Chapter VI

“He wasn’t in the house nor anywhere in sight, and Logan was sitting mending a bag net by the door.

“‘Where’s Johnstone?’ says Bone.

“‘How the —— do I know?’ says Logan. He was a most civil spoken chap as a rule, and as soon as he’d let that out of his head, Bone didn’t look round no more for Johnstone.

“He sat down and smoked a pipe, and fell to wondering when his turn would come. He had one thing fixed in his head, and that was the fact that if he let on to be suspicious old smiler would do him in. He’d be wanted to help work the schooner back to ’Frisco, and it was quite on the cards if he pretended to know nothing and suspec’ nothing he might get off with his life, but he was in a stew. My hat! that chap was in a stew. Living with a man-eating tiger at his elbow wouldn’t be worse, and that night, when no Johnstone turned up, he could no more sleep than a runnin’ dynamo driven by a ten thousand horse-power injin stoked by Satan.

“Logan said a wave must have taken Johnstone off the outer beach of the reef, or he’d tumbled in and a shark had took him, and Bone agreed.

“Next day, however, when Bone was taking a walk away to the north of the house, he saw a lot of big seagulls among the mammee apple bushes that grew thick just there, and making his way through the thick stuff and driving off the birds, he found old man Johnstone on his face with his head bashed in and etceteras.

“Bone was a man, notwithstandin’ the fact that he’d helped to Shanghai poor sailor chaps, and when he seen Logan’s work he forgot his fright of Logan, and swore he’d be even with him.

“There wasn’t no law on that island, nor anyone to help him to hang old toothy; so he fixed it in his mind to do him in, get him by himself and bash him on the head same as he’d bashed Johnstone.

“But Logan never gave him a chance, and the work went on till all the trade goods were used up and there was no more to pay for the divers.

“‘That’s the end,’ said Logan to Bone, ‘but it doesn’t matter; we’ve pretty well skinned the lagoon, and we’ll push out day after to-morrow when we get water and fruit aboard.’

“‘Where for?’ says Bone.

“‘Sydney,’ says the other; ‘I’m not going back to ’Frisco, and seeing Johnstone is drowned, the show is mine; he’s got no relatives. We’ll make for Sydney, and to make you keep your head shut, I’ll give you the old schooner for keeps; she’ll fetch you a good price in Sydney, more than you’d make in ten dozen years long-shoring in ’Frisco. I only want the pearls.’

“‘All right,’ says Bone, ‘I’ll keep my head shut and help you work her,’ having in his mind to tell the whole story soon as he landed, for he’d given up the notion of killing the other chap, not being able to get him alone. But they never put out for Sydney, and here’s the reason why.

“There was a Kanaka on that island by name of Kiliwakee, a chap with a head all frizzled out like a furze bush. He was a looney, though a good enough workman, and he’d got no end of tobacco and fish scale jewellery and such rubbish from Johnstone for his work, and now that supplies had dried up he was pretty much down in the mouth; he’d got to connect pearls and tobacco in his woolly head, and now the lagoon was skinned and there were no more pearls, he saw there was to be no more tobacco, nor jewellery, nor canned salmon.

“Well, that night there was a big Kanaka pow-wow on the beach; the chaps were sitting in a ring and talking and talking, and Bone, catching sight of them, crawled through the bushes to listen.

“He heard the chief chap talking.

“He couldn’t make out at first what he was jabbering about; then at last he got sense of what he was saying.

“‘There’ll be no more good things,’ says he, ‘sticks of tobacco, nor fish in cans, nor knives, nor print calico to make breeches of, nor nothing, for,’ says he, using a figure of speech, ‘the man with the teeth has killed the fat one and swallowed his pearls.’

“Then the meeting closed and the congressmen took their ways home, all but Kiliwakee, the half-lunatic chap, who sits in the moonlight wagging his fuzzy head, which was his way of thinking.

“Then he fetches a knife out of his loin cloth and looks at it, then he lays on his back and begins to strop it on his heel, same as a chap strops a razor.

“Bone said he’d never seen anything funnier than that chap lying in the moonlight stropping away at that knife. It give him a shiver, too, somehow.

“Well, Kiliwakee sits up again and does another brood, feeling the sharp edge of the knife. Then, with the knife between his teeth, he makes off on all fours like a land crab, for the house.

“Bone follows.

“Kiliwakee listens at the house door and hears someone snoring inside—Logan, no less; then he crawls through the door, and Bone guessed that looney was after the pearls. If Bone had run he’d have been in time to save Logan, but he didn’t. He just listened. He heard a noise like a yelp. Then, five minutes after, out comes Kiliwakee. He’d done Logan in and cut his stomach open, but he hadn’t found no pearls, not knowing the chief chap had been usin’ a figure of speech.

“Now you know what a figure of speech is, and don’t you forget it, and if you want to know any more about it go and buy a grammar book. Bone—Oh, he never got away with the schooner, nor the boodle neither. A Chile gunboat looked into that lagoon next week and collared the fishin’ rights and produce in the name of Chile, and told Bone to go fight it in the courts if he wanted to put in a claim. Said the place had been charted and claimed by Chile two years before, which was a lie.

“But Bone wasn’t up for fighting. Too much afraid of questions being asked and the doing in of Logan put down to him by the Kanakas.

“So he took a passage in the gunboat to Valdivia. He’d six big pearls stolen from the takings and hid in the lining of his waistcoat, and he sold them for two hundred dollars to a Jew, and that got him back to ’Frisco.

“Thank you, I don’t mind; whisky with a dash, if it’s all the same to you.”

XIV—UNDER THE FLAME TREES