the deadly kawas, the killing-
stone of the Hebrides, first weapon ever invented by man
above the apes. . . . Mr. Spicer had never used one, had
never seen one used in his life. But his fingers closed
on it.
Noukamara capered with his shadow in the grass.
Would it be too much to tell that Mr. Spicer capered too?
There they faced each other; the head-hunting cannibal
chief and the soul-saving missionary. There they met in
immemorial combat.
Noukamara sang his war-song. Would it be too much
to say that Mr. Spicer sang one of his own as well?
Suddenly whirling, the chief let drive his javelin. The
point missed a hair's breadth, the barbs ploughed Mr.
Spicer's shoulder. He heard a little sobbing cry behind
him. Possibly it told him what had happened. Possibly


THE WITCH WOMAN 263
it nerved his arm with supreme venge fulness as he put
forth his strength and throw the kawas. . . . Nouka-
mara dodged—a movement that was his bane. The stone
flew across the clearing in humming-bird flight; curved
slightly; and took Noukamara's skull just over the ear
like a chipped egg.
Mr. Spicer was in time to catch Fiji Mary before she
fell. Already her gaze was dimmed, but she smiled into
his face as he drew away the dart, gently—gently.
"Missi," she gasped. "Me been one damn good fella
friend along you—yes?"
"Yes," he said, as well as he could.
"Missi—you be one damn good fella friend along
me?" she asked.
"Yes," he said.
She regarded him quizzically, with the same odd and
wistful expectancy. If Broomie Street could have seen
her then! If Broomie Street could have seen Mr.
Spicer!
"S'pose," she whispered, "alia same them fella pa'langi
(white folk) you kiss'm me—eh? S'pose you kiss'm me
one time! What you say?"
What could he say?
"Yes," he answered, choking.
"Ah," said Fiji Mary, nestling back with a sigh of
content. "Now me savee you plenty. Now you no
fright. Now you no fright some more at all!" . . . And
she was right. He was not "fright." For ere he low-
ered her he kissed her full on the lips.
One later glimpse of Mr. Spicer's night remains. It
is the one that lingers most clearly in intimate local


THE WITCH WOMAN 265
the trading schooner that had brought him to the island.
It was rather a nuisance, because he had so many more
pressing and important things to do, but he felt he really
must prepare his mail; and presently he sat down at the
work-bench that served him for a desk, with a split reed
for a pen and dried banana leaf for paper. „
"Effective from date—" he began; then paused and
frowned a little, but finally let it stand.
"Effective from date, I hereby notify you that Malolo
Station will rank as a self-supporting station on the list of
the Heathen Missions Committee. I take the greater pleas-
ure in this statement as it is my intention to stay here as
long as thought worthy. Some time ago I suffered a severe
attack of fever, during which we had certain troubles which
I do not well remember. But I give humble thanks 'the op-
pressors are consumed out of the land.' Our copra crop this
year will return us a handsome profit.
"I suggest in sending us any supplies, you need not take
such anxious thought—"
He looked down at himself in the garb he sat in, and
then up at his frock-coat where it hung on the wall,
charred, but still serviceable enough for times of cere-
mony; and he smiled a little wisely, a bit grimly.
"—about trousers. These are people, you know. Just
ordinary human people like the rest of us. But they have
been here some years; they have ways of their own. What
we chiefly need are tools to work with, and medicines for
the sick, and a printing-press to begin our own progress to-
ward the light. 'Therefore with joy shall we draw water out
of the wells of salvation. . . ."'


ONE DROP OF MOONSHINE 271
day Island or the Low Archipelago, to shake the market
and set the collectors of the world distracted. Not alone
by its size—the equal of a robin's egg, but this was flaw-
less, uniform in grain and colouring, singly and mar-
vellously perfect, fit to adorn the bosom of Selene, with
no more than the merest luminous thought of a blush
upon it, like that the pallid goddess betrayed, perhaps,
what time she spied the young Endymion. . . .
So it might have seemed to some wandering beach-
comber—who, as Tusitala of beloved memory tells us,
is often poor relation to the poet—if he had chanced to
spy it there.
To others of sober turn it might have been rather a
sinister thing, for it was lovelier and far more precious
than many a gem for which feuds have been fought and
life, honour and tears freely spilled; for which crowns
and courtesans have been famed and have earned ill-
fame; a deadly concentrate of lust, greed and envy; a
fateful corrosive on the minds of men.
To these dwellers by Fufuti beach—children of the
sun, child-eyed and child-hearted survivors in the last,
last remnant of an earthly paradise—it meant matters
much simpler.
"Sixteen thousand Chili," remarked Mata, "would buy
a real white man's house with a tin roof, and pigs and
tobacco! Also, maybe, a new shot-gun which we need so
badly," he added, nodding toward the ancient, rusted
fowling-piece on the wall. »
It lay before them as yet unstoried; virgin; vastly
potential. And each of the others understood Mata's
covetous thrill in reading out its destiny and each did
the same for himself, with his own secret amendment,


272 IN DARK PLACES
until, while they stared tense and eager, suddenly the
dangerous silence was ended by a little quaver of merri-
ment and the pearl itself flashed—presto!—with an effect
of magic.
Startled, they saw it caught in slim brown fingers.
And then presently they relaxed again. For the clever
bit of sleight had been performed by the fifth member
of their household, whom they had forgotten, whom they
often did forget, so quiet she would keep for hours—
Lele, the cripple girl.
She sat propped on her low bedstead, a trundle-bed,
in fact, a battered relic of Fufuti's only missionary es-
tablishment (lately dispersed) and Lele's own personal
and unlucky inheritance. She had leaned from that
couch to whip away the strip of coconut fibre and neatly
possess herself of their prize. Now she rolled it and
tossed it and held it up before the light to show its wan
splendour.
"Pretty—it is pretty!" she cried. "But it is sad, too,"
she added softly to herself. "See how pale and sad.
Like moonshine. Like a drop of moonshine!"
She made them smile. Even dark Tumaui and sulky
Falea smiled at her whimsy. It was hard not to laugh
with Lele, whenever Lele still chose to laugh.
There had been a time of plenteous laughter, of little
else but laughter; a time when no other maid in the island
could match her spendthrift spirit of youth and health.
No other had been so apt to run and to play; to chase
the rainbow fish a fathom deep through the blued cham-
pagne of the lagoon, to ride the roaring surf like a sky-
tossed bubble, to dance like a wind-tormented leaf of the


ONE DROP OF MOONSHINE 273
passion vine until her lithe and strong young body seemed
to melt in the rhythm of the chant.
Aye, she had laughed in those times. And she had
sung. And she had had a way of calling folk and things
and life itself by all manner of sharp or endearing little
names—the way of a bird. And for the rest she had
flirted . . . delightfully. Outrageously. With the en-
tire male population; with Mata's three sons in particular.
Until the question of her ultimate marriage, and her
proper suppression in marriage, had become not so much
a public topic as a public issue.
But a day had ended all that. The day, long to be
remembered with mingled awe and humour by the easy-
going islanders, when the mission of the late Rev. Din-
widdie fell, and great was the fall thereof.
It fell, quite literally, in the first hurricane of its first
season; for the Reverend D. neglected to found himself
on a rock, and the collapse of all his dreams of an ortho-
dox, converted, flannel-shirted, hymn-singing Fufuti was
equally complete with the wreck of beam and roof-tree,
of corrugated iron slabs and imported worsted texts that
strewed its beach. Nobody would have complained
much, except the Reverend himself—nobody else would
greatly have bemoaned that obvious rude jest of the old
rude gods—if Lele had not happened to be an accidental
sacrifice. Lele, the untamed creature marked for a first
convert, who was somehow caught in the disaster, pinned
down by a settling wall, crushed and maimed for
life. . . .
Since then she had come to live with Mata, her half-
uncle and the only relative who could find a place for
her. She came with her trundle-bed—and in truth she


274 IN DARK PLACES
did wonders; kept the house and the hearth, took direc-
tion of the two aged cooking-women, wove and sewed
and braided sennit, and meanwhile contrived never to be
seen off the couch where she reigned. It was her cour-
age and her pride still to reign, an apparent queen; to
be freshly garbed and combed and beflowered, with chains
of shells and bright berries on her breast, with clusters
of starry stephanotis in her glorious hair, to deck her
beauty as before. Even though it meant nothing.
For it could mean nothing now to any man.
The three sons of Mata were kind. They were
indulgent. They accepted her in fraternal harmony.
Never again could she flutter them. Never again in their
eyes, nor in any eyes, would she see the quick flame of
jealousy and desire for Lele, a cripple girl. . . .
Perhaps that fact like a fixed shadow had deepened
her vision in unexpected ways; perhaps that wild young
heart, bereft of youth, had gained an understanding and
a tenderness of them in their peaceful, contented life
together such as they never suspected. She was watch-
ing them anxiously from under lowered lashes while she
played so lightly with the pearl.
"And yet of itself it is only an old oyster egg," she
ventured, at last.
"Oyster egg?" echoed Motui, shocked. "A fine thing
to call it! Have you no sense, girl? . . ."
This time they did not smile. The superior male
warned her of a limit. They had gone too far toward
actual tragedy in this business.
"It is the most wonderful find ever was made on
Fufuti," explained Motui. "It is the happiest fortune
that could come to us!"


275 IN DARK PLACES
markets—a man skilful, deep and wise—doubtless he
would get much more than sixteen thousand; would re-
turn triumphant, a sack of silver in either fist, with
,enough to satisfy everybody!
"I would ask no pay for my trouble," concluded the
cunning Motui, modestly.
"Oh-ho!" said Lele. "You are that man?"
"I am the right man."
"To take the pearl away, yourself, among the white
people—you would be happy?"
Motui admitted nothing would make him happier, and
Lele came to the youngest son.
"Falea, it is your turn."
Throughout the session Falea had remained mostly a
fretful auditor. He still kept to one side of the others.
His grievance was heavier than theirs—as his years were
lighter—and would allow no compromise, it seemed. For
abruptly at Lele's appeal, he kicked the balance sky-high.
"No! I will not have a turn. I will not join to be
talked out of it. . . . Thieves!" he cried as he sprang to
his feet.
It was the snapping of their tension. Stealthily Motui
loosed a knife in his belt. Tumaui rose like a thunder-
cloud.
"Who is a thief?"
"You—each of you!" declared Falea. "If I pick
a coconut, is it mine? If I find a pearl—can any one
take it from me without stealing? Or any part of it?"
he added, shouting them down.
A very handsome copper-bronze godling he looked.
"A part of a pearl is no good to me. . . . The pearl
itself is the charm—and with it I would be a king! I


280 IN DARK PLACES
"What—what is the talk?"
"I am asking you in marriage, Lele."
She lowered her face in her hands.
"I must think. ... Go away, Mata."
"Very well," said the old gentleman, crestfallen. "I
go. But I do not advise you to listen to any other pro-
posals, my dear. These sons of mine are lively fel-
lows. Nobody could keep them in order for you, save
only me. . . . Remember that!"
She never knew how long it was before another voice
murmured in her ear—a smooth and luring voice this
time.
"Lele—oh, Lele," it began, and she looked up at Motui
and his smirk. "Greatly I admire you, Lele. You are
very clever. Too clever not to make the most of your
chance when I tell you—when I tell you that you need not
always be a cripple, Lele. I know where you can be
cured! . . . We can go to that place together, you and
I!"
"What do you mean?" she gasped.
"There is a schooner leaving our harbour tomorrow for
Fiji, and at Fiji is a hospital where the great white
medicine doctors work their wonderful cures. Will you
not be glad to be free again? Will you not rejoice to
sport and to run as you used? Then come with me to
Fiji!"
She swayed on her couch.
"Only marry me, Lele, and I will have you carried
aboard tonight!"
Somehow, suffocated though she was, she found the
force to wave him away.


284 IN DARK PLACES
on her heaving bosom. "Liars, every one. ... It was
only the pearl you wanted!"
Their sullen eyes sought the ground, but presently
Mata spoke their thought.
"For all that, you will have to choose among us, Lele.
You will have to settle this. Pick some one, and give
him the gun to defend himself, and you, and the pearl
—if you still have the pearl. . . . Buy your own happi-
ness as you will!"
"Yes—yes," they chorused. "Choose!"
"Very well," said Lele, after a pause. "I still have
it." Without relinquishing the gun, she made a little
flashing gesture of her free hand, and somehow, from
somewhere—presto!—the treasure appeared again. She
held it up before them to show its loveliness; the won-
drous soft radiance of that fateful toy that seemed to
light all the shadows. "And I will choose," she added.
"I do not marvel any more why it should be so sad.
I know. . . . Because it is so wicked. It made you
wicked—Tumaui! Motui! Falea! Mata! Me it made
wicked, also. And see how sad we are! . . . Where are
peace and content such as we used to know? Where are
the trust and affection and loving kindness that bound
us?"
They hung their heads before her.
"Now, do I remember," she went on, in a kind of
mournful exaltation, "now, do I remember the wisdom of
the white man! At the missionary's chapel I learned it,
and indeed I have paid for it with the life and the hope out
of my own body: 'The lust of riches is the seed of evil,'"
she quoted, with the full throat of knowledge and of
suffering.