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THE RED ONE 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 KKW YORK BOSTON - CHICAGO DALLAS 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD. 
 
 TORONTO 
 

 JACK LONDON 
 
 Photo Dy Arnold Genihe, N.Y. 
 
THE RED ONE 
 
 BY 
 
 JACK LONDON 
 
 Author of "The Call of the Wild," "Jerry 
 of the Island," "Adventure," etc. 
 
 gorfe 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 1918 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1816, BY JACK LONDON 
 COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE COMPANY 
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ELIZA SHEPARD AND WILLARD L. 
 GROW ALL, EXECUTORS 
 
 Set up and electro typed. Published, October, 1918 
 
6% 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE RED ONE i 
 
 THE Hussv 51 
 
 LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES .... 89 
 
 THE PRINCESS 142 
 
THE RED ONE 
 
 THERE it was! The abrupt liberation of 
 sound, as he timed it with his watch, Bas- 
 sett likened to the trump of an archangel. Walls 
 of cities, he meditated, might well fall down be 
 fore so vast and compelling a summons. For the 
 thousandth time vainly he tried to analyze the 
 tone-quality of that enormous peal that domi 
 nated the land far into the strongholds of the sur 
 rounding tribes. The mountain gorge which 
 was its source rang to the rising tide of it until 
 it brimmed over and flooded earth and sky and 
 air. With the wantonness of a sick man s fancy, 
 he likened it to the mighty cry of some Titan of 
 the Elder World vexed with misery or wrath. 
 Higher and higher it arose, challenging and de 
 manding in such profounds of volume that it 
 seemed intended for ears beyond the narrow con 
 fines of the solar system. There was in it, too, 
 the clamor of protest in that there were no ears 
 to hear and comprehend its utterance. 
 
2 THE RED ONE 
 
 Such the sick man s fancy. Still he strove 
 to analyze the sound. Sonorous as thunder was 
 it, mellow as a golden bell, thin and sweet as a 
 thrummed taut cord of silver no; it was none 
 of these, nor a blend of these. There were no 
 words nor semblances in his vocabulary and ex 
 perience with which to describe the totality of that 
 sound. 
 
 Time passed. Minutes merged into quarters 
 of hours, and quarters of hours into half hours, 
 and still the sound persisted, ever changing from 
 its initial vocal impulse yet never receiving fresh 
 impulse fading, dimming, dying as enormously 
 as it had sprung into being. It became a con 
 fusion of troubled mutterings and babblings and 
 colossal whisperings. Slowly it withdrew, sob by 
 sob, into whatever great bosom had birthed it, 
 until it whimpered deadly whispers of wrath and 
 as equally seductive whispers of delight, striving 
 still to be heard, to convey some cosmic secret, 
 some understanding of infinite import and value. 
 It dwindled to a ghost of sound that had lost its 
 menace and promise, and became a thing that 
 pulsed on in the sick man s consciousness for 
 minutes after it had ceased. When he could 
 
THE RED ONE 3 
 
 hear it no longer, Bassett glanced at his watch. 
 An hour had elapsed ere that archangel s trump 
 had subsided into tonal nothingness. 
 
 Was this, then, his dark tower? Bassett 
 pondered, remembering his Browning and gazing 
 at his skeleton-like and fever-wasted hands. 
 And the fancy made him smile of Childe 
 Roland bearing a slug-horn to his lips with an 
 arm as feeble as his was. Was it months, or 
 years, he asked himself, since he first heard 
 that mysterious call on the beach at Ringmanu? 
 To save himself he could not tell. The long 
 sickness had been most long. In conscious count 
 of time he knew of months, many of them; but 
 he had no way of estimating the long intervals 
 of delirium and stupor. And how fared Captain 
 Bateman of the blackbirder Narif he wondered; 
 and had Captain Bateman s drunken mate died 
 of delirium tremens yet? 
 
 From which vain speculations, Bassett turned 
 idly to review all that had occurred since that 
 day on the beach of Ringmanu when he first heard 
 the sound and plunged into the jungle after it. 
 Sagawa had protested. He could see him yet, 
 his queer little monkeyish face eloquent with fear, 
 
4 THE RED ONE 
 
 his back burdened with specimen cases, in his 
 hands Bassett s butterfly net and naturalist s shot 
 gun, as he quavered in Beche de mer English: 
 " Me fella too much fright along bush. Bad 
 fella boy too much stop m along bush." 
 
 Bassett smiled sadly at the recollection. The 
 little New Hanover boy had been frightened, but 
 had proved faithful, following him without 
 hesitancy into the bush in the quest after the 
 source of the wonderful sound. No fire-hol 
 lowed tree-trunk, that, throbbing war through the 
 jungle depths, had been Bassett s conclusion. 
 Erroneous had been his next conclusion, namely, 
 that the source or cause could not be more distant 
 than an hour s walk and that he would easily be 
 back by mid-afternoon to be picked up by the 
 Nari s whaleboat. 
 
 " That big fella noise no good, all the same 
 devil-devil," Sagawa had adjudged. And Sag- 
 awa had been right. Had he not had his 
 head hacked off within the day? Bassett shud 
 dered. Without doubt Sagawa had been eaten 
 as well by the bad fella boys too much that 
 stopped along the bush. He could see him, as 
 he had last seen him, stripped of the shotgun 
 
THE RED ONE 5 
 
 and all the naturalist s gear of his master, lying 
 on the narrow trail where he had been decapi 
 tated barely the moment before. Yes, within a 
 minute the thing had happened. Within a 
 minute, looking back, Bassett had seen him 
 trudging patiently along under his burdens. 
 Then Bassett s own trouble had come upon him. 
 He looked at the cruelly healed stumps of the 
 first and second fingers of his left hand, then 
 rubbed them softly into the indentation in the 
 back of his skull. Quick as had been the flash 
 of the long-handled tomahawk, he had been quick 
 enough to duck away his head and partially to de 
 flect the stroke with his up-flung hand. Two 
 fingers and a nasty scalp-wound had been the 
 price he paid for his life. With one barrel of his 
 ten-gauge shotgun he had blown the life out of 
 the bushman who had so nearly got him; with 
 the other barrel he had peppered the bushmen 
 bending over Sagawa, and had the pleasure of 
 knowing that the major portion of the charge 
 had gone into the one who leaped away with 
 Sagawa s head. Everything had occurred in a 
 flash. Only himself, the slain bushman, and 
 what remained of Sagawa, were in the narrow, 
 
6 THE RED ONE 
 
 wild-pig run of a path. From the dark jungle 
 on either side came no rustle of movement or 
 sound of life. And he had suffered distinct and 
 dreadful shock. For the first time in his life he 
 had killed a human being, and he knew nausea 
 as he contemplated the mess of his handiwork. 
 
 Then had begun the chase. He retreated up 
 the pig-run before his hunters, who were between 
 him and the beach. How many there were, he 
 could not guess. There might have been one, or 
 a hundred, for aught he saw of them. That 
 some of them took to the trees and traveled 
 along through the jungle roof he was certain ; but 
 at the most he never glimpsed more than an oc 
 casional flitting of shadows. No bow-strings 
 twanged that he could hear; but every little while, 
 whence discharged he knew not, tiny arrows 
 whispered past him or struck tree-boles and 
 fluttered to the ground beside him. They were 
 bone-tipped and feather-shafted, and the feathers, 
 torn from the breasts of humming-birds, iridesced 
 like jewels. 
 
 Once and now, after the long lapse of time, 
 he chuckled gleefully at the recollection he had 
 detected a shadow above him that came to instant 
 
THE RED ONE 7 
 
 rest as he turned his gaze upward. He could 
 make out nothing, but, deciding to chance it, had 
 fired at it a heavy charge of number five shot. 
 Squalling like an infuriated cat, the shadow 
 crashed down through tree-ferns and orchids and 
 thudded upon the earth at his feet, and, still 
 squalling its rage and pain, had sunk its human 
 teeth into the ankle of his stout tramping boot. 
 He, on the other hand, was not idle, and with 
 his free foot had done what reduced the squall 
 ing to silence. So inured to savagery had Bassett 
 since become, that he chuckled again with the 
 glee of the recollection. 
 
 What a night had followed! Small wonder 
 that he had accumulated such a virulence and 
 variety of fevers, he thought, as he recalled that 
 sleepless night of torment, when the throb of his 
 wounds was as nothing compared with the myriad 
 stings of the mosquitoes. There had been no 
 escaping them, and he had not dared to light a 
 fire. They had literally pumped his body full 
 of poison, so that, with the coming of day, eyes 
 swollen almost shut, he had stumbled blindly on, 
 not caring much when his head should be hacked 
 off and his carcass started on the way of Sagawa s 
 
8 THE RED ONE 
 
 to the cooking fire. Twenty-four hours had 
 made a wreck of him of mind as well as body. 
 He had scarcely retained his wits at all, so 
 maddened was he by the tremendous inoculation 
 of poison he had received. Several times he fired 
 his shotgun with effect into the shadows that 
 dogged him. Stinging day insects and gnats 
 added to his torment, while his bloody wounds 
 attracted hosts of loathsome flies that clung slug 
 gishly to his flesh and had to be brushed off and 
 crushed off. 
 
 Once, in that day, he heard again the wonder 
 ful sound, seemingly more distant, but rising im 
 periously above the nearer war-drums in the bush. 
 Right there was where he had made his mistake. 
 Thinking that he had passed beyond it and that, 
 therefore, it was between him and the beach of 
 Ringmanu, he had worked back toward it when 
 in reality he was penetrating deeper and deeper 
 into the mysterious heart of the unexplored 
 island. That night, crawling in among the 
 twisted roots of a banyan tree, he had slept from 
 exhaustion while the mosquitoes had had their will 
 of him. 
 
 Followed days and nights that were vague as 
 
THE RED ONE 9 
 
 nightmares in his memory. One clear vision he 
 remembered was of suddenly finding himself in 
 the midst of a bush village and watching the old 
 men and children fleeing into the jungle. All 
 had fled but one. From close at hand and above 
 him, a whimpering as of some animal in pain and 
 terror had startled him. And looking up he had 
 seen her a girl, or young woman, rather, sus 
 pended by one arm in the cooking sun. Perhaps 
 for days she had so hung. Her swollen, protrud 
 ing tongue spoke as much. Still alive, she gazed 
 at him with eyes of terror. Past help, he de 
 cided, as he noted the swellings of her legs which 
 advertised that the joints had been crushed and 
 the great bones broken. He resolved to shoot 
 her, and there the vision terminated. He could 
 not remember whether he had or not, any more 
 than could he remember how he chanced to be 
 in that village or how he succeeded in getting 
 away from it. 
 
 Many pictures, unrelated, came and went in 
 Bassett s mind as he reviewed that period of his 
 terrible wanderings. He remembered invading 
 another village of a dozen houses and driving all 
 before him with his shotgun save for one old man, 
 
io THE RED ONE 
 
 too feeble to flee, who spat at him and whined 
 and snarled as he dug open a ground-oven and 
 from amid the hot stones dragged forth a 
 roasted pig that steamed its essence deliciously 
 through its green-leaf wrappings. It was at this 
 place that a wantonness of savagery had seized 
 upon him. Having feasted, ready to depart with 
 a hind quarter of the pig in his hand, he delib 
 erately fired the grass thatch of a house with his 
 burning glass. 
 
 But seared deepest of all in Bassett s brain, 
 was the dank and noisome jungle. It actually 
 stank with evil, and it was always twilight. 
 Rarely did a shaft of sunlight penetrate its 
 matted roof a hundred feet overhead. And 
 beneath that roof was an aerial ooze of vegeta 
 tion, a monstrous, parasitic dripping of decadent 
 life-forms that rooted in death and lived on death. 
 And through all this he drifted, ever pursued by 
 the flitting shadows of the anthropophagi, them 
 selves ghosts of evil that dared not face him in 
 battle but that knew, soon or late, that they 
 would feed on him. Bassett remembered that at 
 the time, in lucid moments, he had likened him 
 self to a wounded bull pursued by plains 1 coyotes 
 
THE RED ONE n 
 
 too cowardly to battle with him for the meat of 
 him, yet certain of the inevitable end of him when 
 they would be full gorged. As the bull s horns 
 and stamping hoofs kept off the coyotes, so his 
 shotgun kept off these Solomon Islanders, these 
 twilight shades of bushmen of the island of 
 Guadalcanal. 
 
 Came the day of the grass lands. Abruptly, 
 as if cloven by the sword of God in the hand of 
 God, the jungle terminated. The edge of it, per 
 pendicular and as black as the infamy of it, was a 
 hundred feet up and down. And, beginning at the 
 edge of it, grew the grass sweet, soft, tender, 
 pasture grass that would have delighted the eyes 
 and beasts of any husbandman and that extended, 
 on and on, for leagues and leagues of velvet ver 
 dure, to the backbone of the great island, the 
 towering mountain range flung up by some ancient 
 earth-cataclysm, serrated and gullied but not yet 
 erased by the erosive tropic rains. But the grass ! 
 He had crawled into it a dozen yards, buried his 
 face in it, smelled it, and broken down in a fit of 
 involuntary weeping. 
 
 And, while he wept, the wonderful sound had 
 pealed forth if by peal, he had often thought 
 
12 THE RED ONE 
 
 since, an adequate description could be given of 
 the enunciation of so vast a sound so melting 
 sweet. Sweet it was as no sound ever heard. 
 Vast it was, of so mighty a resonance that it might 
 have proceeded from some brazen-throated mon 
 ster. And yet it called to him across that leagues- 
 wide savannah, and was like a benediction to his 
 long-suffering, pain-wracked spirit. 
 
 He remembered how he lay there in the grass, 
 wet-cheeked but no longer sobbing, listening to the 
 sound and wondering that he had been able to hear 
 it on the beach of Ringmanu. Some freak of air 
 pressures and air currents, he reflected, had made 
 it possible for the sound to carry so far. Such 
 conditions might not happen again in a thousand 
 days or ten thousand days ; but the one day it had 
 happened had been the day he landed from the 
 Nari for several hours collecting. Especially had 
 he been in quest of the famed jungle butterfly, a 
 foot across from wing-tip to wing-tip, as velvet- 
 dusky of lack of color as was the gloom of the 
 roof, of such lofty arboreal habits that it resorted 
 only to the jungle roof and could be brought down 
 only by a dose of shot. It was for this purpose 
 
THE RED ONE 13 
 
 that Sagawa had carried the twenty-gauge shot 
 gun. 
 
 Two days and nights he had spent crawling 
 across that belt of grass land. He had suffered 
 much, but pursuit had ceased at the jungle-edge. 
 And he would have died of thirst had not a heavy 
 thunderstorm revived him on the second day. 
 
 And then had come Balatta. In the first shade, 
 where the savannah yielded to the dense mountain 
 jungle, he had collapsed to die. At first she had 
 squealed with delight at sight of his helplessness, 
 and was for beating his brain out with a stout for 
 est branch. Perhaps it was his very utter help 
 lessness that had appealed to her, and perhaps it 
 was her human curiosity that made her refrain, 
 At any rate, she had refrained, for he opened his 
 eyes again under the impending blow, and saw her 
 studying him intently. What especially struck her 
 about him were his blue eyes and white skin. 
 Coolly she had squatted on her hams, spat on his 
 arm, and with her finger-tips scrubbed away the 
 dirt of days and nights of muck and jungle that 
 sullied the pristine whiteness of his skin. 
 
 And everything about her had struck him espe- 
 
i 4 THE RED ONE 
 
 daily, although there was nothing conventional 
 about her at all. He laughed weakly at the recol 
 lection, for she had been as innocent of garb as 
 Eve before the fig-leaf adventure. Squat and lean 
 at the same time, asymmetrically limbed, string- 
 muscled as if with lengths of cordage, dirt-caked 
 from infancy save for casual showers, she was as 
 unbeautiful a prototype of woman as he, with a 
 scientist s eye, had ever gazed upon. Her breasts 
 advertised at the one time her maturity and youth; 
 and, if by nothing else, her sex was advertised by 
 the one article of finery with which she was 
 adorned, namely a pig s tail, thrust through a hole 
 in her left ear-lobe. So lately had the tail been 
 severed, that its raw end still oozed blood that 
 dried upon her shoulder like so much candle-drop 
 pings. And her face! A twisted and wizened 
 complex of apish features, perforated by upturned, 
 sky-open, Mongolian nostrils, by a mouth that 
 sagged from a huge upper-lip and faded precipi 
 tately into a retreating chin, and by peering queru 
 lous eyes that blinked as blink the eyes of denizens 
 of monkey-cages. 
 
 Not even the water she brought him in a forest- 
 leaf, and the ancient and half-putrid chunk of roast 
 
THE RED ONE 15 
 
 pig, could redeem in the slightest the grotesque 
 hideousness of her. When he had eaten weakly 
 for a space, he closed his eyes in order not to see 
 her, although again and again she poked them open 
 to peer at the blue of them. Then had come the 
 sound. Nearer, much nearer, he knew it to be; 
 and he knew equally well, despite the weary way 
 he had come, that it was still many hours distant. 
 The effect of it on her had been startling. She 
 cringed under it, with averted face, moaning and 
 chattering with fear. But after it had lived its 
 full life of an hour, he closed his eyes and fell 
 asleep with Balatta brushing the flies from him. 
 
 When he awoke it was night, and she was gone. 
 But he was aware of renewed strength, and, by 
 then too thoroughly inoculated by the mosquito 
 poison to suffer further inflammation, he closed his 
 eyes and slept an unbroken stretch till sun-up. A 
 little later Balatta had returned, bringing with her 
 a half dozen women who, unbeautiful as they were, 
 were patently not so unbeautiful as she. She evi 
 denced by her conduct that she considered him her 
 find, her property, and the pride she took in show 
 ing him off would have been ludicrous had his situ 
 ation not been so desperate. 
 
1 6 THE RED ONE 
 
 Later, after what had been to him a terrible 
 journey of miles, when he collapsed in front of the 
 devil-devil house in the shadow of the breadfruit 
 tree, she had shown very lively ideas on the matter 
 of retaining possession of him. Ngurn, whom 
 Bassett was to know afterward as the devil-devil 
 doctor, priest, or medicine man of the village, had 
 wanted his head. Others of the grinning and 
 chattering monkey-men, all as stark of clothes and 
 bestial of appearance as Balatta, had wanted his 
 body for the roasting oven. At that time he had 
 not understood their language, if by language 
 might be dignified the uncouth sounds they made 
 to represent ideas. But Bassett had thoroughly 
 understood the matter of debate, especially when 
 the men pressed and prodded and felt of the flesh 
 of him as if he were so much commodity in a 
 butcher s stall. 
 
 Balatta had been losing the debate rapidly, 
 when the accident happened. One of the men, 
 curiously examining Bassett s shotgun, managed to 
 cock and pull a trigger. The recoil of the butt 
 into the pit of the man s stomach had not been the 
 most sanguinary result, for the charge of shot, at a 
 
THE RED ONE 17 
 
 distance of a yard, had blown the head of one of 
 the debaters into nothingness. 
 
 Even Balatta joined the others in flight, and, ere 
 they returned, his senses already reeling from the 
 oncoming fever-attack, Bassett had regained pos 
 session of the gun. Whereupon, although his 
 teeth chattered with the ague and his swimming 
 eyes could scarcely see, he held onto his fading 
 consciousness until he could intimidate the bush- 
 men with the simple magics of compass, watch, 
 burning glass, and matches. At the last, with due 
 emphasis of solemnity and awfulness, he had 
 killed a young pig with his shotgun and promptly 
 fainted. 
 
 Bassett flexed his arm-muscles in quest of what 
 possible strength might reside in such weakness, 
 and dragged himself slowly and totteringly to his 
 feet. He was shockingly emaciated; yet, during 
 the various convalescences of the many months of 
 his long sickness, he had never regained quite the 
 same degree of strength as this time. What he 
 feared was another relapse such as he had already 
 frequently experienced. Without drugs, without 
 even quinine, he had managed so far to live 
 
1 8 THE RED ONE 
 
 through a combination of the most pernicious and 
 most malignant of malarial and black-water 
 fevers. But could he continue to endure? Such 
 was his everlasting query. For, like the genuine 
 scientist he was, he would not be content to die 
 until he had solved the secret of the sound. 
 
 Supported by a staff, he staggered the few steps 
 to the devil-devil house where death and Ngurn 
 reigned in gloom. Almost as infamously dark 
 and evil-stinking as the jungle was the devil-devil 
 house in Bassett s opinion. Yet therein was 
 usually to be found his favorite crony and gossip, 
 Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a discussion, 
 the while he sat in the ashes of death and in a slow 
 smoke shrewdly revolved curing human heads sus 
 pended from the rafters. For, through the 
 months interval of consciousness of his long sick 
 ness, Bassett had mastered the psychological sim 
 plicities and lingual difficulties of the language of 
 the tribe of Ngurn and Balatta, and Gngngn 
 the latter the addle-headed young chief who was 
 ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered intrigue had 
 it, was the son of Ngurn. 
 
 "Will the Red One speak to-day?" Bassett 
 asked, by this time so accustomed to the old man s 
 
THE RED ONE 19 
 
 gruesome occupation as to take even an interest in 
 the progress of the smoke-curing. 
 
 With the eye of an expert Ngurn examined the 
 particular head he was at work upon. 
 
 " It will be ten days before I can say * finish, 
 he said. " Never has any man fixed heads like 
 these." 
 
 Bassett smiled inwardly at the old fellow s re 
 luctance to talk with him of the Red One. It had 
 always been so. Never, by any chance, had 
 Ngurn or any other member of the weird tribe di 
 vulged the slightest hint of any physical character 
 istic of the Red One. Physical the Red One must 
 be, to emit the wonderful sound, and though it was 
 called the Red One, Bassett could not be sure that 
 red represented the color of it. Red enough were 
 the deeds and powers of it, from what abstract 
 clews he had gleaned. Not alone, had Ngurn in 
 formed him, was the Red One more bestial power 
 ful than the neighbor tribal gods, ever a-thirst for 
 the red blood of living human sacrifices, but the 
 neighbor gods themselves were sacrificed and tor 
 mented before him. He was the god of a dozen 
 allied villages similar to this one, which was the 
 central and commanding village of the federation. 
 
20 THE RED ONE 
 
 By virtue of the Red One many alien villages had 
 been devastated and even wiped out, the prisoners 
 sacrificed to the Red One. This was true to-day, 
 and it extended back into old history carried down 
 by word of mouth through the generations. 
 When he, Ngurn, had been a young man, the tribes 
 beyond the grass lands had made a war raid. In 
 the counter raid, Ngurn and his fighting folk had 
 made many prisoners. Of children alone over 
 five score living had been bled white before the 
 Red One, and many, many more men and women. 
 
 The Thunderer, was another of Ngurn s names 
 for the mysterious deity. Also at times was he 
 called The Loud Shouter, The God-Voiced, The 
 Bird-Throated, The One with the Throat Sweet 
 as the Throat of the Honey-Bird, The Sun Singer, 
 and The Star-Born. 
 
 Why The Star-Born? In vain Bassett inter 
 rogated Ngurn. According to that old devil-devil 
 doctor, the Red One had always been, just where 
 he was at present, forever singing and thundering 
 his will over men. But Ngurn s father, wrapped 
 in decaying grass-matting and hanging even then 
 over their heads among the smoky rafters of the 
 devil-devil house, had held otherwise. That de- 
 
THE RED ONE 21 
 
 parted wise one had believed that the Red One 
 came from out of the starry night, else why so 
 his argument had run had the old and forgotten 
 ones passed his name down as the Star-Born? 
 Bassett could not but recognize something cogent 
 in such argument. But Ngurn affirmed the long 
 years of his long life, wherein he had gazed upon 
 many starry nights, yet never had he found a star 
 on grass land or in jungle depth and he had 
 looked for them. True, he had beheld shooting 
 stars (this in reply to Bassett s contention) ; but 
 likewise had he beheld the phosphorescence of fun 
 goid growths and rotten meat and fireflies on dark 
 nights, and the flames of wood-fires and of blazing 
 candle-nuts; yet what were flame and blaze and 
 glow when they had flamed, and blazed and 
 glowed? Answer: memories, memories only, of 
 things which had ceased to be, like memories of 
 matings accomplished, of feasts forgotten, of de 
 sires that were the ghosts of desires, flaring, flam 
 ing, burning, yet unrealized in achievement of 
 easement and satisfaction. Where was the appe 
 tite of yesterday? the roasted flesh of the wild 
 pig the hunter s arrow failed to slay? the maid, 
 unwed and dead, ere the young man knew her ? 
 
22 THE RED ONE 
 
 A memory was not a star, was Ngurn s conten 
 tion. How could a memory be a star? Further, 
 after all his long life he still observed the starry 
 night-sky unaltered. Never had he noted the ab 
 sence of a single star from its accustomed place. 
 Besides, stars were fire, and the Red One was not 
 fire which last involuntary betrayal told Bassett 
 nothing. 
 
 "Will the Red One speak to-morrow?" he 
 queried. 
 
 Ngurn shrugged his shoulders as who should 
 say. 
 
 " And the day after? and the day after 
 that? " Bassett persisted. 
 
 " I would like to have the curing of your head, * 
 Ngurn changed the subject. " It is different from 
 any other head. No devil-devil has a head like it. 
 Besides, I would cure it well. I would take 
 months and months. The moons would come and 
 the moons would go, and the smoke would be very 
 slow, and I should myself gather the materials for 
 the curing smoke. The skin would not wrinkle. 
 It would be as smooth as your skin now." 
 
 He stood up, and from the dim rafters grimed 
 with the smoking of countless heads, where day 
 
THE RED ONE 23 
 
 was no more than a gloom, took down a matting- 
 wrapped parcel and began to open it. 
 
 " It is a head like yours," he said, " but it is 
 poorly cured." 
 
 Bassett had pricked up his ears at the suggestion 
 that it was a white man s head; for he had long 
 since come to accept that these jungle-dwellers, in 
 the midmost center of the great island, had never 
 had intercourse with white men. Certainly he had 
 found them without the almost universal Beche de 
 mer English of the west South Pacific. Nor had 
 they knowledge of tobacco, nor of gunpowder. 
 Their few precious knives, made from lengths of 
 hoop-iron, and their few and more precious toma 
 hawks, made from cheap trade hatchets, he had 
 surmised they had captured in war from the bush- 
 men of the jungle beyond the grass lands, and that 
 they, in turn, had similarly gained them from the 
 salt water men who fringed the coral beaches of 
 the shore and had contact with the occasional white 
 men. 
 
 4 The folk in the out beyond do not know how 
 to cure heads," old Ngurn explained, as he drew 
 forth from the filthy matting and placed in Bas- 
 sett s hands an indubitable white man s head. 
 
24 THE RED ONE 
 
 Ancient it was beyond question; white it was as 
 the blond hair attested. He could have sworn it 
 once belonged to an Englishman, and to an 
 Englishman of long before by token of the heavy 
 gold circlets still threaded in the withered ear- 
 lobes. 
 
 " Now your head . . ." the devil-devil doctor 
 began on his favorite topic. 
 
 " I ll tell you what," Bassett interrupted, struck 
 by a new idea. " When I die I ll let you have my 
 head to cure, if, first, you take me to look upon 
 the Red One." 
 
 " I will have your head anyway when you are 
 dead," Ngurn rejected the proposition. He 
 added, with the brutal frankness of the savage: 
 " Besides, you have not long to live. You are 
 almost a dead man now. You will grow less 
 strong. In not many months I shall have you here 
 turning and turning in the smoke. It is pleasant, 
 through the long afternoons, to turn the head of 
 one you have known as well as I know you. And 
 I shall talk to you and tell you the many secrets 
 you want to know. Which will not matter, for 
 you will be dead." 
 
 "Ngurn," Bassett threatened in sudden anger. 
 
THE RED ONE 25 
 
 u You know the Baby Thunder in the Iron that is 
 mine." (This was in reference to his all-potent 
 and all-awful shotgun.) " I can kill you any time, 
 and then you will not get my head." 
 
 " Just the same, will Gngngn, or some one else 
 of my folk get it," Ngurn complacently assured 
 him. u And just the same will it turn and turn 
 here in the devil-devil house in the smoke. The 
 quicker you slay me with your Baby Thunder, the 
 quicker will your head turn in the smoke." 
 
 And Bassett knew he was beaten in the discus 
 sion. 
 
 What was the Red One? Bassett asked him 
 self a thousand times in the succeeding week, while 
 he seemed to grow stronger. What was the 
 source of the wonderful sound? What was this 
 Sun Singer, this Star-Born One, this mysterious 
 deity, as bestial-conducted as the black and kinky- 
 headed and monkey-like human beasts who wor 
 shiped it, and whose silver-sweet, bull-mouthed 
 singing and commanding he had heard at the taboo 
 distance for so long? 
 
 Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable 
 curing of his head when he was dead. Gngngn, 
 imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic, 
 
26 THE RED ONE 
 
 too much under the sway of Ngurn, to be consid 
 ered. Remained Balatta, who, from the time she 
 found him and poked his blue eyes open to recru 
 descence of her grotesque, female hideousness, had 
 continued his adorer. Woman she was, and he 
 had long known that the only way to win from her 
 treason to her tribe was through the woman s 
 heart of her. 
 
 Bassett was a fastidious man. He had never 
 recovered from the initial horror caused by 
 Balatta s female awfulness. Back in England, 
 even at best, the charm of woman, to him, had 
 never been robust. Yet now, resolutely, as only 
 a man can do who is capable of martyring himself 
 for the cause of science, he proceeded to violate 
 all the fineness and delicacy of his nature by mak 
 ing love to the unthinkably disgusting bushwoman. 
 
 He shuddered, but with averted face hid his 
 grimaces and swallowed his gorge as he put his 
 arm around her dirt-crusted shoulders and felt the 
 contact of her rancid-oily and kinky hair with his 
 neck and chin. But he nearly screamed when she 
 succumbed to that caress so at the very first of the 
 courtship and mowed and gibbered and squealed 
 little, queer, pig-like gurgly noises of delight. It 
 
THE RED ONE 27 
 
 was too much. And the next he did in the singular 
 courtship was to take her down to the stream and 
 give her a vigorous scrubbing. 
 
 From then on he devoted himself to her like a 
 true swain as frequently and for as long at a time 
 as his will could override his repugnance. But 
 marriage, which she ardently suggested, with due 
 observance of tribal custom, he balked at. Fortu 
 nately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe. Thus, 
 Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of 
 crocodile. This had been ordained at his birth. 
 Gngngn was denied ever the touch of woman. 
 Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be 
 purged only by the death of the offending female. 
 It had happened once, since Bassett s arrival, when 
 a girl of nine, running in play, stumbled and fell 
 against the sacred chief. And the girl-child was 
 seen no more. In whispers, Balatta told Bassett 
 that she had been three days and nights in dying 
 before the Red One. As for Balatta, the bread 
 fruit was taboo to her. For which Bassett was 
 thankful. The taboo might have been water. 
 
 For himself, he fabricated a special taboo. 
 Only could he marry, he explained, when the 
 Southern Cross rode highest in the sky Knowing 
 
28 THE RED ONE 
 
 his astronomy, he thus gained a reprieve of nearly 
 nine months; and he was confident that within that 
 time he would either be dead or escaped to the 
 coast with full knowledge of the Red One and of 
 the source of the Red One s wonderful voice. At 
 first he had fancied the Red One to be some colos 
 sal statue, like Memnon, rendered vocal under 
 certain temperature conditions of sunlight. But 
 when, after a war raid, a batch of prisoners was 
 brought in and the sacrifice made at night, in the 
 midst of rain, when the sun could play no part, the 
 Red One had been more vocal than usual, Bassett 
 discarded that hypothesis. 
 
 In company with Balatta, sometimes with men 
 and parties of women, the freedom of the jungle 
 was his for three quadrants of the compass. But 
 the fourth quadrant, which contained the Red 
 One s abiding place, was taboo. He made more 
 thorough love to Balatta also saw to it that she 
 scrubbed herself more frequently. Eternal fe 
 male she was, capable of any treason for the sake 
 of love. And, though the sight of her was provo 
 cative of nausea and the contact of her provocative 
 of despair, although he could not escape her awful- 
 ness in his dream-haunted nightmares of her, he 
 
THE RED ONE 29 
 
 nevertheless was aware of the cosmic verity of sex 
 that animated her and that made her own life of 
 less value than the happiness of her lover with 
 whom she hoped to mate. Juliet or Balatta? 
 Where was the intrinsic difference? The soft and 
 tender product of ultra-civilization, or her bestial 
 prototype of a hundred thousand years before her? 
 there was no difference. 
 
 Bassett was a scientist first, a humanist after 
 ward. In the jungle-heart of Guadalcanal he put 
 the affair to the test, as in the laboratory he would 
 have put to the test any chemical reaction. He in 
 creased his feigned ardor for the bushwoman, at 
 the same time increasing the imperiousness of his 
 will of desire over her to be led to look upon the 
 Red One face to face. It was the old story, he 
 recognized, that the woman must pay, and it oc 
 curred when the two of them, one day, were catch 
 ing the unclassified and unnamed little black fish, 
 an inch long, half-eel and half-scaled, rotund with 
 salmon-golden roe, that frequented the fresh 
 water and that were esteemed, raw and whole, 
 fresh or putrid, a perfect delicacy. Prone in the 
 muck of the decaying jungle-floor, Balatta threw 
 herself, clutching his ankles with her hands, kissing 
 
30 THE RED ONE 
 
 his feet and making slubbery noises that chilled 
 his backbone up and down again. She begged him 
 to kill her rather than exact this ultimate love-pay 
 ment. She told him.of the penalty of breaking the 
 taboo of the Red One a-week of torture, living, 
 the details of which she yammered out from her 
 face in the mire until he realized that he was yet 
 a tyro in knowledge of the frightfulness the human 
 was capable of wreaking on the human. 
 
 Yet did Bassett insist on having his man s will 
 satisfied, at the woman s risk, that he might solve 
 the mystery of the Red One s singing, though she 
 should die long and horribly and screaming. And 
 Balatta, being mere woman, yielded. She led him 
 into the forbidden quadrant. An abrupt moun 
 tain, shouldering in from the north to meet a sim 
 ilar intrusion from the south, tormented the stream 
 in which they had fished into a deep and gloomy 
 gorge. After a mile along the gorge, the way 
 plunged sharply upward until they crossed a saddle 
 of raw limestone which attracted his geologist s 
 eye. Still climbing, although he paused often 
 from sheer physical weakness, they scaled forest- 
 clad heights until they emerged on a naked mesa 
 or tableland Bassett recognized the stuff of its 
 
THE RED ONE 31 
 
 composition as black volcanic sand, and knew that 
 a pocket magnet could have captured a full load of 
 the sharply angular grains he trod upon. 
 
 And then, holding Balatta by the hand and lead 
 ing her onward, he came to it a tremendous pit, 
 obviously artificial, in the heart of the plateau. 
 Old history, the South Seas Sailing Directions, 
 scores of remembered data and connotations swift 
 and furious, surged through his brain. It was 
 Mendana who had discovered the islands and 
 named them Solomon s, believing that he had 
 found that monarch s fabled mines. They had 
 laughed at the old navigator s child-like credulity; 
 and yet here stood himself, Bassett, on the rim of 
 an excavation for all the world like the diamond 
 pits of South Africa. 
 
 But no diamond this that he gazed down upon. 
 Rather was it a pearl, with the depth of iridescence 
 of a pearl; but of a size all pearls of earth and 
 time welded into one, could not have totaled; and 
 of a color undreamed of any pearl, or of anything 
 else, for that matter, for it was the color of the 
 Red One. And the Red One himself Bassett 
 knew it to be on the instant. A perfect sphere, 
 fully two hundred feet in diameter, the top of it 
 
32 THE RED ONE 
 
 was a hundred feet below the level of the rim. 
 He likened the color quality of it to lacquer. In 
 deed, he took it to be some sort of lacquer, applied 
 by man, but a lacquer too marvelously clever 
 to have been manufactured by the bush-folk. 
 Brighter than bright cherry-red, its richness of 
 color was as if it were red builded upon red. It 
 glowed and iridesced in the sunlight as if gleaming 
 up from underlay under underlay of red. 
 
 In vain Balatta strove to dissuade him from de 
 scending. She threw herself in the dirt ; but, when 
 he continued down the trail that spiraled the pit- 
 wall, she followed, cringing and whimpering her 
 terror. That the red sphere had been dug out 
 as a precious thing, was patent. Considering the 
 paucity of members of the federated twelve vil 
 lages and their primitive tools and methods, Bas- 
 sett knew that the toil of a myriad generations 
 could scarcely have made that enormous excava 
 tion. 
 
 He found the pit bottom carpeted with human 
 bones, among which, battered and defaced, lay 
 village gods of wood and stone. Some, covered 
 with obscene totemic figures and designs, were 
 carved from solid tree trunks forty or fifty feet in 
 
THE RED ONE 33 
 
 length. He noted the absence of the shark and 
 turtle gods, so common among the shore villages, 
 and was amazed at the constant recurrence of the 
 helmet motive. What did these jungle savages of 
 the dark heart of Guadalcanal know of helmets? 
 Had Mendana s men-at-arms worn helmets and 
 penetrated here centuries before? And if not, 
 then whence had the bush-folk caught the motive ? 
 
 Advancing over the litter of gods and bones, 
 Balatta whimpering at his heels, Bassett entered 
 the shadow of the Red One and passed on under 
 its gigantic overhang until he touched it with his 
 finger-tips. No lacquer that. Nor was the sur 
 face smooth as it should have been in the case of 
 lacquer. On the contrary, it was corrugated and 
 pitted, with here and there patches that showed 
 signs of heat and fusing. Also, the substance of 
 it was metal, though unlike any metal or combina 
 tion of metals he had ever known. As for the 
 color itself, he decided it to be no application. It 
 was the intrinsic color of the metal itself. 
 
 He moved his finger-tips, which up to that had 
 merely rested, along the surface, and felt the 
 whole gigantic sphere quicken and live and re 
 spond. It was incredible! So light a touch on 
 
34 THE RED ONE 
 
 so vast a mass ! Yet did it quiver under the finger 
 tip caress in rhythmic vibrations that became 
 whisperings and rustlings and mutterings of sound 
 but of sound so different; so elusive thin that it 
 was shimmeringly sibillant; so mellow that it was 
 maddening sweet, piping like an elfin horn, which 
 last was just what Bassett decided would be like a 
 peal from some bell of the gods reaching earth 
 ward from across space. 
 
 He looked to Balatta with swift questioning; 
 but the voice of the Red One he had evoked had 
 flung her face-downward and moaning among the 
 bones. He returned to contemplation of the 
 prodigy. Hollow it was, and of no metal known 
 on earth, was his conclusion. It was right-named 
 by the ones of old-time as the Star-Born. Only 
 from the stars could it have come, and no thing of 
 chance was it. It was a creation of artifice and 
 mind. Such perfection of form, such hollowness 
 that it certainly possessed, could not be the result 
 of mere fortuitousness. A child of intelligences, 
 remote and unguessable, working corporally in 
 metals, it indubitably was. He stared at it in 
 amaze, his brain a racing wild-fire of hypotheses to 
 account for this far-journeyer who had adventured 
 
THE RED ONE 35 
 
 the night of space, threaded the stars, and now 
 rose before him and above him, exhumed by 
 patient anthropophagi, pitted and lacquered by its 
 fiery bath in two atmospheres. 
 
 But was the color a lacquer of heat upon some 
 familiar metal? Or was it an intrinsic quality of 
 the metal itself? He thrust in the blade-point of 
 his pocket-knife to test the constitution of the stuff. 
 Instantly the entire sphere burst into a mighty 
 whispering, sharp with protest, almost twanging 
 goldenly if a whisper could possibly be considered 
 to twang, rising higher, sinking deeper, the two 
 extremes of the registry of sound threatening to 
 complete the circle and coalesce into the bull- 
 mouthed thundering he had so often heard beyond 
 the taboo distance. 
 
 Forgetful of safety, of his own life itself, en 
 tranced by the wonder of the unthinkable and un- 
 guessable thing, he raised his knife to strike heav 
 ily from a long stroke, but was prevented by 
 Balatta. She upreared on her own knees in an 
 agony of terror, clasping his knees and supplicating 
 him to desist In the intensity of her desire to im 
 press him, she put her forearm between her teeth 
 and sank them to the bone. 
 
36 THE RED ONE 
 
 He scarcely observed her act, although he 
 yielded atomatically to his gentler instincts and 
 withheld the knife-hack. To him, human life had 
 dwarfed to microscopic proportions before this 
 colossal portent of higher life from within the dis 
 tances of the sidereal universe. As had she been a 
 dog, he kicked the ugly little bushwoman to her 
 feet and compelled her to start with him on an 
 encirclement of the base. Part way around, he 
 encountered horrors. Even, among the others, 
 did he recognize the sun-shriveled remnant of the 
 nine-years girl who had accidentally broken 
 Chief Gngngn s personality taboo. And, among 
 what was left of these that had passed, he encoun 
 tered what was left of one who had not yet passed. 
 Truly had the bush-folk named themselves into the 
 name of the Red One, seeing in him their own im 
 age which they strove to placate and please with 
 such red offerings. 
 
 Farther around, always treading the bones and 
 images of humans and gods that constituted the 
 floor of this ancient charnel house of sacrifice, he 
 came upon the device by which the Red One was 
 made to send his call singing thunderingly across 
 the jungle-belts and grass-lands to the far beach of 
 
THE RED ONE 37 
 
 Ringmanu. Simple and primitive was it as was the 
 Red One s consummate artifice. A great king 
 post, half a hundred feet in length, seasoned by 
 centuries of superstitious care, carven into dynas 
 ties of gods, each superimposed, each helmeted, 
 each seated in the open mouth of a crocodile, was 
 slung by ropes, twisted of climbing vegetable para 
 sites, from the apex of a tripod of three great 
 forest trunks, themselves carved into grinning and 
 grotesque adumbrations of man s modern concepts 
 of art and god. From the striker king-post, were 
 suspended ropes of climbers to which men could 
 apply their strength and direction. Like a batter 
 ing ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward 
 against the mighty, red-iridescent sphere. 
 
 Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned 
 religiously for himself and the twelve tribes under 
 him. Bassett laughed aloud, almost with mad 
 ness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger, 
 winged with intelligence across space, to fall into a 
 bushman stronghold and be worshiped by ape-like, 
 rnan-eating and head-hunting savages. It was as 
 if God s Word had fallen into the muck mire of 
 the abyss underlying the bottom of hell; as if Je 
 hovah s Commandments had been presented on 
 
3 8 THE RED ONE 
 
 carved stone to the monkeys of the monkey cage 
 at the Zoo; as if the Sermon on the Mount had 
 been preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics. 
 
 The slow weeks passed. The nights, by elec 
 tion, Bassett spent on the ashen floor of the devil- 
 devil house, beneath the ever-swinging, slow-curing 
 heads. His reason for this was that it was taboo 
 to the lesser sex of woman, and, therefore, a 
 refuge for him from Balatta, who grew more per- 
 secutingly and perilously loverly as the Southern 
 Cross rode higher in the sky and marked the 
 imminence of her nuptials. His days Bassett 
 spent in a hammock swung under the shade of 
 the great breadfruit tree before the devil-devil 
 house. There were breaks in this program, when, 
 in the comas of his devastating fever-attacks, he 
 lay for days and nights in the house of heads. 
 Ever he struggled to combat the fever, to live, to 
 continue to live, to grow strong and stronger 
 against the day when he would be strong enough 
 to dare the grass-lands and the belted jungle be 
 yond, and win to the beach, and to some labor- 
 recruiting, black-birding ketch or schooner, and 
 on to civilization and the men of civilization, to 
 
THE RED ONE 39 
 
 whom he could give news of the message from 
 other worlds that lay, darkly worshiped by beast- 
 men, in the black heart of Guadalcanal s mid 
 most center. 
 
 On other nights, lying late under the breadfruit 
 tree, Bassett spent long hours watching the slow 
 setting of the western stars beyond the black wall 
 of jungle where it had been thrust back by the 
 clearing for the village. Possessed of more than 
 a cursory knowledge of astronomy, he took a sick 
 man s pleasure in speculating as to the dwellers on 
 the unseen worlds of those incredibly remote suns, 
 to haunt whose houses of light, life came forth, a 
 shy visitant, from the rayless crypts of matter. 
 He could no more apprehend limits to time than 
 bounds to space. No subversive radium specula 
 tions had shaken his steady scientific faith in the 
 conservation of energy and the indestructibility of 
 matter. Always and forever must there have 
 been stars. And surely, in that cosmic ferment, 
 all must be comparatively alike, comparatively of 
 the same substance, or substances, save for the 
 freaks of the ferment. All must obey, or com 
 pose, the same laws that ran without infraction 
 through the entire experience of man. There- 
 
40 THE RED ONE 
 
 fore, he argued and agreed, must worlds and life 
 be appanages to all the suns as they were appan 
 ages to the particular sun of his own solar sys 
 tem. 
 
 Even as he lay here, under the breadfruit tree, 
 an intelligence that stared across the starry gulfs, 
 so must all the universe be exposed to the ceaseless 
 scrutiny of innumerable eyes, like his, though 
 grantedly different, with behind them, by the same 
 token, intelligences that questioned and sought the 
 meaning and the construction of the whole. So 
 reasoning, he felt his soul go forth in kinship with 
 that august company, that multitude whose gaze 
 was forever upon the arras of infinity. 
 
 Who were they, what were they, those far dis 
 tant and superior ones who had bridged the sky 
 with their gigantic, red-iridescent, heaven-singing 
 message? Surely, and long since, had they, too, 
 trod the path on which man had so recently, by 
 the calendar of the cosmos, set his feet. And to 
 be able to send such a message across the pit of 
 space, surely they had reached those heights to 
 which man, in tears and travail and bloody sweat, 
 in darkness and confusion of many counsels, was 
 so slowly struggling. And what were they on 
 
THE RED ONE 41 
 
 their heights ? Had they won Brotherhood? Or 
 had they learned that the law of love imposed the 
 penalty of weakness and decay? Was strife, life? 
 Was the rule of all the universe the pitiless rule 
 of natural selection? And, and most immediately 
 and poignantly, were their far conclusions, their 
 long-won wisdoms, shut even then in the huge, 
 metallic heart of the Red One, waiting for the first 
 earth-man to read? Of one thing he was certain: 
 No drop of red dew shaken from the lion-mane of 
 some sun in torment, was the sounding sphere. It 
 was of design, not chance, and it contained the 
 speech and wisdom of the stars. 
 
 What engines and elements and mastered forces, 
 what lore and mysteries and destiny-controls, 
 might be there ! Undoubtedly, since so much 
 could be inclosed in so little a thing as the foun 
 dation stone of public building, this enormous 
 sphere should contain vast histories, profounds of 
 research achieved beyond man s wildest guesses, 
 laws and formulae that, easily mastered, would 
 make man s life on earth, individual and collective, 
 spring up from its present mire to inconceivable 
 heights of purity and power. It was Time s great 
 est gift to blindfold, insatiable, and sky-aspiring 
 
42 THE RED ONE 
 
 man. And to him, Bassett, had been vouchsafed 
 the lordly fortune to be the first to receive this 
 message from man s interstellar kin ! 
 
 No white man, much less no outland man of the 
 other bush-tribes, had gazed upon the Red One 
 and lived. Such the law expounded by Ngurn to 
 Bassett. There was such a thing as blood broth 
 erhood, Bassett, in return, had often argued in the 
 past. But Ngurn had stated solemnly no. Even 
 the blood brotherhood was outside the favor of the 
 Red One. Only a man born within the tribe could 
 look upon the Red One and live. But now, his 
 guilty secret known only to Balatta, whose fear of 
 immolation before the Red One fast-sealed her 
 lips, the situation was different. What he had to 
 do was to recover from the abominable fevers that 
 weakened him and gain to civilization. Then 
 would he lead an expedition back, and, although 
 the entire population of Guadalcanal be destroyed, 
 extract from the heart of the Red One the message 
 of the world from other worlds. 
 
 But Bassett s relapses grew more frequent, his 
 brief convalescences less and less vigorous, his 
 periods of coma longer, until he came to know, 
 beyond the last promptings of the optimism inher- 
 
THE RED ONE 43 
 
 ent in so tremendous a constitution as his own, that 
 he would never live to cross the grass lands, per 
 forate the perilous coast jungle, and reach the sea. 
 He faded as the Southern Cross rose higher in the 
 sky, till even Balatta knew that he would be dead 
 ere the nuptial date determined by his taboo. 
 Ngurn made pilgrimage personally and gathered 
 the smoke materials for the curing of Bassett s 
 head, and to him made proud announcement and 
 exhibition of the artistic perfectness of his inten 
 tion when Bassett should be dead. As for him 
 self, Bassett was not shocked. Too long and too 
 deeply had life ebbed down in him to bite him with 
 fear of its impending extinction. He continued to 
 persist, alternating periods of unconsciousness with 
 periods of semi-consciousness, dreamy and unreal, 
 in which he idly wondered whether he had ever 
 truly beheld the Red One or whether it was a night 
 mare fancy of delirium. 
 
 Came the day when all mists and cobwebs dis 
 solved, when he found his brain clear as a bell, 
 and took just appraisement of his body s weak 
 ness. Neither hand nor foot could he lift. So 
 little control of his body did he have, that he was 
 scarcely aware of possessing one. Lightly indeed 
 
44 THE RED ONE 
 
 his flesh sat upon his soul, and his soul, in its brief 
 ness of clarity, knew by its very clarity, that the 
 black of cessation was near. He knew the end 
 was close ; knew that in all truth he had with his 
 eyes beheld the Red One, the messenger between 
 the worlds; knew that he would never live to carry 
 that message to the world that message, for 
 aught to the contrary, which might already have 
 waited man s hearing in the heart of Guadalcanal 
 for ten thousand years. And Bassett stirred with 
 resolve, calling Ngurn to him, out under the shade 
 of the breadfruit tree, and with the old devil-devil 
 doctor discussing the terms and arrangements of 
 his last life effort, his final adventure in the quick 
 of the flesh. 
 
 " I know the law, O Ngurn," he concluded the 
 matter. " Whoso is not of the folk may not look 
 upon the Red One and live. I shall not live any 
 way. Your young men shall carry me before the 
 face of the Red One, and I shall look upon him, 
 and hear his voice, and thereupon die, under your 
 hand, O Ngurn. Thus will the three things be 
 satisfied : the law, my desire, and your quicker pos 
 session of my head for which all your preparations 
 wait." 
 
THE RED ONE 4 5 
 
 To which Ngurn consented, adding: 
 " It is better so. A sick man who cannot get 
 well is foolish to live on for so little a while. 
 Also, is it better for the living that he should go. 
 You have been much in the way of late. Not but 
 what it was good for me to talk to such a wise one. 
 But for moons of days we have held little talk. 
 Instead, you have taken up room in the house of 
 heads, making noises like a dying pig, or talking 
 much and loudly in your own language which I do 
 not understand. This has been a confusion to me, 
 for I like to think on the great things of the light 
 and dark as I turn the heads in the smoke. Your 
 much noise has thus been a disturbance to the long- 
 learning and hatching of the final wisdom that 
 will be mine before I die. As for you, upon whom 
 the dark has already brooded, it is well that you die 
 now. And I promise you, in the long days to come 
 when I turn your head in the smoke, no man of the 
 tribe shall come in to disturb us. And I will tell 
 you many secrets, for I am an old man and very 
 wise, and I shall be adding wisdom to wisdom as 
 I turn your head in the smoke." 
 
 So a litter was made, and, borne on the shoul 
 ders of half a dozen of the men, Bassett departed 
 
46 THE RED ONE 
 
 on the last little adventure that was to cap the total 
 adventure, for him, of living. With a body of 
 which he was scarcely aware, for even the pain had 
 been exhausted out of it, and with a bright clear 
 brain that accommodated him to a quiet ecstasy of 
 sheer lucidness of thought, he lay back on the 
 lurching litter and watched the fading of the 
 passing world, beholding for the last time the 
 breadfruit tree before the devil-devil house, the 
 dim day beneath the matted jungle roof, the 
 gloomy gorge between the shouldering mountains, 
 the saddle of raw limestone, and the mesa of 
 black, volcanic sand. 
 
 Down the spiral path of the pit they bore him, 
 encircling the sheening, glowing Red One that 
 seemed ever imminent to iridesce from color and 
 light into sweet singing and thunder. And over 
 bones and logs of immolated men and gods they 
 bore him, past the horrors of other immolated 
 ones that yet lived, to the three-king-post tripod 
 and the huge king-post striker. 
 
 Here Bassett, helped by Ngurn and Balatta, 
 weakly sat up, swaying weakly from the hips, and 
 with clear, unfaltering, all-seeing eyes gazed upon 
 the Red One. 
 
THE RED ONE 47 
 
 " Once, O Ngurn," he said, not taking his eyes 
 from the sheening, vibrating surface whereon and 
 wherein all the shades of cherry-red played unceas 
 ingly, ever a-quiver to change into sound, to be 
 come silken rustlings, silvery whisperings, golden 
 thrummings of cords, velvet pipings of elfland, 
 mellow-distances of thunderings. 
 
 " I wait," Ngurn prompted after a long pause, 
 the long-handled tomahawk unassumingly ready in 
 his hand. 
 
 " Once, O Ngurn," Bassett repeated, " let the 
 Red One speak so that I may see it speak as well 
 as hear it. Then strike, thus, when I raise my 
 hand; for, when I raise my hand, I shall drop my 
 head forward and make place for the stroke at the 
 base of my neck. But, O Ngurn, I, who am about 
 to pass out of the light of day forever, would like 
 to pass with the wonder-voice of the Red One sing 
 ing greatly in my ears." 
 
 u And I promise you that never will a head be so 
 well cured as yours," Ngurn assured him, at the 
 same time signaling the tribesmen to man the pro 
 pelling ropes suspended from the king-post 
 striker. " Your head shall be my greatest piece 
 of work in the curing of heads." 
 
48 THE RED ONE 
 
 Bassett smiled quietly to the old one s conceit, as 
 the great carved log, drawn back through two- 
 score feet of space, was released. The next mo 
 ment he was lost in ecstasy at the abrupt and thun 
 derous liberation of sound. But such thunder! 
 Mellow it was with preciousness of all sounding 
 metals. Archangels spoke in it; it was magnifi 
 cently beautiful before all other sounds; it was in 
 vested with the intelligence of supermen of planets 
 of other suns; it was the voice of God, seducing 
 and commanding to be heard. And the ever 
 lasting miracle of that interstellar metal! Bas 
 sett, with his own eyes, saw color and colors trans 
 form into sound till the whole visible surface of the 
 vast sphere was a-crawl and titillant and vaporous 
 with what he could not tell was color or was 
 sound. In that moment the interstices of matter 
 were his, and the interfusings and intermating 
 transfusings of matter and force. 
 
 Time passed. At the last Bassett was brought 
 back from his ecstasy by an impatient movement 
 of Ngurn. He had quite forgotten the old devil- 
 devil one. A quick flash of fancy brought a husky 
 chuckle into Bassett s throat. His shotgun lay be 
 side him in the litter. All he had to do, muzzle to 
 
THE RED ONE 49 
 
 head, was press the trigger and blow his head into 
 nothingness. 
 
 But why cheat him? was Bassett s next thought. 
 Head-hunting, cannibal beast of a human that was 
 as much ape as human, nevertheless Old Ngurn 
 had, according to his lights, played squarer than 
 square. Ngurn was in himself a fore-runner of 
 ethics and contract, of consideration, and gentle 
 ness in man. No, Bassett decided; it would be a 
 ghastly pity and an act of dishonor to cheat the old 
 fellow at the last. His head was Ngurn s, and 
 Ngurn s head to cure it would be. 
 
 And Bassett, raising his hand in signal, bending 
 forward his head as agreed so as to expose cleanly 
 the articulation to his taut spinal cord, forgot 
 Balatta, who was merely a woman, a woman 
 merely and only and undesired. He knew, with 
 out seeing, when the razor-edged hatchet rose in 
 the air behind him. And for that instant, ere the 
 end, there fell upon Bassett the shadow of the Un 
 known, a sense of impending marveLof the rending 
 of walls before the imaginable. Almost, when he 
 knew the blow had started and just ere the edge 
 of steel bit the flesh and nerves, it seemed that he 
 gazed upon the serene face of the Medusa, Truth 
 
50 THE RED ONE 
 
 And, simultaneous with the bite of the steel on 
 the onrush of the dark, in a flashing instant of 
 fancy, he saw the vision of his head turning slowly, 
 always turning, in the devil-devil house beside the 
 breadfruit tree. 
 
 Waikiki, Honolulu, 
 May 22, 1916. 
 
THE HUSSY 
 
 THERE are some stories that have to be 
 true the sort that cannot be fabricated 
 by a ready fiction-reckoner. And by the same 
 token there are some men with stories to tell who 
 cannot be doubted. Such a man was Julian Jones, 
 although I doubt the average reader of this will 
 believe the story Julian Jones told me. Neverthe 
 less I believe it. So thoroughly am I convinced of 
 its verity that I am willing, nay, eager, to invest 
 capital in the enterprise and embark personally on 
 the adventure to a far land. 
 
 It was in the Australian Building at the Panama 
 Pacific Exposition that I met him. I was stand 
 ing before an exhibit of fac-similes of the record 
 nuggets which had been discovered in the gold 
 fields of the Antipodes. Knobbed, misshape^ and 
 massive, it was as difficult to believe that they were 
 not real gold as it was to believe the accompanying 
 statistics of their weights and values. 
 
 * That s what those kangaroo-hunters call a 
 
52 THE RED ONE 
 
 nugget," boomed over my shoulder directly at the 
 largest of the specimens. 
 
 I turned and looked up into the dim blue eyes 
 of Julian Jones. I looked up, for he stood some 
 thing like six feet four inches in height. His hair, 
 a wispy, sandy yellow, seemed as dimmed and 
 faded as his eyes. It may have been the sun which 
 had washed out his coloring; at least his face bore 
 the evidence of a prodigious and ancient sun-burn 
 which had long since faded to yellow. As his 
 eyes turned from the exhibit and focused on mine I 
 noted a queer look in them as of one who vainly 
 tries to recall some fact of supreme importance. 
 
 "What s the matter with it as a nugget?" I 
 demanded. 
 
 The remote, indwelling expression went out of 
 his eyes as he boomed: 
 
 " Why, its size." 
 
 " It does seem large," I admitted. " But 
 there s no doubt it s authentic. The Australian 
 Government would scarcely dare " 
 
 " Large ! " he interrupted, with a sniff and a 
 sneer. 
 
 " Largest ever discovered " I started on. 
 
 " Ever discovered! " His dim eyes smoldered 
 
THE HUSSY 53 
 
 hotly as he proceeded. " Do you think that every 
 lump of gold ever discovered has got into the news 
 papers and encyclopedias? " 
 
 " Well," I replied judicially, " if there s one that 
 hasn t, I don t see how we re to know about it. If 
 a really big nugget, or nugget-finder, elects to blush 
 
 unseen " 
 
 " But it didn t," he broke in quickly. " I saw it 
 with my own eyes, and, besides, I m too tanned to 
 blush anyway. I m a railroad man and I ve been 
 in the tropics a lot. Why, I used to be the color of 
 mahogany real old mahogany, and have been 
 taken for a blue-eyed Spaniard more than once 
 
 It was my turn to interrupt, and I did. 
 
 * Was that nugget bigger than those in there, 
 Mr. er ?" 
 
 " Jones, Julian Jones is my name." 
 
 He dug into an inner pocket and produced an 
 envelope addressed to such a person, care of Gen 
 eral Delivery, San Francisco; and I, in turn, pre 
 sented him with my card. 
 
 u Pleased to know you, sir," he said, extending 
 his hand, his voice booming as if accustomed to 
 loud noises or wide spaces. " Of course I ve 
 heard of you, seen your picture in the papers, and 
 
54 THE RED ONE 
 
 all that, and, though I say it that shouldn t, I want 
 to say that I didn t care a rap about those articles 
 you wrote on Mexico. You re wrong, all wrong. 
 You make the mistake of all Gringos in thinking 
 a Mexican is a white man. He ain t. None of 
 them ain t Greasers, Spiggoties, Latin-Ameri 
 cans and all the rest of the cattle. Why, sir, they 
 don t think like we think, or reason, or act. Even 
 their multiplication table is different. You think 
 seven times seven is forty-nine; but not them. 
 They work it out different. And white isn t white 
 to them, either. Let me give you an example. 
 Buying coffee retail for housekeeping in one-pound 
 or ten-pound lots " 
 
 " How big was that nugget you referred to? " 
 I queried firmly. " As big as the biggest of 
 those?" 
 
 " Bigger," he said quietly. " Bigger than the 
 whole blamed exhibit of them put together, and 
 then some." He paused and regarded me with a 
 steadfast gaze. u I don t see no reason why I 
 shouldn t go into the matter with you. You ve got 
 a reputation a man ought to be able to trust, and 
 I ve read you ve done some tall skylarking your 
 self in out-of-the-way places. I ve been browsing 
 
THE HUSSY 55 
 
 around with an eye open for some one to go in 
 with me on the proposition." 
 
 " You can trust me," I said. 
 
 And here I am, blazing out into print with the 
 whole story just as he told it to me as we sat on 
 a bench by the lagoon before the Palace of Fine 
 Arts with the cries of the sea gulls in our ears. 
 Well, he should have kept his appointment with 
 me. But I anticipate. 
 
 As we started to leave the building and hunt 
 for a seat, a small woman, possibly thirty years 
 of age, with a washed-out complexion of the 
 farmer s wife sort, darted up to him in a bird-like 
 way for all the world like the darting veering gulls 
 over our heads, and fastened herself to his arm 
 with the accuracy and dispatch and inevitableness 
 of a piece of machinery. 
 
 u There you go!" she shrilled. " A-trottin 
 right off and never givin me a thought," 
 
 I was formally introduced to her. It was 
 patent that she had never heard of me and she 
 surveyed me bleakly with shrewd black eyes, set 
 close together and as beady and restless as a bird s. 
 
 " You ain t goin to tell him about that hussy? " 
 she complained. 
 
56 THE RED ONE 
 
 " Well, now, Sarah, this is business, you see," 
 he argued plaintively. " I ve been lookin for a 
 likely man this long while, and now that he s 
 shown up, it seems to me I got a right to give 
 him the hang of what happened." 
 
 The small woman made no reply, but set her 
 thin lips in a needle-like line. She gazed straight 
 before her at the Tower of Jewels with so austere 
 an expression that no glint of refracted sunlight 
 could soften it. We proceeded slowly to the 
 lagoon, managed to obtain an unoccupied seat, 
 and sat down with mutual sighs of relief as we 
 released our weights from our tortured, sight 
 seeing feet. 
 
 " One does get so mortal weary," asserted the 
 small woman, almost defiantly. 
 
 Two swans waddled up from the mirroring 
 water and investigated us. When their suspi 
 cions of our niggardliness or lack of peanuts had 
 been confirmed, Jones half-turned his back on 
 his life-partner and gave me his story. 
 
 "Ever been in Ecuador? Then take my ad 
 vice and don t. Though I take that back, for 
 you and me might be hitting it for there together 
 if you can rustle up the faith in me and the back- 
 
THE HUSSY 57 
 
 bone in yourself for the trip. Well, anyway, it 
 ain t so many years ago that I came ambling in 
 there on a rusty, foul-bottomed, tramp collier from 
 Australia, forty-three days from land to land. 
 Seven knots was her speed when everything 
 favored, and we d had a two weeks gale to 
 the north ard of New Zealand, and broke our 
 engines down for two days off Pitcairn Island. 
 
 " I was no sailor on her. I m a locomotive 
 engineer. But I d made friends with the skipper 
 at Newcastle an come along as his guest for as 
 far as Guayaquil. You see, I d heard wages was 
 way up on the American railroad runnin from 
 that place over the Andes to Quito. Now Guaya 
 quil " 
 
 " Is a fever-hole," I interpolated. 
 
 Julian Jones nodded. 
 
 " Thomas Nast died there of it within a month 
 after he landed. He was our great American 
 cartoonist," I added. 
 
 " Don t know him," Julian Jones said shortly. 
 " But I do know he wasn t the first to pass out 
 by a long shot. Why, look you the way I found 
 it. The pilot grounds is sixty miles down the 
 river. How s the fever? said I to the pilot 
 
58 THE RED ONE 
 
 who came aboard in the early morning. * See that 
 Hamburg bark, said he, pointing to a sizable 
 ship at anchor. Captain and fourteen men dead 
 of it already, and the cook and two men dying 
 right now, and they re the last left of her. 
 
 " And by jinks, he told the truth. And right 
 then they were dying forty a day in Guayaquil of 
 Yellow Jack. But that was nothing, as I was to 
 find out. Bubonic plague and small-pox was rag 
 ing, while dysentery and pneumonia was reducing 
 the population, and the railroad was raging worst 
 of all. I mean that. For them that insisted in 
 riding on it, it was more dangerous than all the 
 other diseases put together. 
 
 " When we dropped anchor off Guayaquil half 
 a dozen skippers from other steamers came on 
 board to warn our skipper not to let any of his 
 crew of officers go ashore except the ones he 
 wanted to lose. A launch came off for me from 
 Duran, which is on the other side of the river 
 and is the terminal of the railroad. And it 
 brought off a man that soared up the gangway 
 three jumps at a time he was that eager to get 
 aboard. When he hit the deck he hadn t time 
 to speak to any of us. He just leaned out over 
 
THE HUSSY 59 
 
 the rail and shook his fist at Duran and shouted: 
 1 1 beat you to it ! I beat you to it ! 
 
 " Who d you beat to it, friend? I asked. 
 * The railroad, he said, as he unbuckled the straps 
 and took off a big 44 Colt s automatic from where 
 he wore it handy on his left side under his coat. 
 1 1 staid as long as I agreed three months 
 and it didn t get me. I was a conductor. 
 
 " And that was the railroad I was to work for. 
 All of which was nothing to what he told me in 
 the next few minutes. The road ran from sea 
 level at Duran up to twelve thousand feet on 
 Chimborazo and down to ten thousand at Quito 
 on the other side of the range. And it was so 
 dangerous that the trains didn t run nights. The 
 through passengers had to get off and sleep in the 
 towns at night while the train waited for daylight. 
 And each train carried a guard of Ecuadoriano 
 soldiers which was the most dangerous of all. 
 They were supposed to protect the train crews, but 
 whenever trouble started they unlimbered their 
 rifles and joined the mob. You see, whenever a 
 train wreck occurred, the first cry of the Spiggoties 
 was * Kill the Gringos ! They always did that, 
 and proceeded to kill the train crew and whatever 
 
6o THE RED ONE 
 
 chance Gringo passengers that d escaped being 
 killed in the accident. Which is their kind of 
 arithmetic, which I told you a while back as being 
 different from ours. 
 
 " Shucks ! Before the day was out I was to 
 find out for myself that that ex-conductor wasn t 
 lying. It was over at Duran. I was to take 
 my run on the first division out to Quito, for which 
 place I was to start next morning only one 
 through train running every twenty-four hours. 
 It was the afternoon of my first day, along about 
 four o clock, when the boilers of the Governor 
 Hancock exploded and she sank in sixty feet of 
 water alongside the dock. She was the big ferry 
 boat that carried the railroad passengers across 
 the river to Guayaquil. It was a bad accident, 
 but it was the cause of worse that followed. By 
 half past four, big trainloads began to arrive. 
 It was a feast day and they d run an excursion 
 up country out of Guayaquil, and this was the 
 crowd coming back. 
 
 " And the crowd there was five thousand of 
 them wanted to get ferried across, and the 
 ferry was at the bottom of the river, which wasn t 
 our fault. But by the Spiggoty arithmetic, it 
 
THE HUSSY 6 1 
 
 was. * Kill the Gringos ! shouts one of them. 
 And right there the beans were spilled. Most of 
 us got away by the skin of our teeth. I raced on 
 the heels of the Master Mechanic, carrying one 
 of his babies for him, for the locomotives that 
 was just pulling out. You see, way down there 
 away from everywhere they just got to save their 
 locomotives in time of trouble, because, without 
 them, a railroad can t be run. Half a dozen 
 American wives and as many children were crouch 
 ing on the cab floors along with the rest of us 
 when we pulled out; and the Ecuadoriano soldiers, 
 who should have been protecting our lives and 
 property, turned loose with their rifles and must 
 have given us all of a thousand rounds before 
 we got out of range. 
 
 " We camped up country and didn t come back 
 to clean up until next day. It was some cleaning. 
 Every flat-car, box-car, coach, asthmatic switch 
 engine, and even hand-car that mob of Spiggoties 
 had shoved off the dock into sixty feet of water 
 on top of the Governor Hancock. They d burnt 
 the round house, set fire to the coal bunkers, and 
 made a scandal of the repair shops. Oh, yes, and 
 there were three of our fellows they d got that we 
 
62 THE RED ONE 
 
 had to bury mighty quick. It s hot weather all 
 the time down there." 
 
 Julian Jones came to a full pause and over his 
 shoulder studied the straight-before-her gaze and 
 forbidding expression of his wife s face. 
 
 " I ain t forgotten the nugget," he assured me. 
 
 " Nor the hussy," the little woman snapped, ap 
 parently at the mud-hens paddling on the surface 
 of the lagoon. 
 
 " I ve been traveling toward the nugget right 
 along" 
 
 There was never no reason for you to stay in 
 that dangerous country," his wife snapped in on 
 him. 
 
 " Now, Sarah," he appealed. " I was working 
 for you right along." And to me he explained: 
 4 The risk was big, but so was the pay. Some 
 months I earned as high as five hundred gold. 
 And here was Sarah waiting for me back in Ne 
 braska " 
 
 " An us engaged two years," she complained 
 to the Tower of Jewels. 
 
 " What of the strike, and me being black 
 listed, and getting typhoid down in Australia, 
 and everything," he went on. " And luck was 
 
THE HUSSY 63 
 
 with me on that railroad. Why, I saw fellows 
 fresh from the States pass out, some of them not a 
 week on their first run. If the diseases and the 
 railroad didn t get them, then it was the Spig- 
 goties got them. But it just wasn t my fate, even 
 that time I rode my engine down to the bottom 
 of a forty-foot washout. I lost my fireman; and 
 the conductor and the Superintendent of Rolling 
 Stock (who happened to be running down to 
 Duran to meet his bride) had their heads knifed 
 off by the Spiggoties and paraded around on poles. 
 But I lay snug as a bug under a couple of feet 
 of tender coal, and they thought I d headed for 
 tall timber lay there a day and a night till the 
 excitement cooled down. Yes, I was lucky. The 
 worst that happened to me was I caught a cold 
 once, and another time had a carbuncle. But the 
 other fellows ! They died like flies, what of Yel 
 low Jack, pneumonia, the Spiggoties, and the rail 
 road. The trouble was I didn t have much chance 
 to pal with them. No sooner d I get some 
 intimate with one of them he d up and die all 
 but a fireman named Andrews, and he went loco 
 for keeps. 
 
 " I made good on my job from the first, and 
 
64 THE RED ONE 
 
 lived in Quito in a dobe house with whacking big 
 Spanish tiles on the roof that I d rented. And 
 I never had much trouble with the Spiggoties, 
 what of letting them sneak free rides in the tender 
 or on the cowcatcher. Me throw them off? 
 Never ! I took notice, when Jack Harris put off 
 a bunch of them, that I attended his funeral muy 
 pronto " 
 
 " Speak English," the little woman beside him 
 snapped. 
 
 " Sarah just can t bear to tolerate me speaking 
 Spanish," he apologized. " It gets so on her 
 nerves that I promised not to. Well, as I was 
 saying, the goose hung high and everything was 
 going hunkydory, and I was piling up my wages 
 to come back to Nebraska and marry Sarah, when 
 I run onto Vahna " 
 
 1 The hussy! " Sarah hissed. 
 
 " Now, Sarah," her towering giant of a husband 
 begged, " I just got to mention her or I can t 
 tell about the nugget. It was one night when 
 I was taking a locomotive no train down to 
 Amato, about thirty miles from Quito. Seth 
 Manners was my fireman. I was breaking him in 
 to engineer for himself, and I was letting him 
 
THE HUSSY 65 
 
 run the locomotive while I sat up in his seat medi 
 tating about Sarah here. I d just got a letter 
 from her, begging as usual for me to come home 
 and hinting as usual about the dangers of an un 
 married man like me running around loose in a 
 country full of senoritas and fandangos. Lord! 
 If she could only a-seen them. Positive frights, 
 that s what they are, their faces painted white as 
 corpses and their lips red as as some of the 
 train wrecks I ve helped clean up. 
 
 " It was a lovely April night, not a breath of 
 wind, and a tremendous big moon shining right 
 over the top of Chimborazo. Some mountain 
 that. The railroad skirted it twelve thousand 
 feet above sea level, and the top of it ten thousand 
 feet higher than that. 
 
 " Mebbe I was drowsing, with Seth running the 
 engine; but he slammed on the brakes so sudden 
 hard that I darn near went through the cab win 
 dow. 
 
 " What the I started to yell, and * Holy 
 hell/ Seth says, as both of us looked at what 
 was on the track. And I agreed with Seth en 
 tirely in his remark. It was an Indian girl 
 and take it from me, Indians ain t Spiggoties by 
 
66 THE RED ONE 
 
 any manner of means. Seth had managed to 
 fetch a stop within twenty feet of her, and us 
 bowling down hill at that ! But the girl. She " 
 
 I saw the form of Mrs. Julian Jones stiffen, al 
 though she kept her gaze fixed balefully upon 
 two mud-hens that were prowling along the lagoon 
 shallows below us. "The hussy!" she hissed, 
 once and implacably. Jones had stopped at the 
 sound, but went on immediately. 
 
 " She was a tall girl, slim and slender, you know 
 the kind, with black hair remarkably long hang 
 ing down loose behind her, as she stood there no 
 more afraid than nothing, her arms spread out 
 to stop the engine. She was wearing a slimpsy 
 sort of garment wrapped around her that wasn t 
 cloth but ocelot skins, soft and dappled, and silky. 
 It was all she had on " 
 
 "The hussy!" breathed Mrs. Jones. 
 
 But Mr. Jones went on, making believe that he 
 was unaware of the interruption. 
 
 Hell of a way to stop a locomotive/ I com 
 plained at Seth, as I climbed down onto the right 
 of way. I walked past our engine and up to 
 the girl, and what do you think? Her eyes were 
 shut tight. She was trembling that violent that 
 
THE HUSSY 67 
 
 you could see it by the moonlight. And she was 
 barefoot, too. 
 
 " What s the row? I said, none too gentle. 
 She gave a start, seemed to come out of her trance, 
 and opened her eyes. Say ! They were big and 
 black and beautiful. Believe me, she was some 
 looker " 
 
 " The hussy! " At which hiss the two mud- 
 hens veered away a few feet. But Jones was get 
 ting himself in hand, and didn t even blink. 
 
 What are you stopping this locomotive for ? 
 I demanded in Spanish. Nary an answer. She 
 stared at me, then at the snorting engine, and 
 then burst into tears, which you ll admit is un 
 common behavior for an Indian woman. 
 
 " If you try to get rides that way/ I slung 
 at her in Spiggoty Spanish (which they tell me is 
 some different from regular Spanish) , you ll be 
 taking one smeared all over our cowcatcher and 
 headlight, and it ll be up to my fireman to scrape 
 you off/ 
 
 " My Spiggoty Spanish wasn t much to brag on, 
 but I could see she understood, though she only 
 shook her head and wouldn t speak. But great 
 Moses, she was some looker " 
 
68 THE RED ONE 
 
 I glanced apprehensively at Mrs. Jones, who 
 must have caught me out of the tail of her eye, 
 for she muttered: " If she hadn t been do you 
 think he d a-taken her into his house to live? " 
 
 " Now hold on, Sarah," he protested. " That 
 ain t fair. Besides, I m telling this. Next thing, 
 Seth yells at me, Coin to stay here all night ? 
 
 " Come on/ I said to the girl, and climb on 
 board. But next time you want a ride don t flag 
 a locomotive between stations. She followed 
 along; but when I got to the step and turned to 
 give her a lift-up, she wasn t there. I went for 
 ward again. Not a sign of her. Above and be 
 low was sheer cliff, and the track stretched ahead 
 a hundred yards clear and empty. And then I 
 spotted her, crouched down right against the cow 
 catcher, that close I d almost stepped on her. If 
 we d started up, we d have run over her in a 
 second. It was all so nonsensical, I never could 
 make out her actions. Maybe she was trying to 
 suicide. I grabbed her by the wrist and jerked 
 her none too gentle to her feet. And she came 
 along all right. Women do know when a man 
 means business." 
 
 I glanced from this Goliath to his little, bird- 
 
THE HUSSY 69 
 
 eyed spouse, and wondered if he had ever tried 
 to mean business with her. 
 
 " Seth kicked at first, but I boosted her into the 
 cab and made her sit up beside me 
 
 " And I suppose Seth was busy running the 
 engine," Mrs. Jones observed. 
 
 " I was breaking him in, wasn t I? " Mr. Jones 
 protested. " So we made the run into Amato. 
 She d never opened her mouth once, and no 
 sooner d the engine stopped than she d jumped to 
 the ground and was gone. Just like that. Not 
 a thank you kindly. Nothing. 
 
 " But next morning, when we came to pull out 
 for Quito with a dozen flat cars loaded with rails, 
 there she was in the cab waiting for us; and in the 
 daylight I could see how much better a looker she 
 was than the night before. 
 
 Huh ! she s adopted you, Seth grins. And 
 it looked like it. She just stood there and looked 
 at me at us like a loving hound dog that you 
 love, that you ve caught with a string of sausages 
 inside of him, and that just knows you ain t go 
 ing to lift a hand to him. * Go chase yourself ! 
 I told her pronto" (Mrs. Jones made her 
 proximity noticeable with a wince at the Spanish 
 
70 THE RED ONE 
 
 word.) "You see, Sarah, I d no use for her, 
 even at the start." 
 
 Mrs. Jones stiffened. Her lips moved sound 
 lessly, but I knew to what syllables. 
 
 " And what made it hardest was Seth jeering 
 at me. You can t shake her that way, he said. 
 4 You saved her life I didn t, I said 
 sharply; it was you. 1 But she thinks you did, 
 which is the same thing, he came back at me. 
 1 And now she belongs to you. Custom of the 
 country, as you ought to know. 
 
 " Heathenish," said Mrs. Jones, and though 
 her steady gaze was set upon the Tower of Jewels 
 I knew she was making no reference to its archi 
 tecture. 
 
 * She s come to do light housekeeping for you, 
 Seth grinned. I let him rave though afterwards 
 I kept him throwing in the coal too fast to work 
 his mouth very much. Why, say, when I got to 
 the spot where I picked her up, and stopped the 
 train for her to get off, she just flopped down on 
 her knees, got a hammerlock with her arms around 
 my knees, and cried all over my shoes. What 
 was I to do?" 
 
 With no perceptible movement that I was aware 
 
THE HUSSY 71 
 
 of, Mrs. Jones advertised her certitude of knowl 
 edge of what she would have done. 
 
 " And the moment we pulled into Quito, she 
 did what she d done before vanished. Sarah 
 never believes me when I say how relieved I felt 
 to be quit of her. But it was not to be. I got 
 to my dobe house and managed a cracking fine 
 dinner my cook had ready for me. She was 
 mostly Spiggoty and half Indian, and her name 
 was Paloma. Now, Sarah, haven t I told you 
 she was older n a grandmother, and looked more 
 like a buzzard than a dove? Why, I couldn t 
 bear to eat with her around where I could look at 
 her. But she did make things comfortable, and 
 she was some economical when it came to market 
 ing. 
 
 " That afternoon, after a big long siesta, what d 
 I find in the kitchen, just as much at home as if she 
 belonged there, but that blamed Indian girl. And 
 old Paloma was squatting at the girl s feet and 
 rubbing the girl s knees and legs like for rheuma 
 tism, which I knew the girl didn t have from the 
 way I d sized up the walk of her, and keeping 
 time to the rubbing with a funny sort of gibberish 
 chant. And I let loose right there and then. 
 
72 THE RED ONE 
 
 As Sarah knows, I never could a-bear women 
 around the house young, unmarried women, I 
 mean. But it was no go! Old Paloma sided 
 with the girl, and said if the girl went she went, 
 too. Also, she called me more kinds of a fool 
 than the English language has accommodation 
 for. You d of liked the Spanish lingo, Sarah, for 
 expressing yourself in such ways, and you d of 
 liked old Paloma, too. She was a good woman, 
 though she didn t have any teeth and her face 
 could kill a strong man s appetite in the cra 
 dle. 
 
 " I gave in. I had to. Except for the excuse 
 that she needed Vahna s help around the house 
 (which she didn t at all), old Paloma never said 
 why she stuck up for the girl. Anyway, Vahna 
 was a quiet thing, never in the way. And she 
 never gadded. Just sat in-doors jabbering with 
 Paloma and helping with the chores. But I 
 wasn t long in getting onto that she was afraid 
 of something. She would look up, that anxious 
 it hurt, whenever anybody called, like some of 
 the boys to have a gas or a game of pedro. I 
 tried to worm it out of Paloma what was worrying 
 the girl, but all the old woman did was to look 
 
THE HUSSY 73 
 
 solemn and shake her head like all the devils in 
 hell was liable to precipitate a visit on us. 
 
 " And then one day Vahna had a visitor. I d 
 just come in from a run and was passing the time 
 of day with her I had to be polite, even if she 
 had butted in on me and come to live in my house 
 for keeps when I saw a queer expression come 
 into her eyes. In the doorway stood an Indian 
 boy. He looked like her, but was younger and 
 slimmer. She took him into the kitchen and they 
 must have had a great palaver, for he didn t leave 
 until after dark. Inside the week he came back, 
 but I missed him. When I got home, Paloma 
 put a fat nugget of gold into my hand, which 
 Vahna had sent him for. The blamed thing 
 weighed all of two pounds and was worth more 
 than five hundred dollars. She explained that 
 Vahna wanted me to take it to pay for her keep. 
 And I had to take it to keep peace in the house. 
 
 " Then, after a long time, came another visitor. 
 We were sitting before the fire " 
 
 " Him and the hussy," quoth Mrs. Jones. 
 
 " And Paloma," he added quickly. 
 
 " Him and his cook and his light housekeeper 
 sitting by the fire," she amended. 
 
74 THE RED ONE 
 
 " Oh, I admit Vahna did like me a whole heap," 
 he asserted recklessly, then modified with a pang 
 of caution: "A heap more than was good for 
 her, seeing that I had no inclination her way. 
 
 " Well, as I was saying, she had another visitor. 
 He was a lean, tall, white-headed old Indian, with 
 a beak on him like an eagle. He walked right in 
 without knocking. Vahna gave a little cry that 
 was half like a yelp and half like a gasp and 
 flumped down on her knees before me, pleading to 
 me with deer s eyes and to him with the eyes of 
 a deer about to be killed that don t want to be 
 killed. Then, for a minute that seemed as long 
 as a life-time, she and the old fellow glared at 
 each other. Paloma was the first to talk, in his 
 own lingo, for he talked back to her. But great 
 Moses, if he wasn t the high and mighty one 1 
 Paloma s old knees were shaking, and she cringed 
 to him like a hound dog. And all this in my own 
 house! I d have thrown him out on his neck, 
 only he was so old. 
 
 " If the things he said to Vahna was as terrible 
 as the way he looked ! Say ! He just spit words 
 at her! But Paloma kept whimpering and but 
 ting in, till something she said got across, because 
 
THE HUSSY 75 
 
 his face relaxed. He condescended to give me 
 the once over and fired some question at Vahna. 
 She hung her head, and looked foolish, and 
 blushed, and then replied with a single word and 
 a shake of the head. And with that he just nat 
 urally turned on his heel and beat it. I guess 
 she d said No. 
 
 " For some time after that Vahna used to flus 
 ter up whenever she saw me. Then she took to 
 the kitchen for a spell. But after a long time 
 she began hanging around the big room again. 
 She was still mighty shy, but she d keep on fol 
 lowing me about with those big eyes of hers " 
 
 "The hussy!" I heard plainly. But Julian 
 Jones and I were pretty well used to it by this 
 time. 
 
 " I don t mind saying that I was getting some 
 interested myself oh, not in the way Sarah 
 never lets up letting me know she thinks. That 
 two-pound nugget was what had me going. If 
 Vahna d put me wise to where it came from, I 
 could say good-by to railroading and hit the high 
 places for Nebraska and Sarah. 
 
 " And then the beans was spilled ... by ac 
 cident. Come a letter from Wisconsin. My 
 
76 THE RED ONE 
 
 Aunt Eliza d died and up and left me her big 
 farm. I let out a whoop when I read it; but 
 I could have canned my joy, for I was jobbed out 
 of it by the courts and lawyers afterward not 
 a cent to me, and I m still paying m in install 
 ments. 
 
 " But I didn t know, then; and I prepared to 
 pull back to God s country. Paloma got sore, 
 and Vahna got the weeps. * Don t go ! Don t 
 go ! That was her song. But I gave notice on 
 my job, and wrote a letter to Sarah here didn t 
 I, Sarah? 
 
 " That night, sitting by the fire like at a funeral, 
 Vahna really loosened up for the first time. 
 Don t go, she says to me, with old Paloma 
 nodding agreement with her. * I ll show you 
 where my brother got the nugget, if you don t 
 go. * Too late, said I. And I told her why." 
 
 " And told her about me waiting for you back 
 in Nebraska," Mrs. Jones observed in cold, pas 
 sionless tones. 
 
 " Now, Sarah, why should I hurt a poor Indian 
 girl s feelings? Of course I didn t. Well, she 
 and Paloma talked Indian some more, and then 
 Vahna says : If you stay, I ll show you the big- 
 
THE HUSSY 77 
 
 gest nugget that is the father of all other nuggets. 
 How big? I asked. l As big as me? She 
 laughed. * Bigger than you, she says, much, 
 much bigger. They don t grow that way, I 
 said. But she said she d seen it and Paloma 
 backed her up. Why, to listen to them you d have 
 thought there was millions in that one nugget. 
 Paloma d never seen it herself, but she d heard 
 about it. A secret of the tribe which she couldn t 
 share, being only half Indian herself." 
 
 Julian Jones paused and heaved a sigh. 
 
 " And they kept on insisting until I fell for 
 
 The hussy," said Mrs. Jones, pert as a bird, 
 at the ready instant. 
 
 " No; for the nugget. What of Aunt Eliza s 
 farm I was rich enough to quit railroading, but 
 not rich enough to turn my back on big money 
 and I just couldn t help believing them two 
 women. Gee! I could be another Vanderbilt, 
 or J. P. Morgan. That s the way I thought; and 
 I started in to pump Vahna. But she wouldn t 
 give down. * You come along with me, she says. 
 We can be back here in a couple of weeks with 
 all the gold the both of us can carry. We ll take 
 a burro, or a pack-train of burros, was my sugges- 
 
7 8 THE RED ONE 
 
 tion. But nothing doing. And Paloma agreed 
 with her. It was too dangerous. The Indians 
 would catch us. 
 
 " The two of us pulled out when the nights 
 were moonlight. We traveled only at night, and 
 laid up in the days. Vahna wouldn t let me light 
 a fire, and I missed my coffee something fierce. 
 We got up in the real high mountains of the main 
 Andes, where the snow on one pass gave us some 
 trouble; but the girl knew the trails, and, though 
 we didn t waste any time, we were a full week 
 getting there. I know the general trend of our 
 travel, because I carried a pocket compass; and the 
 general trend is all I need to get there again, be 
 cause of that peak. There s no mistaking it. 
 There ain t another peak like it in the world. 
 Now, I m not telling you its particular shape, but 
 when you and I head out for it from Quito I ll take 
 you straight to it. 
 
 "It s no easy thing to climb, and the person 
 doesn t live that can climb it at night. We had to 
 take the daylight to it, and didn t reach the top 
 till after sunset. Why, I could take hours and 
 hours telling you about that last climb, which I 
 won t. The top was flat as a billiard table, about 
 
THE HUSSY 79 
 
 a quarter of an acre in size, and was almost clean 
 of snow. Vahna told me that the great winds 
 that usually blew, kept the snow off of it. 
 
 " We were winded, and I got mountain sickness 
 so bad that I had to stretch out for a spell. Then, 
 when the moon come up, I took a prowl around. 
 It didn t take long, and I didn t catch a sight or a 
 smell of anything that looked like gold. And 
 when I asked Vahna, she only laughed and clapped 
 her hands. Meantime my mountain sickness 
 tuned up something fierce, and I sat down on a big 
 rock to wait for it to ease down. 
 
 " * Come on, now, I said, when I felt better. 
 Stop your fooling and tell me where that nugget 
 is. * It s nearer to you right now than I ll ever 
 get, she answered, her big eyes going sudden wist 
 ful. * All you Gringos are alike. Gold is the 
 love of your heart, and women don t count much. 
 
 " I didn t say anything. That was no time to 
 tell her about Sarah here. But Vahna seemed to 
 shake off her depressed feelings, and began to 
 laugh and tease again. * How do you like it? 
 she asked. Like what? The nugget you re 
 sitting on. 
 
 " I jumped up as though it was a red-hot stove. 
 
8o THE RED ONE 
 
 And all it was was a rock. I felt my heart sink. 
 Either she had gone clean loco, or this was her 
 idea of a joke. Wrong on both counts. She 
 gave me the hatchet and told me to take a hack 
 at the bowlder, which I did, again and again, for 
 yellow spots sprang up from under every blow. 
 By the great Moses! it was gold! The whole 
 blamed bowlder! " 
 
 Jones rose suddenly to his full height and flung 
 out his long arms, his face turned to the southern 
 skies. The movement shot panic into the heart 
 of a swan that had drawn near with amiably preda 
 tory designs. Its consequent abrupt retreat col 
 lided it with a stout old lady, who squealed and 
 dropped her bag of peanuts. Jones sat down and 
 resumed. 
 
 " Gold, I tell you, solid gold and that pure and 
 soft that I chopped chips out of it. It had been 
 coated with some sort of rain-proof paint or 
 lacquer made out of asphalt or something. No 
 wonder I d taken it for a rock. It was ten feet 
 long, all of five feet through, and tapering to both 
 ends like an egg. Here. Take a look at this." 
 
 From his pocket he drew and opened a leather 
 case, from which he took an object wrapped in 
 
THE HUSSY 8 1 
 
 oiled tissue paper. Unwrapping it, he dropped 
 into my hand a chip of pure soft gold the size of 
 a ten-dollar gold-piece. I could make out the 
 grayish substance on one side with which it had 
 been painted. 
 
 " I chopped that from one end of the thing," 
 Jones went on, replacing the chip in its paper and 
 leather case. " And lucky I put it in my pocket. 
 For right at my back came one loud word more 
 like a croak than a word, in my way of thinking. 
 And there was that lean old fellow with the eagle 
 beak who had dropped in on us one night. And 
 there was about thirty Indians with him all slim 
 young fellows. 
 
 " Vahna d flopped down and begun whimper 
 ing, but I told her, Get up and make friends 
 with them for me/ No, no, she cried. This 
 is death. Good-by, amigo 
 
 Here Mrs. Jones winced, and her husband ab 
 ruptly checked the particular flow of his narra 
 tive. 
 
 " Then get up and fight along with me/ I said 
 to her. And she did. She was some hellion, 
 there on the top of the world, clawing and scratch 
 ing tooth and nail a regular she-cat. And I 
 
82 THE RED ONE 
 
 wasn t idle, though all I had was that hatchet and 
 my long arms. But they were too many for me, 
 and there was no place for me to put my back 
 against a wall. When I come to, minutes after 
 they d cracked me on the head here, feel this." 
 
 Removing his hat, Julian Jones guided my finger 
 tips through his thatch, of sandy hair until they 
 sank into an indentation. It was fully three 
 inches long, and went into the bone itself of the 
 skull. 
 
 " When I come to, there was Vahna, spread- 
 eagled on top the nugget, and the old fellow with 
 a beak jabbering away solemnly as if going 
 through some sort of religious exercises. In his 
 hand he had a stone knife you know, a thin, 
 sharp sliver of some obsidian-like stuff same as 
 they make arrow-heads out of. I couldn t lift a 
 hand, being held down, and being too weak be 
 sides. And well, anyway, that stone knife did 
 for her, and me they didn t even do the honor of 
 killing there on top their sacred peak. They 
 chucked me off of it like so much carrion. 
 
 " And the buzzards didn t get me either. I 
 can see the moonlight yet, shining on all those 
 peaks of snow, as I went down. Why, sir, it was 
 
THE HUSSY 83 
 
 a five-hundred-foot fall, only I didn t make it. 
 I went into a big snow-drift in a crevice. And 
 when I come to (hours after I know, for it was 
 full day when I next saw the sun) , I found myself 
 in a regular snow-cave or tunnel caused by the 
 water from the melting snow running along the 
 ledge. In fact, the stone above actually overhung 
 just beyond where I first landed. A few feet more 
 to the side, either way, and I d almost be going 
 yet. It was a straight miracle, that s what it was. 
 
 " But I paid for it. It was two years and over 
 before I knew what happened. All I knew was 
 that I was Julian Jones and that I d been black 
 listed in the big strike, and that I was married to 
 Sarah here. I mean that. I didn t know any 
 thing in between, and when Sarah tried to talk 
 about it, it gave me pains in the head. I mean 
 my head was queer, and I knew it was queer. 
 
 " And then, sitting on the porch of her father s 
 farmhouse back in Nebraska one moonlight eve 
 ning, Sarah came out and put that gold chip into 
 my hand. Seems she d just found it in the torn 
 lining of the trunk I d brought back from Ecuador 
 I who for two years didn t even know I d been 
 to Ecuador, or Australia, or anything! Well, I 
 
84 THE RED ONE 
 
 just sat there looking at the chip in the moonlight, 
 and turning it over and over and figuring what it 
 was and where it d come from, when all of a 
 sudden there was a snap inside my head as if 
 something had broken, and then I could see Vahna 
 spread-eagled on that big nugget and the old fel 
 low with the beak waving the stone knife, and . . . 
 and everything. That is, everything that had 
 happened from the time I first left Nebraska to 
 when I crawled to the daylight out of the snow 
 after they had chucked me off the mountain-top. 
 But everything that d happened after that I d 
 clean forgotten. When Sarah said I was her hus 
 band, I wouldn t listen to her. Took all her fam 
 ily and the preacher that d married us to convince 
 me. 
 
 " Later on I wrote to Seth Manners. The 
 railroad hadn t killed him yet, and he pieced out a 
 lot for me. I ll show you his letters. I ve got 
 them at the hotel. One day, he said, making his 
 regular run, I crawled out onto the track. I 
 didn t stand upright, I just crawled. He took 
 me for a calf, or a big dog, at first. I wasn t 
 anything human, he said, and I didn t know him 
 or anything. As near as I can make out, it was 
 
THE HUSSY 85 
 
 ten days after the mountain-top to the time Seth 
 picked me up. What I ate I don t know. Maybe 
 I didn t eat. Then it was doctors at Quito, and 
 Paloma nursing me (she must have packed that 
 gold chip in my trunk) , until they found out I 
 was a man without a mind, and the railroad sent 
 me back to Nebraska. At any rate, that s what 
 Seth writes me. Of myself, I don t know. But 
 Sarah here knows. She corresponded with the 
 railroad before they shipped me and all that." 
 
 Mrs. Jones nodded affirmation of his words, 
 sighed and evidenced unmistakable signs of eager 
 ness to go. 
 
 u I ain t been able to work since," her husband 
 continued. " And I ain t been able to figure out 
 how to get back after that big nugget. Sarah s 
 got money of her own, and she won t let go a 
 penny " 
 
 " He won t get down to that country no more ! " 
 she broke forth. 
 
 " But, Sarah, Vahna s dead you know that," 
 Julian Jones protested. 
 
 " I don t know anything about anything," she 
 answered decisively, " except that that country is 
 no place for a married man." 
 
86 THE RED ONE 
 
 Her lips snapped together, and she fixed an un 
 seeing stare across to where the afternoon sun 
 was beginning to glow into sunset. I gazed for a 
 moment at her face, white, plump, tiny, and im 
 placable, and gave her up. 
 
 " How do you account for such a mass of gold 
 being there?" I queried of Julian Jones. "A 
 solid-gold meteor that fell out of the sky? " 
 
 " Not for a moment." He shook his head. 
 " It was carried there by the Indians." 
 
 " Up a mountain like that and such enorm 
 ous weight and size ! " I objected. 
 
 " Just as easy," he smiled. " I used to be 
 stumped by that proposition myself, after I got 
 my memory back. Now how in Sam Hill 
 I used to begin, and then spend hours figuring at 
 it. And then when I got the answer I felt down 
 right idiotic, it was that easy." He paused, then 
 announced: " They didn t." 
 
 " But you just said they did." 
 
 They did and they didn t," was his enigmatic 
 reply. " Of course they never carried that mon 
 ster nugget up there. What they did was to carry 
 up its contents." 
 
THE HUSSY 87 
 
 He waited until he saw enlightenment dawn in 
 my face. 
 
 " And then of course melted all the gold, or 
 welded it, or smelted it, all into one piece. You 
 know the first Spaniards down there, under a 
 leader named Pizzaro, were a gang of robbers 
 and cutthroats. They went through the country 
 like the hoof-and-mouth disease, and killed the 
 Indians off like cattle. You see, the Indians had 
 lots of gold. Well, what the Spaniards didn t get, 
 the surviving Indians hid away in that one big 
 chunk on top the mountain, and it s been waiting 
 there ever since for me and for you, if you 
 want to go in on it." 
 
 And here, by the Lagoon of the Palace of Fine 
 Arts, ended my acquaintance with Julian Jones. 
 On my agreeing to finance the adventure, he prom 
 ised to call on me at my hotel next morning with 
 the letters of Seth Manners and the railroad, and 
 conclude arrangements. But he did not call. 
 That evening I telephoned his hotel and was in 
 formed by the clerk that Mr. Julian Jones and 
 wife had departed in the early afternoon with 
 their baggage. 
 
88 THE RED ONE 
 
 Can Mrs. Jones have rushed him back and hid 
 den him away in Nebraska? I remember that 
 as we said good-by there was that in her smile 
 that recalled the vulpine complacency of Mona 
 Lisa, the Wise. 
 
 Kohala, Hawaii, 
 May 5, 1916. 
 
LIKE ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT 
 TIMES 
 
 IT was the summer of 1897, and there was 
 trouble in the Tarwater family. Grand 
 father Tarwater, after remaining properly sub 
 dued and crushed for a quiet decade, had broken 
 out again. This time it was the Klondike fever. 
 His first and one unvarying symptom of such 
 attacks was song. One Chant only he raised, 
 though he remembered no more than the first 
 stanza and but three lines of that. And the fam 
 ily knew his feet were itching and his brain was 
 tingling with the old madness, when he lifted his 
 hoarse-cracked voice, now falsetto-cracked, in: 
 
 " Like Argus of the ancient times, 
 We leave this modern Greece, 
 Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn, 
 To shear the Golden Fleece." 
 
 Ten years earlier he had lifted the chant, sung 
 to the air of the " Doxology," when afflicted with 
 the fever to go gold-mining in Patagonia. The 
 
 89 
 
9 o THE RED ONE 
 
 multitudinous family had sat upon him, but had 
 had a hard time doing it. When all else had 
 failed to shake his resolution, they had applied 
 lawyers to him, with the threat of getting out 
 guardianship papers and of confining him in the 
 state asylum for the insane which was reason 
 able for a man who had, a quarter of a century 
 before, speculated away all but ten meager acres 
 of a California principality, and who had dis 
 played no better business acumen ever since. 
 
 The application of lawyers to John Tarwater 
 was like the application of a mustard plaster. 
 For, in his judgment, they were the gentry, more 
 than any other, who had skinned him out of the 
 broad Tarwater acres. So, at the time of his 
 Patagonian fever, the very thought of so drastic a 
 remedy was sufficient to cure him. He quickly 
 demonstrated he was not crazy by shaking the 
 fever from him and agreeing not to go to Pata 
 gonia. 
 
 Next, he demonstrated how crazy he really was, 
 by deeding over to his family, unsolicited, the 
 ten acres on Tarwater Flat, the house, barn, out 
 buildings, and water-rights. Also did he turn 
 over the eight hundred dollars in bank that was 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 91 
 
 the long-saved salvage of his wrecked fortune. 
 But for this the family found no cause for com 
 mittal to the asylum, since such committal would 
 necessarily invalidate what he had done. 
 
 " Grandfather is sure peeved," said Mary, his 
 oldest daughter, herself a grandmother, when her 
 father quit smoking. 
 
 All he had retained for himself was a span of 
 old horses, a mountain buckboard, and his one 
 room in the crowded house. Further, having 
 affirmed that he would be beholden to none of 
 them, he got the contract to carry the United 
 States mail, twice a week, from Kelterville up 
 over Tarwater Mountain to Old Almaden 
 which was a sporadically worked quicksilver mine 
 in the upland cattle country. With his old horses 
 it took all his time to make the two weekly round 
 trips. And for ten years, rain or shine, he had 
 never missed a trip. Nor had he failed once to 
 pay his week s board into Mary s hand. This 
 board he had insisted on, in the convalescence 
 from his Patagonian fever, and he had paid it 
 strictly though he had given up tobacco in order to 
 be able to do it. 
 
 " Huh! " he confided to the ruined water wheel 
 
92 THE RED ONE 
 
 of the old Tarwater Mill, which he had built 
 from the standing timber and which had ground 
 wheat for the first settlers. u Huh! They ll 
 never put me in the poor farm so long as I sup 
 port myself. And without a penny to my name 
 it ain t likely any lawyer fellows ll come snoopin 
 around after me." 
 
 And yet, precisely because of these highly ra 
 tional acts, it was held that John Tarwater was 
 mildly crazy! 
 
 The first time he had lifted the chant of " Like 
 Argus of the Ancient Times," had been in 1849, 
 when, twenty-two years of age, violently attacked 
 by the California fever, he had sold two hundred 
 and forty Michigan acres, forty of it cleared, for 
 the price of four yoke of oxen and a wagon, and 
 had started across the Plains. 
 
 " And we turned off at Fort Hall, where the 
 Oregon emigration went north ard, and swung 
 south for Californy," was his way of concluding 
 the narrative of that arduous journey. " And 
 Bill Ping and me used to rope grizzlies out of the 
 underbrush of Cache Slough in the Sacramento 
 Valley." 
 
 Years of freighting and mining had followed, 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 93 
 
 and, with a stake gleaned from the Merced plac 
 ers, he satisfied the land-hunger of his race and 
 time by settling in Sonoma County. 
 
 During the ten years of carrying the mail across 
 Tarwater Township, up Tarwater Valley, and 
 over Tarwater Mountain, most all of which land 
 had once been his, he had spent his time dream 
 ing of winning back that land before he died. 
 And now, his huge gaunt form more erect than it 
 had been for years, with a glinting of blue fires in 
 his small and close-set eyes, he was lifting his 
 ancient chant again. 
 
 "There he goes now listen to him," said 
 William Tarwater. 
 
 " Nobody at home," laughed Harris Topping, 
 day laborer, husband of Annie Tarwater, and 
 father of her nine children. 
 
 The kitchen door opened to admit the old man, 
 returning from feeding his horses. The song had 
 ceased from his lips ; but Mary was irritable from 
 a burnt hand and a grandchild whose stomach re 
 fused to digest properly diluted cow s milk. 
 
 " Now there ain t no use you carryin on that 
 way, father," she tackled him. " The time s past 
 
94 THE RED ONE 
 
 for you to cut and run for a place like the Klondike, 
 and singing won t buy you nothing." 
 
 " Just the same," he answered quietly. " I bet 
 I could go to that Klondike place and pick up 
 enough gold to buy back the Tarwater lands." 
 
 u Old fool!" Annie contributed. 
 
 " You couldn t buy them back for less n three 
 hundred thousand and then some," was William s 
 effort at squelching him. 
 
 " Then I could pick up three hundred thousand, 
 and then some, if I was only there," the old man 
 retorted placidly. 
 
 Thank God, you can t walk there, or you d 
 be startin , I know," Mary cried. " Ocean travel 
 costs money." 
 
 " I used to have money," her father said hum 
 bly. 
 
 4 Well, you ain t got any now so forget it," 
 William advised. " Them times is past, like rop 
 ing bear with Bill Ping. There ain t no more 
 bear." 
 
 " Just the same " 
 
 But Mary cut him off. Seizing the day s paper 
 from the kitchen table, she flourished it savagely 
 under her aged progenitor s nose. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 95 
 
 "What do those Klondikers say? There it is 
 in cold print. Only the young and robust can 
 stand the Klondike. It s worse than the north 
 pole. And they ve left their dead a-plenty there 
 themselves. Look at their pictures. You re 
 forty years older n the oldest of them." 
 
 John Tarwater did look, but his eyes strayed 
 to other photographs on the highly sensational 
 front page. 
 
 " And look at the photys of them nuggets they 
 brought down," he said. " I know gold. Didn t 
 I gopher twenty thousand outa the Merced? And 
 wouldn t it a-ben a hundred thousand if that cloud 
 burst hadn t busted my wing-dam? Now if I 
 was only in the Klondike " 
 
 " Crazy as a loon," William sneered in open 
 aside to the rest. 
 
 " A nice way to talk to your father," Old Man 
 Tarwater censured mildly. " My father d have 
 walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if 
 I d spcke to him that way." 
 
 " But you are crazy, father " William began. 
 
 " Reckon you re right, son. And that s where 
 my father wasn t crazy. He d a-done it." 
 
 " The old man s been reading some of them 
 
96 THE RED ONE 
 
 magazine articles about men who succeeded after 
 forty," Annie gibed. 
 
 " And why not, daughter? " he asked. " And 
 why can t a man succeed after he s seventy? I 
 was only seventy this year. And mebbe I could 
 succeed if only I could get to the Klondike " 
 
 " Which you ain t going to get to," Mary shut 
 him off. 
 
 " Oh, well, then," he sighed, " seein s I ain t, I 
 might just as well go to bed." 
 
 He stood up, tall, gaunt, great-boned and 
 gnarled, a splendid ruin of a man. His ragged 
 hair and whiskers were not gray but snowy white, 
 as were the tufts of hair that stood out on the 
 backs of his huge bony fingers. He moved to 
 ward the door, opened it, sighed, and paused with 
 a backward look. 
 
 u Just the same," he murmured plaintively, 
 " the bottoms of my feet is itching something ter 
 rible." 
 
 Long before the family stirred next morning, 
 his horses fed and harnessed by lantern light, 
 breakfast cooked and eaten by lamplight, Old 
 Man Tarwater was off and away down Tar- 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 97 
 
 water Valley on the road to Kelterville. Two 
 things were unusual about this usual trip which he 
 had made a thousand and forty times since taking 
 the mail contract. He did not drive to Kelter 
 ville, but turned off on the main road south to 
 Santa Rosa. Even more remarkable than this 
 was the paper-wrapped parcel between his feet. 
 It contained his one decent black suit, which Mary 
 had been long reluctant to see him wear any more, 
 not because it was shabby, but because, as he 
 guessed what was at the back of her mind, it was 
 decent enough to bury him in. 
 
 And at Santa Rosa, in a second-hand clothes 
 shop, he sold the suit outright for two dollars and 
 a half. From the same obliging shopman he re 
 ceived four dollars for the wedding ring of his 
 long-dead wife. The span of horses and the 
 wagon he disposed of for seventy-five dollars, al 
 though twenty-five was all he received down in 
 cash. Chancing to meet Alton Granger on the 
 street, to whom never before had he mentioned 
 the ten dollars loaned him in 74, he reminded 
 Alton Granger of the little affair, and was 
 promptly paid. Also, of all unbelievable men to 
 be in funds, he so found the town drunkard for 
 
98 THE RED ONE 
 
 whom he had bought many a drink in the old and 
 palmy days. And from him John Tarwater bor 
 rowed a dollar. Finally, he took the afternoon 
 train to San Francisco. 
 
 A dozen days later, carrying a half-empty 
 canvas sack of blankets and old clothes, he landed 
 on the beach of Dyea in the thick of the great 
 Klondike Rush. The beach was screaming bed 
 lam. Ten thousand tons of outfit lay heaped and 
 scattered, and twice ten thousand men struggled 
 with it and clamored about it. Freight, by In 
 dian-back, over Chilcoot to Lake Linderman, had 
 jumped from sixteen to thirty cents a pound, which 
 latter was a rate of six hundred dollars a ton. 
 And the sub-arctic winter gloomed near at hand. 
 All knew it, and all knew that of the twenty thou 
 sand of them very few would get across the passes, 
 leaving the rest to winter and wait for the late 
 spring thaw. 
 
 Such the beach old John Tarwater stepped 
 upon; and straight across the beach and up the 
 trail toward Chilcoot he headed, cackling his an 
 cient chant, a very Grandfather Argus himself, 
 with no outfit worry in the world, for he did not 
 possess any outfit. That night he slept on the 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 99 
 
 flats, five miles above Dyea, at the head of canoe 
 navigation. Here the Dyea River became a rush 
 ing mountain torrent, plunging out of a dark 
 canyon from the glaciers that fed it far above. 
 
 And here, early next morning, he beheld a 
 little man weighing no more than a hundred, stag 
 gering along a foot-log under all of a hundred 
 pounds of flour strapped on his back. Also, he 
 beheld the little man stumble off the log and fall 
 face-downward in a quiet eddy where the water 
 was two feet deep and proceed quietly to drown. 
 It was no desire of his to take death so easily, 
 but the flour on his back weighed as much as he 
 and would not let him up. 
 
 " Thank you, old man," he said to Tarwater, 
 when the latter had dragged him up into the air 
 and ashore. 
 
 While he unlaced his shoes and ran the water 
 out, they had further talk. Next, he fished out 
 a ten-dollar gold-piece and offered it to his res 
 cuer. 
 
 Old Tarwater shook his head and shivered, for 
 the ice-water had wet him to his knees. 
 
 " But I reckon I wouldn t object to settin down 
 ,to a friendly meal with you." 
 
ioo THE RED ONE 
 
 "Ain t had breakfast?" the little man, who 
 was past forty and who had said his name was 
 Anson, queried with a glance frankly curious. 
 
 " Nary bite," John Tarwater answered. 
 
 "Where s your outfit? Ahead?" 
 
 " Nary outfit." 
 
 " Expect to buy your grub on the Inside? " 
 
 " Nary a dollar to buy it with, friend. Which 
 ain t so important as a warm bite of breakfast 
 right now." 
 
 In Anson s camp, a quarter of a mile on, Tar- 
 water found a slender, red-whiskered young man 
 of thirty cursing over a fire of wet willow wood. 
 Introduced as Charles, he transferred his scowl 
 and wrath to Tarwater, who, genially oblivious, 
 devoted himself to the fire, took advantage of the 
 chill morning breeze to create a draught which 
 the other had left stupidly blocked by stones, and 
 soon developed less smoke and more flame. The 
 third member of the party, Bill Wilson, or Big 
 Bill as they called him, came in with a hundred- 
 and-forty-pound pack; and what Tarwater es 
 teemed to be a very rotten breakfast was dished 
 out by Charles. The mush was half cooked and 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 101 
 
 mostly burnt, the bacon was charred carbon, and 
 the coffee was unspeakable. 
 
 Immediately the meal was wolfed down, the 
 three partners took their empty packstraps and 
 headed down trail to where the remainder of their 
 outfit lay at the last camp a mile away. And old 
 Tarwater became busy. He washed the dishes, 
 foraged dry wood, mended a broken packstrap, 
 put an edge on the butcher-knife and camp-ax, and 
 repacked the picks and shovels into a more carry- 
 able parcel. 
 
 What had impressed him during the brief break 
 fast was the sort of awe in which Anson and Big 
 Bill stood of Charles. Once, during the morning, 
 while Anson took a breathing spell after bringing 
 in another hundred-pound pack, Tarwater deli 
 cately hinted his impression. 
 
 " You see, it s this way," Anson said. " We ve 
 divided our leadership. We ve all got specialties. 
 Now I m a carpenter. When we get to Lake Lin- 
 derman, and the trees are chopped and whipsawed 
 into planks, I ll boss the building of the boat Big 
 Jim is a logger and miner. So he ll boss getting 
 out the logs and all mining operations. Most of 
 our outfit s ahead. We went broke paying the In- 
 
102 THE RED ONE 
 
 dians to pack that much of it to the top of Chilcoot. 
 Our last partner is up there with it, moving it along 
 by himself down the other side. His name s 
 Liverpool, and he s a sailor. So, when the boat s 
 built, he s the boss of the outfit to navigate the 
 lakes and rapids to Klondike." 
 
 " And Charles this Mr. Clayton what 
 might his specialty be? " Tarwater asked. 
 
 " He s the business man. When it comes to 
 business and organization he s boss." 
 
 " Hum," Tarwater pondered. " Very lucky to 
 get such a bunch of specialties into one outfit." 
 
 " More than lucky," Anson agreed. " It was 
 all accident, too. Each of us started alone. We 
 met on the steamer coming up from San Francisco, 
 and formed the party. Well, I got to be goin . 
 Charles is liable to get kicking because I ain t 
 packing my share. Just the same, you can t expect 
 a hundred-pound man to pack as much as a hun- 
 dred-and-sixty-pounder." 
 
 " Stick around and cook us something for din 
 ner," Charles, on his next load in and noting the 
 effects of the old man s handiness, told Tarwater. 
 
 And Tarwater cooked a dinner that was a din 
 ner, washed the dishes, had real pork and beans 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 103 
 
 for supper, and bread baked in a frying-pan that 
 was so delectable that the three partners nearly 
 foundered themselves on it. Supper dishes 
 washed, he cut shavings and kindling for a quick 
 and certain breakfast fire, showed Anson a trick 
 with foot-gear that was invaluable to any hiker, 
 sang his " Like Argus of the Ancient Times," and 
 told them of the great emigration across the Plains 
 in Forty-nine. 
 
 " My goodness, the first cheerful and hearty-like 
 camp since we hit the beach," Big Jim remarked 
 as he knocked out his pipe and began pulling off his 
 shoes for bed. 
 
 " Kind of made things easy, boys, eh? " Tar- 
 water queried genially. 
 
 All nodded. " Well, then, I got a proposition, 
 boys. You can take it or leave it, but just listen 
 kindly to it. You re in a hurry to get in before the 
 freeze-up. Half the time is wasted over the cook 
 ing by one of you that he might be puttin in packin 
 outfit. If I do the cookin for you, you all ll get 
 on that much faster. Also, the cookin 11 be bet 
 ter, and that ll make you pack better. And I can 
 pack quite a bit myself in between times, quite a 
 bit, yes, sir, quite a bit." 
 
io 4 THE RED ONE 
 
 Big Bill and Anson were just beginning to nod 
 their heads in agreement, when Charles stopped 
 them. 
 
 "What do you expect of us in return? " he 
 demanded of the old man. 
 
 " Oh, I leave it up to the boys." 
 
 " That ain t business," Charles reprimanded 
 sharply. " You made the proposition. Now fin 
 ish it." 
 
 " Well, it s this way " 
 
 "You expect us to feed you all winter, eh?" 
 Charles interrupted. 
 
 " No, siree, I don t. All I reckon is a passage 
 to Klondike in your boat would be mighty square 
 of you." 
 
 " You haven t an ounce of grub, old man. 
 You ll starve to death when you get there." 
 
 " I ve been feedin some long time pretty suc 
 cessful," Old Tarwater replied, a whimsical light 
 in his eyes. " I m seventy, and ain t starved to 
 death never yet." 
 
 " Will you sign a paper to the effect that you 
 shift for yourself as soon as you get to Dawson? " 
 the business one demanded. 
 
 " Oh, sure," was the response. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 105 
 
 Again Charles checked his two partners expres 
 sions of satisfaction with the arrangement. 
 
 " One other thing, old man. We re a party of 
 four, and we all have a vote on questions like this. 
 Young Liverpool is ahead with the main outfit. 
 He s got a say so, and he isn t here to say it." 
 
 "What kind of a party might he be?" Tar- 
 water inquired. 
 
 " He s a rough-neck sailor, and he s got a 
 quick, bad temper." 
 
 " Some turbulent," Anson contributed. 
 
 " And the way he can cuss is simply God-awful," 
 Big Jim testified. 
 
 " But he s square," Big Jim added. 
 
 Anson nodded heartily to this appraisal. 
 
 " Well, boys," Tarwater summed up, " I set out 
 for Californy and I got there. And I m going to 
 get to Klondike. Ain t a thing can stop me, ain t 
 a thing. I m going to get three hundred thousand 
 outa the ground, too. Ain t a thing can stop me, 
 ain t a thing, because I just naturally need the 
 money. I don t mind a bad temper so long s the 
 boy is square. I ll take my chance, an I ll work 
 along with you till we catch up with him. Then, if 
 he says no to the proposition, I "reckon I ll lose. 
 
io6 THE RED ONE 
 
 But somehow I just can t see m sayin no, because 
 that d mean too close up to freeze-up and too late 
 for me to find another chance like this. And, as 
 I m sure going to get to Klondike, it s just plumb 
 impossible for him to say no." 
 
 Old John Tarwater became a striking figure on 
 a trail unusually replete with striking figures. 
 With thousands of men, each back-tripping half a 
 ton of outfit, retracing every mile of the trail 
 twenty times, all came to know him and to hail him 
 as " Father Christmas." And as he worked ever 
 he raised his chant with his age-falsetto voice. 
 None of the three men he had joined could com 
 plain about his work. True, his joints were stiff 
 . he admitted to a trifle of rheumatism. He 
 moved slowly, and seemed to creak and crackle 
 when he moved; but he kept on moving. Last 
 into the blankets at night, he was first out in the 
 morning, so that the other three had hot coffee 
 before their one before-breakfast pack. And, 
 between breakfast and dinner and between dinner 
 and supper, he always managed to back-trip for 
 several packs himself. Sixty pounds was the limit 
 of his burden, however. He could manage sev 
 enty-five, but he could not keep it up. Once, he 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 107 
 
 tried ninety, but collapsed on the trail and was 
 seriously shaky for a couple of days afterward. 
 
 Work! On a trail where hard-working men 
 learned for the first time what work was, no man 
 worked harder in proportion to his strength than 
 Old Tarwater. Driven desperately on by the 
 near-thrust of winter, and lured madly on by the 
 dream of gold, they worked to their last ounce 
 of strength and fell by the way. Others, when 
 failure made certain, blew out their brains. Some 
 went mad, and still others, under the irk of the 
 man-destroying strain, broke partnerships and dis 
 solved life-time friendships with fellows just as 
 good as themselves and just as strained and mad. 
 
 Work! Old Tarwater could shame them all, 
 despite his creaking and crackling and the nasty 
 hacking cough he had developed. Early and late, 
 on trail or in camp beside the trail, he was ever in 
 evidence, ever busy at something, ever responsive 
 to the hail of " Father Christmas." Weary back- 
 trippers would rest their packs on a log or rock 
 alongside of where he rested his, and would say: 
 " Sing us that song of yourn, dad, about Forty- 
 Nine." And, when he had wheezingly complied, 
 they would arise under their loads, remark that it 
 
io8 THE RED ONE 
 
 was real heartening, and hit the forward trail 
 again. 
 
 " If ever a man worked his passage and earned 
 it," Big Jim confided to his two partners, " that 
 man s our old Skeezicks." 
 
 " You bet," Anson confirmed. " He s a valu 
 able addition to the party, and I, for one, ain t at 
 all disagreeable to the notion of making him a 
 regular partner " 
 
 "None of that!" Charles Crayton cut in. 
 " When we get to Dawson we re quit of him 
 that s the agreement. We d only have to bury 
 him if we let him stay on with us. Besides, there s 
 going to be a famine, and every ounce of grub ll 
 count. Remember, we re feeding him out of our 
 own supply all the way in. And if we run short in 
 the pinch next year, you ll know the reason. 
 Steamboats can t get up grub to Dawson till the 
 middle of June, and that s nine months away." 
 
 " Well, you put as much money and outfit in 
 as the rest of us," Big Bill conceded, " and you ve 
 a say according." 
 
 " And I m going to have my say," Charles as 
 serted with increasing irritability. " And it s 
 lucky for you with your fool sentiments that 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 109 
 
 you ve got somebody to think ahead for you, else 
 you d all starve to death. I tell you that famine s 
 coming. I ve been studying the situation. Flour 
 will be two dollars a pound, or ten, and no sellers. 
 .You mark my words." 
 
 Across the rubble-covered flats, up the dark can 
 yon to Sheep Camp, past the overhanging and ever- 
 threatening glaciers to the Scales, and from the 
 Scales up the steep pitches of ice-scoured rock 
 where packers climbed with hands and feet, Old 
 Tarwater camp-cooked and packed and sang. He 
 blew across Chilcoot Pass, above timber-line, in 
 the first swirl of autumn snow. Those below, 
 without firewood, on the bitter rim of Crater Lake, 
 heard from the driving obscurity above them a 
 weird voice chanting: 
 
 " Like Argus of the ancient times, 
 We leave this modern Greece, 
 Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn, 
 To shear the Golden Fleece." 
 
 And out of the snow flurries they saw appear a 
 tall, gaunt form, with whiskers of flying white that 
 blended with the storm, bending under a sixty- 
 pound pack of camp dunnage. 
 
no THE RED ONE 
 
 "Father Christmas!" was the hail. And 
 then: " Three rousing cheers for Father Christ 
 mas!" 
 
 Two miles beyond Crater Lake lay Happy 
 Camp so named because here was found the 
 uppermost fringe of the timber line, where men 
 might warm themselves by fire again. Scarcely 
 could it be called timber, for it was a dwarf rock- 
 spruce that never raised its loftiest branches higher 
 than a foot above the moss, and that twisted and 
 groveled like a pig-vegetable under the moss. 
 Here, on the trail leading into Happy Camp, in 
 the first sunshine of half a dozen days, Old Tar- 
 water rested his pack against a huge bowlder and 
 caught his breath. Around this bowlder the trail 
 passed, laden men toiling slowly forward and men 
 with empty pack-straps limping rapidly back for 
 fresh loads. Twice Old Tarwater essayed to 
 rise and go on, and each time, warned by his 
 shakiness, sank back to recover more strength. 
 From around the bowlder he heard voices in greet 
 ing, recognized Charles Crayton s voice, and real 
 ized that at last they had met up with Young Liv 
 erpool. Quickly, Charles plunged into business, 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES in 
 
 and Tarwater heard with great distinctness every 
 word of Charles unflattering description of him 
 and of the proposition to give him passage to Daw- 
 son. 
 
 " A damn fool proposition," was Liverpool s 
 judgment, when Charles had concluded. " An old 
 granddad of seventy ! If he s on his last legs, why 
 in hell did you hook up with him? If there s 
 going to be a famine, and it looks like it, we need 
 every ounce of grub for ourselves. We only out 
 fitted for four, not five." 
 
 " It s all right," Tarwater heard Charles assur 
 ing the other. " Don t get excited. The old 
 codger agreed to leave the final decision to you 
 when we caught up with you. All you ve got to 
 do is put your foot down and say no." 
 
 " You mean it s up to me to turn the old 
 one down, after your encouraging him and tak 
 ing advantage of his work clear from Dyea 
 here?" 
 
 " It s a hard trail, Liverpool, and only the men 
 that are hard will get through," Charles strove to 
 palliate. 
 
 " And I m to do the dirty work? " Liverpool 
 complained, while Tarwater s heart sank. 
 
ii2 THE RED ONE 
 
 " That s just about the size of it," Charles said. 
 " You ve got the deciding." 
 
 Then Old Tarwater s heart uprose again as the 
 air was rent by a cyclone of profanity, from the 
 midst of which crackled sentences like: " Dirty 
 skunks! ... See you in hell first! . . . My 
 mind s made up ! ... Hell s fire and corruption ! 
 . . . The old codger goes down the Yukon with 
 us, stack on that, my hearty! . . . Hard? You 
 don t know what hard is unless I show you I ... 
 I ll bust the whole outfit to hell and gone if any of 
 you try to side-track him! . . . Just try to side 
 track him, that s all, and you ll think the day of 
 Judgment and all God s blastingness has hit the 
 camp in one chunk ! " 
 
 Such was the invigoratingness of Liverpool s 
 flow of speech that, quite without consciousness of 
 effort, the old man arose easily under his load and 
 strode on toward Happy Camp. 
 
 From Happy Camp to Long Lake, from Long 
 Lake to Deep Lake, and from Deep Lake up over 
 the enormous hog-back and down to Linderman, 
 the man-killing race against winter kept on. Men 
 broke their hearts and backs and wept beside the 
 trail in sheer exhaustion. But winter never fal- 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 113 
 
 tered. The fall gales blew, and amid bitter soak 
 ing rains and ever increasing snow flurries, Tar- 
 water and the party to which he was attached piled 
 the last of their outfit on the beach. 
 
 There was no rest. Across the lake, a mile 
 above a roaring torrent, they located a patch of 
 spruce and built their saw-pit. Here, by hand, 
 with an inadequate whipsaw, they sawed the 
 spruce-trunks into lumber. They worked night 
 and day. Thrice, on the night-shift, underneath 
 in the saw-pit, Old Tarwater fainted. By day he 
 cooked as well, and, in the betweenwhiles, helped 
 Anson in the building of the boat beside the tor 
 rent as the green planks came down. 
 
 The days grew shorter. The wind shifted into 
 the north and blew unending gales. In the morn 
 ings the weary men crawled from their blankets 
 and in their socks thawed out their frozen shoes by 
 the fire Tarwater always had burning for them. 
 Ever arose the increasing tale of famine on the 
 Inside. The last grub steamboats up from Bering 
 Sea were stalled by low water at the beginning 
 of the Yukon Flats hundred of miles north of 
 Dawson. In fact, they lay at the old Hudson 
 Bay Company s post at Fort Yukon inside the Arc- 
 
ii 4 THE RED ONE 
 
 tic Circle. Flour in Dawson was up to two dollars 
 a pound but no one would sell. Bonanza and El 
 dorado Kings, with money to burn, were leaving 
 for the Outside because they could buy no grub. 
 Miners Committees were confiscating all grub and 
 putting the population on strict rations. A man 
 who held out an ounce of grub was shot like a 
 dog. A score had been so executed already. 
 
 And, under a strain which had broken so many 
 younger men, Old Tarwater began to break. His 
 cough had become terrible, and had not his ex 
 hausted comrades slept like the dead, he would 
 have kept them awake nights. Also, he began to 
 take chills, so that he dressed up to go to bed. 
 When he had finished so dressing, not a rag of gar 
 ment remained in his clothes bag. All he pos 
 sessed was on his back and swathed around his 
 gaunt old form. 
 
 " Gee! " said Big Bill. " If he puts all he s 
 got on now, when it ain t lower than twenty above, 
 what ll he do later on when it goes down to fifty 
 and sixty below?" 
 
 They lined the rough-made boat down the 
 mountain torrent, nearly losing it a dozen times, 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 115 
 
 and rowed across the south end of Lake Linder- 
 man in the thick of a fall blizzard. Next morn 
 ing they planned to load and start, squarely into 
 the teeth of the north, on their perilous traverse 
 of half a thousand miles of lakes and rapids 
 and box canyons. But before he went to bed 
 that night, Young Liverpool was out over the 
 camp. He returned to find his whole party asleep. 
 Rousing Tarwater, he talked with him in low 
 tones. 
 
 " Listen, dad," he said. " You ve got a pas 
 sage in our boat, and if ever a man earned a pas 
 sage you have. But you know yourself you re 
 pretty well along in years, and your health right 
 now ain t exciting. If you go on with us you ll 
 croak surer n hell. Now wait till I finish, dad. 
 The price for a passage has jumped to five hun 
 dred dollars. I ve been throwing my feet and 
 I ve hustled a passenger. He s an official of the 
 Alaska Commercial and just has to get in. He s 
 bid up to six hundred to go with me in our boat. 
 Now the passage is yours. You sell it to him, 
 poke the six hundred into your jeans, and pull 
 South for California while the goin s good. You 
 
n6 THE RED ONE 
 
 can be in Dyea in two days, and in California in a 
 week more. What d ye say? " 
 
 Tarwater coughed and shivered for a space, ere 
 he could get freedom of breath for speech. 
 
 " Son," he said, " I just want to tell you one 
 thing. I drove my four yoke of oxen across the 
 Plains in Forty-nine and lost nary a one. I drove 
 them plumb to Californy, and I freighted with 
 them afterward out of Sutter s Fort to American 
 Bar. Now I m going to Klondike. Ain t nothing 
 can stop me, ain t nothing at all. I m going to 
 ride that boat, with you at the steering sweep, clean 
 to Klondike, and I m going to shake three hundred 
 thousand out of the moss-roots. That being so, 
 it s contrary to reason and common sense for me to 
 sell out my passage. But I thank you kindly, son, 
 I thank you kindly." 
 
 The young sailor shot out his hand impulsively 
 and gripped the old man s. 
 
 " By God, dad! " he cried. " You re sure go 
 ing to go then. You re the real stuff." He 
 looked with undisguised contempt across the sleep 
 ers to where Charles Crayton snored in his red 
 beard. They don t seem to make your kind any 
 more, dad." 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 117 
 
 Into the north they fought their way, although 
 old-timers, coming out, shook their heads and 
 prophesied they would be frozen in on the lakes. 
 That the freeze-up might come any day was patent, 
 and delays of safety were no longer considered. 
 For this reason, Liverpool decided to shoot the 
 rapid stream connecting Linderman to Lake Ben 
 nett with the fully loaded boat. It was the custom 
 to line the empty boats down and to portage the 
 cargoes across. Even then, many empty boats 
 had been wrecked. But the time was past for such 
 precaution. 
 
 " Climb out, dad," Liverpool commanded, as 
 he prepared to swing from the bank and enter the 
 rapids. 
 
 Old Tarwater shook his white head. 
 
 " I m sticking to the outfit," he declared. " It s 
 the only way to get through. You see, son, I m 
 going to Klondike. If I stick by the boat, then the 
 boat just naturally goes to Klondike, too. If I 
 get out, then most likely you ll lose the boat." 
 
 " Well, there s no use in overloading," Charles 
 announced, springing abruptly out on the bank as 
 the boat cast off. 
 
 " Next time you wait for my orders ! " Liver- 
 
n8 THE RED ONE 
 
 pool shouted ashore as the current gripped the 
 boat. " And there won t be any more walking 
 around rapids and losing time waiting to pick you 
 up!" 
 
 What took them ten minutes by river, took 
 Charles half an hour by land, and while they 
 waited for him at the head of Lake Bennett they 
 passed the time of day with several dilapidated old- 
 timers on their way out. The famine news was 
 graver than ever. The Northwest Mounted Po 
 lice, stationed at the foot of Lake Marsh where 
 the gold-rushers entered Canadian Territory, were 
 refusing to let a man past who did not carry with 
 him seven hundred pounds of grub. In Dawson 
 City a thousand men, with dog-teams, were waiting 
 the freeze-up to come out over the ice. The trad 
 ing companies could not fill their grub-contracts, 
 and partners were cutting the cards to see which 
 should go and which should stay and work the 
 claims. 
 
 :t That settles it," Charles announced, when he 
 learned of the action of the mounted police on 
 the boundary. " Old Man, you might as well 
 start back now." 
 
 "Climb aboard!" Liverpool commanded. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 119 
 
 " We re going to Klondike, and old dad is going 
 along." 
 
 A shift of gale to the south gave them a fair 
 wind down Lake Bennett, before which they ran 
 under a huge sail made by Liverpool. The 
 heavy weight of outfit gave such ballast that he 
 cracked on as a daring sailor should when mo 
 ments counted. A shift of four points into the 
 southwest, coming just at the right time as they 
 entered upon Caribou Crossing, drove them down 
 that connecting link to lakes Taggish and Marsh. 
 In stormy sunset and twilight they made the dan 
 gerous crossing of Great Windy Arm, wherein 
 they beheld two other boat-loads of gold-rushers 
 capsize and drown. 
 
 Charles was for beaching for the night, but Liv 
 erpool held on, steering down Tagish by the sound 
 of the surf on the shoals and by the occasional 
 shore-fires that advertised wrecked or timid argo 
 nauts. At four in the morning, he aroused 
 Charles. Old Tarwater, shiveringly awake, 
 heard Liverpool order Crayton aft beside him at 
 the steering-sweep, and also heard the one-sided 
 conversation. 
 
 " Just listen, friend Charles, and keep your own 
 
120 THE RED ONE 
 
 mouth shut," Liverpool began. " I want you to 
 get one thing into your head and keep it there: 
 old dad s going by the police. Understand? 
 He s going by. When they examine our outfit, 
 old dad s got a fifth share in it, savvee ? That ll 
 put us all way under what we ought to have, but 
 we can bluff it through. Now get this, and get it 
 hard: there ain t going to be any fall-down on this 
 bluf" 
 
 " If you think I d give away on the old 
 codger " Charles began indignantly. 
 
 41 You thought that," Liverpool checked him, 
 " because I never mentioned any such thing. Now 
 get me and get me hard: I don t care what 
 you ve been thinking. It s what you re going to 
 think. We ll make the police post some time this 
 afternoon, and we ve got to get ready to pull 
 the bluff without a hitch, and a word to the wise 
 is plenty." 
 
 " If you think I ve got it in my mind " Charles 
 began again. 
 
 " Look here," Liverpool shut him off. " I 
 don t know what s in your mind. I don t want to 
 know. I want you to know what s in my mind. 
 If there s any slip-up, if old dad gets turned back 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 121 
 
 by the police, I m going to pick out the first quiet 
 bit of landscape and take you ashore on it. And 
 then I m going to beat you up to the Queen s taste. 
 Get me, and get me hard. It ain t going to be 
 any half-way beating, but a real, two-legged, two- 
 fisted, he-man beating. I don t expect I ll kill you, 
 but I ll come damn near to half-killing you." 
 
 " But what can I do? " Charles almost whim 
 pered. 
 
 " Just one thing," was Liverpool s final word. 
 " You just pray. You pray so hard that old dad 
 gets by the police that he does get by. That s all. 
 Go back to your blankets." 
 
 Before they gained Lake Le Barge, the land was 
 sheeted with snow that would not melt for half 
 a year. Nor could they lay their boat at will 
 against the bank, for the rim-ice was already form 
 ing. Inside the mouth of the river, just ere it 
 entered Lake Le Barge, they found a hundred 
 storm-bound boats of the argonauts. Out of the 
 north, across the full sweep of the great lake, blew 
 an unending snow gale. Three mornings they put 
 out and fought it and the cresting seas it drove 
 that turned to ice as they fell in-board. While 
 
122 THE RED ONE 
 
 the others broke their hearts at the oars, Old Tar- 
 water managed to keep up just sufficient circula 
 tion to survive by chopping ice and throwing it 
 overboard. 
 
 Each day for three days, beaten to helplessness, 
 they turned tail on the battle and ran back into 
 the sheltering river. By the fourth day, the hun 
 dred boats had increased to three hundred, and the 
 two thousand argonauts on board knew that the 
 great gale heralded the freeze-up of Le Barge. 
 Beyond, the rapid rivers would continue to run for 
 days, but unless they got beyond, and immediately, 
 they were doomed to be frozen in for six months 
 to come. 
 
 " This day we go through," Liverpool an 
 nounced. " We turn back for nothing. And 
 those of us that dies at the oars will live again and 
 go on pulling." 
 
 And they went through, winning half the length 
 of the lake by nightfall and pulling on through all 
 the night hours as the wind went down, falling 
 asleep at the oars and being rapped awake by Liv 
 erpool, toiling on through an age-long nightmare 
 while the stars came out and the surface of the lake 
 turned to the unruffledness of a sheet of paper and 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 123 
 
 froze skin-ice that tinkled like broken glass as their 
 oar-blades shattered it. 
 
 As day broke clear and cold, they entered the 
 river, with behind them a sea of ice. Liverpool 
 examined his aged passenger and found him help 
 less and almost gone. When he rounded the boat 
 to against the rim-ice to build a fire and warm up 
 Tarwater inside and out, Charles protested against 
 such loss of time. 
 
 This ain t business, so don t you come horning 
 in," Liverpool informed him. ; I m running the 
 boat trip. So you just climb out and chop fire 
 wood, and plenty of it. I ll take care of dad. 
 You, Anson, make a fire on the bank. And you, 
 Bill, set up the Yukon stove in the boat. Old dad 
 ain t as young as the rest of us, and for the rest 
 of this voyage he s going to have a fire on board to 
 sit by." 
 
 All of which came to pass ; and the boat, in the 
 grip of the current, like a river steamer with 
 smoke rising from the two joints of stove-pipe, 
 grounded on shoals, hung up on split currents, and 
 charged rapids and canyons, as it drove deeper 
 into the Northland winter. The Big and Little 
 Salmon rivers were throwing mush-ice into the 
 
124 THE RED ONE 
 
 main river as they passed, and, below the riffles, 
 anchor-ice arose from the river bottom and coated 
 the surface with crystal scum. Night and day 
 the rim-ice grew, till, in quiet places, it extended 
 out a hundred yards from shore. And Old Tar- 
 water, with all his clothes on, sat by the stove and 
 kept the fire going. Night and day, not daring to 
 stop for fear of the imminent freeze-up, they 
 dared to run, an increasing mushiness of ice run 
 ning with them. 
 
 " What ho, old hearty? " Liverpool would call 
 out at times. 
 
 " Cheer O," Old Tarwater had learned to re 
 spond. 
 
 " What can I ever do for you, son, in pay 
 ment?" Tarwater, stoking the fire, would some 
 times ask Liverpool beating now one released 
 hand and now the other as he fought for cir 
 culation where he steered in the freezing stern- 
 sheets. 
 
 " Just break out that regular song of yours, old 
 Forty-Niner," was the invariable reply. 
 
 And Tarwater would lift his voice in the cack 
 ling chant, as he lifted it at the end, when the boat 
 swung in through driving cake-ice and moored to 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 125 
 
 the Dawson City bank, and all waterfront Dawson 
 pricked its ears to hear the triumphant paean : 
 
 " Like Argus of the ancient times, 
 We leave this modern Greece, 
 Turn-turn, turn-turn, turn, turn, turn-turn, 
 To shear the Golden Fleece." 
 
 Charles did it, but he did it so discreetly that 
 none of his party, least of all the sailor, ever 
 learned of it. He saw two great open barges 
 being filled up with men, and, on inquiry, learned 
 that these were grubless ones being rounded up 
 and sent down the Yukon by the Committee of 
 Safety. The barges were to be towed by the last 
 little steamboat in Dawson, and the hope was that 
 Fort Yukon, where lay the stranded steamboats, 
 would be gained before the river froze. At any 
 rate, no matter what happened to them, Dawson 
 would be relieved of their grub-consuming pres 
 ence. So to the Committee of Safety Charles 
 went, privily to drop a flea in its ear concerning 
 Tarwater s grubless, moneyless, and aged con 
 dition. Tarwater was one of the last gathered in, 
 and when Young Liverpool returned to the boat, 
 from the bank he saw the barges in a run of cake- 
 
126 THE RED ONE 
 
 ice, disappearing around the bend below Moose- 
 hide Mountain. 
 
 Running in cake-ice all the way, and several 
 times escaping jams in the Yukon Flats, the barges 
 made their hundreds of miles of progress farther 
 into the north and froze up cheek by jowl with the 
 grub-fleet. Here, inside the Arctic Circle Old 
 Tarwater settled down to pass the long winter. 
 Several hours work a day, chopping firewood for 
 the steamboat companies, sufficed to keep him in 
 food. For the rest of the time there was nothing 
 to do but hibernate in his log cabin. 
 
 Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured his hack 
 ing cough and put him in as good physical con 
 dition as was possible for his advanced years. 
 But, even before Christmas, the lack of fresh veg 
 etables caused scurvy to break out, and disap 
 pointed adventurer after disappointed adventurer 
 took to his bunk in abject surrender to this culmi 
 nating misfortune. Not so Tarwater. Even be 
 fore the first symptoms appeared on him, he was 
 putting into practice his one prescription, namely, 
 exercise. From the junk of the old trading post 
 he resurrected a number of rusty traps, and from 
 one of the steamboat captains he borrowed a rifle. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 127 
 
 Thus equipped, he ceased from wood-chopping, 
 and began to make more than a mere living. Nor 
 was he downhearted when the scurvy broke out on 
 his own body. Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang 
 his ancient chant. Nor could the pessimist shake 
 his surety of the three hundred thousand of Alas 
 kan gold he was going to shake out of the moss- 
 roots. 
 
 " But this ain t gold-country," they told him. 
 
 " Gold is where you find it, son, as I should 
 know who was mining before you was born, way 
 back in Forty-Nine," was his reply. * What was 
 Bonanza Creek but a moose-pasture? No 
 miner d look at it; yet they washed five-hundred- 
 dollar pans and took out fifty million dollars. 
 Eldorado was just as bad. For all you know, 
 right under this here cabin, or right over the next 
 hill, is millions just waiting for a lucky one like 
 me to come and shake it out." 
 
 At the end of January came his disaster. Some 
 powerful animal that he decided was a bob-cat, 
 managing to get caught in one of his smaller traps, 
 dragged it away. A heavy snow-fall put a stop 
 midway to his pursuit, losing the trail for him and 
 losing himself. There were but several hours of 
 
128 THE RED ONE 
 
 daylight each day between the twenty hours of 
 intervening darkness, and his efforts in the gray 
 light and continually falling snow succeeded only 
 in losing him more thoroughly. Fortunately, 
 when winter snow falls in the Northland the ther 
 mometer invariably rises; so, instead of the cus 
 tomary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees be 
 low zero, the temperature remained fifteen below. 
 Also, he was warmly clad and had a full match 
 box. Further to mitigate his predicament, on 
 the fifth day he killed a wounded moose that 
 weighed over half a ton. Making his camp beside 
 it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to last out 
 the winter, unless a searching party found him or 
 his scurvy grew worse. 
 
 But at the end of two weeks there had been no 
 sign of search, while his scurvy had undeniably 
 grown worse. Against his fire, banked from outer 
 cold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he 
 crouched long hours in sleep and long hours in 
 waking. But the waking hours grew less, becom 
 ing semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the 
 processes of hibernation worked their way with 
 him. Slowly the sparkle point of consciousness 
 and identity that was John Tarwater sank, deeper 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 129 
 
 and deeper, into the profounds of his being that 
 had been compounded ere man was man, and while 
 he was becoming man, when he, first of all animals 
 regarded himself with an introspective eye and 
 laid the beginnings of morality in foundations of 
 nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own 
 ethic-thwarted desires. 
 
 Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of 
 consciousness, so Old Tarwater awoke, cooked his 
 moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more and more 
 time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was 
 day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the con 
 tent of his unconsciousness. And here, in the un- 
 forgetable crypts of man s unwritten history, un 
 thinkable and unrealizable, like passages of night 
 mare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he en 
 countered the monsters created of man s first 
 morality that ever since have vexed him into the 
 spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle 
 with them. 
 
 In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the 
 vast and silent loneliness of the North, Old Tar- 
 water, as in the delirium of drug or anaesthetic, 
 recovered, within himself, the infantile mind of the 
 child-man of the early world. It was in the dusk 
 
130 THE RED ONE 
 
 of Death s fluttery wings that Tarwater thus 
 crouched, and, like his remote forebear, the child- 
 man, went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing, 
 himself hero-maker and the hero in quest of the 
 immemorable treasure difficult of attainment. 
 
 Either must he attain the treasure for so ran 
 the inexorable logic of the shadow-land of the un 
 conscious or else sink into the all-devouring sea, 
 the blackness eater of the light that swallowed to 
 extinction the sun each night . . . the sun that 
 arose ever in rebirth next morning in the east, 
 and that had become to man man s first sym 
 bol of immortality through rebirth. All this, 
 in the deeps of his unconsciousness (the shad 
 owy western land of descending light), was the 
 near dusk of Death down into which he slowly 
 ebbed. 
 
 But how to escape this monster of the dark that 
 from within him slowly swallowed him? Too 
 deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or feel the 
 prod of desire to escape. For him reality had 
 ceased. Nor from within the darkened chamber 
 of himself could reality recrudesce. His years 
 were too heavy upon him, the debility of disease 
 and the lethargy and torpor of the silence and the 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 131 
 
 cold were too profound. Only from without could 
 reality impact upon him and reawake within him 
 an awareness of reality. Otherwise he would 
 ooze down through the shadow-realm of the un 
 conscious into the all-darkness of extinction. 
 
 But it came, the smash of reality from without, 
 crashing upon his ear drums in a loud, explosive 
 snort. For twenty days, in a temperature that 
 had never risen above fifty below, no breath of 
 wind had blown movement, no slightest sound had 
 broken the silence. Like the smoker on the opium 
 couch refocusing his eyes from the spacious walls 
 of dream to the narrow confines of the mean little 
 room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyed before 
 him, across his dying fire, at a huge moose that 
 stared at him in startlement, dragging a wounded 
 leg, manifesting all signs of extreme exhaustion, it, 
 too, had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, 
 and had wakened to reality only just ere it stepped 
 into Tarwater s fire. 
 
 He feebly slipped the large fur mitten lined with 
 thicknesses of wool from his right hand. Upon 
 trial he found the trigger finger too numb for 
 movement. Carefully, slowly, through long 
 minutes, he worked the bare hand inside his 
 
132 THE RED ONE 
 
 blankets, up under his fur parka, through the chest 
 openings of his shirts, and into the slightly warm 
 hollow of his left arm-pit. Long minutes passed 
 ere the finger could move, when, with equal slow 
 ness of caution, he gathered his rifle to his shoul 
 der and drew bead upon the great animal across 
 the fire. 
 
 At the shot, of the two shadow-wanderers, the 
 one reeled downward to the dark and the other 
 reeled upward to the light, swaying drunkenly on 
 his scurvy-ravaged legs, shivering with nervous 
 ness and cold, rubbing swimming eyes with shaking 
 fingers, and staring at the real world all about him 
 that had returned to him with such sickening sud 
 denness. He shook himself together, and real 
 ized that for long, how long he did not know, he 
 had bedded in the arms of Death. He spat, with 
 definite intention, heard the spittle crackle in the 
 frost, and judged it must be below and far below 
 sixty below. In truth, that day at Fort Yukon, the 
 spirit thermometer registered seventy-five degrees 
 below zero, which, since freezing-point is thirty- 
 two above, was equivalent to one hundred and 
 seven degrees of frost. 
 
 Slowly Tarwater s brain reasoned to action. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 133 
 
 Here, in the vast alone, dwelt Death. Here had 
 come two wounded moose. With the clearing of 
 the sky after the great cold came on, he had lo 
 cated his bearings, and he knew that both wounded 
 moose had trailed to him from the east. There 
 fore, in the east, were men whites or Indians he 
 could not tell, but at any rate men who might 
 stand by him in his need and help moor him to 
 reality above the sea of dark. 
 
 He moved slowly, but he moved in reality, gird 
 ing himself with rifle, ammunition, matches, and a 
 pack of twenty pounds of moose-meat. Then, an 
 Argus rejuvenated, albeit lame of both legs and 
 tottery, he turned his back on the perilous west 
 and limped into the sun-arising, re-birthing 
 east. . . . 
 
 Days later how many days later he was 
 never to know dreaming dreams and seeing 
 visions, cackling his old gold-chant of Forty-Nine, 
 like one drowning and swimming feebly to keep his 
 consciousness above the engulfing dark, he came 
 out upon the snow-slope to a canyon and saw 
 below smoke rising and men who ceased from 
 work to gaze at him. He tottered down the hill 
 to them, still singing; and when he ceased from 
 
i 3 4 THE RED ONE 
 
 lack of breath they called him variously: Santa 
 Claus, Old Christmas, Whiskers, the Last of the 
 Mohicans, and Father Christmas. And when he 
 stood among them he stood very still, without 
 speech, while great tears welled out of his eyes. 
 He cried silently, a long time, till, as if suddenly 
 bethinking himself, he sat down in the snow with 
 much creaking and crackling of his joints, and 
 from this low vantage point toppled sidewise and 
 fainted calmly and easily away. 
 
 In less than a week Old Tarwater was up and 
 limping about the housework of the cabin, cooking 
 and dish-washing for the five men of the creek. 
 Genuine sour-doughs (pioneers) they were, tough 
 and hard-bitten, who had been buried so deeply in 
 side the Circle that they did not know there was a 
 Klondike Strike. The news he brought them was 
 their first word of it. They lived on an almost 
 straight-meat diet of moose, caribou, and smoked 
 salmon, eked out with wild berries and somewhat 
 succulent wild roots they had stocked up with in 
 the summer. They had forgotten the taste of 
 coffee, made fire with a burning glass, carried live 
 fire-sticks with them wherever they traveled, and 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 135 
 
 in their pipes smoked dry leaves that bit the tongue 
 and were pungent to the nostrils. 
 
 Three years before, they had prospected from 
 the head-reaches of the Koyokuk northward and 
 clear across to the mouth of the Mackenzie on the 
 Arctic Ocean. Here, on the whaleships, they had 
 beheld their last white men and equipped them 
 selves with the last whiteman s grub, consisting 
 principally of salt and smoking tobacco. Striking 
 south and west on the long traverse to the junc 
 tion of the Yukon and Porcupine at Fort Yukon, 
 they had found gold on this creek and remained 
 over to work the ground. 
 
 They hailed the advent of Tarwater with joy, 
 never tired of listening to his tales of Forty-Nine, 
 and rechristened him Old Hero. Also, with tea 
 made from spruce needles, with concoctions 
 brewed from the inner willow bark, and with sour 
 and bitter roots and bulbs from the ground, they 
 dosed his scurvy out of him, so that he ceased limp 
 ing and began to lay on flesh over his bony frame 
 work. Further, they saw no reason at all why he 
 should not gather a rich treasure of gold from the 
 ground. 
 
 " Don t know about all of three hundred thou- 
 
136 THE RED ONE 
 
 sand," they told him one morning, at breakfast, 
 ere they departed to their work, " but how d a hun 
 dred thousand do, Old Hero? That s what we 
 figure a claim is worth, the ground being badly 
 spotted, and we ve already staked your location 
 
 notices." 
 
 " Well, boys," Old Tarwater answered, " and 
 thanking you kindly, all I can say is that a hundred 
 thousand will do nicely, and very nicely, for a 
 starter. Of course, I ain t goin to stop till I get 
 the full three hundred thousand. That s what I 
 come into the country for." 
 
 They laughed and applauded his ambition and 
 reckoned they d have to hunt a richer creek for 
 him. And Old Hero reckoned that as the spring 
 came on and he grew spryer, he d have to get out 
 and do a little snooping around himself. 
 
 " For all anybody knows," he said, pointing to 
 a hillside across the creek bottom, " the moss 
 under the snow there may be plumb rooted in nug 
 get gold." 
 
 He said no more, but as the sun rose higher and 
 the days grew longer and warmer, he gazed often 
 across the creek at the definite bench-formation 
 half way up the hill. And, one day, when the 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 137 
 
 thaw was in full swing, he crossed the stream and 
 climbed to the bench. Exposed patches of ground 
 had already thawed an inch deep. On one such 
 patch he stooped, gathered a bunch of moss in 
 his big gnarled hands, and ripped it out by the 
 roots. The sun smoldered on dully glistening 
 yellow. He shook the handful of moss, and 
 coarse nuggets, like gravel, fell to the ground. It 
 was the Golden Fleece ready fo r the shearing. 
 
 Not entirely unremembered in Alaskan annals 
 is the summer stampede of 1898 from Fort Yukon 
 to the bench diggings of Tarwater Hill. And 
 when Tarwater sold his holdings to the Bowdie 
 interests for a sheer half-million and faced for 
 California, he rode a mule over a new-cut trail, 
 with convenient road houses* along the way, clear 
 to the steamboat landing at Fort Yukon. 
 
 At the first meal on the ocean-going steamship 
 out of St. Michaels, a waiter, grayish-haired, pain- 
 ravaged of face, scurvy-twisted of body, served 
 him. Old Tarwater was compelled to look him 
 over twice in order to make certain he was Charles 
 Cray ton. 
 
 " Got it bad, eh, son? " Tarwater queried. 
 
 " Just my luck," the other complained, after 
 
i 3 8 THE RED ONE 
 
 recognition and greeting. " Only one of the 
 party that the scurvy attacked. I ve been through 
 hell. The other three are all at work and healthy, 
 getting grub-stake to prospect up White River this 
 winter. Anson s earning twenty-five a day at car 
 pentering, Liverpool getting twenty logging for 
 the saw-mill, and Big Bill s getting forty a day as 
 chief sawyer. I tried my best, and if it hadn t 
 been for scurvy . . ." 
 
 " Sure, son, you done your best, which ain t 
 much, you being naturally irritable and hard from 
 too much business. Now I ll tell you what. You 
 ain t fit to work crippled up this way. I ll pay 
 your passage with the captain in kind remembrance 
 of the voyage you gave me, and you can lay up and 
 take it easy the rest of the trip. And what are 
 your circumstances when you land at San Fran 
 cisco? 1 
 
 Charles Crayton shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 " Tell you what," Tarwater continued. 
 ;< There s work on the ranch for you till you can 
 start business again." 
 
 " I could manage your business for you " 
 Charles began eagerly. 
 
 " No, siree," Tarwater declared emphatically. 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 139 
 
 " But there s always post-holes to dig, and cord- 
 wood to chop, and the climate s fine. . . ." 
 
 Tarwater arrived home a true prodigal grand 
 father for whom the fatted calf was killed and 
 ready. But first, ere he sat down at table, he 
 must stroll out and around. And sons and daugh 
 ters of his flesh and of the law needs must go with 
 him, fulsomely eating out of the gnarled old hand 
 that had half a million to disburse. He led the 
 way, and no opinion he slyly uttered was prepos 
 terous or impossible enough to draw dissent from 
 his following. Pausing by the ruined water wheel 
 which he had built from the standing timber, his 
 face beamed as he gazed across the stretches of 
 Tarwater Valley, and on and up the far heights to 
 the summit of Tarwater Mountain now all his 
 again. 
 
 A thought came to him that made him avert his 
 face and blow his nose in order to hide the twinkle 
 in his eyes. Still attended by the entire family, he 
 strolled on to the dilapidated barn. He picked 
 up an age-weathered single-tree from the ground. 
 
 " William," he said. " Remember that little 
 conversation we had just before I started to Klon 
 dike? Sure, William, you remember. You told 
 
140 THE RED ONE 
 
 me I was crazy. And I said my father d have 
 walloped the tar out of me with a single-tree if I d 
 spoke to him that way." 
 
 " Aw, but that was only fooling" William tem 
 porized. 
 
 William was a grizzled man of forty-five, and 
 his wife and grown sons stood in the group, curi 
 ously watching Grandfather Tarwater take off his 
 coat and hand it to Mary to hold. 
 
 " William - come here," he commanded im 
 peratively. 
 
 No matter how reluctantly, William came. 
 
 " Just a taste, William, son, of what my father 
 give me often enough," Old Tarwater crooned, as 
 he laid on his son s back and shoulders with the 
 single-tree. " Observe, I ain t hitting you on the 
 head. My father had a gosh-wollickin temper 
 and never drew the line at heads when he went 
 after tar. Don t jerk your elbows back that way ! 
 You re likely to get a crack on one by accident. 
 And just tell me one thing, William, son : is there 
 any notion in your head that I m crazy? " 
 
 " No ! " William yelped out in pain, as he 
 danced about. "You ain t crazy, father! Of 
 course you ain t crazy!" 
 
ARGUS OF THE ANCIENT TIMES 141 
 
 " You said it," Old Tarwater remarked sen- 
 tentiously, tossing the single-tree aside and starting 
 to struggle into his coat. " Now let s all go in 
 and eat." 
 
 Glen Ellen, California, 
 September 14, 1916. 
 
THE PRINCESS 
 
 AFIRE burned cheerfully in the jungle 
 camp, and beside the fire lolled a cheerful- 
 seeming though horrible-appearing man. This 
 was a hobo jungle, pitched in a thin strip of woods 
 that lay between a railroad embankment and the 
 bank of a river. But no hobo was the man. So 
 deep-sunk was he in the social abyss that a proper 
 hobo would not sit by the same fire with him. A 
 gay-cat, who is an ignorant newcomer on the 
 " Road," might sit with such as he, but only long 
 enough to learn better. Even low down bindle- 
 stiffs and stew-bums, after a once-over, would have 
 passed this man by. A genuine hobo, a couple of 
 punks, or a bunch of tender-yeared road-kids 
 might have gone through his rags for any stray 
 pennies or nickels and kicked him out into the 
 darkness. Even an alki-stiff would have reckoned 
 himself immeasurably superior. 
 
 For this man was that hybrid of tramp-land, an 
 142 
 
THE PRINCESS 143 
 
 alki-stiff that has degenerated into a stew-bum, 
 with so little self-respect that he will never " boil- 
 up," and with so little pride that he will eat out of 
 a garbage can. He was truly horrible-appearing. 
 He might have been sixty years of age ; he might 
 have been ninety. His garments might have been 
 discarded by a rag-picker. Beside him, an un 
 rolled bundle showed itself as consisting of a 
 ragged overcoat and containing an empty and 
 smoke-blackened tomato can, an empty and bat 
 tered condensed milk can, some dog-meat partly 
 wrapped in brown paper and evidently begged 
 from some butcher-shop, a carrot that had been 
 run over in the street by a wagon-wheel, three 
 greenish-cankered and decayed potatoes, and a 
 sugar-bun with a mouthful bitten from it and res 
 cued from the gutter as was made patent by the 
 gutter-filth that still encrusted it. 
 
 A prodigious growth of whiskers, grayish-dirty 
 and untrimmed for years, sprouted from his face. 
 This hirsute growth should have been white, but 
 the season was summer and it had not been ex 
 posed to a rain-shower for some time. What was 
 visible of the face looked as if at some period it 
 had stopped a hand-grenade. The nose was so 
 
144 THE RED ONE 
 
 variously malformed in its healed brokenness that 
 there was no bridge, while one nostril, the size of a 
 pea, opened downward, and the other, the size of a 
 robin s egg, tilted upward to the sky. One eye, 
 of normal size, dim-drown and misty, bulged to 
 the verge of popping out, and as if from senility 
 wept copiously and continuously. The other eye, 
 scarcely larger than a squirrel s and as uncannily 
 bright, twisted up obliquely into the hairy scar of a 
 bone-crushed eyebrow. And he had but one arm. 
 Yet was he cheerful. On his face, in mild de 
 gree, was depicted sensuous pleasure as he lethar 
 gically scratched his ribs with his one hand. He 
 pawed over his food-scraps, debated, then drew a 
 twelve-ounce druggist s bottle from his inside coat- 
 pocket. The bottle was full of a colorless liquid, 
 the contemplation of which made his little eye 
 burn brighter and quickened his movements. 
 Picking up the tomato can, he arose, went down 
 the short path to the river, and returned with the 
 can filled with not-nice river water. In the con 
 densed milk can he mixed one part of water with 
 two parts of fluid from the bottle. This colorless 
 fluid was druggist s alcohol, and as such is known 
 in tramp-land as " alki." 
 
THE PRINCESS 145 
 
 Slow footsteps, coming down the side of the 
 railroad embankment, alarmed him ere he could 
 drink. Placing the can carefully upon the 
 ground between his legs, he covered it with his 
 hat and waited anxiously whatever impended. 
 
 Out of the darkness emerged a man as filthy 
 ragged as he. The newcomer, who might have 
 been fifty, and might have been sixty, was gro 
 tesquely fat. He bulged everywhere. He was 
 composed of bulges. His bulbous nose was the 
 size and shape of a turnip. His eyelids bulged 
 and his blue eyes bulged in competition with them. 
 In many places the seams of his garments had 
 parted across the bulges of body. His calves grew 
 into his feet, for the broken elastic sides of his 
 Congress gaiters were swelled full with the fat 
 of him. One arm only he sported, from the 
 shoulder of which was suspended a small and tat 
 tered bindle with the mud caked dry on the outer 
 covering from the last place he had pitched his 
 doss. He advanced with tentative caution, made 
 sure of the harmlessness of the man beside the 
 fire, and joined him. 
 
 " Hello, grandpa," the newcomer greeted, then 
 paused to stare at the other s flaring, sky-open 
 
146 THE RED ONE 
 
 nostril. " Say, Whiskers, how d ye keep the 
 night dew out of that nose o yourn? " 
 
 Whiskers growled an incoherence deep in his 
 throat and spat into the fire in token that he was 
 not pleased by the question. 
 
 " For the love o Mike," the fat man chuckled, 
 " if you got caught out in a rainstorm without an 
 umbrella you d sure drown, wouldn t you? " 
 
 " Can it, Fatty, can it," Whiskers muttered 
 wearily. " They ain t nothin new in that line of 
 chatter. Even the bulls hand it out to me." 
 
 " But you can still drink, I hope," Fatty at the 
 same time mollified and invited, with his one hand 
 deftly pulling the slip-knots that fastened his 
 bindle. 
 
 From within the bindle he brought to light a 
 twelve-ounce bottle of alki. Footsteps coming 
 down the embankment alarmed him, and he hid 
 the bottle under his hat on the ground between 
 his legs. 
 
 But the next comer proved to be not merely one 
 of their own ilk, but likewise to have only one 
 arm. So forbidding of aspect was he that greet 
 ings consisted of no more than grunts. Huge- 
 boned, tall, gaunt to cadaverousness, his face a 
 
THE PRINCESS 147 
 
 dirty death s head, he was as repellant a night 
 mare of old age as ever Dore imagined. His 
 toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter 
 slash under a great curved nose that almost met 
 the chin and that was like a buzzard s beak. His 
 one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The 
 beady gray eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were 
 bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as 
 merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whisk 
 ers and Fatty instinctively drew together for pro 
 tection against the unguessed threat of him. 
 Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a 
 chunk of rock several pounds in weight close to his 
 hand if need for action should arise. Fatty du 
 plicated the performance. 
 
 Then both sat licking their lips, guiltily em 
 barrassed, while the unblinking eyes of the terrible 
 one bored into them, now into one, now into 
 another, and then down at the rock-chunks of their 
 preparedness. 
 
 "Huh!" sneered the terrible one, with such 
 dreadfulness of menace as to cause Whiskers and 
 Fatty involuntarily to close their hands down on 
 their cave-man s weapons. 
 
 " Huhl " the other repeated, reaching his one 
 
148 THE RED ONE 
 
 talon into his side coat pocket with swift definite- 
 ness. " A hell of a chance you two cheap bums 
 d have with me." 
 
 The talon emerged, clutching ready for action 
 a six-pound iron quoit. 
 
 "We ain t lookin for trouble, Slim," Fatty 
 quavered. 
 
 "Who in hell are you to call me Slim ?" 
 came the snarling answer. 
 
 " Me ? I m just Fatty, an seein s I never seen 
 you before " 
 
 " An I suppose that s Whiskers, there, with the 
 gay an festive lamp tangoing into his eyebrow an 
 the God-forgive-us nose joy-riding all over his 
 mug?" 
 
 " It ll do, it ll do," Whiskers muttered uncom 
 fortably. " One monica s as good as another, I 
 find, at my time of life. And everybody hands it 
 out to me anyway. And I need an umbrella when 
 it rains to keep from getting drowned, an all the 
 rest of it" 
 
 " I ain t used to company don t like it," Slim 
 growled. "So if you guys want to stick around, 
 mind your step, that s all, mind your step." 
 
 He fished from his pocket a cigar stump, self- 
 
THE PRINCESS 149 
 
 evidently shot from the gutter, and prepared to 
 put it in his mouth to chew. Then he changed his 
 mind, glared at his companions savagely, and un 
 rolled his bindle. Appeared in his hand a drug 
 gist s bottle of alki. 
 
 " Well," he snarled, " I suppose I gotta give 
 you cheap skates a drink when I ain t got more n 
 enough for a good petrification for myself." 
 
 Almost a softening flicker of light was imminent 
 in his withered face as he beheld the others 
 proudly lift their hats and exhibit their own sup 
 plies. 
 
 " Here s some water for the mixin s," Whisk 
 ers said, proffering his tomato-can of river slush. 
 " Stockyards just above," he added apologetically. 
 " But they say " 
 
 " Huh! " Slim snapped short, mixing the drink. 
 " I ve drunk worse n stockyards in my time." 
 
 Yet when all was ready, cans of alki in their soli 
 tary hands, the three things that had once been 
 men hesitated, as if of old habit, and next betrayed 
 shame as if at self-exposure. 
 
 Whiskers was the first to brazen it. 
 
 " I ve sat in at many a finer drinking," he 
 bragged. 
 
150 THE RED ONE 
 
 " With the pewter," Slim sneered. 
 
 " With the silver/ Whiskers corrected. 
 
 Slim turned a scorching eye-interrogation on 
 Fatty. 
 
 Fatty nodded. 
 
 " Beneath the salt," said Slim. 
 
 " Above it," came Fatty s correction. " I was 
 born above it, and I ve never traveled second 
 class. First or steerage, but no intermediate in 
 
 mine." 
 
 " Yourself? " Whiskers queried of Slim. 
 
 " In broken glass to the Queen, God bless 
 her," Slim answered, solemnly, without snarl or 
 sneer. 
 
 " In the pantry? " Fatty insinuated. 
 
 Simultaneously Slim reached for his quoit, and 
 Whiskers and Fatty for their rocks. 
 
 " Now don t let s get feverish," Fatty said, 
 dropping his own weapon. u We aren t scum. 
 We re gentlemen. Let s drink like gentlemen." 
 
 " Let it be a real drinking," Whiskers approved. 
 
 " Let s get petrified," Slim agreed. " Many 
 a distillery s flowed under the bridge since we 
 were gentlemen; but let s forget the long road 
 we ve traveled since, and hit our doss in the good 
 
THE PRINCESS 151 
 
 old fashion in which every gentleman went to 
 bed when we were young." 
 
 " My father done it did it/ Fatty concurred 
 and corrected, as old recollections exploded long- 
 sealed brain-cells of connotation and correct 
 usage. 
 
 The other two nodded a descent from simi 
 lar fathers and elevated their tin cans of alco 
 hol. 
 
 By the time each had finished his own bottle 
 and from his rags fished forth a second one, their 
 brains were well-mellowed and a-glow, although 
 they had not got around to telling their real names. 
 But their English had improved. They spoke it 
 correctly, while the argo of trampland ceased from 
 their lips. 
 
 " It s my constitution," Whiskers was explain 
 ing. " Very few men could go through what I 
 have and live to tell the tale. And I never took 
 any care of myself. If what the moralists and 
 the physiologists say were true, I d have been dead 
 long ago. And it s the same with you two. Look 
 at us, at our advanced years, carousing as the 
 young ones don t dare, sleeping out in the open 
 
152 THE RED ONE 
 
 on the ground, never sheltered from frost nor 
 rain nor storm, never afraid of pneumonia or 
 rheumatism that would put half the young ones 
 on their backs in hospital. * 
 
 He broke off to mix another drink, and Fatty 
 took up the tale. 
 
 " And we ve had our fun," he boasted. " And 
 speaking of sweethearts and all," he cribbed from 
 Kipling, " We ve rogued and we ve ranged " 
 
 " In our time, " Slim completed the crib for 
 him. 
 
 " I should say so, I should say so," Fatty con 
 firmed. " And been loved by princesses at 
 least I have." 
 
 " Go on and tell us about it," Whiskers urged. 
 The night s young, and why shouldn t we re 
 member back to the roofs of kings? " 
 
 Nothing loath, Fatty cleared his throat for the 
 recital and cast about in his mind for the best 
 way to begin. 
 
 " It must be known that I came of good family. 
 Percival Delaney, let us say, yes, let us say Per- 
 cival Delaney, was not unknown at Oxford once 
 upon a time .not for scholarship, I am frank 
 to admit; but the gay young dogs of that day, 
 
THE PRINCESS 153 
 
 if any be yet alive, would remember him - 
 
 " My people came over with the Conqueror, * 
 Whiskers interrupted, extending his hand to 
 Fatty s in acknowledgment of the introduction. 
 
 "What name?" Fatty queried. "I did not 
 seem quite to catch it." 
 
 " Delarouse, Chauncey Delarouse. The name 
 will serve as well as any." 
 
 Both completed the handshake and glanced to 
 Slim. 
 
 " Oh, well, while we re about it . . ." Fatty 
 urged. 
 
 " Bruce Cadogan Cavendish," Slim growled 
 morosely. " Go on, Percival, with your princesses 
 and the roofs of kings." 
 
 " Oh, I was a rare young devil," Percival 
 obliged, " after I played ducks and drakes at home 
 and sported out over the world. And I was 
 some figure of a man before I lost my shape 
 polo, steeple-chasing, boxing, wrestling, swim 
 ming. I won medals at buckjumping in Australia, 
 and I held more than several swimming records 
 from the quarter of a mile up. Women turned 
 their heads to look when I went by. The women ! 
 God bless them!" 
 
154 THE RED ONE 
 
 And Fatty, alias Percival Delaney, a grotesque 
 of manhood, put his bulgy hand to his puffed lips 
 and kissed audibly into the starry vault of the 
 sky. 
 
 " And the Princess ! " he resumed, with another 
 kiss to the stars. " She was as fine a figure of a 
 woman as I was a man, as high-spirited and 
 courageous, as reckless and dare-devilish. Lord, 
 Lord, in the water she was a mermaid, a sea- 
 goddess. And when it came to blood, beside her 
 I was parvenu. Her royal line traced back into 
 the mists of antiquity. 
 
 " She was not a daughter of a fair-skinned folk. 
 Tawny golden was she, with golden-brown eyes, 
 and her hair that fell to her knees was blue-black 
 and straight, with just the curly tendrilly tendency 
 that gives to woman s hair its charm. Oh, there 
 were no kinks in it, any more than were there kinks 
 in the hair of her entire genealogy. For she was 
 Polynesian, glowing, golden, lovely and lovable, 
 royal Polynesian." 
 
 Again he paused to kiss his hand to the memory 
 of her, and Slim, alias Bruce Cadogan Cavend 
 ish took advantage to interject: 
 
 " Huh 1 Maybe you didn t shine in scholarship, 
 
THE PRINCESS 155 
 
 but at least you gleaned a vocabulary out of Ox 
 ford." 
 
 " And in the South Seas garnered a better vo 
 cabulary from the lexicon of Love," Percival was 
 quick on the uptake. 
 
 " It was the island of Talofa," he went on, 
 " meaning love, the Isle of Love, and it was her 
 island. Her father, the king, an old man, sat on 
 his mats with paralyzed knees and drank square- 
 face gin all day and most of the night, out of 
 grief, sheer grief. She, my princess, was the only 
 issue, her brothers having been lost in their double 
 canoe in a hurricane while coming up from a voy 
 age to Samoa. And among the Polynesians the 
 royal women have equal right with the men to 
 rule. In fact, they trace their genealogies always 
 by the female line." 
 
 To this both Chauncey Delarouse and Bruce 
 Cadogan Cavendish nodded prompt affirmation. 
 
 " Ah," said Percival, " I perceive you both know 
 the South Seas, wherefore, without undue expendi 
 ture of verbiage on my part, I am assured that 
 you will appreciate the charm of my princess, the 
 Princess Tui-nui of Talofa, the Princess of the 
 Isle of Love." 
 
156 THE RED ONE 
 
 He kissed his hand to her, sipped from his con 
 densed milk can a man-size drink of druggist s 
 alcohol, and to her again kissed his hand. 
 
 " But she was coy, and ever she fluttered near 
 to me but never near enough. When my arm 
 went out to her to girdle her, presto, she was not 
 there. I knew, as never before, nor since, the 
 thousand dear and delightful anguishes of love 
 frustrate but ever resilient and beckoned on by 
 the very goddess of love." 
 
 " Some vocabulary," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish 
 muttered in aside to Chauncey Delarouse. But 
 Percival Delaney was not to be deterred. He 
 kissed his pudgy hand aloft into the night and held 
 warmly on. 
 
 " No fond agonies of rapture deferred that 
 were not lavished upon me by my dear Princess, 
 herself ever a luring delight of promise flitting 
 just beyond my reach. Every sweet lover s in 
 ferno unguessed of by Dante she led me through. 
 Ah! Those tropic nights! Those swooning 
 tropic nights, under our palm trees, the distant 
 surf a languorous murmur as from some vast sea 
 shell of mystery, when she, my Princess, all but 
 melted to my yearning, and with her laughter, 
 
THE PRINCESS 157 
 
 that was as silver strings by buds and blossoms 
 smitten, all but made lunacy of my lover s ardency. 
 
 " It was by my wrestling with the champions 
 of Talofa that I first interested her. It was by 
 my prowess at swimming that I awoke her. And 
 it was by a certain swimming deed that I won 
 from her more than coquettish smiles and shy 
 timidities of feigned retreat. 
 
 " We were squidding that day, out on the reef 
 you know how, undoubtedly, diving down the 
 face of the wall of the reef, five fathoms, ten 
 fathoms, any depth within reason, and shoving 
 our squid-sticks into the likely holes and crannies 
 of the coral where squid might be lairing. With 
 the squid-stick, bluntly sharp at both ends, per 
 haps a foot long, and held crosswise in the hand, 
 the trick was to gouge any lazying squid until 
 he closed his tentacles around fist, stick, and arm. 
 Then you had him, and came to the surface with 
 him, and bit him in the head which is in the center 
 of him, and peeled him off into the waiting canoe. 
 . . . And to think I used to do that ! " 
 
 Percival Delaney paused a moment, a glimmer 
 of awe on his rotund face, as he contemplated the 
 mighty picture of his youth. 
 
i 5 8 THE RED ONE 
 
 " Why, I ve pulled out a squid, with tentacles 
 eight feet long, and done it under fifty feet of 
 water. I could stay down four minutes. I ve 
 gone down, with a coral-rock to sink me, in a hun 
 dred and ten feet to clear a fouled anchor. And 
 I could back-dive with a once-over and go in feet- 
 first from eighty feet above the surface " 
 
 " Quit it, delete it, cease it," Chauncey Dela- 
 rouse admonished testily. ; Tell of the Princess. 
 That s what makes old blood leap again. Almost 
 can I see her. Was she very wonderful? " 
 
 Pervical Delaney kissed unutterable affirmation. 
 
 " I have said she was a mermaid. She was. 
 I know she swam thirty-six hours before being 
 rescued, after her schooner was capsized in a 
 double-squall. I have seen her do ninety feet 
 and bring up pearl shell in each hand. She was 
 wonderful. As a woman she was ravishing, sub 
 lime. I have said she was a sea-goddess. She 
 was. Oh, for a Phidias or a Praxiteles to have 
 made the wonder of her body immortal ! 
 
 " And that day, out for squid on the reef, I 
 was almost sick for her. Mad I know I was 
 mad for her. We would step over the side from 
 the big canoe, and swim down, side by side, into 
 
THE PRINCESS 159 
 
 the delicious depths of cool and color, and she 
 would look at me, as we swam, and with her eyes 
 tantalize me to further madness. And at last, 
 down, far down, I lost myself and reached for her. 
 She eluded me like the mermaid she was, and I 
 saw the laughter on her face as she fled. She fled 
 deeper, and I knew I had her for I was between 
 her and the surface; but in the muck coral sand 
 of the bottom she made a churning with her squid 
 stick. It was the old trick to escape a shark. 
 And she worked it on me, roiling the water so 
 that I could not see her. And when I came up, 
 she was there ahead of me, clinging to the side 
 of the canoe and laughing. 
 
 " Almost I would not be denied. But not for 
 nothing was she a princess. She rested her hand 
 on my arm and compelled me to listen. We 
 should play a game, she said, enter into a com 
 petition for which should get the more squid, the 
 biggest squid, and the smallest squid. Since the 
 wagers were kisses, you can well imagine I went 
 down on the first next dive with soul aflame. 
 
 " I got no squid. Never again in all my life 
 have I dived for squid. Perhaps we were five 
 fathoms down and exploring the face of the reef- 
 
160 THE RED ONE 
 
 wall for lurking places of our prey, when it hap 
 pened. I had found a likely lair and just proved 
 it empty, when I felt or sensed the nearness of 
 something inimical. I turned. There it was, 
 alongside of me, and no mere fish-shark. Fully 
 a dozen feet in length, with the unmistakable 
 phosphorescent cat s eye gleaming like a drowning 
 star, I knew it for what it was, a tiger shark. 
 
 " Not ten feet to the right, probing a coral 
 fissure with her squid stick, was the Princess, and 
 the tiger shark was heading directly for her. My 
 totality of thought was precipitated to conscious 
 ness in a single all-embracing flash. The man- 
 eater must be deflected from her, and what was I, 
 except a mad lover who would gladly fight and 
 die, or more gladly fight and live, for his be 
 loved? Remember, she was the woman wonder 
 ful, and I was aflame for her. 
 
 " Knowing fully the peril of my act, I thrust 
 the blunt-sharp end of my squid-stick into the side 
 of the shark, much as one would attract a passing 
 acquaintance with a thumb-nudge in the ribs. And 
 the man-eater turned on me. You know the South 
 Seas, and you know that the tiger shark, like the 
 bald-face grizzly of Alaska, never gives trail. 
 
THE PRINCESS 161 
 
 The combat, fathoms deep under the sea, was on 
 if by combat may be named such a one-sided 
 struggle. 
 
 " The Princess, unaware, caught her squid and 
 rose to the surface. The man-eater rushed me. 
 I fended him off with both hands on his nose above 
 his thousand-toothed open mouth, so that he 
 backed me against the sharp coral. The scars are 
 there to this day. Whenever I tried to rise, he 
 rushed me, and I could not remain down there 
 indefinitely without air. Whenever he rushed me, 
 I fended off with my hands on his nose. And 
 I would have escaped unharmed, except for the 
 slip of my right hand. Into his mouth it went 
 to the elbow. His jaws closed, just below the 
 elbow. You know how a shark s teeth are. 
 Once in they cannot be released. They must go 
 through to complete the bite, but they cannot go 
 through heavy bone. So, from just below the 
 elbow he stripped the bone clean to the articula 
 tion of the wrist-joint, where his teeth met and 
 my good right hand became his for an appetizer. 
 
 " But while he was doing this, I drove the 
 thumb of my left hand, to the hilt, into his eye- 
 orifice and popped out his eye. This did not stop 
 
1 62 THE RED ONE 
 
 him. The meat had maddened him. He pur 
 sued the gushing stump of my wrist. Half a 
 dozen times I fended with my intact arm. Then 
 he got the poor mangled arm again, closed down, 
 and stripped the meat off the bone from the shoul 
 der down to the elbow-joint, where his teeth met 
 and he was free of his second mouthful of me. 
 But, at the same time, with my good arm, I 
 thumbed out his remaining eye." 
 
 Percival Delaney shrugged his shoulders, ere 
 he resumed. 
 
 " From above, those in the canoe had beheld the 
 entire happening and were loud in praise of my 
 deed. To this day they still sing the song of 
 me, and tell the tale of me. And the Princess." 
 His pause was brief but significant. " The Prin 
 cess married me. . . . Oh, well-a-day and lack-a- 
 day, the whirligig of time and fortune, the topsy- 
 turviness of luck, the wooden shoe going up and 
 the polished heel descending, a French gunboat, 
 a conquered island-kingdom of Oceania, to-day 
 ruled over by a peasant-born, unlettered, colonial 
 gendarme, and . . ." 
 
 He completed the sentence and the tale by bury 
 ing his face in the down-tilted mouth of the con- 
 
THE PRINCESS 163 
 
 densed milk can and by gurgling the corrosive 
 drink down his throat in thirsty gulps. 
 
 After an appropriate pause, Chauncey Delar- 
 ouse, otherwise Whiskers, took up the tale. 
 
 " Far be it from me to boast of no matter what 
 place of birth I have descended from to sit here 
 by this fire with such as ... as chance along. 
 I may say, however, that I, too, was once a con 
 siderable figure of a man. I may add that it 
 was horses, plus parents too indulgent, that exiled 
 me out over the world. I may still wonder to 
 query : Are Dover s cliffs still white ? 
 
 " Huh! " Bruce Cadogan Cavendish sneered. 
 " Next you ll be asking * how fares the old Lord 
 Warden ?" 
 
 " And I took every liberty, and vainly, with a 
 constitution that was iron," Whiskers hurried on. 
 " Here I am with my three score and ten behind 
 me, and back on that long road have I buried many 
 a youngster that was as rare and devilish as I 
 but who could not stand the pace. I knew the 
 worst too young. And now I know the worst too 
 old. But there was a time, alas all too short, 
 when I knew the best. 
 
1 64 THE RED ONE 
 
 " I, too, kiss my hand to the Princess of my 
 heart. She was truly a princess, Polynesian, a 
 thousand miles and more away to the eastward 
 and the south from Delaney s Isle of Love. The 
 natives of all around that part of the South Seas 
 called it the Jolly Island. Their own name, the 
 name of the people who dwelt thereon, translates 
 delicately and justly into The Island of Tranquil 
 Laughter. 5 On the chart you will find the er 
 roneous name given to it by the old navigators 
 to be Manatomana. The seafaring gentry the 
 round ocean around called it the Adamless Eden. 
 And the missionaries for a time called it God s 
 Witness so great had been their success at con 
 verting the inhabitants. As for me, it was, and 
 ever shall be, Paradise. 
 
 " It was my Paradise, for it was there my 
 Princess lived. John Asibeli Tungi was king. 
 He was full-blooded native, descended out of the 
 oldest and highest chief-stock that traced back 
 to Manua which was the primeval sea home of 
 the race. Also was he known as John the Apos 
 tate. He lived a long life and apostasized fre 
 quently. First converted by the Catholics, he 
 threw down the idols, broke the tabus, cleaned 
 
THE PRINCESS 165 
 
 out the native priests, executed a few of the re 
 calcitrant ones, and sent all his subjects to church. 
 
 " Next he fell for the traders, who developed 
 in him a champagne thirst, and he shipped off the 
 Catholic priests to New Zealand. The great ma 
 jority of his subjects always followed his lead, 
 and, having no religion at all, ensued the time of 
 the Great Licentiousness, when by all South Seas 
 Missionaries his island, in sermons, was spoken 
 of as Babylon. 
 
 " But the traders ruined his digestion with too 
 much champagne, and after several years he fell 
 for the Gospel according to the Methodists, sent 
 his people to church, and cleaned up the beach 
 and the trading crowd so spick and span that he 
 would not permit them to smoke a pipe out of 
 doors on Sunday, and fined one of the chief trad 
 ers one hundred gold sovereigns for washing his 
 schooner s decks on the Sabbath morn. 
 
 " That was the time of the Blue Laws, but 
 perhaps it was too rigorous for King John. Off 
 he packed the Methodists, one fine day, exiled sev 
 eral hundred of his people to Samoa for sticking 
 to Methodism, and, of all things, invented a re 
 ligion of his own, with himself the figurehead of 
 
1 66 THE RED ONE 
 
 worship. In this he was aided and abetted by a 
 renegade Fijian. This lasted five years. Maybe 
 he grew tired of being God, or maybe it was be 
 cause the Fijian decamped with the six thousand 
 pounds in the royal treasury; but at any rate the 
 Second Reformed Wesleyans got him, and his 
 entire kingdom went Wesleyan. The pioneer 
 Wesleyan missionary he actually made prime 
 minister, and what he did to the trading crowd 
 was a caution. Why, in the end, King John s 
 kingdom was blacklisted and boycotted by the 
 traders till the revenues diminished to zero, the 
 people went bankrupt, and King John couldn t 
 borrow a shilling from his most powerful chief. 
 " By this time he was getting old, and philoso 
 phic, and tolerant, and spiritually atavistic. He 
 fired out the Second Reformed Wesleyans, called 
 back the exiles from Samoa, invited in the traders, 
 held a general love-fest, took the lid off, pro 
 claimed religious liberty and high tariff, and as 
 for himself went back to the worship of his an 
 cestors, dug up the idols, reinstated a few octo 
 genarian priests, and observed the tabus. All of 
 which was lovely for the traders, and prosperity 
 reigned. Of course, most of his subjects followed 
 
 
THE PRINCESS 167 
 
 him back into the heathen worship. Yet quite a 
 sprinkling of Catholics, Methodists and Wesleyans 
 remained true to their beliefs and managed to 
 maintain a few squalid, one-horse churches. But 
 King John didn t mind, any more than did he the 
 high times of the traders along the beach. Every 
 thing went, so long as the taxes were paid. Even 
 when his wife, Queen Mamare, elected to become 
 a Baptist, and invited in a little, weazened, sweet- 
 spirited, club-footed Baptist missionary, King 
 John did not object. All he insisted on was that 
 these wandering religions should be self-support 
 ing and not feed a pennyworth s out of the royal 
 coffers. 
 
 " And now the threads of my recital draw to 
 gether in the paragon of female exquisiteness 
 my Princess." 
 
 Whiskers paused, placed carefully on the round 
 his half-full condensed milk can with which he 
 had been absently toying, and kissed the fingers 
 of his one hand audibly aloft. 
 
 " She was the daughter of Queen Mamare. 
 She was the woman wonderful. Unlike the Diana 
 type of Polynesian, she was almost ethereal. She 
 was ethereal, sublimated by purity, as shy and 
 
1 68 THE RED ONE 
 
 modest as a violet, as fragile-slender as a lily, 
 and her eyes, luminous and shrinking tender, were 
 as asphodels on the sward of heaven. She was 
 all flower, and fire, and dew. Hers was the sweet 
 ness of the mountain rose, the gentleness of the 
 dove. And she was all of good as well as all of 
 beauty, devout in her belief in her mother s 
 worship, which was the worship introduced by 
 Ebenezer Naismith, the Baptist missionary. But 
 make no mistake. She was no mere sweet spirit 
 ripe for the bosom of Abraham. All of exquisite 
 deliciousness of woman was she. She was woman, 
 all woman, to the last sensitive, quivering atom of 
 her 
 
 " And I? I was a wastrel of the beach. The 
 wildest was not so wild as I, the keenest not so 
 keen, of all that wild, keen trading crowd. It 
 was esteemed I played the stiffest hand of poker. 
 I was the only living man, white, brown, or black, 
 who dared run the Kuni-kuni Passage in the dark. 
 And on a black night I have done it under reefs 
 in a gale of wind. Well, anyway, I had a bad 
 reputation on a beach where there were no good 
 reputations. I was reckless, dangerous, stopped 
 at nothing in fight or frolic ; and the trading cap- 
 
THE PRINCESS 169 
 
 tains used to bring boiler-sheeted prodigies from 
 the vilest holes of the South Pacific to try and 
 drink me under the table. I remember one, a 
 calcined Scotchman from the New Hebrides. It 
 was a great drinking. He died of it, and we laded 
 him aboard ship, pickled in a cask of trade rum, 
 and sent him back to his own place. A sample, 
 a fair sample, of the antic tricks we cut up on 
 the beach of Manatomana. 
 
 " And of all unthinkable things, what did I up 
 and do, one day, but look upon the Princess to find 
 her good and to fall in love with her. It was the 
 real thing. I was as mad as a March hare, and 
 after that I got only madder. I reformed. 
 Think of that ! Think of what a slip of a woman 
 can do to a lusty, roving man! By the Lord 
 Harry, it s true. I reformed. I went to church. 
 Hear me ! I became converted. I cleared my 
 soul before God and kept my hands I had two 
 then off the ribald crew of the beach when it 
 laughed at this, my latest antic, and wanted to 
 know what was my game. 
 
 " I tell you I reformed, and gave myself in 
 passion and sincerity to a religious experience that 
 has made me tolerant of all religion ever since. 
 
170 THE RED ONE 
 
 I discharged my best captain for immorality. So 
 did I my cook, and a better never boiled water 
 in Manatomana. For the same reason I dis 
 charged my chief clerk. And for the first time 
 in the history of trading my schooners to the west 
 ward carried bibles in their stock. I built a little 
 anchorite bungalow up town on a mango-lined 
 street squarely alongside the little house occupied 
 by Ebenezer Naismith. And I made him my 
 pal and comrade, and found him a veritable honey 
 pot of sweetnesses and goodnesses. And he was 
 a man, through and through a man. And he 
 died long after like a man, which I would like to 
 tell you about, were the tale of it not so deservedly 
 long. 
 
 " It was the Princess, more than the missionary, 
 who was responsible for my expressing my faith 
 in works, and especially in that crowning work, 
 the New Church, Our Church, the Queen-mother s 
 church. 
 
 " Our poor church, she said to me, one night 
 after prayer-meeting. I had been converted only 
 a fortnight. * It is so small, its congregation can 
 never grow. And the roof leaks. And King 
 
THE PRINCESS 171 
 
 John, my hard-hearted father, will not contribute 
 a penny. Yet he has a big balance in the treasury. 
 And Manatomana is not poor. Much money is 
 made and squandered. I know. I hear the 
 gossip of the wild ways of the beach. Less than 
 a month ago you lost more in one night, gambling 
 at cards, than the cost of the upkeep of our poor 
 church for a year/ 
 
 " And I told her it was true, but that it was 
 before I had seen the light. (I d had an infernal 
 run of bad luck.) I told her I had not tasted 
 liquor since, nor turned a card. I told her that 
 the roof would be repaired at once, by Christian 
 carpenters selected by her from the congregation. 
 But she was filled with the thought of a great re 
 vival that Ebenezer Naismith could preach she 
 was a dear saint; and she spoke of a great church, 
 saying : 
 
 " You are rich. You have many schooners, 
 and traders in far islands, and I have heard of a 
 great contract you have signed to recruit labor 
 for the German plantations of Upolu. They say, 
 next to Sweitzer, you are the richest trader here. 
 I should love to see some use of all this money 
 
1 72 THE RED ONE 
 
 placed to the glory of God. It would be a noble 
 thing to do, and I should be proud to know the 
 man who would do it. 
 
 " I told her that Ebenezer Naismith would 
 preach the revival, and that I would build a church 
 great enough in which to house it. 
 
 " As big as the Catholic church? she asked. 
 
 " This was the ruined cathedral, built at the 
 time when the entire population was converted, 
 and it was a large order; but I was afire with 
 love, and I told her that the church I would build 
 would be even bigger. 
 
 " But it will take money, I explained. i And 
 it takes time to make money. 
 
 " You have much, she said. Some say you 
 have more money than my father, the King. 5 
 
 " I have more credit, I explained. But you 
 do not understand money. It takes money to have 
 credit. So, with the money I have, and the credit 
 I have, I will work to make more money and 
 credit, and the church shall be built. 
 
 Work! I was a surprise to myself. It is an 
 amazement, the amount of time a man finds on 
 his hands after he s given up carousing, and gam 
 bling, and all the time-eating diversions of the 
 
THE PRINCESS 173 
 
 beach. And I didn t waste a second of all my 
 new-found time. Instead I worked it over time. 
 I did the work of half a dozen men. I became 
 a driver. My captains made faster runs than 
 ever and earned bigger bonuses, as did my super 
 cargoes, who saw to it that my schooners did not 
 loaf and dawdle along the way. And I saw to it 
 that my supercargoes did see to it. 
 
 " And good ! By the Lord Harry, I was so 
 good it hurt. My conscience got so expansive 
 and fine-strung it lamed me across the shoulders to 
 carry it around with me. Why, I even went back 
 over my accounts and paid Sweitzer fifty quid 
 I d jiggered him out of in a deal in Fiji three years 
 before. And I compounded the interest as well. 
 
 "Work! I planted sugar cane the first 
 commercial planting on Manatomana. I ran in 
 cargoes of kinky-heads from Malaita, which is 
 in the Solomons, till I had twelve hundred of the 
 blackbirds putting in cane. And I sent a schooner 
 clear to Hawaii to bring back a dismantled sugar 
 mill and a German who said he knew the field- 
 end of cane. And he did, and he charged me 
 three hundred dollars screw a month, and I took 
 hold of the mill-end. I installed the mill my- 
 
174 THE RED ONE 
 
 self, with the help of several mechanics I brought 
 up from Queensland. 
 
 " Of course there was a rival. His name was 
 Motomoe. He was the very highest chief blood 
 next to King John s. He was full native, a strap 
 ping, handsome man, with a glowering way of 
 showing his dislikes. He certainly glowered at 
 me when I began hanging around the palace. He 
 went back in my history and circulated the blackest 
 tales about me. The worst of it was that most 
 of them were true. He even made a voyage to 
 Apia to find things out as if he couldn t find 
 a plenty right there on the beach of Manatomana ! 
 And he sneered at my falling for religion, and 
 at my going to prayer-meeting, and, most of all, 
 at my sugar-planting. He challenged me to fight, 
 and I kept off of him. He threatened me, and 
 I learned in the nick of time of his plan to have 
 me knocked on the head. You see, he wanted 
 the Princess just as much as I did, and I wanted 
 her more. 
 
 " She used to play the piano. So did I, once. 
 But I never let her know after I d heard her 
 play the first time. And she thought her play 
 ing was wonderful, the dear, fond girl! You 
 
THE PRINCESS 175 
 
 know the sort, the mechanical one-two-three, tum- 
 tum-tum school-girl stuff. And now I ll tell you 
 something funnier. Her playing was wonderful, 
 to me. The gates of heaven opened to me when 
 she played. I can see myself now, worn out and 
 dog-tired after the long day, lying on the mats 
 of the palace veranda and gazing upon her at 
 the piano, myself in a perfect idiocy of bliss. 
 Why, this idea she had of her fine playing was 
 the one flaw in her deliciousness of perfection, and 
 I loved her for it. It kind of brought her within 
 my human reach. Why, when she played her 
 one-two-three, tum-tum-tum, I was in the seventh 
 heaven of bliss. My weariness fell from me. I 
 loved her, and my love for her was clean as flame, 
 clean as my love for God. And do you know, 
 into my fond lover s fancy continually intruded 
 the thought that God in most ways must look like 
 her. 
 
 " That s right, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish, 
 sneer as you like. But I tell you that s love that 
 I ve been describing. That s all. It s love. It s 
 the realest, purest, finest thing that can happen 
 to a man. And I know what I m talking about. 
 It happened to me." 
 
176 THE RED ONE 
 
 Whiskers, his beady squirrel s eye glittering 
 from out his ruined eyebrow like a live coal in a 
 jungle ambush, broke off long enough to down a 
 sedative draught from his condensed milk can 
 and to mix another. 
 
 " The cane," he resumed, wiping his prodigious 
 mat of face hair with the back of his hand. " It 
 matured in sixteen months in that climate, and 
 I was ready, just ready and no more, with the 
 mill for the grinding. Naturally, it did not all 
 mature at once, but I had planted in such suc 
 cession that I could grind for nine months stead 
 ily, while more was being planted and the ratoons 
 were springing up. 
 
 " I had my troubles the first several days. If 
 it wasn t one thing the matter with the mill, it was 
 another. On the fourth day, Ferguson, my 
 engineer, had to shut down several hours in order 
 to remedy his own troubles. I was bothered by 
 the feeder. After having the niggers (who had 
 been feeding the cane) pour cream of lime on the 
 rollers to keep everything sweet, I sent them out 
 to join the cane-cutting squads. So I was all alone 
 at that end, just as Ferguson started up the mill, 
 just as I discovered what was the matter with 
 
THE PRINCESS 177 
 
 the feed-rollers, and just as Motomoe strolled up. 
 
 " He stood there, in Norfolk jacket, pigskin 
 puttees, and all the rest of the fashionable get-up 
 out of a bandbox, sneering at me covered with 
 filth and grease to the eyebrows and looking like 
 a navvy. And, the rollers now white from the 
 lime, I d just seen what was wrong. The rollers 
 were not in plumb. One side crushed the cane 
 well, but the other side was too open. I shoved 
 my fingers in on that side. The big, toothed 
 cogs on the rollers did not touch my fingers. And 
 yet, suddenly, they did. With the grip of ten 
 thousand devils, my finger-tips were caught, drawn 
 in, and pulped to well, just pulp. And, like a 
 stick of cane, I had started on my way. There 
 was no stopping me. Ten thousand horses could 
 not have pulled me back. There was nothing to 
 stop me. Hand, arm, shoulder, head, and chest, 
 down to the toes of me, I was doomed to feed 
 through. 
 
 " It did hurt. It hurt so much it did not hurt 
 at all. Quite detached, almost may I say, I 
 looked on my hand being ground up, knuckle by 
 knuckle, joint by joint, the back of the hand, the 
 wrist, the forearm, all in order slowly and inevi- 
 
178 THE RED ONE 
 
 tably feeding in. O engineer hoist by thine own 
 petard I O sugar-maker crushed by thine own 
 cane-crusher ! 
 
 " Motomoe sprang forward involuntarily, and 
 the sneer was chased from his face by an expres 
 sion of solicitude. Then the beauty of the situa 
 tion dawned on him, and he chuckled and grinned. 
 No, I didn t expect anything of him. Hadn t he 
 tried to knock me on the head? What could 
 he do anyway? He didn t know anything about 
 engines. 
 
 " I yelled at the top of my lungs to Ferguson 
 to shut off the engine, but the roar of the ma 
 chinery drowned my voice. And there I stood, 
 up to the elbow and feeding right on in. Yes, 
 it did hurt. There were some astonishing twinges 
 when special nerves were shredded and dragged 
 out by the roots. But I remember that I was 
 surprised at the time that it did not hurt worse. 
 
 " Motomoe made a movement that attracted 
 my attention. At the same time he growled out 
 loud, as if he hated himself, * I m a fool. What 
 he had done was to pick up a cane-knife you 
 know the kind, as big as a machete and as heavy. 
 And I was grateful to him in advance for putting 
 
THE PRINCESS 179 
 
 me out of my misery. There wasn t any sense in 
 slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and 
 already my arm was pulped half way from elbow 
 to shoulder, and the pulping was going right on. 
 So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the 
 blow. 
 
 " * Get your head out of the way, you idiot! 
 he barked at me. 
 
 " And then I understood and obeyed. I was a 
 big man, and he took two hacks to do it; but 
 he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder 
 and dragged me back and laid me down on the 
 cane. 
 
 " Yes, the sugar paid enormously; and I built 
 for the Princess the church of her saintly dream, 
 and . . . she married me." 
 
 He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his 
 final word. 
 
 " Alackaday ! Shuttlecock and battledore. 
 And this at the end of it all, lined with boiler 
 plate that even alcohol will not corrode and that 
 only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and 
 I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess 
 long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John 
 that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien 
 
i8o THE RED ONE 
 
 flag that floats over the bungalow of the British 
 Government House. . . ." 
 
 Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympa 
 thetically drank out of his own small can. Bruce 
 Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with im 
 placable bitterness. He was a man who pre 
 ferred to drink by himself. Across the thin lips 
 that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played 
 twitches of mockery that caught Fatty s eye. And 
 Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was 
 within reach, challenged. 
 
 ;< Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan 
 Cavendish? It s your turn." 
 
 The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fat 
 ty s until he physically betrayed uncomfortable- 
 ness. 
 
 " I ve lived a hard life," Slim grated harshly. 
 " What do I know about love passages? " 
 
 " No man of your build and make-up could 
 have escaped them," Fatty wheedled. 
 
 "And what of it?" Slim snarled. "It s no 
 reason for a gentleman to boast of amorous tri 
 umphs." 
 
 " Oh, go on, be a good fellow," Fatty urged. 
 " The night s still young. We ve still some drink 
 
THE PRINCESS 181 
 
 left. Delarouse and I have contributed our 
 share. It isn t often that three real ones like us 
 get together for a telling. Surely you ve got at 
 least one adventure in love you aren t ashamed to 
 tell about " 
 
 Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron 
 quoit and seemed to debate whether or not he 
 should brain the other. He sighed, and put back 
 the quoit. 
 
 " Very well, if you will have it," he surrendered 
 with manifest reluctance. " Like you two, I have 
 had a remarkable constitution. And right now, 
 speaking of armor-plate lining, I could drink the 
 both of you down when you were at your prime. 
 Like you two, my beginnings were far distant and 
 different. That I am marked with the hall-mark 
 of gentlehood there is no discussion . . . unless 
 either of you cares to discuss the matter now . . ." 
 
 His one hand slipped into his pocket and 
 clutched the quoit. Neither of his auditors spoke 
 nor betrayed any awareness of his menace. 
 
 " It occurred a thousand miles to the westward 
 of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag," he 
 continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine dis 
 appointment in that there had been no discussion. 
 
1 82 THE RED ONE 
 
 " But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. 
 For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of de 
 scent I shall not describe, in the crown of my man 
 hood and the prime of my devilishness in which 
 Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had 
 nothing on me, I found myself master and owner 
 of a schooner so well known that she shall re 
 main historically nameless. I was running black 
 bird labor from the West South Pacific and the 
 Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the 
 nitrate mines of Chili " 
 
 " It was you who cleaned out the entire popula 
 tion of " Fatty exploded, ere he could check 
 his speech. 
 
 The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish 
 flashed pocketward and flashed back with the quoit 
 balanced ripe for business. 
 
 " Proceed," Fatty sighed. " I ... I have 
 quite forgotten what I was going to say." 
 
 " Beastly funny country over that way," 
 the narrator drawled with perfect casualness. 
 " You ve read this Sea Wolf stuff " 
 
 " You weren t the Sea Wolf," Whiskers broke 
 in with involuntary positiveness. 
 
 " No, sir," was the snarling answer. " The 
 
THE PRINCESS 183 
 
 Sea Wolf s dead, isn t he? And I m still alive, 
 aren t I?" 
 
 " Of course, of course," Whiskers conceded. 
 " He suffocated head-first in the mud off a wharf 
 in Victoria a couple of years back." 
 
 " As I was saying and I don t like interrup 
 tions," Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, " it s 
 a beastly funny country over that way. I was at 
 Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs 
 to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn t at 
 all, for the Solomons are high islands. Ethno- 
 graphically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, 
 and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the 
 South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift 
 and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly in 
 terbred. The scum of the scrapings of the bottom 
 of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in 
 Taki-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof 
 I speak. 
 
 " It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving 
 out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron 
 and hatchets for copra and ivory-nuts, running 
 niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji 
 the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the 
 chiefs still eating long-pig. To the westward it 
 
1 84 THE RED ONE 
 
 was fierce funny little black kinky-heads, man- 
 eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat 
 and spilling over with wealth " 
 
 " Jack-pots? " Fatty queried. At sight of an ir 
 ritable movement, he added: " You see, I never 
 got over to the West like Delarouse and you." 
 
 " They re all head-hunters. Heads are valu 
 able, especially a whiteman s head. They deco 
 rate the canoe-houses and devil-devil houses with 
 them. Each village runs a jack-pot, and every 
 body antes. Whoever brings in a whiteman s 
 head takes the pot. If there aren t openers for 
 a long time, the pot grows to tremendous propor 
 tions. Beastly funny, isn t it? 
 
 " I know. Didn t a Holland mate die on me of 
 blackwater? And didn t I win a pot myself? 
 It was this way. We were lying at Lango-lui at 
 the time. I never let on, and arranged the af 
 fair with Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a 
 kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. He cut 
 the dead mate s head off and sneaked ashore in 
 the night, while I whanged away with my rifle as 
 if I were trying to get him. He opened the pot 
 with the mate s head, and got it, too. Of course, 
 
THE PRINCESS 185 
 
 next day I sent in a landing boat, with two cover 
 ing boats, and fetched him off with the loot." 
 
 " How big was the pot? " Whiskers asked. 
 " I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid." 
 
 " To commence with," Slim answered, " there 
 were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime 
 shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a 
 fathom. That was two hundred dollars right 
 there. There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell- 
 money, which is pretty close to five hundred in 
 itself. And there were twenty-two gold sover 
 eigns. I split it four ways : one-fourth to Johnny, 
 one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, 
 and one-fourth to me as skipper. Johnny never 
 complained. He d never had so much wealth all 
 at one time in his life. Besides, I gave him a 
 couple of the mate s old shirts. And I fancy the 
 mate s head is still there decorating the canoe- 
 house." 
 
 " Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian," 
 Whiskers observed. 
 
 " But a lucrative burial," Slim retorted. " I 
 had to feed the rest of the mate overside to the 
 sharks for nothing. Think of feeding an eight- 
 
1 86 THE RED ONE 
 
 hundred-dollar head along with it. It would 
 have been criminal waste and stark lunacy. 
 
 " Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over 
 there to the westward. And, without telling you 
 the scrape I got into at Taki-Tiki, except that I 
 sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for 
 Queensland labor, and for rny manner of collect 
 ing them had two British ships of war combing 
 the Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to 
 the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to the 
 Spanish plantations on Bangar. 
 
 " Typhoon season. We caught it. The 
 Merry Mist was my schooner s name, and I had 
 thought she was stoutly built until she hit that 
 typhoon. I never saw such seas. They pounded 
 that stout craft to pieces, literally so. The sticks 
 were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to 
 matchwood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst 
 had passed, the covering boards began to go. We 
 just managed to repair what was left of one boat 
 and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went 
 down barely enough to get away. And we out 
 fitted that boat in a hurry. The carpenter and 
 I were the last, and we had to jump for it as she 
 went down. There were only four of us " 
 

 THE PRINCESS 187 
 
 11 Lost all the niggers? " Whiskers inquired. 
 
 " Some of them swam for some time/ Slim 
 replied. " But I don t fancy they made the land. 
 We were ten days in doing it. And we had a 
 spanking breeze most of the way. And what do 
 you think we had in the boat with us? Cases 
 of square-face gin and cases of dynamite. Funny, 
 wasn t it? Well, it got funnier later on. Oh, 
 there was a small breaker of water, a little salt 
 horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit 
 enough to keep us alive to Tagalag. 
 
 " Now Tagalag is the disappointingest island 
 I ve ever beheld. It shows up out of the sea so as 
 you can make its fall twenty miles off. It is a vol 
 cano cone thrust up out of deep sea, with a seg 
 ment of the crater wall broken out. This gives 
 sea entrance to the crater itself, and makes a fine 
 sheltered harbor. And that s all. Nothing lives 
 there. The outside and the inside of the crater 
 are too steep. At one place, inside, is a patch 
 of about a thousand coconut palms. And that s 
 all, as I said, saving a few insects. No four-legged 
 thing, even a rat, inhabits the place. And it s 
 funny, most awful funny, with all those coconuts, 
 not even a coconut crab. The only meat-food liv- 
 
1 88 THE RED ONE 
 
 ing was schools of mullet in the harbor fattest, 
 finest, biggest mullet I ever laid eyes on. 
 
 " And the four of us landed on the little beach 
 and set up housekeeping among the coconuts with 
 a larder full of dynamite and square-face. Why 
 don t you laugh? It s funny, I tell you. Try it 
 some time Holland gin and straight coconut 
 diet. I ve never been able to look a confectioner s 
 window in the face since. Now I m not strong 
 on religion like Chauncey Delarouse there, but I 
 have some primitive ideas; and my concept of 
 hell is an illimitable coconut plantation, stocked 
 with cases of square-face and populated by ship 
 wrecked mariners. Funny? It must make the 
 devil scream. 
 
 4 You know, straight coconut is what the agri 
 culturalists call an unbalanced ration. It certainly 
 unbalanced our digestions. We got so that when 
 ever hunger took an extra bite at us, we took an 
 other drink of gin. After a couple of weeks of 
 it, Olaf, a squarehead sailor, got an idea. It 
 came when he was full of gin, and we, being in 
 the same fix, just watched him shove a cap and 
 short fuse into a stick of dynamite and stroll down 
 toward the boat. 
 
THE PRINCESS 189 
 
 " It dawned on me that he was going to shoot 
 fish if there were any about; but the sun was 
 beastly hot, and I just reclined there and hoped 
 he d have luck. 
 
 " About half an hour after he disappeared, we 
 heard the explosion. But he didn t come back. 
 We waited till the cool of sunset, and down on 
 the beach found what had become of him. The 
 boat was there all right, grounded by the prevail 
 ing breeze, but there was no Olaf. He would 
 never have to eat coconut again* We went back, 
 shakier than ever, and cracked another square- 
 face. 
 
 " The next day the cook announced that he 
 would rather take his chance with dynamite than 
 continue trying to exist on coconut, and that, 
 though he didn t know anything about dynamite, 
 he knew a sight too much about coconut. So we 
 bit the detonator down for him, shoved in a fuse, 
 and picked him a good fire-stick, while he jolted 
 up with a couple more stiff ones of gin. 
 
 " It was the same program as the day before. 
 After a while we heard the explosion and at twi 
 light went down to the boat, from which we 
 scraped enough of the cook for a funeral. 
 
190 THE RED ONE 
 
 " The carpenter and I stuck it out two days 
 more, then we drew straws for it and it was his 
 turn. We parted with harsh words; for he 
 wanted to take a square-face along to refresh him 
 self by the way, while I was set against running 
 any chance of wasting the gin. Besides, he had 
 more than he could carry then, and he wobbled and 
 staggered as he walked. 
 
 " Same thing, only there was a whole lot of 
 him left for me to bury, because he d prepared 
 only half a stick. I managed to last it out till 
 next day, when, after duly fortifying myself, I 
 got sufficient courage to tackle the dynamite. I 
 used only a third of a stick you know, short 
 fuse, with the end split so as to hold the head of 
 a safety match. That s where I mended my pre 
 decessors* methods. Not using the match-head, 
 they d too-long fuses. Therefore, when they 
 spotted a school of mullet and lighted the fuse, 
 they had to hold the dynamite till the fuse burned 
 short before they threw it. If they threw it 
 too soon, it wouldn t go off the instant it hit 
 the water, while the splash of it would frighten 
 the mullet away. Funny stuff dynamite. At 
 
THE PRINCESS 191 
 
 any rate, I still maintain mine was the safer 
 method. 
 
 " I picked up a school of mullet before I d been 
 rowing five minutes. Fine big fat ones they were, 
 and I could smell them over the fire. When I 
 stood up, fire-stick in one hand, dynamite stick in 
 the other, my knees were knocking together. 
 Maybe it was the gin, or the anxiousness, or the 
 weakness and the hunger, and maybe it was the 
 result of all of them, but at any rate I was all of a 
 shake. Twice I failed to touch the fire-stick to 
 the dynamite. Then I did, heard the match-head 
 splutter, and let her go. 
 
 " Now I don t know what happened to the 
 others, but I know what I did. I got turned about. 
 Did you ever stem a strawberry and throw the 
 strawberry away and pop the stem into your 
 mouth? That s what I did. I threw the fire- 
 stick into the water after the mullet and held onto 
 the dynamite. And my arm went off with the 
 stick when it went off. . . ." 
 
 Slim investigated the tomato-can for water to 
 mix himself a drink, but found it empty He 
 stood up. 
 
i 9 2 THE RED ONE 
 
 " Heigh ho," he yawned, and started down the 
 path to the river. 
 
 In several minutes he was back. He mixed the 
 due quantity of river slush with the alcohol, took 
 a long, solitary drink, and stared with bitter moodi- 
 ness into the fire. 
 
 "Yes, but . . ." Fatty suggested. "What 
 happened then? " 
 
 " Oh," said Slim. " Then the princess mar 
 ried me, of course." 
 
 " But you were the only person left, and there 
 wasn t any princess . . ." Whiskers cried out ab 
 ruptly, and then let his voice trail away to em 
 barrassed silence. 
 
 Slim stared unblinkingly into the fire. 
 
 Percival Delaney and Chauncey Delarouse 
 looked at each other. Quietly, in solemn silence, 
 each with his one arm aided the one arm of the 
 other in rolling and tying his bindle. And in 
 silence, bindles slung on shoulders, they went away 
 out of the circle of fire-light. Not until they 
 reached the top of the railroad embankment did 
 they speak. 
 
 " No gentleman would have done it," said 
 Whiskers. 
 
THE PRINCESS 193 
 
 " No gentleman would have done it," Fatty 
 agreed. 
 
 Glen Ellen, California, 
 September 26, 1916. 
 
 THE END 
 
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