Part 1

[Illustration: He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a rib was broken.]

MAEHOE

By Murray Leinster

A brutal white, a faithful black, and Fear act out their part in this drama of the Solomon Islands.

The wicked flee when no man pursueth.--Proverbs 28:1

This is the story of Gleason and Maehoe and of Fear, who makes a bad third in any company. Henderson doesn’t really count, because he died of black-water fever some three weeks after Gleason met him. And old Sunaku--he was killed, later, when a British warship shelled his village for trying to cut off a trading schooner--is a very minor character. All you really have to remember is that Maehoe desired, passionately, to become a member of the Native Constabulary Force of the Solomon Islands Protectorate, and that Henderson was entirely too fond of one Biblical quotation.

Gleason had no idea of the triangular relationship he was entering when he landed his whaleboat on the shingle beach below Henderson’s house and staggered through the surf supported by his four surviving paddlers. He had a spear wound in his shoulder, and he thought a rib was broken--it hurt excruciatingly as one of his boat-boys helped him up the beach--and he was a mass of minor wounds and bruises.

The four boat-boys were in at least as bad a case. A particularly filthy rag about the arm of one of them was stained unpleasantly by the wound made by an irregularly shaped slug fired at close range. A trade gas-pipe gun had fired the slug as part of its charge of half a handful of assorted hardware. Another of the boys--they were To Ba’ita boys, from the north of Malaita--was limping with a gaping hole in his leg. The other two were merely slashed, cut, pounded, scratched, and generally battered, as the survivors of the defeated side in the nastiest kind of jungle fighting are so very apt to be. Those injuries had come about when Gleason was trying to rob a devil-devil house of its trophies for strictly commercial reasons. The whole tale would be unpleasant. But he had gotten caught in a jungle path and he and his boat-boys had to fight nearly two miles to get back to the water. The boys, being from north Malaita, rated as potential long pig in south Malaita, and fought like demons to get away. Gleason got away with them by a miracle, but he lost his schooner, and after Henderson patched him up he was very unphilosophic about the affair.

He gave Henderson an entirely fictitious account of his misfortune, redounding much to the discredit of the Sunaku mentioned a little while back. And for days he lived in terror lest Sunaku send a raiding party after him.

* * * * *

Henderson laughed at that idea. He had a houseboy, one Maehoe, who had told him truthfully that Sunaku had a _tabu_ laid upon his ever passing Cape Kini on a war-party. A _tabu_, you know, is a sort of ceremonial prohibition, a jinx, a talismanic warning against ever having anything to do with the thing _tabued_. It differs for every man; it is laid upon him by the devil-devil doctor; and it may range from a totemic prohibition against eating the flesh of his name-animal--this sort of _tabu_ is given a new-born infant on those mornings when the devil-devil doctor is feeling low and devoid of originality--to warnings of dire disaster if he ever happens to speak to one of his maternal second cousins when the moon is new. Not very reasonable things, those _tabus_, but absolutely binding and frequently convenient--as in this case.

Henderson had picked out his island as a site for a copra plantation after learning about Sunaku’s tabu. It made him safe, because nobody else wanted to poach on Sunaku’s territory and Sunaku wouldn’t raid himself. Henderson was as safe as, he felt, so seeing Gleason full of terror he tried to laugh him out of it.

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” he would quote maliciously. “Your boys sweated blood for a good ten miles after Sunaku gave up the chase. One of them is likely to run up his toes, by the way, Gleason. I give him rum and he gets better. I stop it, and he gets worse. Dammit, I wish he’d make up his mind before he drinks all the trade-rum in stock.” To which Gleason replied unpleasantly that he did not give a hoot in hell whether the boy died or not. Gleason was still weak, though growing stronger, and Henderson didn’t see that he was crazy with envy of a man who was safe and prosperous and ought to turn out rich when his newly planted coconut trees came into bearing.

“Your nerves are bad, Gleason,” Henderson would tell him tolerantly, and add, grinning, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But there’s no use staying in a blue funk. Cheer up!”

He would march on his way, whistling, while Gleason ground his teeth. Henderson had a kid back in school in England, and he had it figured out that he would be a rich man just about the time a lot of money would mean a great deal to a girl. He had it all planned out how he’d spend his money and have a wonderful time buying frocks for her and so on, and taking her about the Continent.

But that hasn’t anything to do with Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.

* * * * *

Maehoe was the head houseboy at Henderson’s--the boy who’d found out about Sunaku’s personal and private _tabu_. He rather attached himself to Gleason while Gleason was getting well. His costume consisted of an immaculate, rather short white jacket and a gee-string, and he had at some time past discarded a nose-plug and several ear-ornaments in token of his ambition to become a member of the Native Constabulary of the Solomon Islands Protectorate. If Gleason had been otherwise he might have been amused by Maehoe.

A round and frizzy head of hair would appear above the flooring of the veranda. It would be followed by a not particularly high forehead, the dark-brown and invincibly sad eyes of the Malaita bushboy, and then a wide, flat, very black nose with a dangling strip of cartilage where the nose-plug had been removed on Maehoe’s adoption of civilization. There would follow, then, in quick succession a wide and beaming grin, a thick and corded neck, an absolutely immaculate white drill jacket, and lean and gnarly brown legs--astoundingly long and very naked-looking--with many scars from the scratches of thorns and underbrush. Last of all, wide, splay feet, with each and every toe prehensile, would step up on the veranda, and Maehoe would beam more widely still and say in a hushed voice:

“I fetch’m one-fella peg, Sar?”

Gleason generally took the peg. But he did not humor Maehoe by listening to a description of the glories of the Native Constabulary Force of the Solomon Islands Protectorate, delivered with a vast gusto in an amazing beche-de-mer agglomeration of supposedly English syllables. Maehoe had been refused for the constabulary for some reason he could never fathom, but hopefully anticipated a reversal of the refusal at some future time. Henderson had promised to speak in his favor, and Henderson listened to him now and again, wherefore he worshipped Henderson and served him with an honesty that in a Malaita bushboy was superhuman.

But Gleason hated him cordially, especially after a certain morning when he felt a little stronger and tried to walk about a bit. Henderson was inland, swearing at a labor gang that was clearing more land for the planting of yet more coconut trees. Gleason walked down to the beach, looked nervously at Cape Kini--he was always a little nervous about Sunaku--and went aimlessly over toward the barrack sheds, and there he suddenly heard a voice talking in English behind a bush.

Gleason moved suspiciously to where he could look. He saw Maehoe going through apparently aimless evolutions--now here, saying something, and now there, replying. It was seconds before he realized that Maehoe was practising. He was imitating his master and Gleason with great solemnity and for his own personal pleasure.

“The wicked flee when no man pursueth,” announced Maehoe solemnly, maltreating the words in a fashion no possible print could reproduce. “Your boys sweated blood for good ten miles after Sunaku gave up chase. One them likely turn up toes, Gleason--”

He went on with a vast solemnity duplicating Henderson’s speech and even his intonation with a surprising fidelity. Gleason watched suspiciously. Maehoe finished with Henderson’s lines, his face shining with pleasure, and went over to a spot from where he solemnly swore in Gleason’s own terms that he did not give a hoot in hell whether the boy died or not. And then he returned and solemnly repeated, “Your nerves bad, Gleason. The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But no use staying in blue funk. Cherrup.”

He beamed at his own exactitude and wiped the sweat off his face, happy. He considered, and set about going soberly over the whole business again.

* * * * *

Gleason walked away, shaking with the fretful sort of rage that a white man sometimes feels in the Solomons. It comes of too much fever, too many pegs, and too much brooding. Gleason should have laughed, instead of thinking savagely of innumerable forms of insult Maehoe’s private diversion seemed to him to constitute. Or he could have done as Henderson did when he told him about it. Henderson chuckled for half an hour and devised a speech full of incredible words and involved phrases, which he repeated after that whenever he could be sure Maehoe was listening. And Henderson tried to eavesdrop and discover Maehoe struggling with the new and to him unpronounceable words.

He did not succeed. Henderson came down with black-water fever about three days later, and in a week he was dead.

While he was ill, though, Gleason saw one other side of Maehoe that eventually led to the triangular drama of Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.

It was the plantation boys, of course. Gleason should have taken them in hand when Henderson went flat on his back, and kept the vice sweated out of them. Idleness is not good for anybody, and especially for recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation. These boys were bushboys, from salt water villages, and two days of idleness gave them time to remember much devilment and speculate hopefully on more.

Two days after Henderson developed black-water fever, Gleason’s four paddlers came shivering to the house and begged to be allowed to stay there. They were To Ba’ita boys, and the labor gangs were south Malaita men.

“’M fella boy talk too damn much _Pau_ talk,” their leader explained fearfully to Gleason. “I think’m _kai-kai_ ’m To Ba’ita boy plenty damn quick.”

Gleason chewed at his nails. The thing to do, of course, was strap on an extra revolver and go over to the barrack sheds and fill each several and separate man with an unholy fear. It could be done especially with the four paddlers to guard his back. Three of them were strong enough to fight, anyhow.

Gleason did not. He assigned sleeping quarters to his men underneath the house, and went and took a peg. During the next hour or so he took several more. And he fretfully stopped Maehoe, who was about to give Henderson quinine. Quinine is almost a specific for ordinary fevers, but it is rank poison in black-water.

Next day--three days after Henderson went down--there was a tumult down at the store-shed. A houseboy fired off a rifle and fled. A knot of scared figures plunged for the bush and vanished. They’d tried to loot the store.

And when recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation try to loot the storehouse, it is then time for any white man who wants to keep his head on his shoulders to take some action. The proper and approved action--though it is strictly unlawful--is to flog every man who may conceivably be suspected of the attempt. And it is a very good idea to knock the others about a bit and generally act as if you are fairly itching for them to try to rush you. And of course, thereafter you must work them until they drop in their tracks--bullying them the while--and make their lives a burden to them for some time to come. Loving kindness is not understood or appreciated by salt water boys who contemplate the ownership of a white man’s head with a yearning wistfulness.

But Gleason had a chill, which may or may not have been the sort of chill that comes from a blue funk on top of a fever-racked system. Gleason did nothing whatever except go in half a dozen times to see if Henderson was getting over his delirium with prospects of being able to get up. And he stopped Maehoe from giving him quinine. He was just in time.

The thing was that Sunaku had scared Gleason down to the marrow of his soul. A timid man either gets out of the Solomons or he doesn’t last long. Gleason had become timid. He had lost his nerve because of the exceeding narrowness of his escape from Sunaku.

* * * * *

In consequence, when on the fourth day of Henderson’s illness the inhabitants of the barrack sheds were observed to be talking excitedly, Gleason went and took a peg. When, later, they vanished suddenly, he went and took a couple more. In justice to him, it should also be remarked that during the next hour he stopped Maehoe for the fiftieth time from giving Henderson quinine.

But at two o’clock in the afternoon Gleason’s fear of Maehoe began. The plantation boys had actually tried to rush the house.

A howl from Gleason’s four paddlers underneath the house was warning. Dark figures with improvised clubs were racing across the house-clearing, yelling. A few knives were in evidence, and many tools, and at least one flint-lock pistol smuggled painstakingly through the entire recruiting process and hidden in somebody’s barrack-box.

Gleason started shooting in a panic. He dropped one--two--three of them. His four paddlers swarmed up, gray with fear and frenziedly ready to fight. The wave of frizzy-haired, nose-plugged caricatures of humanity came on, screeching. Gleason shot crazily.

And Maehoe came out on the veranda with a box of dynamite in his hands and one of Henderson’s cheroots between his teeth. He hadn’t told Gleason about fusing the dynamite. Gleason would have stopped him, not trusting natives with civilized weapons.

[Illustration: Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a fuse-end, and flung it.]

Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a fuse-end, and flung it. Before the stick went off he had flung another. With a handful of sticks in his hand, he ran around the veranda lighting fuses as he ran and flinging the dynamite down among the attackers.

The sticks made an awful racket when they went off. The house rocked from the detonations. Then the veranda floor lifted and shook. The dynamite box jolted from the floor a full six inches, coming down with a terrific crash. Gleason’s four paddlers howled and dived over the railing. But the dynamite did not go off and Gleason’s courage came back suddenly. He began to shoot with steadier hands, putting bullets in black backs that were running away again. And it may be that the howls that followed the explosions helped to steady his hands.

There was a final detonation and a last chorus of screams. Maehoe came back. He saw Gleason, full of courage now, firing vengefully at fleeing figures. Maehoe went inside the house. A moment later Gleason heard him blubbering.

Henderson had heard the shooting and the screams. The sound had penetrated even his delirium. He had gotten up and tried to come out with a revolver in his hand. He hadn’t quite made it. Maehoe was lifting him back to his bunk.

Fifteen minutes later Maehoe came out again, wearing his immaculate white drill jacket and his gee-string and nothing else except a cheroot between his teeth. He was sobbing softly to himself and his eyes were fixed. He took a double handful of dynamite sticks from the box and went on down into the bush, his gnarly, lean brown legs astonishingly prominent below the white jacket.

Five minutes later Gleason heard a dynamite stick go off. Screams followed it. Ten minutes more, and another went off. And then, for an hour, at odd and irregular intervals there came the crisp, crackling detonations of dynamite, curiously echoed among the tree trunks. Usually, after an explosion, there were howls and outcries.

Then Maehoe came back. His white drill jacket was stained with blood. He limped a little, and there was a monstrous bruise on one temple where a flung club had nearly downed him.

He looked at Gleason with dumb agony in his eyes, in the sort of dull apathy which comes over a bushboy after he has gone into a frenzy akin to hysteria, has done a lot of damage, and has accomplished nothing.

“Fella marster go die plenty damn quick,” he said dully. “No got one-fella _mane ni ha’a mauria_. No fetch ’em stuff _puru puru_. Fella marster go die plenty damn quick.”

He went into the house with dragging steps, leaving Gleason biting at his finger-ends. Maehoe thought Henderson was dying because there was no doctor and he hadn’t been given the stuff from the bottle--quinine. The dynamite and his hysterical hunting of his fellow bushboys had been for the purpose of working off the rage and despair that filled him.

And Gleason, with the hair raising on his head, began to wonder what Maehoe would do when Henderson died. He would blame it all on Gleason for preventing his giving Henderson quinine. And Gleason began to feel a rather horrible fear.

* * * * *

When Maehoe desperately got out the medicine bottle that afternoon and stared dumbly at Gleason, begging for permission to administer the medicine that had made Henderson well of other fevers, Gleason shivered and went out of the room. He was afraid to stop Maehoe again.

And that night, because he knew Henderson was going to die, Gleason ran away in his whaleboat. He took his own four paddlers and four of the houseboys, whom he impressed into service by flourishing a revolver. Maehoe knew nothing of his departure. He was hovering over Henderson’s bunk, dumbly miserable, waiting for signs of improvement in Henderson’s condition from the quinine. And quinine is, of course, rank poison in black-water fever.

And that was that. Gleason should have gotten away nicely. He should have made Uras Cove in about four days. There is a missionary there, and unregenerate persons have convinced the neighboring tribesmen that the particularly potent devils of the white men will consume the vitals, bit by bit, of any man who harms a hair of his head--of which conviction, however, the missionary is wholly ignorant. Gleason would have been safe with him until a trading schooner came along.

But news travels fast in the bush. All that had gone on on Henderson’s island since Gleason’s landing and before, was known for an astonishing distance along the mainland. And with astonishing speed that news was kept up to date. No white man knows how news does travel in the bush, but it goes, and when it is news of a white man unarmed or unnerved or ill there are innumerable bepainted, befrizzed and tattooed young warriors who inspect their weapons and dream high dreams.

So when Gleason’s whaleboat blundered into a belated fishing-canoe some ten miles to the northwest of Henderson’s place, there was an instant reaction. The fishing-canoe challenged. A To Ba’ita boy answered. There was excited chatter in the fishing-canoe, caused by his foreign manner of speech. Gleason warned it off in a white man’s curt voice. And the fishing-canoe fled.

That opened the second act of the drama of Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.

* * * * *

Five minutes after the fishing-canoe had vanished into utter darkness, a few puffs of wind came from nowhere. Gleason had a sail hoisted and prepared to beat his way up to the northwest. The boat was intended for surf work and was a clumsy sailer, but would make better time under sail than with unskilled oarsmen. The puffs of wind continued, enough to tease him with the hope of a steady breeze at any minute, but not enough to make much headway. It was utterly dark. A long, oily swell came from offshore and pounded dully on the beach--where there was a beach--and gurgled among mangrove roots where there was none. There was a thin film of cloud overhead, just enough to obscure most of the stars and make the world abysmally dark and to make the boat seem hideously and horribly alone.

Then, from a little distance behind, there arose a dull and monotonous throbbing thunder. Devil-devil drums, sending out a general call for any devils that might be in the neighborhood to call at the devil-devil house and receive instruction. Lights appeared, racing about the village that housed the drums. Great flaring flambeaux sent pin points of reflected light dancing upon the distant smooth swells. There were yells and howls, and there was much activity ashore. Two long war-boats--_la’os_--were being slid down into the dark water.

They went swiftly into the outer darkness, beyond the shore. A white man had been sighted in a whaleboat. A To Ba’ita boy had answered a challenge. The white man had warned the fishing-canoe off instead of cursing it or desiring to trade with it. Therefore it was the _mane maala_, the wounded man from Henderson’s.

The news went swiftly through the bush. The puffs of wind died down. The whaleboat fell off from her course and rocked and rolled soggily in the long smooth swells. Gleason began to feel little prickles at the base of his skull. He was being hunted.

His paddlers were at work again, trying to use their unaccustomed oars silently, when there came through the night a second dull and distant booming. Far ahead this was, and it meant that another village was awake and preparing to scour the surface of the sea in its greater war canoes. Treasure was afloat. A white man’s head, and the white man proven not invulnerable nor over-dangerous. And it seemed to Gleason, sweating suddenly from terror, that he heard yet other drums, more distant still.

All the dark coast began to boom with drums, both before and behind the whaleboat. The drums, of course, were summoning the local devils to be sent to raise hell with Gleason until the war-boats found him. This sound tactical use of devils is universal in the Solomons. And every village launched its boats, and every boat hunted for Gleason with a panting enthusiasm, and Gleason went into the bluest of blue funks.

He drove his boatmen, whimpering with terror, straight for the shore and apparently for the very stronghold of his enemies. The sensible thing would have been to stand out for the open sea. But one of Henderson’s boat-boys kept Gleason’s panic from being altogether suicide.

* * * * *

All night long the devil-devil drums beat on, and all night long the smoky fires flared in devil-devil houses, and all night long the war-boats hunted tirelessly. The news spread farther and yet farther as the night wore on, until all the coast was awake and aware of what was going on, and all the coast was joining in the hunt. But Gleason was not caught.