Chapter VI: Part 6

So they guillotined Bibi-Ri. In due course, by due process, he passed before the Marine Tribunal, before the Commandant and the Procurator General and the Director and the rest of our salaried philanthropists. They dealt with him faithfully and of a gray early morning they led him from the little door of the condemned cell. They marched him out with his legs hobbled and his hands tied behind his back; with the chaplain tottering at his side and the bayonets of the guard shining martially file and file: with some of the chiefest of these judges to receive him and some hundreds of us convicts drawn up below to do him honor.

Such was the method of his elevation, you will perceive: such the means by which he attained his ambitions, his uplifted position in the world--when he climbed the scaffold in the courtyard of the central prison on Ile de Nou and took his final look on life.

I was there. For my complicity at Mother Carron's that night and my refusal to testify at the trial they had shipped me back to the Collective. I stood in the front row. I was among those felons whose special privilege is their compulsory attendance at executions. I could miss nothing. Not a word nor a movement. Not the hurried mumbling of the death sentence. Not the ruffling of the drums that covered the fatal preparations.... Not even the icy chill to the marrow when we sank there in our ranks on the damp flagstones.

"Convicts: on your knees! Hats off!"

Just as well for me I was allowed to kneel, perhaps.... Never mind.... It does not bear talking of. Except one thing. One thing I recall to comfort me, as I saw it through a mist of tears, wrung with pity and with awe. And that was Bibi-Ri's last salute to my address before they lashed him on the bascule, under the knife.... He smiled at me, the little fellow. Even gayly. Bidding me note as plain as words how he held fast his good courage, how he had kept his counsel and his great secret in prison and would keep them to the end. How he apprehended and viewed clear-eyed the inconceivable grim jest of the family party there on the scaffold: himself and the executioner!

Then he looked away across the harbor, toward the anchorage, and he did not shift his gaze again from that goal of Noumea. Taking his farewell, Monsieur. Taking his farewell in spirit and quite content, as he had said, I do believe. For this was the day, this the very morning, when the steamer left Noumea bearing his beloved Zelie for home....

And one other thing I can tell you, crisp and clear. Do you remember when I began I said I had evened the score against M. de Nou? Evened it for always until that fiend shall be dragged to the nethermost level of hell and earn his reward? Evened it the only way it could be evened on this side of the grave?... And so I did. Never was such an evening! Listen:

Ask me not how it was done, by aid of what obscure pressure, through what underground channels. But the miniature--the miniature of Bibi-Ri! You recollect? Somehow. Monsieur--somehow, I say--it found its way into the panier with the head of Bibi-Ri. Somehow the new assistant, Bombiste's successor, discovered it when he "robbed the basket"--when he stooped to gather the little perquisites of office for his master. And somehow and finally it was laid straightway in the palm of M. de Nou....

He glanced at it. I saw him start. I saw him stare. I saw him stand and stand and still stare. I saw him lose bit by bit that shell of damnable pride, that prop of untouched and unrelenting hatred and contempt which was and which had been through all his years, his evil support.... He gave a movement, of horror, of growing terror. He stepped over. And he looked into the basket at his handiwork still lying there. He looked and he looked. But he could not know. He cannot know. He can never, never know, Monsieur.... For the red mark about that severed neck was all one red mark--do you see?--and the Red Mark remains a mystery forever!

EAST OF EASTWARD

Few persons ever attain any precise knowledge of the immemorial East, its ways or its meanings; its wickedness or its mystery. But Tunstal was a young man with a cherubic smile and a plethoric letter of credit, and he had traveled far and wide to Honolulu, to Yokohama, to Macao, and even to Singapore, which is very far indeed, besides being extremely wicked. By the time he had taken passage on the _Lombock_ for a tour of the archipelago his education seemed complete. He had just learned to play fan-tan with much the same skill he was wont to display at poker in more familiar climes.

Tunstal had fallen in with other traveled men on board the _Lombock_, which covers a beat among the lesser ports of Netherlands India. These were simple planters, merchants and traders for the most part, largely Dutch in flavor as well as speed. He thought them pretty dull, but they proved to be good listeners. So he had been instructing them all around, charming their ears with tales of Sago Lane and the Jalan Sultan, of Gay Street and Number Nine and the dances at Kapiolani, the while he banked a bowl of chinking cash as long as any would sit up with him.

That was how he came to find himself alone in the smoking room one breathless hot morning some days out from Singapore, amid the dead cheroots and the empty glasses, with a pile of ill-gotten profits before him, a very dry throat, and a great call for swifter action and yet newer worlds. It was all too easy. This globe-trotting thing threatened to become monotonous....

"And not even a drink on tap," he complained, for the virtuous steward--also Dutch--had retired long ago beyond the troubling of a bell push. "A fellow might just as well be back home with the lid down."

He stumbled out on deck in the dawn that came pouring up from behind the earth like a cloud of luminous, pearly smoke. The _Lombock_ had made harbor some time during the night and now lay anchored in a river mouth off the fringe of a toy town--one of those island cities apparently built of matches and cigar boxes that have a thousand years of history behind them and no sense of dignity and not so much as a brick block to support the same.

The water front was a tangle of crazy jetties, of string-tied fishing boats and bird-cage houses, some on stilts and some on floating shingles, to rise and fall with the tide. There stood the inevitable ancient fort, clad in creepers, and there were the usual rows of godowns, lime-washed and naked. A little mosque sprouted from a nest of palms, like a moldy turnip trying to grow the wrong way. Up along the wooded rise nestled a few solid dwellings, with garden walls and tended terraces. But Tunstal discovered no wonders--nothing to claim a star in any guidebook--and he looked indifferently at that age-old land with its great green, jungled slopes shouldering back and back until they faded in dim blue.

The early stir of little brown men, the raffle of small craft propelled by pictorial pirates in kilted sarongs, the amphibious urchin who paddled a log and besought a chance to dive for coppers; the mounting heat, the lifting river mists, the first saffron tinting of the sun, and even the complex and curious odor that wafted overstream, of jasmine and mud flats and ripe fish, of swamps and hearths and the indescribable exhalation of the human forcing house--he had observed these things before in places quite similar.

Wherefore he yawned in the face of the immemorial East and moved toward the lowered gangway to meet the first mate, a lean and leathery mariner, whom he hailed with boisterous outcry.

"Hello chief--you're the very chap I need."

The mate paused to turn his patient, almost mournful regard that seemed never to focus short of the horizon.

"I'm going ashore," announced Mr. Tunstal, "for a taste of local ginger."

"Ginger?" inquired Nivin.

"Some kind of tropic spice."

"Spice?"

"I didn't come all this way," explained Tunstal, "to waste my opportunities with a lot of fat koopmans who talk of nothing but calicoes and the rate of exchange. I'm a humble seeker after truth, right enough, but I want it fresh and snappy. I've got the price and, believe me, chief, I've got the appetite.... What port is this?"

Nivin told him. The name does not matter. It might have been one or another about that coast. It meant little to Tunstal beyond the fact that they would lie there till midnight.

"And plenty long enough, by the looks. I'll just collect three thrills and a shock and be back for tiffin. All I want from you, chief, is the wise tip. Tell me, chief, tell me. Is there anything--you know--anything specially worth seeing hereabouts?"

Thus spake and thus queried Alfred Poynter Tunstal, and Nivin examined the figure he made there under the dawn. Quite a pleasing figure. His suit of cream-colored silk fitted sleekly upon his well-fed person and his tie was a dainty scrap. He carried a dove-gray sun helmet with not more than three yards of bright peacock puggree. His buckskin shoes were fleckless. Also he wore a smile, which requires to be noted. It began in dimples and circled chubbily. A captious eye might have marked it as somewhat lacking--somewhat too round and ready, like the ripple on a pan of water. But it was brisk, forward, and perfectly assured.

"Anything worth seeing?" repeated Nivin, considering that smile.

The mate had sailed with globe-trotters before, though possibly with none quite duplicating Mr. Tunstal. This man Nivin was one of a type not so rare in outlying lanes and obscure corners as might be thought, into which something of the sun and the air of warm seas has penetrated. A bit of a dreamer, perhaps, mellowed by service under softer skies, among softer races. To such an officer any passenger is apt to become an object of real concern, aside from the strictly professional value thereof. He had overheard Mr. Tunstal's hectic memoirs in the smoking room and simply, laboriously, he went about to convey a certain warning....

"I should hardly think so--for a gentleman of your experience. The fact is, sir, you're off the traveled track here, so to speak. A town like this has no use for tourists and provides no class to fatten off the likes. Music, dances--all the giddy frolic made up for a show--they don't lower theirselves to that cut o' business."

"Why, they're only natives, aren't they?" asked Tunstal, and the whole philosophy of his kind was rolled in the phrase.

"Only natives, as you say, sir," returned Nivin slowly--"which is Malay and poor to jest with, besides frequently carrying a creese. They're a sober-minded breed, sir. Quite superior and fit for respect in their way."

* * * * *

But Tunstal had been leaning to watch the river traffic, and here he prodded the other to look. Just passing them at the moment came a clumsy proa that had worked upchannel on the last of the tide under sweeps--a singular blot of color. Alow and aloft, from her tub cutwater and forward-sloping rail to her languid wings of matting, she was grimed an earthy, angry red. Her sailors were smeared with the same stain, their head rags and kilts and their bare arms and knotted fingers at the oars, so that she and they seemed to swim in a sullen, an infernal conflagration, and the sunrise slanting across the river reaches picked spar and rope and savage-dyed group with dabs of ruby and vermilion and dull citrine.

"It's a cinnabar boat," said Nivin as they stared down at that silent crew of ensanguined devils.

"From the mines. I know," nodded Tunstal. "Up the river--what? I heard about those mines. Van Goor, that pop-eyed little chap--an agent for some mining company, I believe--he was telling us last night around fourth-drink time. It appears these mercury miners are imported Kwangsi coolies. About as low a race as crawls, with peculiar customs of their own. They trade with the country people for supplies, and they drive some queer trades. Did you ever happen to hear yourself, chief?"

"There's no lack of tales."

"Maybe, but this is the only real one I got a smell of--pity Van Goor wasn't a bit thirstier. He said a famine has been raging in some coast district or other and the villagers are keen to sell. At the same time the commodity naturally loses weight, through starvation, and the coolie gangs buy by the pound. So a canny village will pool its food to fatten up a few--Ah!"

The ore boat had drawn level with them, so near they might have tossed a biscuit to the rude decks. And there under the break of the poop they saw three women, scarcely more than girls, crouched against the bulkhead. One raised her face for an instant, a face struck out like a pallid, sharp-carven cameo from its ruddy setting--struck out with the poignant, mute intimacy that sometimes springs between craft and craft across a widening gulf. A vivid and unforgettable face!

* * * * *

The head boatman snarled, and the ragged creatures huddled from sight like nestlings under shadow of a hawk, while the proa swept in toward an upper jetty.

"Couldn't ever be proved," muttered Nivin at last.

"Of course not," agreed Tunstal genially. "Who wants to prove it? And anyway the commodity is still in transit--coming in from those coast villages, very likely."

"What would they be doing here?"

"Oh, they probably have a local clearing house for the trade," said Tunstal, learned in wickedness.

"Why should you think so?"

"Well, observe the commodity again. It hasn't been delivered, has it? You'll notice it shows no stain of cinnabar--_yet_!"...

The mate's face was stony as he stood gripping the rail, but Tunstal only smiled with the proper cynical detachment of the globe-trotter. From a silver case he drew a fat and sophisticated cigar to adorn that smile.

"And so much for your superior Malay. Chief, I'm surprised at you, trying to string me. Fancy a native how you like, but don't put it on grounds of respect--because I know 'em. I've seen 'em pretty much, and I've no more respect for any coffee-shaded tribe using two legs instead of four than I have for so many monkeys. Monkeys--that's what they are. Apes!

"Play with 'em? Sure. It's all they're fit for--cute little rascals sometimes too. But they simply have no moral sense. I take 'em as I find 'em; always ready for any of their cunning little games, you understand. Now here's this burg. I don't expect a complete Arabian Night's Dream, but I'm dead sure of finding a joint of some kind, and I mean to look it over--the place where the monkeys perform for you."

"I can't help you," said Nivin, tight-lipped. "You may be right--and yet I'd swear these people have never been spoiled. There's so few whites come here. You see, sir, you're pretty far East--"

"Too far for a 'sailor's rest'?" laughed Tunstal. "Pshaw! Come now; are you going to turn me loose on my own or will you steer me up to the local tropic drink, at least?"

Nivin might have been seen to wince a trifle, as one sorely tried, and his melancholy gaze sought the shore. Was there or was there not the beginning of a twinkle in the gray depths? He would have denied it--he afterward did deny it.

"A drink?" he murmured. "A drink? Oh, aye, I could name a drink if that would fill your need. Look over yonder on the slope beyond the Government House, that purple blaze. It's a big bachang tree in bloom, and if you should take the path that climbs beside it you might find such entertainment as perhaps you're seeking. Local I believe it is and quite tropic. Keep always to the left till you reach a pair o' green gates--three turns, or it may be four--and mind your footing as you go, sir--"

So this was the way Mr. Tunstal won his wish in the early morning when he came to the garden of Lol Raman, up from terrace to terrace above that far, that very far Eastern town.

He met his first thrill where Ezekiel met his in the vision, within the threshold of the gate. The high wall he had been following gave suddenly under an arch. There were the double green doors, standing open, and he entered a sort of open-air conservatory. At least he had no better word for the place so crammed with color and scent, and no word at all for the strange flowers and improbable trees that clustered along the walks. Down by the farther end of the inclosure stood a low house almost lost in shrubbery. An arbor with some chairs and tables seemed to invite the passer-by. And just before him, in Buddhistic meditation under a palm, squatted the reception committee of one--a monstrous orang-utan, the true red-haired jungle man, with a face like a hideous black caricature of Death.

Things happened. At sight of a visitor the huge beast reared himself, and sprang abruptly into vehement life, bouncing on bent knuckles. He started out to the limit of his chain until the bright steel links snicked ominously behind him and the leather harness drew taut about his shoulders, pumping and roaring in the great cavern of his chest to top a gale of his own forests. He scurried around the trunk and snatched at something--a packet of leaves. He ran around the other way and retrieved a little lacquer box. Crouching over these treasures with every appearance of the most frantic rage, he began, swiftly and incredibly--to roll cigarettes!

And meanwhile, impassive as a wax manikin, a white-jacketed, white-saronged servitor glided from space somewhere to prepare a table and to offer a chair in the arbor, to set out a square-faced bottle, to pour a glass of golden yellow liquor, and to collect the tiny, fresh cylinders of tobacco which the earnest ape was shedding about him in a shower--all with the gesture of conjuring.

Tunstal sat down hard. He succeeded in lighting one of the cigarettes. Exquisite. He gulped the glass of liquor. Delicious....

"I seem," said Tunstal, mopping his brow--"I seem to have landed as per invoice."

And yet these portents were valid enough too, as Nivin could have told him--the customary welcome at Lol Raman's. For even among the byways a resort must have its features, though it boast no cafe chantant and hang no battery of conscientious nudes. In the warm, clammy evenings when the fog crept up from the river marshes it was nothing unusual for Lol Raman--whoever or whatever he might be--to entertain as many as a dozen patrons in his garden on the hill. They gathered about his tables and admired his pet orang-utan, they smoked his cigarettes and more particularly they fortified themselves with his private stock, which was arrack. A very potent safeguard against the seasonal fever is arrack, being country spirit of a golden tint and undisciplined taste. But Lol Raman's owned a private recipe, and hither came the initiated--traders, wanderers, officials of the island government, officers of passing tramps. Here they came, and here they often remained until their friends bore them away again, thoroughly safeguarded to the point of petrifaction.

Nivin might have explained these matters, but he had omitted so to do, and Tunstal's was the sheer delight of discovery.

"_Stengah_," he observed, reaching for the bottle. "_Manti dooloo!_"

The waxen gentleman looked a trifle more intelligent than an eggplant. Evidently his island Malay was not up to the classical standard. Tunstal tried him in fragmentary Dutch to the same effect and with the same result.

"Damn it--I say I want more and never mind taking that bottle away!"

The manikin's face opened.

"Oh, sure. Three dolla' hap'."

On being paid in Singapore silver he vanished into space once more while Tunstal philosophized.

"Too bad about the simple native that has no use for a tourist!"

The garden had fallen to a drowsy hush. Within its four walls only the great red ape stayed to do the honors, and he had subsided, applying himself seriously now to the cigarette industry. He sat cross-legged, workmanlike, with a bobbing of his ugly head and a ridiculous curling tongue above the delicate task. Selecting a leaf of the natural weed and adding a pinch for filler, he would somehow twist the spill and nip under the ends with flying fingers. Curious fingers he had--long and black and muscular--sinister talons that yet were nimble enough to trick the eye. It was amazing to watch him. As if a fiend from the pit had been trained to do featherstitch!

* * * * *

Tunstal watched for a time and drank for a time and chuckled like a parrot over sugar. The adventure suited him; it developed well. There was promise in it of something different, something quite local and tropic indeed.

A smooth exhilaration began to crawl through his veins, a heightened sense of power and perception. He found a special charm in each detail about him, each to be separately savored. The sunlight, he noted, was singularly rich and fluid. The yellow lights in his glass seemed to wink with recondite confidences. A tender spray of vanna showered its tribute of orange stars upon him; some glorious rose-pink rhododendrons drooped seductively toward his shoulder. He reached to reap them, and at that moment--the leaves parted and he saw the girl....

If the event had only transpired a trifle later, as the bard so nearly says, it would never have transpired at all. Two glasses more of the golden arrack, one glass even, and the subsequent proceedings could hardly have interested Mr. Tunstal or anybody else, except possibly Nivin--Nivin, who had laid his innocent plot to that end. So narrow is the margin of trouble! He should have blinked at the lovely vision and slept peacefully safeguarded beside the square-faced bottle until carried thence aboard the steamer and gone on to tell another globe-trotting yarn. But he was just a snifter short on that potent and undisciplined drink. And here was the girl.... "By jing!" breathed Mr. Tunstal.

Truly by any standard East or West, she was very fair. Of her face he marked only the oval, the delicate bisque-tinted skin that shames mere white, and the straight brows, not too broad for a tight-drawn casque of hair. A striped sarong clipped her waist below the jutting front of her little green jacket, and he saw the soft swell at her throat and the fine, free swing of lines as she leaned forward, startled, downward-looking. An alluring and timely apparition!

Tunstal thought so--to call it thinking. "You pippin," he remarked as he pulled himself to his feet by the table. He fumbled at his helmet with some confused notion of beginning gallantly, but it fell from his fingers, and he stood flushed and staring. "You pippin!" he said again.

She belonged in this garden, in the checker of light and shadow and exotic color, slender like a young bamboo and rounded as a purple passion fruit. She belonged with the whole affair. She was just the thing he had been waiting for. He took an unsteady step, and another. She made no move. She still regarded him as he stayed, swaying. Through the play of sun-threaded foliage she seemed even to smile, provocative, as if to mock him for hesitating on his cue; and at that he lost his head altogether--what was left him. Thrusting aside shrubs and creepers, he reached for her as he had reached to pluck the rhododendron.

"D'you--d'you come seeking me, m'dear?" he stammered fatuously. "Come right along, then, you beauty--and gie's a kiss, won't you?"

He did not do it well--in fact by the time he arrived at the gesture he did it very badly.

* * * * *

Smoking-room audiences that had hung upon the fervid tales of Tunstal, globe-trotter; his fellow passengers, instructed in speed by the same--they must have felt somehow cheated if they could have seen him then. They must have suspected the sad, sad dog, a wolf for theory but a pug for practice, whose snap and dash in outlandish parts had been harmless enough after all. There is a technique to such affairs. Even arrack cannot supply the deficiencies of the amateur--as Tunstal was, and as he presently knew himself to be....

He recognized her. His arms were about the lithe figure, drawing her close when he became aware of the clean-carven cameo face so near him. She was the girl of the cinnabar boat, the girl that had glanced upward from the evil decks. Yet the shock of discovery was not his chief reaction, neither amazement at her presence in the garden and her changed attire. He was looking into her eyes.

They were wide and brown, deep as grotto pools, and strange, with a hint of obliquity alien to him by untold centuries. But he could read--as they blazed into his own--he could read their language. Terror was there and bewilderment. But pride too--pride of soul like the chill purity of mountain peaks. And from that height she feared and loathed him, the brutish creature of another race who dared to lay his defiling and incomprehensible touch upon her.

These things he saw while he stooped, while his lips pressed her bud of a mouth. For he kissed her. After a fashion he did kiss her--though the fume was clearing from his brain as haze lifts on the channel, though he understood how abhorrent was this caress unknown to Orientals--beginning to feel pretty much ashamed of himself.... But a bit too late.

The same instant she broke away from his hold, spurning him, and as he reeled a bunch of hairy great fingers closed on the back of his neck.

He screamed once and clutched a stout, hanging creeper and clung there while his cry throttled down to a gasp. Behind him he could hear the click of steel links; before him the sunlight swam. Helpless as a kitten nipped by the scruff, he fought for life.

Because the chain was fastened high and because the beast was yoked between the shoulders he had come within the grip of only one murderous paw, which was mere luck. But through a long moment while his blood beat thick and his eyeballs started from their sockets he knew the agony of those that die by the garrote. A claw tough as a metal ring dug into his flesh, working for a firmer span, gathering the cords and muscles, tightening slowly. He could only stare at vacancy and dance upon the air and clench the creeper that brought down around him a little snowstorm of flower petals from the quaking branches overhead.

The creeper held. So did not his collar when the eager fingers shifted and found a purchase whereby the half of his coat was stripped like a husk of corn. At the sudden release he lost footing....

He was like one overtaken in a nightmare, too faint and clogged to will an effective movement for escape. With safety a matter of inches he floundered on the verge, entangled by vines and grasses, tugging madly at his hip. And the nightmare was very close, a horror not to be faced, a red fury with gigantic arms that came flailing and picking at him and tearing his clothes to ribbons as he groveled!

It lasted until the ape took a trick from the man, swung up on a liana, and from the vantage caught him about the body with his feet. Then Tunstal's revolver came free. Crushed in that dreadful embrace, he began to shoot!

When he stood up above the quivering heap and looked about him he was alone. After the frenzy of his struggle the silence dropped in upon him like a ram. The walks were empty, the thickets were quiet, the house at the end of the inclosure seemed deserted. He turned to the spot where he had seen the girl. She was gone. He turned toward the gates. They had been closed. He ran stumbling and flung against them and found they had been locked as well. No one came, no one called. And the garden drowsed in the warmth of a forenoon brilliant, heavy-scented, tropical!...

The last Tunstal remembered was raving back and forth within those four walls with a useless gun in his fist and the pitiless sun beating upon his head.

* * * * *

There is no tradition of the mercantile marine that provides for following the fortunes of travelers who step ashore to enjoy the scenery or other benefits. But a traveler who carries an important letter of credit and a through passage ticket may present something of an exception. In the early evening of the _Lombock's_ stay at the port by the river mouth her first mate found time and occasion for a cryptic word with her captain. And the captain was exceeding wroth, for the _Lombock_ would finish her landing on the ebb and he had no mind to miss a tide.

"Who d'y'say? Him? Not back yet, d'y'say? Well, what's that to me? Have I got to drynurse every glorified pup of a globe-trotter that takes a sanctified notion to soak hisself?"

Nivin explained at some length.

"To hell with all passengers!" wished the captain then, a man of strictly professional temper. "Here's this little rat Van Goor been devilin' me all day about the grub we fed his blessed coolies in the 'tween-decks. He says he'll lose a week's labor off the lot before they're fit for work.... Well, go on, go on. If your blighter's such a fool as you say, you better go get him. But I'll not wait past midnight--mind that. And I wish you joy of the job."

So Nivin came ashore at dusk to wander through the same streets and alleys to which he had directed another's erring steps at dawn.

* * * * *

He sought a handsome young stranger in a suit of cream-colored silk and a dove-gray helmet with peacock puggree. Drunk, probably. Even very drunk. Possibly violent and uproarious--this was Nivin's fear. More likely to be fever-proofed and solidified--this was Nivin's hope. Had any seen such a wonder? None had, though a boatman remembered landing the white tuan from the _Lombock_, and there was plain testimony that he had purchased a bottle of arrack for three dollars and a half Singapore silver. Beyond that point the trail evaporated. Apparently the person of Alfred Poynter Tunstal had dissolved in local liquor.

It was the hour of lamp lighting when the mate arrived at Government House to lay his quest before a genial and elephantine official in white ducks who was by way of being an acquaintance and who beamed upon him from the step. "You los' somebody? Here? My dear fallow, do you sink you are in Calcutta or Kowloon? Nosing happens here to sailormen or whoever. Why, zis is not even semicivilize', wizout one coffee shop!... Unless, of course, he actually injuries ze people."

"Ah," said Nivin.

"In zeir pride," added De Haan reflectively.

"And if he did?"

De Haan smoothed a glossy beard with a deliberate hand the size of a spade. He was controller in a district of some tens of thousands of brown population and long had been, and his father before him.

"If he did--I cannot say," he answered. "In such affairs we always remember zese folk haf been alife in ze land a few years before us. Who shall say? But it would be somesing fitting--mos' fitting and op-propriate. Zere was once a man came to steal liddle stone pictures from old temples in ze hills. He wanted ze heads for souvenirs, you see?" He rocked complacently. "I haf seen his head, nicely smoked. Which was alzo a souvenir."

But he met Nivin's melancholy gaze and his tone changed.

"You tell me you los' your frien' at Lol Raman's? Haf you been to look?"

"Three times. There's no trace. I found a servant who sold the lad drink; no more."

"Come wit' me, zen," said the controller. "And do not half such trouble at heart. We will find him. He is only schleeping off zat fever cure."

They searched high and low, among the terraces and through the water front where De Haan questioned all manner of natives: stolid, self-possessed little men who looked him between the eyes at answering--but they found no nook wherein Tunstal might be slumbering, nor any clue, and Nivin's lean jaw lengthened.

"Your fren' was come alone?" asked De Haan, puzzled.

"Alone and early. There wouldn't likely be any other customer at that time. No witnesses."

"It is all right now--do not be tragic. Nosing of ze kind could be. We will see ze garden again."...

But all they saw was no aid to the case. They entered the garden of Lol Raman to find it disposed as usual, inviting the evening trade. Paper lanterns swung among the trees like phosphorescent fruits and drew a myriad fluttering moths. As if the glow had drawn them too, a few visitors lounged at ease about the tables, sipping and murmuring languidly. Some of the _Lombock's_ passengers were there, notably a smallish man with shiny skin and bulbous eyes, glittering and predatory, who bowed effusively to De Haan and received a cool nod. Gliding here and yon, and jiggling a tray to serve the general need, went a waxen-faced manikin. Glasses shone and sparkled. White garments showed fresh and span. And farther back, amid the shadows under the big palm, could be seen the vague figure of the presiding genius of the place, the huge red ape, huddled in the attitude of meditation.

"All ze same, hey?" said De Haan. "Still we remain a liddle. Perhaps we hear somesing. And you, my dear fallow, drink zis."

He chose a table in the arbor near a magnificent rhododendron and poured a measure of golden yellow liquid from a ready bottle, and the mate had need of the same. Nivin was paying the penalty just then for unprofessional weakness and the mellower streak of his nature, as those of his type have often to pay here below. He remembered that he alone had guided Tunstal. He could not acquit himself for whatever ill had befallen. And he remembered something else--another evil he had done nothing to check that day--the passage of the cinnabar boat with her ruddy devils and suspected errand....

"What is ze matter wit' zat beast?" rumbled De Haan, frowning over his shoulder. "He don' yell good to-night. He acts like sick. And alzo he haf no roll' us yet one single cigarette. Yet here is plenty tobacco too--"

With his foot he pushed within the circle of the chain a little lacquer box and a packet of leaves, but when he turned again the kindly official saw that his attempt to set up a diversion had failed. Nivin looked leaner and more leathery than ever, and his eyes had lighted with an almost fanatic gleam which was only partly due to arrack--that potential drink. "It's no use, Mister Controller," he said. "And I thank you for meaning well. But you can't keep from me that something awful has happened to the boy I sent from the _Lombock_ so free and careless."

De Haan squirmed through all his thick bulk. "Don' speak so wit' a pain, my dear fallow," he urged. "I do not admit it. We haf yet to see."

"I can see. You try to tell me certain crimes are spared you here. I take it you mean such deviltry as grows where foreigners have rotted a native country?"

"Yes," said De Haan.

"And that's true; they do rot it. I always thought this place was clean, just as you claim, because so few whites pass through--a plain, decent, wholesome race that keeps its self-respect and harms none till trod upon."

"Yes."

Nivin leaned across at him. "But the rotters are in. They're at their slimy work, grubbin' for profit through muck. And after that what's to be trusted?"

"What do you mean?" demanded De Haan.

"Such people as that rat Van Goor over there--" He jerked a thumb toward the bulbous-eyed man.

"We watch zem. Zat is what we are here for. Meanwhile zey bring development. If zey misbehave, we sling zem out quick."

"And the coolies they bring--scum of the earth. Do you watch them?"

"Of course."

"And you never caught them yet at their slave trade planted right in the heart of your people?"

* * * * *

De Haan stiffened in his chair. "What are you trying to say? Zis is fool talk of ze river."

"Native women sold into slavery to the cinnabar mines to hell and death. Soul traffic, the fine flower of civilization. Here in these lovely islands!"

"I tell you it can't be!"

"The boats, man. The cinnabar boats. Can you answer for their trade up and down and about--transporting commodities to supply the gangs?"

"We inspect every one of zem here, at ze water front. Zere is nosing nor anywhere to hide such doings. You, zat speak to the shame of our people--prove it if you can!"

"What if I could?" cried Nivin.

"What if you could?" De Haan doubled his hands before him, the kind of big, white, capable hands that deliberately and quietly have molded the most successful and the least troublesome colonial empire in the world. "What if you could? By Godd, we would take ze man who did it and break him in liddle pieces! Can you prove it? Speak now and let me hear your proof. By Godd, I tell you zis is my gountry--our gountry, our people! Not dirt, but men and women. Not chattels, not slaves; not--not--"

There broke a sharp click and rattle of steel links. They turned at the sound. Under the big palm the red-haired ape had started into vehement life, bouncing at his leash....

Nivin had fallen back into his chair again, silenced, baffled, for he had no proof to give. De Haan still held the pose of challenge, glancing over his shoulder. Both of them watched the ungainly creature reeling in the shadows; both of them observed the gestures by which he seemed to solicit their attention.

He had taken a leaf of the raw tobacco and adding a pinch for filler was trying to twist the spill. And he could not. It became evident to them that he could not. The fingers moved painfully, trembling.... Curious fingers he had, stumpy and thick and clumsy as if covered with ragged gloves, wholly unequal to the delicate task.

* * * * *

Slowly Nivin levered his lank frame out of the chair and moved a pace like a somnambulist and stood staring at those fingers. He straightened and transfixed De Haan. "Where's your police?" he whispered. "Guns--soldiers--something--!"

"What? What is it?"

Nivin stood braced like a man at the edge of a precipice.

"To hold this place."

De Haan looked around over the patch of lighted garden into the banks of shrubbery and further dim tree shapes.

"I hold zis place," he said simply, bulking big and broad. "I am here. None of my people will harm us now, whatever zey may haf done, whatever you may mean. And zen--?"

Without a word Nivin stepped into the circle about the palm, stepped up to the crouching, sinister captive, flung an arm about him and seemed to wrestle. A knife wrought swiftly in his hand with little flashes.

"_N-n-not--not--not monkeys!_" burst a broken voice, sobbing with eagerness to top the phrase.

And in the fantastic glow of paper lanterns stood Alfred Poynter Tunstal, surely the strangest figure to which a dapper and sophisticated seeker after truth was ever reduced, with a face blackened and unrecognizable like a hideous caricature and slashed across by the raw wound of his recent gag, clad, head to heel, in the plastered red hide of a monstrous orang-utan, the true jungle man!

So he stood to give testimony and make atonement for various things.

"Not monkeys!" he gasped hysterically. "_I_ thought so--_I_ thought they were--and they made a monkey out of me!"

He swayed and straightened in Nivin's grip.

"I killed their ape. I put the touch of dishonor on a brown skin. And they served me proper for it--proper. But I've got the proof you want....

"All day I've been sitting there, under that tree. The man--the man who bought those cinnabar girls--he came to talk business.

"It's true. He gets those girls in starving villages. They engage for service; that's all. They don't know--don't understand--till too late.... Three of them now in that house back there waiting shipment! Blind victims--an incidental side line to Lol Raman!"

"Who?" thundered De Haan!

A long, hairy arm shot out accusing.

"That greasy little cur over there. Van Goor, the agent. _Stop him!_"

The controller stopped him. "Zis," he observed, "zis is mos' op-propriate!"...

* * * * *

And Alfred Poynter Tunstal, recovering as he went, continued his journey eastward as soon and as fast as ever he could make it until East became West again. He brought home few records of his travels, and, curiously, he had not collected a single globe-trotting tale of wickedness and mystery. But one result of his voyaging was marked. He carried a scar--acquired in some slight accident--which ran from each corner of his mouth in a thin line and which transformed his original cheerful chubbiness into an expression quite grim and taciturn. He had lost his cherubic smile.

JETSAM

It is likely that at some time in his extreme youth Junius Peabody was introduced to those single-minded creatures, the ant and the bee. Doubtless he was instructed in the highly moral lessons they are supposed to illustrate to the inquiring mind of childhood. But it is certain he never profited by the acquaintance--indeed, the contemplation of such tenacious industry must have afflicted his infant consciousness with utter repugnance. By the time he was twenty-seven the only living thing that could be said to have served him as a model was the jellyfish.

Now the jellyfish pursues a most amiable theory of life, being harmless, humorous, and decorative. It derives much enjoyment from drifting along through the glitter and froth, as chance may direct. It does no work to speak of. It never needs to get anywhere. And it never, never has to go thirsty. But some day it may get itself stranded, and then the poor jellyfish becomes an object quite worthless and fit only to be shoveled out of sight as soon as possible--because it lacks the use of its legs.

Thus it was with Junius Peabody, who awoke one morning of his twenty-eighth year on the roaring coral beach at Fufuti below Bendemeer's place to find that all the chances had run out and that the glitter had faded finally from a prospect as drab as the dawn spread over a butternut sea before him....

Mr. Peabody sat up and looked about from under a corrugated brow and yawned and shivered. His nerves had been reduced to shreds, and even the fiercest heat of tropic suns seemed never to warm him, a symptom familiar enough to brandy drunkards. But he had had such awakenings before, many of them, and the chill that struck through him on this particular morning was worse than any hang-over. It was the soul of Junius Peabody that felt cold and sick, and when he fumbled through his pockets--the subtle relation between the pockets and the soul is a point sadly neglected by our best little psychologists--he uncovered a very definite reason. His last penny was gone.

Under the shock of conviction Mr. Peabody sought to cast up the mental log, in the hope of determining where he was and how he came to be there.

The entries were badly blurred, but he could trace himself down through Port Said, Colombo, Singapore--his recollections here were limited to a woman's face in a balcony and the cloying aroma of anisette. He remembered a stop at Sydney, where he made the remarkable discovery that the Circular Quay was completely circular and could be circumnavigated in a night. After that he had a sketchy impression of the Shanghai race meeting and a mad sort of trip in a private yacht full of Australian sheep-something--kings, perhaps; tremendous fellows, anyway, of amazing capacity. And then Manila, of course, the place where he hired an ocean-going tug to urge a broken date on the coy ingenue of a traveling Spanish opera company. And then Macao, where he found and lost her again, as coy as ever, together with his wallet. And after that the hectic session when he and a Norwegian schooner captain hit the bank at fan-tan and swore eternal friendship amid the champagne baskets on the schooner's decks under a complicated moon. It was this same captain who had landed him finally--the baskets having been emptied--at the point of a boot on the strand where now he sat. So much was still quite clear and recent, within range of days.

Always through the maze of these memoirs ran one consistent and tragic motive--a dwindling letter of credit, the fag end of his considerable patrimony. It had expired painlessly at last, the night before if he could trust his head, for there had been a noble wake. He recalled the inscrutable face of the tall white man behind the bar who had cashed it for him after a rate of exchange of his own grim devising. And he recalled, too, a waif bit of their conversation as he signed the ultimate coupon.

"You can date it Fufuti," suggested Bendemeer, and spelled the name for him.

"And where--where the devil is Fufuti?" he asked.

"Three thousand miles from the next pub," said Bendemeer, with excessively dry significance.

The phrase came back to him now....

"In that case," decided Junius Peabody, aloud, "--in that case there's no use trying to borrow car fare, and it's too far to walk. I'm stuck."

Some one sniffed beside him, and he turned to stare into a face that might have been a distortion of his own yellow, haggard image.

"Hello," he said--and then, by natural sequence: "say, you don't happen to have a flask anywhere handy about you--what?"

His neighbor scowled aggrievedly.

"Do I _look_ like I 'ad a flask?"

The belligerent whine was enough to renew the identity of the mangy little larrikin whose couch on the sand he had shared. The Sydney Duck, they called him: a descriptive title which served as well as any. Junius did not like him very well, but he had lived in his company nearly a week and he had long forgotten to make effective distinctions. Brandy is a great democrat.

"It's my notion I'm going to have the fantods," explained Junius. "I need a bracer."

"My word, I could do with a nip meself just now," agreed Sydney. "'In't y' got no more credit with Bendemeer?"

Peabody made an effort.

"Seems to me I was thrown out of Bendemeer's last night. Is that right?"

"You was, and so was me and that big Dutchman, Willems--all thrown out. But it was your fault. You started playin' chuck farthin' among his bottles with a bunch of copper spikes.... I never see a man 'old his liquor worse."

"Well, I paid for it, didn't I?" inquired Junius, without heat. "And I believe you had your share. But what I'm getting at is--if he threw me out the credit must be gone."

This was simple logic and unanswerable. "Maybe y' got something else he'll tyke for th' price," suggested Sydney. "Damn 'im--'e's keen enough to drive a tryde!"

* * * * *

Junius went through the form of searching, but without any great enthusiasm, nor was Sydney himself notably expectant--a fact that might have seemed to argue a rather sinister familiarity with the probable result.

"I did have some cuff links and things," said Peabody vaguely. "I wonder what's become of them."

"I wonder," echoed Sydney. As if some last possible claim upon his regard had been dissipated, he let his lips writhe in mockery. "Ah, and that's a pity too. You got to learn now what it means bein' on the beach and doin' _without_ drinks--'cept as you kin cadge them off'n 'alf-caste Chinymen and such. You won't like it, you won't."

"Do you?" asked Junius.

"Me? I'm used to it. But, Lord, look at them 'ands! I'll lay you never did a day's work in your life."

"Did you?" inquired Junius Peabody equably.

"Garn!" retorted Sydney with a peculiarly unlovely sneer. "W'y, you don't know yet what you've come to, you don't. 'Jaimes, fetch me me mornin' drawft!'--that's your style. Only there 'int no Jaimes no more, and no drawfts to be 'ad. Ho!... You're only a beachcomber now, mytey. A lousy beachcomber! And you needn't expect me to do none of your beggin' for you, for I won't--no fear!"

Junius observed him with attention, with rather more attention than he could remember having bestowed upon any specific object for a long time. He examined the features of the Sydney Duck, the undue prominence of nose and upper lip, the singularly sharp ridge of the whole front face--whittled, as it might have been; the thin, pink ears and the jutting teeth that gave him something of the feeble ferocity of a rat. And with new perception he saw Sydney Duck, not only as an unpleasant individual but as a type, the fitting comrade and associate for such as he.

"It's a fact," said Junius Peabody; "I've fallen, pretty low."...

* * * * *

He looked out again upon that unprofitable dawning. To right and left stretched the flat, dim monotony of the beach, lined in misty surf and hedged with slim palms like a tufted palisade. From behind drifted the smokes from scores of homely hearths. Down by Tenbow Head the first pearling luggers were putting out under silver clouds of sail. Sea and land stirred once more with the accustomed affairs of busy men, but here between land and sea was the fringe of things, the deserted domain of wreckage and cast-off remnants. Here lay a broken spar half buried in the sand, part of the complex fabric that once enabled some fair ship to skim the waves. And here among the kelp and the bodies of marine animals he saw the loosened staves of a barrel limply spread and upthrust like the fingers of some dead giant, with an empty bottle near by as if fallen from that slack grip. And here, lastly, he was aware of Junius Peabody, also on the beach, washed up at the far edge of the world like any other useless bit of jetsam: to stay and to rot.

"Pretty low," said Junius Peabody.

But Sydney took no offense, and seemed, on the contrary, to extract a certain degree of pleasure from the other's recognition of his lot.

"Oh, it 'in't so bad," he declared, with a quite human impulse to reverse the picture. "There's easy pickin' if you know 'ow. Nobody starves 'ere anyw'y, that's one thing. No nigger will let a man starve--a soft lot of flats that w'y, the niggers. Often you fall in with a weddin' or a birthday or somethin'; they're always 'avin' a feast and _they_ don't care who comes--they 'in't proud. Then you got nobody aharryin' of you up and down and askin' you wot for, that's a comfort--my word! And once in a while there's sure to be a new chum come along with a bit of brass--some flat who's willin' to stand the drinks."

"Like me," suggested Junius.

"Oh, there's plenty like you," nodded the Sydney Duck. "It's the pearlin' brings 'em, though it 'in't so soft as maybe they think, you see. When they're stony they mostly tyke a job till they find a chance to get aw'y again--that's if they're able to do anything at all."

For the first time in his life, probably, Junius Peabody considered his accomplishments with a view to estimating their value in the open market.

"I once won the fancy diving event at Travers Island," he said. "And I used to swim the four-forty in a trifle over six minutes."

"That must 'a' been several seasons back," grinned Sydney.

"Not so many," said Junius slowly. "I forgot to add that I was also an excellent judge of French brandy."

He got to his feet and began to divest himself of the spotted remains of an expensive white silk suit.

"What's the gyme now?"

"Morning bath. Have you had yours yet?"

The Sydney Duck laughed, laughter that was strangely unmirthful and so convulsive that Junius blinked at him, fearing a fit of some kind.

"You're a rare 'un," gasped the Sydney Duck. "I seen a good few, I 'ave, but none as rare as you. Mornin' bawth--and 'ave I 'ad mine yet!... On the beach at Fufuti!" He waggled his hands.