Part 4

He became the butt of the warriors, who brought him their rifles to mend and called him a coward for his pains. They envied him Fetuao, who, for all her flirtations, slept every night by his side and was not happy when he was out of her sight. They nicknamed him her "Paalangi dog," and would whistle to him derisively and shout, "Come 'ere!" secure in the chronic absent-mindedness that had become a joke to them all. When he answered, as he always answered, "Eh, what?" and raised his vacant, moody face, there would be an outburst of laughter, in which he himself joined with a mirthless geniality, like a man unbending to a lot of children. If a shell went off some one was sure to cry, "Eh, what?" and this phrase, together with a mimicry of Jack's slow, dejected utterance of it, became the stock pleasantry of the camp humorists, who brought it out on all occasions.

The conflicts about Apia were mostly affairs of outposts, a pressing in and a pressing back of the pickets on either side. The naval commanders, in spite of repeated bombardments and the enormous havoc they wrought along the coasts, found themselves hardly able to do more than hold their own against the Mataafa army. The safety of Apia was constantly in jeopardy, though barricades were thrown up in the streets and three hundred men landed from the ships. A desperate night attack on the main guard at the Tivoli Hotel betrayed the weakness of the whites to friends and foes alike, and redoubled the anxiety of the admiral and captains. It was plain that no decisive blow could be struck pending the arrival of the reënforcements that had been urgently cabled for from New Zealand, unless a better use were made of the missionary levies on the spot. These loose native organizations were accordingly broken up, consolidated into a single compact force of eight hundred men, well armed and well drilled, and placed under the absolute command of a naval lieutenant.

This fine force, supported by whites and Maxims, was counted on to retrieve the situation and drive Mataafa from his mountain stronghold. The plan for a joint attack was accordingly drawn up. A quota of seamen and marines, with a couple of machine guns, was to form the center of the little army, while the native brigade on either wing was to advance simultaneously, lap round and outflank the Mataafas. This operation, covered by a terrific bombardment from the three ships of war, was forthwith begun; on its success was staked the hopes of the little clique who had so lightly adopted the cause of a divinity student of seventeen, against the vote and wish of well-nigh all Samoa.

On that day the Oa party held the center of the Mataafa line, a stone wall stretching across a wide clearing to the forest on either side. It was the post of honor, for it crossed the road up which the enemy were toiling with their guns, and guarded the headquarters of the patriot king, not a hundred yards behind. In the trampled grass two hundred men sat or lay with their rifles in their hands and listened to the measured periods of the orators exhorting them to remember their wrongs and die fighting. These old men, white-haired, scarred with the wounds of bygone battles, their wrinkled hands clasping the staves on which they leaned, never winced as the shells whistled above their heads, nor abated by a hair's breadth their tone of strident warning and encouragement. At such a distance, and against a target six hundred feet above the sea level, the men-of-war made poor practice and did little more than waste their ammunition. But the shattering detonations of their guns, and the thundering echoes rolling and re-rolling round the bay, made pleasant music for their crews ashore. It seemed incredible that such earth-shaking explosions could be wholly without effect, and the tired seamen sweating up the hill were kindled by the thought that the rebels were already suffering heavily and likely to run at the first encounter.

Sitting listlessly on a boulder, Jack scarcely took in the fact that anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire from top to toe; her saucy tongue was loosened, and her bright eyes dancing in wild excitement. Joking and laughing in the roaring circle of her admirers, she matched her quick wit against them all in a victorious scream of banter and repartee.

Suddenly a shot rang out in the lower woods; then two, with a faltering third; then a scattered volley like a bunch of firecrackers going off at once. A score of men showed at the turn of the road doubling back for dear life, the pickets who had been dislodged and driven in by the advancing whites. They had hardly leaped the wall, panting, and crouching with the main body behind it, when the machine guns wheeled into the open and began to fire. In the first murderous crash it seemed as though nothing human could withstand them, and the blue-jackets, dotted here and there in the grass, raised an exultant yell, and some even sprang up in anticipation of the call to charge. But the men that worked the guns had to stand exposed and helpless before a fire more galling than their own. They began to drop, and those who were unhurt disconcertedly turned and ran. A couple of officers sprang out of the grass to take charge of the abandoned guns, managing in their flurry to jam them both. For a minute they tinkered and hammered at the choked mechanism, exposing themselves, as they did so, to the concentrated volleys of a hundred Samoan rifles. Of a sudden, one clapped his hand to his breast and sank on his knees; his comrade caught him round the body and dragged him back, leaving the guns, now silent and useless, to shine innocuously in the sun.

All this while the woods on either hand reverberated with the volleys and the cheers of an extended battle, and a haze of powder smoke drifted above the tree tops. No one knew how the day was going, and the most conflicting rumors ran like wildfire through the Mataafa lines together with the names of such an one killed and such an one wounded. Dodging the bullets, Fetuao flitted about with water for the parched fighters, passing the news and rolling cigarettes for such of the wounded as were not too far gone to care for them. Occasionally she ferreted out a trembling wretch in the rear and drove him to the front with taunts; or, if he were too panic-stricken to get up, she had no compunction in thrashing him with a stick until he did so. The little savage was beside herself as she danced and sang like a wanton child in the rain--a rain of Martini and Lee-Remington balls stinging the air all about her.

After the machine guns were put out of action the fight became a rifle duel, which went on briskly for upward of an hour. Again and again the whites rose in the grass, blundered forward and took cover, each rush stemmed by the Oas, who, darting up from their wall, gave volley for volley at point-blank range. Standing in a slop of blood, their great naked feet trampling the dead and writhing bodies of their comrades, they rivaled the rocky wall itself in the unflinching obstinacy of their resistance. It was then the battle reached its deadliest stage, more falling in those terrible minutes than during the whole previous course of the action. There was no shouting, no cheering, but with clenched teeth each man held his place and panted for the supreme moment that should spell either victory or rout. That moment came with the bugle call to charge, when the whites, rising for the last time, flung themselves forward with bayonets fixed. On they came, crimson-faced, mouths open, British and Americans in a pellmell rush like a rally of boys at football. Even as they did so, Fetuao leaped bolt upright on the wall, and swinging her carbine round her head, opposed her slender body to the whole attack. In an instant she was tumbling backward with a bullet through her throat, and as she lay coughing and strangling in the mire, Jack ran forward with a cry and caught her in his arms. There she died, amid the crash and roar of a hand-to-hand fight, jostled and stumbled on, her little hot hands clinging to his in the convulsive grasp of dissolution.

Jack sprang up like a madman. He had no thought in his dizzy head but vengeance--vengeance, sudden, bloody, and swift. He plunged into the thickest of the fray, cursing and raving as he opened a path with his brawny shoulders. A seaman tried to drive him through with a bayonet, but he caught the fellow round the neck and throttled him; he wrenched away the weapon and stabbed out with it right and left, with a strength, skill, and ferocity that nothing could withstand. He was fired at again and again; his ashen face was twenty times a target, once at so close a range that the powder burned his very skin. As the line swayed to and fro in that desperate final struggle, there was a hoarse cry against him, constantly repeated, of, "Shoot that white man!" "Kill the renegade!" But Jack, seemingly proof against bullet and sword, stood his ground like a lion and clubbed the butt of his gun into the faces of his foes; and when the whites, at last losing heart, began to weaken and fall back, it was Jack that led the Samoan charge, waving a dripping bayonet, and bellowing like a maniac for the rest to follow him.

[Illustration: "In an instant she was tumbling backward."]

He stopped beside the guns, laughing wildly to see the blue-jackets scattering like rabbits down the hill, and throwing away their rifles, water bottles, and accouterments in their precipitate flight. There were wounded men lying all about him, groaning, some of them, and calling out faintly for help; but, hell! what did he care! Let them groan, the skunks; let them remember the women and children they had bombarded, and the houses they had burned, and the honest hearts they had broken! To hell with them! Besides, for the matter of that, he was feeling sort of sick himself--sort of numb and shivery--and he staggered like a drunken man as he went slowly back up to the wall. It was all he could do to straddle the blamed thing, and then it was only with the help of a wounded Samoan who took his hand. The Kanaka, dizzily seen through a kind of mist, was no other than Tua; together, like men in a dream, they searched for Fetuao's body; and dragging it out of the shambles where it lay, they tried to clean away the blood with wisps of grass. Jack was sitting with the girl's head in his lap when he began to sway unsteadily backward and forward, feeling strangely sleepy and cold. He moaned. He gasped. Hell! they must have plugged him somewhere, after all. And then he rolled over--dead.

THE SECURITY OF THE HIGH SEAS

Things had been dull in Apia before the arrival of Captain Satterlee in the _Southern Belle_. Not business alone--which was, of course, only to be expected, what with the civil war being just over and the Kanakas driven to eat their cocoanuts instead of selling them to traders in the form of copra--but, socially speaking, the little capital of the Samoan group had been next door to dead. Picnics had been few; a heavy dust had settled on the floor of the public hall--a galvanized iron barn which social leaders could rent for six Chile dollars a night, lights included; the butcher's wedding, contrary to all expectation, had been strictly private, and might almost have slipped by unnoticed had it not been for a friendly editorial in the _Samoa Weekly Times_; and with the exception of an auction, a funeral, and a billiard tournament at the International Hotel, a general lethargy had overtaken Apia and the handful of whites who made it their home.

As Mr. Skiddy, the boyish American consul, expressed himself, "You can't get anybody to do anything these days."

Possibly this long spell of monotony contributed to Captain Satterlee's pronounced and instant success. The topsails of the Southern Belle had hardly more than appeared over the horizon, when people began to wake up and realize that stagnation had too long held them in its thrall. Satterlee was not at all the ordinary kind of sea captain, to which the Beach (as Apia always alluded to itself) was more than well acquainted. Gin had no attractions for Captain Satterlee, nor did he surround himself with dusky impropriety. He played a straight social game, and lived up to the rules, even to party calls, and finger bowls on his cabin table. He was a tall, thin American of about forty-five, with floorwalker manners, grayish mutton-chop whiskers, and a roving eye. The general verdict of Apia was that he was "very superior." His superiority was apparent in his gentlemanly baldness, his openwork socks, his well-turned references to current events, his kindly and indulgent attitude toward all things Samoan. He deplored the rivalry of the three contending nationalities, German, English, and American, whose official representatives quarreled fiercely among themselves and mismanaged the affairs of this unfortunate little South Sea kingdom, and whose unofficial representatives sold guns and cartridges indiscriminately to the warring native factions. Satterlee let it be inferred that the rôle of peacemaker had informally settled upon himself.

"In a little place everybody ought to pull together," he would say, his bland tolerance falling like balm from heaven, and he would clinch the remark by passing round forty-cent cigars.

The _Southern Belle_ was a showy little vessel of about ninety tons, with the usual trade room in the after part of the ship, where the captain himself would wait on you behind a counter, and sell you anything from a bottle of trade scent to a keg of dynamite. He never was so charming as when engaged in this exchange of commodities for coin, and it accorded so piquantly with his evident superiority that the purchaser had a pleasant sense of doing business with a gentleman.

"Of course, I might run her as a yacht, and play the heavy swell," he would remark. "But, candidly, I like this kind of thing; it puts me on a level with the others, you know; and then it's handy for buying supplies, and keeping one in touch with the people." With this he would give you such a warming smile, and perhaps throw in free a handful of fishhooks, or a packet of safety matches, or a toothbrush. Indeed, apart from this invariable prodigality, his scale of prices was ridiculously low, and if you were a lady you could buy out the ship at half price. As for young Skiddy, the American consul, the bars in his case were lowered even more, and he was just asked to help himself; which young Skiddy did, though sparingly. Captain Satterlee took an immense fancy to this youthful representative of their common country, and treated him with an engaging mixture of respect and paternalism; and Skiddy, not to be behindhand, and dazzled, besides, by his elder's marked regard and friendship, threw wide the consular door, and constantly pressed on Satterlee the hospitality of a cot on the back veranda.

The captain professed to find it remarkable--which, indeed, it was--that a boy of twenty-six should have been intrusted with the welfare of so considerable a section of Samoa's white population. The roll of the consulate bore the names of thirty-eight Americans, not to speak of a thirty-ninth who was soon expected, over whom the young consul possessed extraordinary powers withheld from far higher posts in far more important countries. Young Skiddy, on a modest salary of two hundred dollars a month and a house rent-free, was supposed, if need be, to marry you, divorce you, try you for crimes and misdemeanors, and in extreme cases might even dangle you from the flagstaff in his front yard.

He had been very seldom called on, however, to use these extensive powers. In three years he had married as many couples, helped to baptize a half-caste baby, held an inquest on a dead sailor, bullied a Samoan army off his front grass, and had settled a disputed inheritance involving five acres of cocoanuts. This, of course, left him with some spare time on his hands, which, on the whole, he managed to get through with very tolerable enjoyment. But until the date of Captain Satterlee's arrival he had never had a friend, or at least so it seemed to him now in the retrospect. His official colleagues were out of the question--the standoffish Englishman, the sullen German, the grotesque Swede who held the highest judicial office. No, there was not the little finger of a friend in the whole galaxy. And elsewhere? Not a soul to whom one could give intimacy without the danger, almost the certainty, of its being abused. No wonder, then, that he turned to Satterlee, and grasped the hand of fellowship so warmly extended to him.

The little consul had never known such a man; he had never heard such talk; he had never before realized the extent and splendor of the world. Sitting in the cabin of the _Southern Belle_, often far into the night, he would give a rapt attention to this extraordinary being who had done everything and seen everything. Paris, London, Constantinople, New York, all were as familiar to Satterlee as the palm of his hand, and he had the story-telling gift that can throw a glamour over the humblest incident. Not that his incidents were often humble. On the contrary, in his mysterious suggestive fashion he let it be inferred that his bygone part had been a great one. He would offer dazzling little peeps, and then shut the slide; a chance reference that would make his hearer gasp; the adroit use of a mighty name, checked by a sudden, "Oh, hold on--I'm saying more than I ought to!" You felt, somehow, that to have roused the interest of this powerful personage was to insure your own career. With a turn of his hand he was capable of gratifying your wildest ambition. He had remarked your unusual capacity, and had quietly determined it should be given proper scope. When and where and how were to be settled later. These questions you left confidently to Satterlee. It was enough that you were informed, in those fine shades of which he was a master, that your day would surely come. On leaving Satterlee you walked on air without knowing exactly why; or rather Skiddy did, for by "you" I mean the little consul.

It is a sad commentary on human nature that it is so easily deceived. A glib tongue, an attractive manner, a few hundred dollars thrown carelessly about, and presto! you have the counterfeit of a Cecil Rhodes. We are not only willing to take people at their own valuation, but are ever ready to multiply that valuation by ten. Obtrude romance--rich, stirring romance--into the lives of commonplace people, and they instantly lose their heads. Romance, more than cupidity, is what attracts the gold-brick investor.

Of course, Satterlee was a poser, a fraud, a liar; the highest type of liar; the day-dreaming, well-read, genuinely inventive, highly imaginative, loving-it-for-its-own-sake liar. But to Skiddy every word he said was Gospel-true. He never doubted the captain for an instant. Life grew richer to him, stranger and more wonderful. It was like a personal distinction--a medal, or the thanks of Congress--that Satterlee should thus have singled him out. His gratitude was unbounded. He felt both humble and elated. His cup was brimming over.

Let not his credulity be counted against him. After all, he was not the only admirer of the captain. Did he not see Satterlee lionized by the Chief Justice and the rest of his brother officials; publicly honored by the head of the great German company; called to the bosom of both the missionary denominations? Was not all Apia, in fact, regardless of sex, creed, or nationality, acclaiming Satterlee to the skies, and vying among themselves for the privilege of entertaining him? Never, indeed, were there so many picnics, so many parties, such a constant succession of dances at the public hall. Even the king was galvanized into action, and, to the surprise of everyone, gave a sort of At Home, where Satterlee was the guest of honor, and received the second _kava_ cup. A half-caste couple, who before had barely held up their heads, sprang into social prominence by getting married under the direct patronage of the popular captain, and thus rallying to their visiting list all the rank, fashion, and beauty of Apia.

It was a delirious month. There was an event for almost every night of it. The strain on the half-caste band was awful. Miss Potter's millinery establishment worked night and day. Of a morning you couldn't find a lady on a front veranda who wasn't stitching and sewing and basting and cutting out. And the men! Why, in the social whirl few of them had time to sober up, and the sale of Leonard's soda water was unprecedented.

As the time began to draw near for the monthly mail from San Francisco, Satterlee got restless and talked regretfully of leaving. He gave a great P.P.C. bargain day on board the _Southern Belle_, where sandwiches and bottled beer were served to all comers, and goods changed hands at astonishing prices: coal oil at one seventy-five a case; hundred-pound kegs of beef at four dollars; turkey-red cotton at six cents a yard; square face at thirty cents a bottle; and similar cuts in all the standard commodities. There was no custom house in those days, and you were free to carry everything ashore unchallenged. A matter of eighty tons must have been landed all round the beach; and the pandemonium at the gangway, the crush and jostle in the trade room, and the steady hoisting out of fresh merchandise from the main hold, made a very passable South Sea imitation of a New York department store. At any rate, there was the same loss of temper, the same harassed expression on the faces of the purchasers, and the same difficulty in getting change. As like as not you had to take it--the change--in the form of Jews' harps, screw eyes, or anything small and handy that happened to be near by. It was the most lightning performance Apia had ever witnessed, and the captain carried it off in a brisk, smiling way, as though it was the best joke in the world, and he was only doing it all for fun.