Part 12
I guess he thought he'd wind up by pulling off the biggest thing yet, for he had a kind of pride of wickedness in him, and gloried in being the bad man of Puna Punou. He wanted to top it all now, and do something that tremendous that it would shake the whole island from Fale a Lupo to Diamond Rock. Anyway, whatever he thought or didn't think, what he did was to waylay Mrs. Tweedie one morning about ten, as she was going over to visit the native pastor's wife, who was sick; and, tying her hands and feet together with sinnet, he put her in a hammock and carried her off up the mountain; and this, if you please, in open daylight, with scores of people looking on, while she screamed and struggled and fought, and they helpless to do anything against the line of Afiola's rifles--and Tweedie himself not four hundred yards away, organizing a Y.M.C.A. for untattooed boys, and explaining how they was to play basket ball, and learn arithmetic nights!
When I heard the news, which was right off and the moment after it happened, I had only one idea in my head, and that was to reach Captain Coe as fast as the paddles could race me off to the schooner. It is in them moments that the strong man looms up like a mountain and one's cry is for a leader. But it seemed for a spell like it was a knock-out blow for Coe, and that he couldn't grapple with the thing at all, moaning and grinding his teeth, and tearing the red-dotted handkerchief off his neck like it choked him. When I tried to talk, he swore at me terrible, saying he wanted to think, by God! and I was to shut my bloody face; and ordering the mate and the Chinaman into the lazarette to get out the arms. There was a big store of them, which the pair got out on their hands and knees, the place being cramped and low and the guns furthest in; and they broke open boxes of cartridges on the cabin floor till they ran all over. Then Coe ordered the whaleboat cleared and went ashore with nigh all hands, every one of them with a loaded rifle, and he with a twelve-bore gun; and if you ever saw the light of hell in a man's eyes, it was Coe as he formed us up on the beach and headed inland in a crowd. The whole settlement was buzzing like a hornet's nest, and they were beating a wooden drum in front of the king's house, and everybody was running every which way, telling the news, and how Mrs. Tweedie had been carried off by Afiola, and all screaming out at once, like natives do when excited.
Finding Afiola would be about as easy as the needle in the haystack, and the crews of a hundred _Peep o' Days_, and all the warriors of Fale a Lupo besides, couldn't have tracked and cornered him up the mountain. I thought Coe was acting like a hot-headed crazy fool to try, for they were bound to see him first, and could always hide if we got too close, or fight if need be, with all the points of the game in their favor. But that wasn't what he meant to do, not he, but surrounded Afiola's two houses, and took out everybody in them--Talavao his aunt, Oloa his uncle, Filipo his brother (who was sick on a mat), and Afiola's two children, Mali and Popo, and a raft of men and women, to the number of twenty or more all told. They were scared blue at the sight of the cocked rifles, and held up their hands like lambs for the Chinaman to rope them, which he did like lashing a chest and about as tender, the tears streaming down the women's faces. But there wasn't a spark of compassion in Elijah Coe, and he never give them a thought.
He was at a white heat, and his finger was just itching on the trigger of his gun, and he never started for the beach till all the Bowery was crackling in smoke and flame. Not that our eighteen or twenty was the whole of Afiola's family in the settlement. I guess there was several hundreds of them altogether, taking it fine and large, retainers, hangers-on, and connections of one kind and another; but Coe's boldness took them by surprise, and not being in the secret of Mrs. Tweedie's carrying off, they weren't prepared or anything. But even in the time we were tying up the prisoners they began to turn ugly and bunch together and hoot, and all the way back to the beach it was touch and go whether they wouldn't rush us.
Not a soul durst ask Coe what he meant to do as we pitched into the water and shoved off, him sitting there so grim and fierce, with his eyes smoldering in his head like coals; but there was no sound but the straining of the rowlocks, and a whimper or two from the women, and the swish and gurgle of the water along the keel. I'll never forget that boat ride if I live to be a hundred; the drums rolling and re-rolling around the bay, and that strange humming of voices behind us like the wind in the rigging of a ship, and Coe and the Kanakas and the Chinaman and John Rau and the men pulling. But as for Coe's plan, we weren't long kept waiting for what it was. The prisoners were bundled into the ship's waist, with Lum to stand over them, while the mate got out the kedge and brought the schooner broadside on to the mountain. Then they bent a noose and ran up old Oloa between the masts. It was no fancy hanging with a drop calculated to his height, but just the old-fashioned kind, slow and awful, and if the steward hadn't come round with a tray of glasses and some square-face I guess I would have just sunk right down where I was. The crew made one panic-stricken gallop for the side, and popped over, nobody trying to stop them, though Rau asked, quite calm, was he to shoot, and the captain said No. The Nieue steward was the only one that didn't go, but crouched down in the scuppers with his teeth chattering.
Then Coe leaned over the rail and talked to the prisoners in the waist; told them that he was going to string up one an hour, children and all, till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe; and he ordered Lum to cast loose one of the old women so that she might swim ashore and carry the news. My, if she wasn't over that rail like lightning, and striking out for home with her skinny arms! Coe knew mighty well that Afiola had a string of people up the mountain keeping him informed of everything that happened--the Kanaka telegraph, we used to call it. Then, besides, up there they could see for miles, and Coe had kedged the schooner acrost the fairway so that Afiola might reckonize his relations in the rigging. You might wonder that such an unmitigated black villain would care what Coe did, so long as he had his wicked way with Mrs. Tweedie, and a whole trackless mountain to lose himself in; but there's an awful soft streak in Kanakas for their own blood, and we had his whole family in our hands, not to speak of the two kids. It seemed almost like a waste of lives to look up and see not a speck, or the least sign whatever, that was hid under the tree tops, and it was hard to convince oneself that Coe was doing the right thing, and that from those rocky cliffs there was sharp Kanaka eyes taking us all in, with Alethea Tweedie tied hand and foot, and Afiola in a sweat about his children.
The captain sat on a chair at the forrard end of the house, smoking a cigar, and occasionally searching the woods with his binoculars. There was a stack of loaded rifles beside him, and a keg of dynamite with a loose lid to it. Some of the sticks had touch-and-go fuses to them, ready to throw if they tried boarding; and sometimes he would take out his watch and look at it hard, and every time he looked the people in the waist would set up a kind of a wail. At one o'clock we ran up Filipo, Afiola's brother, and settled down to another spell of waiting. Somewheres along of three bells we saw them getting a boat out by Pita's house, and lo and behold! it was Tweedie, with the native pastor and a divinity student named Henry to pull him. When they were close enough to talk, he fell on his knees in the boat, though it was half full of bilge and slopped all over him; and he besought Captain Coe, by all that was holy, to stop murdering the innocent, and rattled on fast and scolding like he was in the pulpit. We was to leave it to God, he said, and went on like we was worse nor Afiola, the pitiful hound, like it wasn't his own wife we was doing our damnedest to save.
Captain Coe let him have his say, and then he leaned over the ship's side, holding to the starboard shrouds with one hand and taking the cigar out of his mouth with the other, and told him, with a most deliberate spit, as how he was going on with one every hour till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe and sound, and when he used up them he had aboard, how he was going to land for more. He didn't speak it particular loud, and you might have thought he was talking what a hot day it was; but there was that in his voice I've never heard before or since, and you knew he'd live right up to every word he said. I guess the pastor and the student understood a little English, for when Coe finished they laid on to their oars like mad, and headed the old sieve for shore again, Tweedie in the bilge and still protesting.
At two o'clock we turned off Sosofina, Afiola's aunt. We now had three aloft, and as we rolled gently broadside on to the swell they'd swing together and swing apart till you didn't care to look at them. That hour from two to three was the very longest I ever spent in my life. It was the hottest time of day and the sun beat down unmerciful, the pitch running in the seams, and the awnings being stripped off to better fight the ship, if need be. The steward passed round sardines and buttered biscuit, and I recollect the Chinaman wolfing his right out of the can and tipping it cornerwise to drink the ile. Bar Coe, he was the coolest customer of the lot, which was the more remarkable, as he was a mild-mannered man ordinarily, given to playing the China fiddle to himself, and very obliging if you wanted fresh yeast or the way he curried pigeon. Rau, the Belgian, with his hairy arms and stubby figure, struck one somehow as being more in his element in so wild a business, and you took his calm for granted, like a soldier serving a gun and doing what he's told. If Coe had ordered him to set off the dynamite and blow up the ship, he would have said "Aye, aye, sir!" and obeyed, respectful and willing, like the first-class seaman and navigator he was. He had served in the Belgian navy, and the habit had stuck to him. But in all of us, after all--me and Lum and John Rau and the Nieue steward--it was Coe's spirit that had raised us to this pitch, and he had blown a little of his own breath into every one of us. We were all Elijah Coe's that day, and it was only afterwards it came over us how different we had acted from our proper selves.
Well, as I said, it was drawing toward six bells, and we were keyed up tremendous, as we might expect to see the result of our work now any minute; and it was a shuddering thing to think of sending up another, and him a child. We all watched Coe out of the corner of our eye as he went on smoking his cigar, and every time he took out his watch and looked at it it seemed like my heart stopped beating.
"Three o'clock, boys!" he says, rising business-like from his chair, while Lum looked up expectant, and my gizzard seemed to shrink inside me. "Three o'clock, boys!"
He hadn't no more nor got the words out of his mouth when Rau ripped out there was a canoe coming off, and we all ran pellmell for the rail. Sure enough, there was an outrigger aiming straight for us, and the fellar in it was bent double and paddling that fast that the water spurted at the bow like it was a race. When he got within a cable's length he stopped, and waved something he had in his hand, and shouted a lot of stuff we couldn't make head or tail of. Coe made motions to him to come nearer, and Rau and me did the same, till the fellar got back something of his nerve, paddling with one hand and holding the little board aloft in the other (like he might a flag of truce), and venturing toward us slower and slower, till at last Coe reached down and took the thing from him standing up.
It was a slab of fresh-cut _fuafua_, about a foot long by three inches wide, and on it, written, as I heard afterwards, in blood and spit and gunpowder, was a message from Mrs. Tweedie herself--not many words on it, and them printed, for she only had a pointed stick by way of a pen, but saying as how she was unharmed and was being brought back fast, and please, he wasn't to trice up any more of Afiola's family.
The captain read it aloud to us about a dozen times, and then, his face working so he couldn't speak no more, he gripped hands with me, and then with John Rau, and not forgetting the Nieue steward, and then he went down the forward ladder, and I'm blest if he didn't put his arm round the Chink, and burst out sobbing--yes, sir, like a great overwrought girl, sitting on the tool chest, limp as a rag, and wiping his eyes with the cuff of his blue-striped panjammers, the Chinaman, patting him like he might a dog, saying, "Poor captain! Never you mind, captain! She all lite now, captain," while the prisoners broke out in a big gabble of how they were saved, and piped up with a hymn.
He wasn't the man to take anything for granted, however, and after he had sort of pulled himself together and got his second wind, so to speak, he cast loose a couple more with a message that he had to have a letter on paper from Mrs. Tweedie herself, countersigned by the king, that she was at home, safe, and no harm done. He might have saved himself the trouble, for they hadn't been gone ten minutes before she came off herself, queening it in the stern of the king's great _alia_, seventy feet long, with Tweedie and Maunga, and the princes, and eighty men chorusing to the paddles, with drums aft, and a young boy dancing in the bow and keeping time with a rifle. Except for her paleness, which was like marble, and the bloody marks of the sinnet on her pretty wrists, you wouldn't have taken her for much different than usual; and she skipped up the ladder as sprightly as you please, and made a bee line for Elijah Coe like a schoolgirl running to her pa for the holidays.
She wanted to throw herself on her knees and kiss his hands; and when he forced her up, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, saying he was her preserver, and how he had saved her from worse than death, and so overflowing and grateful and outspoken that nobody knew where to look, least of all the captain, who turned all colors, and couldn't say anything but "You're welcome," like a ninny.
We cleared a little space for Tweedie to pray in, which was his way of celebrating, and couldn't very well be prevented, and the king followed with a speech what he'd do to Afiola when he caught him--the tarnation liar! The crew came off, swimming in ones and twos to beg for pardon, and the prisoners were unbound and given three crates of biscuit and three barrels of pork and some boat sails to wrap the corpses in, and there was more hurrah-boys and good feeling and port wine in the cabin than you could ever have thought possible under the circumstances.
* * * * *
Was that all? Well, for a time it was, Coe slipping out at dawn on the ebb with a cargo of Afiola rapscallions he was to drop, one here, one there, all around the Group, we having no further use for them in Puna Punou.
The measles struck us shortly afterwards in a Tahiti bark, and it carried off a sight of people, Afiola included, who was in a sort of armed hiding on the other side of the island. Tweedie, too, who had always been a complaining whelp, started up a cough about this time, and died. Of course, this wasn't right off, but spread over a matter of eighteen months or more, Coe coming and going regular in the _Peep o' Day_, and Mrs. Tweedie more blooming than ever.
Coe turned up from Sydney, where he had gone for a general refitting and overhaul, just as Mrs. Tweedie was taking her passage in the _Olive Branch_, missionary auxiliary barkentine for Honolulu. None of the saints would have a word to say to him, calling him "the man of blood," and ordering him off the ship, as he stood his ground and wouldn't budge even when the anchor was apeak and the barkentine under steerage way. But he kept singing out for her while they tried to hustle him over the side and into his boat, and the more they hustled the louder he shouted, "Mrs. Tweedie! Mrs. Tweedie!" till at last she heard him in her cabin below, and came running up, smiling, and arranging her hair with her hands.
It was a tight place for Coe, having to do his courting while they were moving him on like the police; but, for all that, when he went down the ladder it was with Mrs. Tweedie with him, and they pulled ashore and were married by the Kanaka pastor, and went a-honeymooning in the _Peep o' Day_, bringing up in Papiete three weeks later, to buy her some clothes, for every stitch to her name was beating up to Honolulu in the _Olive Branch_.
MR. BOB
Far away in the western Pacific, in that labyrinth of coral reefs and low, palm-rimmed isles floating between the blue of heaven and the deeper blue of sea, known to the pajama-clad, ear-ringed traders as "the Group," and to the outer world as Micronesia--here, one burning morning there arrived a visitor from "Home," who descended, not from some tubby bark or slant-masted schooner, but Godlike from the glorious stars themselves--Christmas Day!
The Rev. Walter Kirke looked out moodily from beneath the eaves of his basket-work house, and his heart sank as he gazed across the sweltering strip of water, twenty miles wide, that divided the island of Apiang from its neighbor, Tarawa. His brother in the Lord across the strait, the perpetually unfortunate Titcombe (the Rev. J. B. Tracy Titcombe, M.A., Cam.), had sent in a proa with a message of such urgency and need that delay, let alone refusal, was utterly out of the question.
"The king has broken all his promises," wrote Titcombe, in a hand illegible from distress and agitation. "He threatens to burn the new church, flog the members, and spear personally the leading lights of our infant congregation. Yesterday, on my remonstrating with him, he gave me twenty-four hours to leave the island, calling me at the same time a sting ray, a detached jellyfish--a white squid, together with some other local expressions of a highly wounding and contemptuous nature. The tiny fold is terrorized, and Thomas Najibika, my deacon and right-hand man, is in hourly apprehension of a massacre. My wife and little Kenneth are down with fever, and this, together with my halting knowledge of the native language, has put me at such a disadvantage that I have no alternative but to appeal to you. For Heaven's sake, please come instantly and exert yourself on my behalf, or else we may lose Tarawa for good, and put back the good work by a dozen years."
"We'll have to go, dear," said Kirke to his pretty wife.
"Yes, we'll have to go," she assented sadly.
She could not help feeling cross with the Titcombes for always muddling things--a little unjustly, perhaps--for her own missionary path had ever been so easy and untroubled. Mrs. Kirke was a woman of marked beauty, whose sweet imperiousness, sympathy, humor, and tact made her the adored of the islanders. She not only spoke native well, but with a zest and sparkle, a silver ripple of irony, ridicule, and good-fellowship that carried everything before it. No kings ever bothered Mrs. Kirke. Even the redoubtable Tembinok, with forty boats full of armed savages, had been stemmed in his Napoleonic career and turned back by her from his projected invasion of Apiang--presenting the missionary's wife, on his departure, with a gold-inlaid Winchester that was the apple of his eye.
"I shall make Karaitch smart for this!" she said vindictively. "I sha'n't let him off with less than twenty tons of copra for my girls' school; and he'll have to apologize, too, and swear on a shark's head to behave for a year."
"We can't all have such intrepid little wives," said Kirke, putting his arm fondly about her. Experience had shown him that in native questions she was always as good as her word, and it was with a kind of proud humility he conceded her the place he was so much less able himself to fill. He had not the faintest apprehensions about the Tarawa matter. Ada would bring the king to heel in fifteen minutes, and in twenty there would be the dawn of a new peace, with stately apologies, gifts of turtle and bonito hooks, endless and troublesomely idiomatic compliments, and incidentally a little friction with the Titcombes, who would certainly resent being saved so easily.
No, Kirke wasn't afraid of Karaitch. Ada would settle Karaitch out of hand. What he dreaded was that twenty miles of water under the noonday sun, and the problem of Daisy--Daisy, their little girl of eight, who was playing so contentedly on the floor with the presents Santa Claus had just brought her.
"Oh, Walter, I can't let Daisy go again!" cried Mrs. Kirke. "Last time she nearly died in the boat, and you know she wasn't really herself for weeks and weeks afterwards."