Chapter IV: Part 4

He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this pair--simple savage and convalescent drunkard--but there was never any question as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate nothing for a whole day.

"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut and kept none for yourself."

"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.

Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.

But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them and laid them one by one.

* * * * *

When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate drop of moisture on the point of a knife.

On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green wall that built up slowly across the west.

Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons, some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki, however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over his shoulder into the east.

The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the first rush of the hurricane caught them.

Karaki himself was reduced to a rattle of bones in a dried skin, and Pellett could scarce lift a hand. But Karaki fought for Pellett among the waves that leaped up like sheets of fire on the reef. Why or how they got through neither could have said. Perhaps because it was written that after drink, illness, madness, and starvation the white man should be saved by the black man again and a last time from ravening waters. When they came ashore on the islet they were both nearly flayed, but they were alive, and Karaki still gripped Pellett's shirt....

For a week they stayed while Pellett fattened on unlimited coconut and Karaki tinkered the proa. It had landed in a water-logged tangle, but Karaki's treasures were safe. He got his bearings from a passing native fisherman, and then he knew that _all_ his treasures were safe. His home island lay across Bougainville Strait, the stretch of water just beyond....

"Balbi over there?" asked Pellett.

"Yes," said Karaki.

"And a mighty good thing too," cried Pellett heartily. "This is the limit of British authority, old boy. Big fella mahster b'long Beretani stop'm here, no can go that side."

Karaki was quite aware of it. If he feared one thing in the world, he feared the Fiji High Court and its Resident Commissioner for the Southern Solomons, who did sure justice upon all who transgressed in its jurisdiction. Once beyond the Strait he might still be liable for the stolen goods and the broken contract. But never--this was the point--never could he be punished for anything he might choose to do over there in Bougainville.

So Karaki was content.

And so was Christopher Alexander Pellett. His body had been wrung and swept and scoured, and he had downed his devils. Sweet air and sunshine were on his lips and in his heart. His bones were sweet in him. As his vigor returned he swam the lagoon or helped Karaki at the proa. He would spend hours hugging the warm sand or rejoicing in the delicate tracery of some tiny sea shell, singing softly to himself while the ground swell hushed along the beach, savoring life as he never had done.

"Oh, this is good--good!" he said.

Karaki puzzled him. Not that he vexed himself, for a smiling wonder at everything, almost childlike, filled him these days. But he thought of this taciturn savage, how he had capped thankless service with rarest sacrifice.

And now that he could consider soberly, the why of it eluded him. Why? Affection? Friendship? It must be so, and he warmed toward the silent little man with the sunken eyes and the expressionless face from which he could never raise a wink.

"Hy, you, Karaki, what name you no laugh all same me? What? You too much fright 'long that fella stuff you steal? Forget it, you old black scamp. If they ever trouble you, I'll square them somehow. By George, I'll say I stole it myself!"

Karaki only grunted and sat down to clean his Winchester with a bit of rag and some drops of oil he had crushed from a dried coconut.

"No, that don't reach him either," murmured Pellett, baffled. "I'd like to know what's going on under that topknot of yours, old chap. You're like Kipling's cat, that walks by himself. God knows I'm not ungrateful. I wish I could show you--"

He sprang up.

"Karaki! Me one big fella friend 'long you: savee? You one big fella friend 'long me: savee? We two dam big fella friend, my word!... What?"

"Yes," said Karaki. No other response. He looked at Pellett and he looked away toward Bougainville. "Yes," he said, "my word," and went on cleaning his gun--the black islander, inscrutable, incomprehensible, an enigma always, and to the end.

* * * * *

The end came two days later at Bougainville.

Under a gorgeous dawn they came into a bay that opened before their prow as with jeweled arms of welcome. The land lay lapped in bright garments like a sleeper half awakened, all flushed and smiling, sensuous intimate, thrilling with life, breathing warm scents--

These were some of the foolish phrases Pellett babbled to himself as he leaped ashore and ran up on a rocky point to see and to feel and to draw all the charm of the place to himself.

Meanwhile Karaki, that simple and efficient little man, was proceeding methodically about his own affairs. He landed his bolts of cloth, his tobacco, his knives, and the other loot. He landed his box of cartridges and his rifle and his fine tomahawk. The goods were somewhat damaged by sea water, but the weapons had been carefully cleaned and polished....

Pellett was declaiming poetry aloud to the alluring solitude when he was aware of a gentle footfall and turned, surprised to find Karaki standing just behind him with the rifle at his hip and the ax in his hand.

"Well," said Pellett cheerfully, "what d'you want, old chappie?"

"Me like," said Karaki, while there gleamed in his eyes the strange light that Moy Jack had glimpsed there, like the flicker of a turning shark; "me like'm too much one fella head b'long you!"

"What? Head! Whose--my head?"

"Yes," said Karaki simply.

That was the way of it. That was all the mystery. The savage had fallen enamored of the head of the beachcomber, and Christopher Alexander Pellett had been betrayed by his fatal red whiskers. In Karaki's country a white man's head, well smoked, is a thing to be desired above wealth, above lands and chiefships, fame, and the love of women. In all Karaki's country was no head like the head of Pellett. Therefore Karaki had served to win it with the patience and single faith of a Jacob. For this he had schemed and waited, committed theft and murder, expended sweat and cunning, starved and denied himself, nursed, watched, tended, fed, and saved his man that he might bring the head alive and on the hoof--so to speak--to the spot where he could remove it at leisure and enjoy the fruits of his labor in safety.

* * * * *

Pellett saw all this at a flash, understood it so far as any white could understand: the whole elemental and stupendous simplicity of it. And standing there in his new strength and sanity under the fair promise of the morning, he gave a laugh that pealed across the waters and started the sea birds from their cliffs, the deep-throated laugh of a man who fathoms and accepts the last great jest....

For finally, by corrected list, the possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name, still intact; the ruins of some rusty ducks; his precious red whiskers--and a soul which had been neatly recovered, renewed, refurbished, reanimated, and restored to him by his good friend Karaki.

_"Thou shouldst die as he dies,
For whom none sheddeth tears;
Filling thine eyes
And fulfilling thine ears
With the brilliance ... the bloom
and the beauty...."_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett over the waters of the bay, and then whirled, throwing wide his arms:

"Shoot, damn you! It's cheap at the price!"

THE SLANTED BEAM

All the world meets beneath the towering spire of Shway Dagohn, which pins back the clouds and throws a shadow between India and the China Sea. All paths in the East tend toward that great pagoda with its mighty shaft of gold. Around the sweep of its pedestal, among its terraced mazes, is one of the common crossroads where men as various as their skins and their faiths come to mingle; to worship or to wonder: seeking each in his own fashion whatever clue to the meaning of things he can take from that vast finger which carries the eye and the soul up and up and points forever to the heart of mystery.

So it was natural enough, as it was also inevitable and ordained since the beginning of time, that Cloots should have met the headman of Apyodaw at last in one of the tiny shrines clustering under the Temple of the Slanted Beam on Thehngoottara Hill....

The shrine in no way differed from the many lesser chapels and _zaydees_ that lined the ramp and the inner and outer platforms. Together they might have seemed a jumble of booths thrown up there to attract the unhurrying, sweet-voiced, hip-swinging natives who drifted and gossiped like holiday makers at a fair.

But those booths were built of enduring stone with a serene and flawless symmetry. And the wares they offered were the philosophies of an old, old religion. And the folk themselves in their thighbound silks of softened maroon and olive and citrine and cutch, with the pink fillets about their brows and their open and twinkling brown faces, were a very ancient folk indeed, who knew what they knew and did as they did a small matter of thirty centuries ago.

* * * * *

Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment of color and contrast.

The pagoda and its whole base, dominating the city, swam in a level flood of late sunset. Every surface had taken an almost intolerable richness and warmth, from the far, jeweled spike of the _htee_ four hundred feet above, down through fire-gilt and smoldering saffron to the pigeon-blood ruby of the monastery roofs below. Even the shadows gave off a purplish haze. But here, inside this plain, windowless cell of white-washed wall and gray pavement, the visitor passed with the swift relief of a diver's plunge to cool and quiet, and the pervading peace of the Excellent Law.

At the end facing the doorway was the sole furnishing--a deep niche and altar where sat the Buddha in perpetual contemplation.

Some forgotten devotee, toiling wearily like the rest of us up the ladder of existence, had once earned the right to skip a step or two by the gift of this life-size image. Some forgotten artist had acquired merit by faithfully carving and lacquering it on teak, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and passionless regard which somehow, no matter what the medium, no matter what conventions interpose, is always so surely portrayed. But that had been long and long ago. Decay had eaten through those painted and gilded robes. The soot of many years had tanned those sacred lineaments to an obscure and homely human tint.

Along the near edge of the altar lay a shallow trough for the better disposal of such offerings as the shrine might receive: fresh flowers and flakes of popped and colored rice, incense sticks of which the vapor rose in a slow, unwavering veil, and a row of paper flags to record the prayers of the pious.

Midway there burned a single taper, a point of light that dimly illumined the holy spot and revealed to Cloots, as he entered, its only other occupant.

On a bamboo mat knelt a young girl, fairly on her knees, as the Rule allows for such frail creatures. Her black hair was drawn sleek as a bird's wing. At her breast she held a new lotus blossom, no softer nor more delicate than the fingers that offered it. Her little feet were carefully tucked within the silken _tamehn_. Her head was bowed. And the gleaming curve of her body, all her lithe vigor, was subdued, was humbled, to the act of ecstatic supplication before the Excellent One.

Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative observer of all these details. They were familiar to him. He understood them, so far as any perceptive, far-wandering white is likely to understand. They ministered to him.

He approved the flaring sunset and he approved this discreet retreat--the hushed and perfumed air of worship no less than the stir and brilliance outside. He could interpret the sigh of imploring lips and the trouble of a fluttered little breast before the altar as keenly as the murmur and laughter of the barefoot crowds and the distant music of numberless pagoda chimes. He enjoyed the more intimate delights of exotic life as well as its bright outward cheek. Particularly, having just renewed his contact with an engaging and responsive native people, he enjoyed this opportunity with a native girl--decidedly engaging and responsive probably.

No mere brutal, casual sensualist was Cloots. He found it good to be alive. He found it very good to be back in a country where he was master of the idiom and the customs. He found it exceeding good to be contemplating the skillful conquest of such a pilgrim, so earnest, so adorable, and so appropriately concerned. The lady, he gathered, was praying for a husband....

He smiled, and when he turned his glance it encountered the eyes of the headman of Apyodaw, who had entered noiselessly at his side and who now stood between him and the entrance.

"I knew I should find thee, Shway Cloots."

It said something for Cloots that he did not cease smiling all at once, that he gave no outward sign, and that he was able to answer quite soon and quite steadily in the same dialect.

"Hast been looking for me, Moung Poh Sin?"

"I did not have to look, Shway. It was written."

"Hast been waiting for me, then?"

"It was written I would have to wait."

"Was it also written that I had become any safe or easy game to track into a corner?" demanded Cloots.

"I did not track thee."

"Half an hour ago I left the docks, newly landed from Moulmein. No man could have given thee word of my return. No man knew if ever I should return."

"I knew."

"By that I mark thee a liar and a fool, Moung Poh Sin, for I knew it not myself. I see now thou hast been watching and spying for me. By the harbor, or by the pagoda here, belike. A long vigil.... But it can profit nothing. What could it profit thee? I am not the kind to be followed and hunted down."

"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their order."

"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"

"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "at big-bell time, I am to slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...

Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes in this inclosed space. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket so that the buttons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly. "Stand away from that door, dog! Remove--stand off!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.

* * * * *

Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.

This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has proved at times extremely discomposing.

Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the narrow-edged coat; his sturdy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_ lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions, beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate, injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or doubt.

* * * * *

Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing assurance. It made him cautious.

"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the business."

"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."

"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."

"It is not money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_, the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that treasure now?"

"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"

"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had found Mah Soung....

But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were lifted to the sacred image.

A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures a bit too far off white man's ground.

He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken forever.

She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and chill.

"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how my child died--"

Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.

"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid for twice."

"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with the _nats_ and such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in due course."

"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest market rate, at least--But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee, Moung Poh Sin."

But Moung Poh Sin did not move.

"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous, simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks when all will be paid."

And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....

He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of the figure by the doorway--and he did some rapid calculating.

Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark, Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air. Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants, bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda, "the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.

* * * * *

Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a delicious interpretation.

If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of this, the time had come to make it good.

He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little farther to the right....

"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known where I have been since I went away?"

"No, Shway."

"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan, the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a minstrel's harp?"

"Yes, Shway."

"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and tore the head from its body?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that door and of me--and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered. But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy information, not to have learned whence I came--and whether I would be likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.

"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine is surely forfeit, as I told thee--here by the Slanted Beam when the sun sets. What will be will be. It is written."

Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The shot burst with a racketing smash against the eardrums. To any on the platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible result.

At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....

"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun," explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."

* * * * *

Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe, picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.

Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.

"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will be swinging out the striker of the big bell."

All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....

Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands, steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing shot.

From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do what he was there to do.

"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....

Outside it had gone quite dark.

Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against a wondering throng.

"How long has he been dead?" asked the assistant inspector.

"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's still warm."

"Instantaneous?"

"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say, with this _dah_." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling about it."

"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.

"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the frozen Buddhist hell by taking a life?"

"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd call orthodox in the hills."

"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system rather older."

"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than any system."

"But still--to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"

"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."

Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.

"You knew this chap?"

"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer--you know the type. Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."

* * * * *

The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots--that was quite sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.

But the doctor's question was quietly put.

"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"

"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people. There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs. And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."

"No theory yet?"

"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse, a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."

"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"

* * * * *

The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition--a life-size image, whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary image....

At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back into the niche for a support and that this--this was a substitute.

"Dead!" he breathed.

The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.

"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!... Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe much in deviations from the normal--in aberrations from the positive, eh?--even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any court--west of Suez, I mean--I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of existence, _a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap there on the floor_!"

"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended animation, now--or what?"

"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at that."

They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.

"'There are more things 'twixt'--" began the doctor.

"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.

"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...

He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the heart--three times.

THE RED MARK

Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his capabilities--as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.

M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even landholders and concessionaires--enjoying the high privilege of forced labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us from Balade to Noumea, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have been set aside in a sort of infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us, perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.

He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from choice. It is his capability! It is the thing he likes to do.

Me, I am even with him. I am even with him against all time. Should it be my fate to pass through his hands some day, should he stand to perform his last dreadful offices for me, still am I even with him. I would grin from under the slide itself and I would say to him--"M. de Nou, I am even with you!" But I would not tell him how. I would turn silent from those haunted yellow eyes, half-understanding and ravening at me, and I would die content to leave him to his damnation. No, I would not tell!... Only I am telling you, truly, so that perhaps this tale may reach some of our friends who have escaped from New Caledonia into the world again. They will remember, and they will rejoice to hear how I evened the score on M. de Nou. Listen:

It was soon after my release from the Collective--when I was considered to be properly chastened by residence in the cells--that I had the ill-luck to meet this individual.

You can see for yourself I was never built for rude labor. But I have a certain deftness of my fingers and perhaps also--well, a certain polish--what?... Monsieur agrees? Too kind! Your servant, Monsieur.... Anyway, it was quite natural I should find employment with Maitre Sergeo, he who keeps the barber shop in the Rue des Fleurs.

Maitre Sergeo is a worthy man, a libere, which means he was formerly a life convict himself, you understand, though since restored to certain rights within the colony limits. Requiring an assistant at his lathery trade he applied to the penitentiary on Ile de Nou.

"Here is a brisk fellow," said the sub-commandant, leading me out like a horse at a fair. "Number 7897. Docile and clever. Condemned for eight years. Having served his Collective with a clear record. If you are ever dull about your place he will sing you the latest operas. He has all the polite accomplishments."

"A duke in trouble," suggested Maitre Sergeo, regarding me with his sober twinkle. "What romance!... Perhaps he is the Red Mark himself!"

Strange he should have said that. Strange, too, that I should have heard the term then and there for the first time in my life. Afterwards I found it common enough, a kind of by-word among people who affect to share the inner mysteries of police and crime. And later still I had good reason to remember it.

Meanwhile the sub-commandant was encouraging no unofficial illusions on my account.

"I said nothing about a duke," he returned. "But this is a superior type. He has been a student in his day and even has taken prizes."

"I hope he has not the habit of taking them from the till," said Maitre Sergeo, like a prudent patron. "What was his little affair?"

The sub-commandant consulted my ticket.

"An argument with a knife, it appears. A favorable case. Only his enemy was so ill-conditioned as to die."

"I shall employ him," decided Maitre Sergeo. "A man who is handy with a knife should also qualify with a razor."

That is how I came, as Bibi-Ri always said, to be scraping throats instead of cutting them. Myself, I considered the jest rather poor taste and Bibi-Ri a good deal of a chattering monkey. But what would you? Nobody could be angry with that mad fellow. He was privileged.

Also, as it happened, Bibi-Ri himself was my single client on this particular afternoon of which I speak. I recall it with an authentic clearness: one of those days made in paradise for a reproach upon us poor wretches in purgatory: the air sweet and mellow, spiced with tropic blossoms: the sky a blue ravishment: the sunlight tawny in the street outside as if seen through a glass of rich wine.

It was very quiet and peaceful. From the Place des Cocotiers not far away one heard the band discoursing. Those convict musicians were playing _Perle d'Italie_, as I bring to mind: a faded but graceful melody. One could be almost happy at moments like this, forgetting the shameful canvas uniform and the mockery of one's freedom on a leash. I even hummed the tune as I listened and kept the measure with stropping my blade.

I waited for Bibi-Ri. By an amiable conceit he never failed each day to get his chin new razored--though in truth it resembled nothing so much as a small onion: as I often told him.

"That is no reason why you should peel it, sacred farceur!" he would sputter. "Please to notice I have only the one skin to my face!"

But this day he was late. I missed the merry rascal. His hour went by and still he did not come. And then, of a sudden, I spied him.

He was passing among the market stalls on the opposite pave: unmistakable, his quick, spare figure in the jacket tight-buttoned to the chin as he always wore it and the convict's straw hat pulled low on his brow. Bibi-Ri in fact. But he never even glanced to my side. At the pace of a rent collector he hurried by and disappeared.... This is singular, I thought. What game has he started now?

Presently he came hurrying back again, and this trip I discovered he was following a girl. But yes! A market girl. Only a slip of a thing--I could not see her well--a dainty piece she seemed, supple as a kitten, who threaded her way with a basket on her arm. I caught a flash of bare ankle white as milk, the sheen of her hair, smooth like a raven's wing: and she was gone, with Bibi-Ri at her skirts.

Three times I saw them so, through the drifting chaffering throng.

"The rogue!" I murmured. "He has found a better amusement than getting himself flayed by me. Evidently!"

At the very word came a swift clatter of sandals and who should burst into the shop upon me but that same Bibi-Ri. I had a finger lifted to accuse him, but I stopped at sight of his face.

"Dumail!" he cried. "Hide me!"

My faith, he took one's breath away.

"Hide me and say nothing!" he implored.

Well, then I thought he was simply up to some of his jokes again. You understand there is no actual hiding in a penal settlement, where we all live in the eye of the police. Nevertheless I obeyed, planted him in my chair, flung a cloth about his neck and slapped on a great mask of lather.

I had him well settled under the razor when a shadow edged across the doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, Bibi-Ri made a jump to rise.

"Animal!" I protested. "Will you take care!"

But I saw him staring with a strange fear.

Just outside by the threshold stood a man, an amazingly tall man, looking in at us. The sunlight descended on him there like the flood of a proscenium and he himself might have seemed a player in some stage burlesque. Yes, one might have smiled at first glimpse of him: a travesty of fashion in his long black redingote and varnished high hat of ancient form which added the touch of caricature to his height. One might have smiled, I say ... but the smile would have frozen next instant as a ripple freezes on a street puddle.

His face was a moist and shining white, the white of a corpse under the icy spray of the Morgue. He was old, of reverend years, though still straight and strong as a poplar. And with that mouth of painted passion and a great nose curved like a saber and the glittering tiger eyes in the skull of him--I leave you to imagine any one more appalling.

Close behind him came another: a bandy-legged, squat fellow like a little black spider, in attendance.

Even then, before knowing, I shrank from them both. They resembled the bizarre and evil figures of the Guignol that used to haunt my dreams in childhood. Truly. And the tall one was Polichinelle, the image of a gratuitous and uncomprehended wickedness.

"Well done, hireling," he observed, in the voice of a crow. "Well done indeed! You are something of a craftsman too. A good beginning. And a good subject, who is ripe to have the head shaved from his shoulders, I should think.... Pray continue," he said. "Cut again and cut deeper!"

Thereupon I became aware he was addressing me, and with the most pointed, the most sinister interest: and next I found myself still holding the razor over Bibi-Ri's cheek where he had taken an ugly gash. That big devil smiled and chuckled in intimate fashion at my red blade. His eyes shone like topaz. Stupidly I followed their gaze. When I looked up again ... the two outside were gone.

"Name of God!" I cried. "Who are those?"

Bibi-Ri had fallen back in his chair.

"The vultures!"

Well, I understood fast enough that I had made acquaintance of the terrible M. de Nou. The other would be his aide and familiar, a former Polish anarchist--I had heard--whom even the society of convicts rejected and who bore the fit name: Bombiste. These were the dreaded servants of the guillotine. But now they had passed I was bold as the best: I could mock myself.

"Imbeciles!" I laughed. "To be scared by an old bogey like that! The executioner? So be it. We can curse him and let him go.... Though in truth he has a sickly notion of an afternoon call, the lascar! ... Sit still while I plaster that sliced onion of yours."

But something had come upon Bibi-Ri. For once he gave me back no jest.

"The monster has marked me down! You heard him? It is a warning!" At that he started up, all streaky with soap and blood as he was, and must rush away on some errand. And then remembering it would be impossible to run the police limits of Noumea before dark, collapsed again. "I am lost!"

Figure my amazement.

"But how?" I demanded. "Does your blessed executioner have power to pick his own victims?... Does he go about cropping heads, for example, like a man in a flower garden? What can he make to you? ... Unless perhaps he has come between you and that fair fortune I saw you pursuing so ardently a moment ago."

The way his jaw dropped! As if I had touched the very spring of his destiny.

Now you can guess that I knew perhaps a little--no matter how little--of lawlessness and violence and secret intrigue persisting within this model criminal laboratory of ours. Do you change vice to virtue by transporting it half a world away and bottling it up? A disturbing question. At least if you expect your convicts to work, to aspire, even to marry and to multiply like free men, you must expect them also to covet, to scheme, to quarrel and to sin--again like free men. These facts I had noted without exploring too deeply, you comprehend. But Bibi-Ri was the last I should have credited with a share in their darker meaning.

Only picture this client as I had found him. A nimble rogue: a kind of licensed pest, with a droll face resembling those rubber toys that wink and grimace between your fingers. True, he had been shipped with the worst of us. But what of that? One knows these gentlemen the Parisian police: how they cry a wolf and then go out and nab some stray puppy in the street. Bibi-Ri! One wondered how he had ever earned his sentence.

And yet--and yet there was certainly something about the fellow. In his eyes were depths. Something fateful and despairing. Something, in view of his accustomed mad humor, to make me pitiful and uneasy.

"Look here, my zig," I said. "I have seen too much and not enough. What have you done? I spy a gay mystery that makes a comedian like you play such a part."

"Perhaps it is the other part I have to play," he returned, with a gleam of his proper spirit. "Perhaps I am playing it at the last gasp of fright--my poor knees clapping like castanets......

"Dumail," he said, "put it this way: Suppose you were within three counted weeks of your final release from this hell of an island. Your little red ticket in hand and the actual ship in harbor that presently should bear you home. Within sight of heaven--you understand. Able to taste it. Able to count the days still left you like so many bars on a red-hot gridiron still to be crossed. Three little weeks, Dumail!... And then your sacred luck offered to trip you up and cheat you again.... Rigolo--what?"

"Very rigolo," I agreed, luring him. "But it seems to me you are borrowing your effects from the martyrdom of the holy St. Laurent."

"Oh, I have a stranger impersonation than that in my repertoire," he flashed. "Conceive, if you can, that I am also supposed to fill the role of a seigneur--and a very noble gentlemen, too--in disguise!"

Perched there on the chair with a dirty towel about his neck, his hair in a wisp, smeared like a clown and preaching his gentility, he made a figure completely comic--should I say?--or tragic. Anyway I gave a gesture of derision that stung him past endurance.

"Dumail--" he broke out. "You laugh? Dumail, will you believe this? There is awaiting me back home at the present moment a heritage of millions. Of millions, I swear to you! Not the treasure of an opium dream, Dumail, but a place ready established among the great and the fortunate. For me: Number Matricule 2232! Life in a gondola, do you see? Luxury, leisure, rank. Beauty. Women. Happiness! Everything a poor lost devil could crave!"

Well, you know, it was a bit too much for me.

"Comedian!" I applauded. "Ah-ah--comedian!"

A sort of fury took him. All else forgotten, he jerked loose the collar of his jacket: made to spread it wide--checked himself and instead drew out from his breast an object for my inspection.