Chapter IV (7)

He looked at the dead. He looked at the ruins of the burning houses. He saw the crows gathering from the woods, and the fierce herring-gulls swooping inshore. He knew then what had happened.

He ran up and down the beach, calling, “Kolite, Kolite!” But none answered him.

He ran into the forest, calling “Kolite!” There was no reply.

He walked two and fro among the burning boards of cedar, crying on “Kolite!” A huge totem-pole, charred through at the base, fell with a crash, scattering him with flakes of painted wood. That was the only response. He made his way to the smouldering ruin of his own house and lay down in the hot black ash, waiting to die.

His hands, beating about as his sorrow hurt him, touched wood that was not burned, and closed on it. He drew from the ashes the hutch that the compass lived in. “Spirit of the bright box,” groaned Kweetchel, “where is Kolite?”

He took out the compass and held it in his hands. The needle shook, quivered, and hung true on the north. . .

Kweetchel, with something hardening in his breast like stone, bowed himself and wept in the ashes of his home.

Then he hung the compass round his neck on a leather string, provisioned his own dug-out with a keg of fresh water, some nice fresh sea-urchins, a little smoked salmon, fishlines, spears, and all things necessary to a long journey, and went off after Kolite.

Kweetchel’s account of what happened to him during the next two months is confused. He seems to have made his way right round Vancouver Island, however, and crossed to the mainland, where he hung about some inlet more-or-less opposite Clew Cumshewa, waiting for a chance to cross to the Queen Charlottes. He knew Kolite was here, because the compass had pointed the way. It troubled him that the compass no longer pointed to the Queen Charlottes, but he decided that it had been bewitched by the powerful Haida spirits.

In a week of calm weather he provisioned his little canoe again, and set out for the Islands. He landed on the southern shore of a tiny bay, notched into a bigger bay, which was notched into a fjord. Enormous cedar-forest grew to the water’s edge. Kweetchel hid his dug-out and lay down in the bushes, watching the unbroken forest on the opposite shore of the little bay, to which the compass needle now pointed. Rain dripped on him, made sweet with the layers of cedar through which it fell. He dared not light a fire. He waited for the event.

At the very edge of the night, something stirred in the cedar forest across the bay. He thought it was a deer; but there are no deer on the Haida’s Islands. Lifting his head, he looked. At the very point the needle had indicated, a woman parted the branches and stood by the water, carrying in her hand a torch like a timid star.

Kweetchel’s heart seemed to leap from his body. For it was Kolite.

Hunter as he was, he made no sound nor stir. He watched her as she bent and extinguished her little torch. Then, a shadow among the shadows of the forest, she slipped out of the bright robes she wore, the robes of a Haida chieftainess. She stood bare and softly dark as the young night sweet with rain; on arms and anklets broad bands of beaten silver gleamed like bars of the moon. She entered the water, holding a knife in her hand, and began to make prayer to the Spirit of the Sea.

“O Scanawa, Un-Una,” said Kolite, in very good Haida, “I entreat you to punish the men who killed my husband. I entreat you to rise, O Scanawa, Un-Una, Soul of Storms, and upset their canoes, and fill their nets with the dog-fish and the mother of the dog-fish, and drive the otter from their coasts, and bite holes in their baskets, and spoil their copper shields, and break their abalone shells. O Scanawa, Un-Una, hear me. I am a poor woman. I have nothing. I am nothing. I am the slave of Annoish-Haung. O Spirit of Storms, I give you all that I have. Hear me, Scanawa, Un-Una, and make Kweetchel alive again so that I no longer fear the emptiness of the night and the arms of Annoish-Haung.” And lifting the knife, Kolite shore from her head the long locks of black hair, and let them fall in the salt water. She wept as she cut them, and there was a faint phosphorescence in the water, so that she stood with a silver ring about her waist, and her hair floated like silver snakes, and each tear as it mingled with the brine was like a spark of pale fire.

Then Kweetchel could no longer be still. He leapt into the water and swam across the little bay. When Kolite saw him coming she ran ashore and crouched on the edge of the forest. Kweetchel rose out of the sea and came to her, and said, “I am come, Kolite.”

They had no words to fit what they felt. They sat near each other, they touched each other softly here and there, and smiled. Then Kweetchel said, “Come with me.” Kolite swam with him across the bay, they found his dug-out. In the dim night, in the sweet rain, they put out to sea.

Kolite said, “Let us go home.” But Kweetchel shook his head and paddled north, for that was the way the compass pointed.

An old woman had followed Kolite through the woods from the Haida town, had heard her prayer to Un-Una, had seen her meeting with Kweetchel. This old woman went back and told all that she had seen and heard to Annoish-Haung. And when in the morning light Kweetchel looked about the great silver disk of the sea, he saw, between him and the misty mountains of the Islands, four black specks beneath the rising cloud of dawn.

“He follows soon,” grunted Kweetchel between his teeth, and bent to the paddle. He had been paddling all night. He must paddle longer. The glittering silver swell lifted the dug-out, she climbed, sank, climbed again. The four canoes pursuing altered course, converging like black ducks upon a stricken fish. Kweetchel’s canoe had been seen.

“If we had a sail. . .” said Kweetchel stolidly.

Kolite stripped off her mantle of a Haida chieftainess, her fine-woven mantle of red and blue. She spread it upon spears. The wind filled it, she steadied it with her arms. The wind stung her body, she leaned back and laughed fiercely at Kweetchel, and he loved her as never before.

The canoe sped more swiftly, but the four big canoes of Annoish-Haung were swifter yet. Kweetchel looked back. Before they had been like low black ducks. Now they were like eagles, and the foam about their high prows was like the white feathers of an eagle’s neck. Kweetchel groaned, bending over the paddle.

“Shall we leap in the sea together?” asked Kolite, child of the seas, laughing fiercely.

“I am a well-born man and my ears are pierced,” panted Kweetchel. “I will die fighting Annoish-Haung.”

There were islands in the sea. “If we hid among the small channels in the fog,” whispered Kolite. But Kweetchel glanced at the compass and stolidly shook his head. The Thing still pointed north. North he went and Annoish Haung followed.

But now Kweetchel was spent with paddling. He glanced despairingly at the dim mountains of the Lak-Haida, at the canoes that hunted him down. His dark chest heaved, water ran down his face. Kolite left the sail and knelt beside him, and wiped the water from his face with her hands. They looked into each other’s eyes. Kolite tore from her arms the bracelets of beaten silver, stamped with the crest of Annoish-Haung, and threw them into the sea.

“O Scanawa, Un-Una,” she cried, “hear us.”

Then she shrieked like a gull and pointed.

Scanawa, Un-Una, Spirit of Storm, Soul of the Sea, had heard. Down from the tall mountains of Lak-Haida swept the squall. Between the small boat and the others two miles astern it drove a sudden wedge of hail and wind. The waves lifted. The air and the sea mingled together. Un-Una reached up and shook the canoes of Annoish-Haung and the souls of the men in them, Kolite seized the paddle, and Kweetchel reeled forward and stayed the sail. He looked up and saw an albatross riding the gale like a ship. Behind the Soul of the Sea fought for them. Kweetchel bowed his head. It is not given to all men to walk with the gods of the sea.

The squall broke away south. The sea about them was driving green and blue, flashing with foam. One staggering shape, water-logged and with torn sails reeled from the rim of the storm and came battling after them. Annoish-Haung still followed.

Under the bright sail, with Kolite bending at the paddle, the little canoe climbed the waves like a duck. Grimly behind her laboured the big canoe of the Haida. Annoish-Haung set his slaves to bail. She lightened each moment. Kweetchel took the paddle once more.

North through the bright ridged sea they struggled, following the compass needle. Islands of refuge, channels of escape, showed here and there among the low clouds. Kweetchel would not turn aside. North he headed. And Annoish-Haung followed fast.

Ahead of them, a great crag reared from the running surf about its base. It roared into an islet of honey-gold rock, grown with vivid green moss and all hollowed by the sea. An hour passed and they could see the sea-lions thick along the reefs as grubs along a leaf; they could hear the roaring of the honey-brown sea-gulls mingle with the roar of the foam.

Towards the crag Kweetchel headed. And Kolite thought, “It is ended.” For she thought he meant to dash upon the crag and die.

But Kweetchel, following where the needle pointed, saw due ahead a great cave in the rock, and in the surf before it a break.

He glanced back. The Haida was near, but she hesitated. He could see Annoish-Haung beating his slaves, who had no stomach for the surf. Kweetchel smiled at Kolite and headed for the break in the reefs.

Inevitable as life or death, the jaws of the reef opened before them. They were enclosed in streaming rocks, from which hung curtains of bronze kelp. From the ledges the sea-bulls reared to look, and right and left the cows dived in the flow.

Kweetchel yelled. The lions bellowed. The surf thundered about the narrow channel of green water. . .

They were through. A great sheet of foam shouldered them quietly into the cave.

Kweetchel looked about him. Rocks buttressed the entrance, and the reefs kept the waves from it. The pool in the cave was foam-red and shallow. He stepped out and drew the canoe behind one of the rock-buttresses. He lifted out Kolite. Clinging together, they looked about them with large scared eyes.

It was a very still place they had entered, though it hummed and shook to the thunder along the reefs. The air of the cave was calm, it seemed to be hung with strange green water-shadows and reflections of the deep. The pool that floored it was calm. The rock beneath the calm pool was covered with a rose-red encrustation, blotched with scarlet, hung with mauve and bronze weeds, and starred with living flowers as green as emerald. Huge crabs, noduled with purple and crimson, moved with the undulations of the sea. In one wall was a rose-pink recess, like a throne for a sea-spirit. Kweetchel lifted Kolite and set her in this shrine. Then he caught up a spear, loosed the knife in his belt, and turned to the entrance.

As he turned, he heard a cry of death. He looked out. The hands of the weary slaves had not been as true as his hand. He saw the Haida swing for the opening of the reef, and miss it. He saw, in a moment of time, her high prow crashed upon the rocks; she split from end to end, slid away, and sank. The slaves went down in the rush and smother of the foam. Only one man, gripping a spear in his mouth, leapt clear; hung to the kelp, heaved himself upward among the herd of sea-lions, and staggered towards the cave. It was Annoish-Haung.

Huge, dark and dripping from the sea, he splashed into the cave, and Kweetchel met him there.

They closed at once, stabbing with shortened spears. The water of the pool rocked, green and silver reflections flowed over the walls. The surf thundered outside, and the bulls of the sea-herd bellowed angrily after the man who had run among them.

Kweetchel kept his knife hidden in his left hand.

Great and fierce was Annoish-Haung among the great fierce Haidas; fair in colour, and delighting in war. Kweetchel was a head shorter, and swarthy, and had no more stomach for war than another man. But he had not followed Annoish-Haung nine weeks for nothing. Waiting his chance, he took many wounds. The froth on the churned pool was stained as pink as the walls. The crabs, pausing in their unceasing run, winnowed the water with horrid feathered jaws.

Annoish-Haung shouted his war-cry and drove again with his spear. Kweetchel avoided it, and the impetus of the stroke carried Annoish-Haung past him. Kweetchel wheeled. The Haida wheeled almost instantly and recovered. But Kweetchel had seized his chance. He leaned forward and slashed his knife across the forehead under the studded head-band.

It was only a shallow cut. But the blood blinded Annoish-Haung. He faltered. Before he could clear his eyes, Kweetchel had run in and slashed his knee. He dropped to the other. He flung his spear, but he could not see clearly. It flew wide. Kweetchel speared him through the heart. He fell forward on his face in the pool, and died. Kolite came from her rosy niche and took him by the hair, and together they carried him to the opening of the cave and heaved him into the surf.

They spent three fireless days on the rock, eating sea-urchins and dulse, while Kweetchel, like another before him frapped his ship; for the dugout had been scraped on the reef; and Kweetchel bound her together with strips of sea-lion hide, and braced her with splinters of Annoish-Haung’s canoe which the tide washed up. Then, suffering badly from thirst, they put off again.

“Now we can go home,” said Kolite, shivering in her mantle.

Kweetchel thought it about time. He looked at the Thing, but it still pointed implacably north. He dared not disobey a spirit that had done so much for him.

So he paddled stolidly north once more.

He paddled forty-eight hours in a rough sea against a north-wester. The dug-out made water badly. They were nearly dead when they fell in with a trading-schooner, and the captain took them on board. He could speak some Haida, and Kolite was able to tell him some of their story. At the end of it,—“Where do you want to go now?” he asked them.

“We want to go home,” said Kolite.

“But we have to go north,” said Kweetchel sadly, “because the Thing inside this shining box points us there.” And he showed the sacred compass to the captain.

The captain began to laugh. He laughed and laughed. Then, looking at their faces, he grew grave. He looked at the compass. He said gently, “but it points south.”

“North, Yetzhabada,” answered Kolite, resignedly.

“But south too,” insisted the white man.

Of course when one end of the needle pointed north, the other pointed south. Kweetchel had never happened to notice this before. It made him very happy. He could go off home with Kolite without fear of angering the masterful Thing in the bright box.

The captain took them south with him and eventually landed them near their old place, at a village of their own tribe. He tried on the voyage to explain the real nature of the compass to Kweetchel, but he never succeeded.

Kweetchel stayed with his own people. In time missionaries found him, and he stopped keeping slaves and eating dog, and became a Christian, and wore a second-hand Stetson. He himself told me this story years ago.

He was a very old man then. I thought he was dead since. But the other day I saw a little totem-pole in a store in Victoria. It was carved of yellow cedar, about two feet high, gaily painted; such as old Indians make to sell to the summer tourists on the Coast. As soon as I saw it, I knew Kweetchel had made it, for he had carved it with all the characters of his saga. He was there, and Kolite, and a sea-lion, and the big canoe and the little canoe, and an albatross, and a terrible representation of Un-Una, in a cave, swallowing up Annoish-Haung. On the very top was something. . . .

I went into the store. They wanted ten dollars for the pole, which was dear. “But, as you can see,” said the man, “it has a heap on it. But no one knows what that thing on the top is.”

I bought the pole, because I knew all about it and what the thing on the top was.

It was a mariner’s compass in a yellow box.

Snam—Guardian spirit, “medicine.”
Mother of the dog-fish—shark.

MANNERING’S MEN

“In that town,” said Blake to himself, peering cautiously through the scrub, “is Mannering’s grave, and the wreck of a brave man’s life-work. O, Sergeant, if those two beggarly Nyam-Nyams try to run away, deal with them straightly. At moonset we will go down.”

“O sons of Eblis,” murmured the Haussa sergeant with a grin, “scum of the market-place, little frogs of the mud-puddles of Wakonda, in that town is good soured milk, much grain, and the chickens and goats as many as the prayers of the prophet. At moonset we will go down.”

The command gurgled pleasantly to itself and lay closer. Blake crawled nearer Macartney, who was raking the silver-patched blackness with a pair of night-glasses wrapped in dark cloth.

“I can make out a tin roof,” whispered Macartney at last; “that will be the roof of the residency.”

“Where Mannering was speared on his own door-step,” said Jim Blake, taking the glasses. “Dead, down and dead, wiped out, absolute failure, Mannering. I can’t get over that, you know. He was such a keen old beggar; so wrapped up in his work. He simply spent himself on this beastly country. And he cleared out Wakonda, as far as mortal eye can see, on purpose to make room for seven other devils worse than the late king.”

“Couldn’t be,” put in Macartney.

“It’s not being speared that’s the worst part of it,” persisted Blake; “we all come to that sooner or later. It’s having absolutely nothing to show for his life or his death. Nothing even for the next man to build on. It’s that,” he continued, shivering as the dawn chill blew up the valley, “which I fancy must worry old Mannering—still.”

“What you need is chlorodyne,” whispered Macartney, indignantly.

They lay silent in the dark, upland grass, and the dew beaded and dripped on the thorns overhead. The command hunted for prickles in its feet, tightened belts, and babbled softly of stewed fowl.

From immense spaces, as spun out and as thin as a thread, came the hunting-cry of a lion. The Haussa sergeant crept up and touched Blake’s foot.

“The moon sets, O Effendi, and it is not yet dawn.”

Blake rose to his feet and looked at the sky. “We be ready,” he said.

The command moved as one man, eyes glinting whitely under the tarbooshes. The last few days had been hungry ones. Below in the valley was good food; it was only to fight a little, and all would be full.

“Ya Illah, brethren, let us go down.”

They went down. Blake was no tactician, and his plan in such cases was simple. You took the main gate, held it, and swept the obstructionists out of the other gates or over the mud walls, broom fashion. He had worked with his present command for a year, and they followed him like a football team. The sergeant at his elbow presently touched his sleeve.

“There is made ground here.”

“Made ground?”

“Yes. The road built by Mannering Bimbashi.”

Already the road built by Mannering for the grain dealers and spice merchants was no more than a track in the under-growth, and the grass swept to the thigh. Their way dipped sharply, and a river valley swirling in mist took them like shadows. Blake felt under his feet the rotten piles of a bridge, and a rifle clanged against rusted iron.

“I think these cattle of Wakonda have the alarm,” said the sergeant as they grunted up the opposite slope.

“Why?”

“There was a watchman at the bridge end; we should have crossed by the ford farther down. But these Wakonda cannot fight, and all is as Allah wills. O Ibrahim, son of Suleiman, keep thy rifle dry and remember to get under the walls.”

The town was clattering like a frightened hen-roost when a company of shadows flitted through the fog, and flung themselves under the walls and against the main gate. Five minutes of noisy, scrambling, hit-or-miss fighting followed, and they were inside, with their hardest work before them. Their ire had driven back the defenders, but they themselves had for the moment no cover. Presently the slugs began to flop on the walls behind them, and two men fell. Blake felt a stinging blow on the knee, and went down on all fours. He rose, laughing rather shakily into Macartney’s scared face.

“A spent bullet,” he cried in the din; “can’t put my foot to the ground. Clear those houses, old man; I’ll hold the gate.”

Macartney nodded and was gone, his men after him. Blake and his handful took cover behind a mud buttress and a dead camel, and prepared to hold the gate. It was only then that Blake saw the sergeant.

“Why art thou here?”

“I stay with thee, O Effendi. Besides,”—he sniffed wistfully,—“in that house they have been cooking good mutton. I would not go too far.”

The din and turmoil of the narrow ways rose and fell like the froth of the sea. The roofs were beginning to burn in a dozen places as Macartney, in rough-and-ready fashion, cleared out the slug-shooters. The red light of burning thatch danced in the fog and the thinning dark, and by this light Blake saw a score of white-wrapped figures leap from the reek and rush for the gate, shouting as they came.

“Steady, men, steady!”

“By the prophet’s beard!” cried the Haussa sergeant, flinging himself flat behind the camel, “these be no Wakonda, but ghazis of the far desert. Shoot well, O my children!”

It was all happening with the jerky rapidity of a cinematograph film, and the noise passed hearing. The command, inspired with visions of buttered mutton, loaded and fired as one man. Two, three close-range volleys swept between the walls, and the alley was blotched with whitish bundles that were the bodies of the desert men. But the others came on, and suddenly Blake was on his feet in the shadow of the gate, fighting hand to hand for his life.

“Stand firm, O my children!”

The sergeant’s voice echoed his. He was the centre of an indescribable confusion. Under the gate the smoke of the volleys hung heavily. Through this broke first one fierce face, then another, the gleams of arms, the surge and retreat of the attack, the blows and outcries of men. Ibrahim, the son of Suleiman, fell across Blake’s feet and coughed his life out in ten seconds. Another of his best men was down, speared through the heart. And then, as suddenly as they had come, the desert men retreated to the shelter of the huts, and Blake, looking up, saw that it was day.

“They are gone,” said the sergeant, looking at the dead, “but they will come again. O Effendi, this is no good place.”

“I should have kept more men,” Blake was thinking clearly and rapidly. “If Mac doesn’t come back inside ten minutes, it will be too late for us, and he’ll have to cut his way out.”

A moment’s dreamlike quiet had succeeded the dreamlike noise. Over his head the sky was clear and growing gold, barred with the black flocks of wild-fowl that flew to their feeding grounds in the valley. The sun rose with the hard flash of metal, and the blink of metal answered from the ruined roof of Mannering’s house. Blake’s breath drew cold. Was he also to die uselessly, wastefully, his work unfinished, under the spears of Wakonda? “Steady, men, steady, and fire slowly! It is ours to hold the gate.”

The Haussa sergeant leaped to his feet.

“They come again! O jackals of the sands, we men are ready—”

“Silence—and lie down!”

Again with that dreaming sense of unreality Blake watched the rush of fluttering figures up the valley. The men were loading and firing as fast as they could, but the rush was scarcely checked. Someone behind him began to croon a wild death-song. A thrown spear flickered before his eyes and struck his head a glancing blow. He looked at it curiously as it clattered down on his boots, and wondered why his hands felt so weak, and why the earth reeled under his feet like an outrolled ribbon. Then everything was lost in a warm red mist through which savage faces seemed to peer and yell. Blinded and dizzy, he braced himself for the shock of the charge, the while some voice in his head was buzzing busily, “you will go down as Mannering did, a failure, a failure. . .”

An utter pity for Mannering filled him. He leaned back against the wall, levelled his revolver as well as he could on his knee, and waited—as Mannering had waited.

“_Ya Illah!_” shouted the sergeant hoarsely. “Who be these?”

Blake cleared the blood from his eyes and looked. The attack had wavered and had turned upon itself, for a compact little force of ten had filed out from behind a house and fallen upon the desert men in the rear. They were in all degrees of dress and undress. Their leader was very tall and very thin, with a great bush of hair, upon which he wore the remains of a tarboosh, and he had an empty bandoleer round his neck. He and his were armed variously, ranging from a damaged Martini to an inlaid jesail from the North. These weapons they were using variously, in disciplined silence. So much Blake saw in a photographic flash of amazement. Then strength came back to him, and he and the sergeant flung themselves across the dead camel.

“Come on, you black rascals!” shouted Blake, staggering as he stood.

“Follow me, sons of darkness!” yelled the sergeant.

The men obeyed with howls. Caught between two forces, the enemy fighting like wolves, were driven down alleys, cut down in corners, scattered and broken. In five minutes Blake’s men and their unknown allies were staring and panting under the gate, their work done.

“Now,” suggested the Haussa, patting Blake all over with his delicate black hands in a search for fatal injuries—“now I go and picket that street whence came the cooking smell.”

“Wait!” commanded Blake. He looked at the gate; at the dead lying in the light and the black shadows. Even now the gold had scarcely gone from the faint, hot blue sky; scattered bands of birds still flew across it, and the high air seemed stirred with a multitude of wings. He looked at the leader of the allies, who was standing on one leg and grinning anxiously.

“Who art thou?”

The man drew his dusty heels together and carefully saluted.

“We be the men of Mannering Bimbashi.”

“Of Mannering Bimbashi?”

“Yea, Master. I was a policeman of the force wherewith he policed this town. He said to us, ‘Go here’ or ‘Go there,’ and we went and punished the evil-doers. Twice and thrice have I fought under Mannering Bimbashi.” He gazed contemptuously at his command. “These others are also of his force, or of his house—warriors, as I am, or gardeners and herders of goats; but all Mannering Bimbashi’s men.”

“Go on,” said Blake quietly.

“Mannering Bimbashi was slain, and many of his folk; but I was left. I remembered. I gathered these others together, and bade them remember also. Mannering Bimbashi was dead, but we were not freed from our service. We had to live. I was a seller of rock-salt in the market-place, and these others did work after their kind. Sometimes we met and spoke together. None knew us for his men, and his name might not be upon our lips; but we laid our hands upon our mouths—so—and then we remembered.”

“Go on.”

“There is no more. It is very difficult to remember. But I knew the English would come in the footsteps of our Bimbashi and I held these of his together in readiness, as thou hast seen. But our Bimbashi—on whom be peace!—has been dead a long time, and now we would take service with thee, O master.”

“Thou hast done well.” Blake’s voice shook a little as he thought how well. “Thou hast done very well. But why?”

The man was very ugly and very black, but all the poetry and sadness of the Arab were in his face as he answered:

“We were his men. We loved him.”

Blake’s eyes were dim as he looked across at the ruined house. There, Mannering had gone down, and his hope, his work, his deeds—all these had gone down with him into dust.

“But even here there was love left,” said Blake aloud, with a kind of wonder; “even here there was love left!”

Then he took his men and Mannering’s and went to join Macartney in the ordering of Wakonda.

HE THAT COMETH AFTER

Admission was by ticket only, and Hillard wondered how and where the man sitting next him had obtained one. He was, in that decorously neutral assembly, as conspicuous in his way as a game-cock among crows. His coat was of some sort of greenish khaki, strapped, patched and pocketed over almost every available inch of its surface; his trousers did not fit him or the coat; his boots—Hillard could not see his boots, but he thought they were tan; his tie looked like a knotted red handkerchief; his hair was red, and he himself so scorched and reddened by sun that it seemed as if his cool grey eyes should have melted amid the fervent heat of his face. So much Hillard saw in his first casual inspection, as he sat awaiting boredom. After a bishop had introduced the speaker and the lecture had begun, he was too much interested in the slight black figure on the platform to spare much attention elsewhere. You know those bioscope pictures that show in a few minutes the life-cycle of a plant from seed to seed? Hillard says that Paul Raynor, with the aid of a magic lantern and his own simplicity, was showing them thus the birth of a seed of law and love, the growth of light in darkness, of safety in the shadow of death. Not a soul in the audience could remain quite unmoved.

It was about half-way through that Hillard felt a tug at his sleeve. The man in the khaki coat was leaning forward intently, his elbow on the back of the chair ahead and his hand at his ear.

“What did he say, mister?”

“I beg your pardon. When?”

The man lifted his hand impatiently. “Then. Before the last picture. I couldn’t be sure . . .”

“Oh, he said he was probably the only man in the country who knew the language.”

“Meanin’ himself? Raynor?”

“Yes.”

“Ah”—the man spoke with a certain jealous satisfaction—“so he thinks. But it ain’t so. It ain’t true.”

“Indeed?” Hillard was curt.

“Nah. I know it.”

Hillard looked at the interrupter who, quick as an animal to read a rebuff, had drawn away and was once more listening to the lecturer with a bitter intentness. Something made Hillard sorry he had been curt; so that when the audience broke up in unusual enthusiasm, and he found himself descending the stairs, shoulder to shoulder with the khaki coat, he followed the impulse of repentance and spoke.

“An uncommonly interesting talk, eh?”

“Interestin’?” The man eyed him warily. “Yes, I guess it was interestin’ all right.”

Hillard: “And you must have found it specially so knowing the country and the people.”

They had reached the pavement, and the man swung round almost threateningly. “Who says I know the country?”

“Well, I thought it likely, as you said you knew the language.”

“Ah, so I did, mister, so I did. . . And you was interested?”

“Why, yes. I think anyone would be. To see the school, the little thatched church, the neat fields, all grown up in a couple of years, and all the work of two white men. . . They’re brave fellows out there; good men.”

They had turned into the Park, pleasant with a sense of cool grass and damp borders. The man in khaki paused and sniffed luxuriously; the wariness had gone out of his face. “Yes,” he said, gravely, “they’re good men. That man Raynor, now, he’s a mix of holiness and horse-sense which you’d call uncommon. Yes, sir, uncommon. And all that good man has”—he turned suddenly and laid his hand on Hillard’s arm—“all that good man has, all he’s done, he owes to Brad Timmins, who weren’t good in any sense o’ the word. Queer, ain’t it?”

Hillard took him deftly by the elbow, turned him to a bench, and said, “Go on.”

It came something like this:

“We were days and days in the grass country, and that’s a thing very bad for the nerves. You see nothing but grass, close-packed, stem and blade. We travelled blind as if we was in a tunnel, and the roof of the tunnel was the achin’ sky. We’d brush through the grass as endless as water. And hot. . . Brad and I we quarreled all the way up, and, what made it worse, we had to quarrel amiable. In a friendly voice, I mean, so the niggers wouldn’t know. It’s that way. It was about a girl; and he’d curse me to kingdom come in a tea-and-ices sort of tone that made me sick, and I’d answer accordin’. He was a hard case, was Brad. But pretty soon he forgot about the girl, and thought of nothing but what we’d come for.

“The heat was such, and the glare on all them leagues of yellowish grass, I give you my word I scarce knew when we got among the trees. I just looked up, saw it was dark, felt a warm splash on my face, and there we was in the forest. Nothing gradual about that country. One hour that blazin’ grass, the next, them everlastin’ trees. Grass couldn’t have been no grassier, forest couldn’t have been no treeier. It’s that way. . .”

He looked at a taxi throbbing beside the curb, watched it as it slid away on the smooth asphalt. “Over there we don’t overrun things—dead things, I mean, like earth and trees and rivers. . . Or are they so dead? Well, over here it’s us that count; over there it’s them. Our life’s nothin’. And it’s not the people either; they may be little better than beasts. But you could plant London, Paris, and Noo York among them trees, and it wouldn’t make no difference—at least, not to last. Them things are so strong. It’s that way.

“We was after ivory, and not green stuff that’s been buried for years, waiting for a good bargain, either. Brad he wanted it fresh. He wanted a good village on the edge of the forest where he could get more hunters and porters, and store his ivory, and send it back in lots. He didn’t think or pray or want for a thing but ivory.

“We found a village. . . Yes, Raynor’s village. There wasn’t no church then, nor no school, and the trees was thicker. Raynor thinned ’em a lot and quite wise. But I see he’s took down some of our stockade, which ain’t so wise. You see that picture of the reclaimed witch-doctor with the locket round his neck, a hoeing his pumpkin-patch? Well, that feller, he run things, and the young headman was under his thumb. He was too clever for a nigger—he favoured us for his reasons, and we favoured him for ours, and things was very pleasant and comfortable all around.

“Brad and me we’d go off in the grass country for days after the herds. Yes, and we had good luck. You wouldn’t get such luck now, not anywheres. A wonderful great country under the moon, and the elephants moving. . . Well, it’s that way. And then we’d go back to our clean grass huts huddling on the edge of the trees, and we’d see the little fires at night and hear the girls chatter, and it would seem ’most like home. Then the young chief he’d come in and talk. A bright young feller and we sort o’ fascinated him. He got terribly fond of Brad Timmins. Brad he was a big, open-faced, hearty-speakin’ sort, and it wasn’t till you know’d him well that you’d see how tight his mouth shut and how hard his eyes was. He was always most fair and friendly with the natives, and they thought no end of him. Only that old witch-doctor, squatting in his hut among the rags and chickens—only he saw through Brad. He’d say: ‘That white man would burn a whole village for the sake of one tusk,’ and it was quite true. But the young headman would say: ‘I’m black and he is white, but he is my friend.’ And the doctor, blinking his black eyelids with the gray lashes like a monkey’s, he’d laugh.

“We sent off three lots of ivory down country. We’d a pile growing, and I—I was getting a bit tired of it. I wanted to take my share and make for the coast, and enjoy myself awhile. Well, it’s that way with me. I ain’t hard like Brad was. But he was a shark over the ivory. He never got enough. He killed out that country—not for the lust to kill that sometimes takes a man, but because of the money in the ivory, which, I give you my word, is quite a different thing, mister. He was like a miser too. He’d a store of the very finest tusks wrapped up like babies and buried under the floor of his hut. He just couldn’t bear to part with ’em, though he knew they might sp’ile. He just loved ’em. No one knew they was there, but me, and he didn’t know I knew. They was his secret hoard, like in a book. I didn’t care. I give you my word that I was half-scared o’ Brad Timmins them days, he was that mad on the ivory, though always most fair and friendly to them that helped him to it.

“I’m nothing to boast of in the way of softness, mister, as you can guess; but there’s things. . . Well, it’s that way with me. You’ll find a feelin’ if you dig far enough, as the dentist said. There’s a few things that reach home to me, and that young headman he was one of them when he pulled Brad out from a charging bull. Yes, sir; right out from under. And boosted him up a tree, and nipped up himself, and Brad he shot the bull. It was a fine thing. ‘You’ll give him a gun for that,’ I says to Brad. And Brad, he says; ‘You mind your own business. I’ve no guns to spare.’ Then I knew he’d do it cheap, and I was ashamed, and I give the nigger my own third gun, and told him it came from Brad, and not because of the gun, but because he’d saved his life. Yes, it’s that way. Queer, ain’t it?

“Well, that country was just about used up; all our ivory was on its way south, and I wanted to follow it. But Brad he would go on. He was set on travelling round the edge of the tree belt till we found fresh elephant country, using the village as a base camp. He had his way, as a man who don’t care nothin’ for nobody else most generally does. The village howled with grief, all but the old witch-doctor, who made our arrangements for us. At the end of the talk he said something that sounded like ‘Mabendy.’

“What’s that?” said I.

“He waved his hands toward the forest. ‘Very bad people,’ he said, ‘come and fight, try and take the village. If they take it, they eat us.’

“And a tough morsel you’d be,” I thought to myself. And Brad, he laughed. The headman was there, too, and generally when Brad laughed he’d laugh. He didn’t now. He said: ‘It is very bad. They are as many as the leaves, and their arrows are strong. They came once before and we beat them off, but they killed many of our fighting men. Now our huts are full of children again, but they are little, and I have just taken my third wife, whom I love. It is very bad.’ He laid his hand, which was black as a coal and delicate as a girl’s, for a moment on Brad’s. ‘It is very bad if they come while you, a great warrior, are away. But I will send a messenger, and then you will return and help us.’

“Yes. He said it just like that. Not as a question. He thought Brad was his friend, you see, and spoke accordin’.

“Brad Timmins he looked at me with one big wink, but I looked at my boots. Later I said to him: ‘If Mabendy—whoever he or they are—comes, and you’re sent for and you don’t go, you’ll lose your face. You won’t get no more hunters and beaters out o’ that village.’ And he swore at me with pure astonishment as a meddlesome grannie that minded what a pack of niggers thought. Yes, he swore amazin’.”

A girl passed, wearing small, high-heeled, patent-leather shoes; the man in khaki watched them gravely until the girl was out of sight. Then he said, suddenly, “But not so bad as when the message come”—and was once more silent.

“Then Mabendy came?”

The man in khaki looked at Hillard, nodding gravely, “Yes, mister. As we heard by special messenger, two days out—a boy with a rag round his head. He come reeling up our line and rolled at Brad’s feet, gasping out a word or two. And Brad he began kickin’ him cruel.

“‘Whatever are you doin’?’ I says, pulling Brad back. He was in a breathless rage, and couldn’t speak for a minute.

“‘Those f-fools,’ he stutters, ‘those fools! Do they think. . .’ His voice ran up to a sort of yell. And then, all of a sudden he stopped, gapin’ at me like a fish, and his jaw workin’.

“‘What is it _now_?’ I says.

“He lets out a sort of whisper—’ My tusks—and the next moment, mister, I give you my word, he was beatin’ our boys with a gun-butt to turn ’em round quicker.”

The man leaned down and brushed some dust from his outrageous trousers. “Yes. He’d remembered those tusks, you see—those choice tusks that I wasn’t expected to know of. Yes; buried under the floor of his hut. He was afraid Mabeady’d find ’em. So we was goin’ back. . . . . .”

He was silent again. When he did speak it was unexpected.

“These pants ’re his.”

“Whose?”

“Brad’s. He was a bigger man than me.”

“Did he give them to you!”

“No, mister; I shouldn’t say gave. . . Found ’em, I did—aft. Couldn’t find anything else; it’d been all took and distributed. No, not exactly stole; more for relics, like the Cath’lics.”

“Then you got back to the village?”

“Yes, we got back—in a little more than thirty hours—half dead, because of the ivory. . . . There was a little hillock beyond arrow-shot, overlooking the village. We was goin’ to spy out a bit from this. We hadn’t met no enemy. The sun was settin’ behind us, behind the great grass-country—settin’ terrible bright, and every leaf and branch on the edge of the forest was sharp and distinct in a great blaze of gold light. Never see such light here, mister. We left our boys on the ground, and Brad and me we crawled up that hillock to have a look. . . .

“The first thing that struck me was the quiet. It was all so quiet. Not till you saw that little black ripple and eddy among the huts would you have guessed that it was men fighting—for their homes and their kids—as you or me might do. It was the absence of firearms that made it seem so quiet.

“I didn’t see it all so quick as Brad; he was ahead of me. When he saw the fight among the huts he gave a cry, kind of as if he was hurt. I guess he was. Then his breath seemed to go from him, and he stood up clear on the top of the mound, his arms out, cursing in whispers—because of the ivory.

“That great gold light seemed to beat on him like water. I can’t describe it, mister. He seemed to grow bigger, to tower over the huts, to be as huge as one of the trees. To those poor harried folk in the shadow he must have shown, I take it, like a god, a deliverer,—a saviour—there in the light with his arms spread out. Come to save ’em, eh?

“I give you my word for it, the whole fight was held up while you could count twenty, while they stared up at the great gold figure on the hillock. Then—we was out of arrow-range, but some one had an old breech-loader—Brad he went down coughing. When I ran up, ‘Damn you,’ he groans. ‘Don’t stop here. Get the tusks out, you fool’. . . Yes, he’d forgot I wasn’t supposed to know about them. They was the last thing he thought of, I guess—this side.

“Then . . .?”

He began again with a start. “Then our men from the village rushed up behind me, mad. And we went down. . .

“I don’t remember much else, mister, I never do. Some takes it this way and some that. I got a crack on the head, too, and when I come round a few days after, Brad Timmins he was dead and buried _and_ what you might call canonized. Yes, sir.

“Which way? Well, for coming back at the call of his friend in need, I suppose, and losin’ his life over it. ‘A man of great heart is he who will go into the dark night at the word of his brother,’ said the young headman to me; I believe it says much the same thing in the Bible. . . And the old witch-doctor pipes up, ‘If he was indeed a man, O child!’

“Mister, I saw the beginning of what you and your kind would call a very curious process—the making of a god. Me, I simply didn’t count, though I’d done a lot more than stand on top of a hill in the sunset. Why, I was all blacked up with the back-spit of my old Colt. It’s that way. . . . I went to look at Brad’s grave, and it was all planted round with holy bushes and a mess of rags and feathers and pots and pumpkins. And while I stood there a woman led her little boy up to the grave and set his little black hand like a monkey’s paw on the earth, and said something to Brad. And in two weeks it was rumoured that Brad didn’t like folks round there after dark. And in three it was said that as he stood on the hillock he’d gathered the sun’s rays in his hands and turned them into the blinded faces of Mabendy. Our village had got off uncommon cheap, and it was all laid down to Brad Timmins. ‘Most unreasonable. But it’s that way. . . .

“And the stamp of Brad Timmins was on every white man after that. He became the type—what you’d call the symbol, mister. He, in his grave there, smoothed the way for Raynor. Raynor, he was listened to because of Brad Timmins. You may say the church was built by Brad, and the schools laid on him as a foundation stone. And all the time. . . Well, what gets me is, who’ll have the credit, eh?”

“And the ivory?”

The man in khaki coughed uneasily. “I give you my word, and you may set me down for a fool, I left the ivory where it was. I guess it’s there still. They’d have known. . . poor devils in the dark. . . I guess I’ve kept you an uncommon time, mister.”

“Not too long.” Hillard drew out a card. “This is my name and address. Will you take it, and—come and tell me some more any time you’re inclined?”

“Thank you; I’d be pleased.” He got up and shook hands absently, and turned away. But he came back.

“Raynor and his kind they don’t know. They can’t know. Stands to reason. . . But you saw the picture of that old witch-doctor hoeing his pumpkins that innocent? Yes? And the locket made o’ cocoa tins round his neck? Yes? There’s the heart of Brad Timmins in them cocoa-tins.” He moved off again, pausing only to say, gravely over his shoulder, “And I guess it rattles about inside like a dried bean.”

Then he went, and Hillard watched him walking cautiously among the well-dressed crowd, as if he were afraid of tripping over the roots of trees, the blinding spears of the elephant grass.

THE CLOSED DOOR

Tonio brought the news after dinner with the turgid mix he called coffee. “Concepcion says,” he remarked, “that there has been a battle beyond Cienaga and all the insurgents have been destroyed. But Concepcion is a liar anyway, and does the señor wish me to open another tin of milk? There is no more fresh. The cow is dead.”

Fellowes lifted his head with a jerk from the sticky leather cushion where he had just laid it, too tired even to swear. “Hello! say that again.”

“The cow is dead and Pepita wept. There is no doubt that it is dead . . .”

“Never mind. I mean about the battle.”

“Saints! Concepcion says there has been one beyond Cienaga, and all the insurgentes have been killed.”

“Who told him?”

“A man who fought in the battle, señor, a man who was there. Pedro is hiding him in the cafetaria.”

“Why?”

“Quien sabe? Pedro says he is frightened. And there is no fresh milk. Little Mother of God, that cow was exhausta . . .”

“Be quiet. Give me my boots again.”

For all his tiredness, Fellowes dropped out of the hammock lightly enough. If there really had been a battle, and the insurgentes really had been wiped out, then the victorious troops would probably straggle back to the Town for rest and refreshment. In that case the Company must be warned, and the Company’s loose property swept up and secured. “Damn all governments, anyway,” said Fellowes, as he struggled with the boots, and wondered where he might lay hand on one of his foremen.

After the heat of the lighted room behind the nettings, the dusk was almost cool as he plunged into it. A storm was coming, and the sun had dropped early into dark cloud. Sky and forest were so much of a blackness that it looked as if the trees had suddenly and silently surged upward and swallowed the day. The foul little roads were dim and deserted; only the square flared with uncertain light. The church seemed at one moment to waver near the ground; the next, it flickered aloft, striking into the inverted pits of dark like a reflection in a well. Only in front of the café a compact and sweating crowd fought and screamed whole-heartedly, tiny by contrast of the night.

A man whirled from the outskirts of the crowd as Fellowes paused, and caught him by the coat. “There is a man!” he shrieked above the din. “One who has seen the battle!” Fellowes shook him off, lowered his head, and drove through the mob by sheer weight of bone. They took his charge with perfect good-temper. Brown hands caught at him, eyes gleamed and darkened, and half the mouths in the Town screamed at him in unison.