Part 2

When the gray dawn spread across the open sea, there was no dancing speck afloat that could not be identified as an authentic Malaita craft upon its unlawful occasion. Gleason had vanished.

But that same gray dawn filtered down through mangrove leaves upon him. One of the houseboys had panted directions for a little streamlet he knew of. It oozed its way sluggishly out between unbroken banks of mangroves, and there was no village beside it. More, when the whaleboat pulled into it the mangroves were found to stretch their branches thirty or forty feet beyond the edge of the mud and to dip their farther ends unpleasantly into the stagnant, stinking stream. The whaleboat had been drawn far in beneath those branches, and its sides bedecked with green. It was thoroughly hidden.

But Gleason still shook with fear, though the filtering pale light seemed to take away some of the menace of the drums. Birds, too, awaking in the branches overhead, seemed to drown out a little of their rumbling threat. And as the mistiness of dawn faded into the colorful light of early morning, one by one the devil-devil drums ceased their booming.

But the mangrove mud stank noisomely, and little, many-times-deflected ripples from the outer surf sucked and gurgled among the tangled roots. The smell of mangrove mud filled his nostrils, and he waited to be discovered.

Crouched in the whaleboat, the paddlers and Gleason alike stared fearfully about them. The sun rose higher in the heavens. Mosquitoes swarmed about them. The soft and indefinite humming noise of a sunlit jungle arose to the high heavens. And all the coast was busy, looking to see where the white man might have hid.

Toward noon, Gleason saw one warrior. He came down to the water’s edge nearly half a mile upstream, where perhaps the mangroves gave place to a more wholesome growth. He saw him plainly. White circles of moistened lime had been daubed about his eyes. His hair was whitened with the same stuff. His ear-lobes had been stretched incredibly to hold a pleasing assortment of variegated knick-knacks, from a brass curtain ring to slender pig bones which projected at varied angles from his head.

He stood in plain sight for a long time, peering up and down the stream. Even his reflection was mirror-like on the upper water. But he did not move from the spot where he had first appeared. Mangrove swamps remain untrod, even on such occasions as this. Leaving aside the incredible toil traveling in them would entail, and the very real danger of being swallowed up entire, there are such things as mangrove ulcers which came from mangrove mud upon a man’s bare leg.

The warrior peered here and there and everywhere in silence, while Gleason eyed him in stark panic. Suddenly he went depressedly back into the jungle without any sign of interest or triumph, and Gleason nearly whimpered in relief. The drooping branches outside the boat had hidden it effectively.

* * * * *

But all that long, hot, malodorous afternoon he abode in fear. A canoe might slip into the stream at any instant. And the report of a single firearm, or the yell of a single man, would bring swarming hordes of warriors....

At dusk, Gleason’s heart stopped. A canoe did come in. It came in very softly and very quietly. There were four paddlers and one man sitting in the stern. This was in the short, abruptly ending twilight of the tropics. Gleason saw the canoe pass by not more than twenty yards away. Beneath the dropping mangrove roots the whaleboat was not seen, but there was enough light left for Gleason to recognize the man in the stern despite new and barbaric ornamentation. It was Maehoe.

He gazed behind him and seemed satisfied. And suddenly he brought up something from the bottom of the canoe and slipped it on. It was an immaculate white drill jacket. And he removed certain ornaments from about his ears and nose, and wiped the lime-streaks from about his eyes, and spoke to his paddlers.

Gleason could piece out the words from his knowledge of the _Pau_ dialect. But before this he had swung his revolver on the four houseboys he had impressed into service. With his eyes wild and staring, he warned them voicelessly that at their first word he would kill them. The words he pieced together of Maehoe’s talk increased his terror.

Maehoe had his own paddlers under a bond of fear. Henderson’s revolver was in his hand. And Maehoe was demanding if this was surely the waterway that one of the houseboys with Gleason knew of. A man answered, trembling, that it was. Maehoe ordered the paddlers to go on upstream.

His white drill jacket dwindled to a speck which--so rapidly did the twilight deepen--was already no more than a gray blur when he vanished past the spot where the warrior had been seen that forenoon. Gleason did not wait for the further deepening of the night. In a racked whisper he ordered his paddlers to clear the whaleboat of the branches that had decked it and to make for the open sea once more.

Sheer horror was almost paralyzing Gleason now. The whaleboat lifted to the first of the ocean swells and made for far offshore. Night rolled across the face of the sea and swallowed up all the world. The whaleboat headed due north, for the open water beyond the coast.

But a dull booming set up behind it. Almost instantly the booming was duplicated to the right and to the left. The whaleboat had been seen before night hid it.

There followed a nightmare of terror. Three times in the next two hours the war canoes went swiftly on past the whaleboat, with paddles splashing in the haste of the paddlers. Once Gleason saw the dim outline of a horrible carved prow with the wide, white-ringed eyes of the god that was its figurehead. Once a four-man canoe blundered slap into the whaleboat and Gleason sobbed as the spurting flames of his revolver split the darkness, and sobbed again as a swimming man from the overturned canoe screeched horribly when the paddlers beat him away from the gunwale with their oar-blades.

The whaleboat turned back for the shore, then. It headed at a panic-stricken rate in the direction of Henderson’s island plantation. That was the last course it would be expected to take, because safety for Gleason lay no nearer than Uras Cove to the northwest. And Gleason, sick with terror in the stem, heard the rushing war-boats streaking for the site of the combat and heard them yelling to one another before they scattered to hunt again.

Of Maehoe he heard nothing. He knew, however, that that questing person had doffed his white jacket and had replaced a nose-plug in the cartilage between his nostrils, and had redecorated his distended ear-lobes with divers gruesome ornaments and was in the thick of the hunt. Maehoe was a native of this part of the world. He was not safe, of course, among the man-hunters of another village than his own, but, armed as he was, and with a white man afloat being hunted by war-boats from half a dozen villages, he would be ignored until the greater game was captured.

Dodging, drifting shadows, sweating alike with exertion and with fear, those in the whaleboat made but little progress. They reached the shingle beach of the plantation island two hours before dawn. By daybreak the whaleboat was hidden. During the day Gleason saw the still smoking ruins of the house and the store. He did not see where Henderson was buried, of course. Maehoe would have attended to the hiding of that burial place. A white man’s head is a white man’s head, however it be come by, and Maehoe on deserting the plantation would take precautions lest his late master provide a trophy for some devil-devil house ashore.

Maehoe came back. A canoe became visible not later than five o’clock in the afternoon, paddling steadily and openly along the sea. Its occupants were plainly savage; befrizzed, bepainted, and going about the business of paddling with the calm practicality of the salt-water boy.

The canoe drove up to the shingle beach and landed. The man in the stem shepherded the others before him--Gleason saw a glint of metal in his hand--up among the trees. Out of sight of the water, that man donned a white drill jacket and moved on, still driving the others before him. Gleason saw gnarly and lean and astoundingly naked-looking legs beneath the white jacket. Three times before sunset and darkness he caught a glimpse of white among the trees, moving about as if looking for signs that Gleason had returned to the ruins.

Gleason cursed himself in a whisper for having had the courage to go and look. A white man’s boot-tracks in fresh ashes would show clearly. When darkness fell and he saw a flambeau lighted, and saw it moving steadily as if Maehoe had at last found his trail and was following it by torchlight, Gleason cursed hysterically.

He drove his paddlers to their work once more. He dared not attempt to make Uras Cove again. All the coast was up and hunting him. The best--the only chance for him was to head southwest, heading past Sunaku’s territory for Maramasike Pass, across it, and to the mission at Saa.

He struck out on the course as darkness settled down upon the ocean and all the world. And half an hour later, with the dull reverberations of many drums dying away below the horizon, one of the paddlers panted.

“Marster! One-fella _irora_!”

Gleason strained his ears and heard it. It was following!

* * * * *

Utter blackness lay over all the world. To the right there was the long, low pestilential coast where Sunaku held sway, where any white man was fair game and Gleason would be prized more than most. To the left was open sea, from which only swells came rolling in unendingly. Ahead was emptiness. Behind was the dull rumble of devil-devil drums in half a dozen villages whose warriors were hunting Gleason--and, nearer, the splashing paddles of a canoe. By the splashings and the tempo, the paddlers were weary to exhaustion. But the canoe drew steadily nearer.

Gleason swung off his course and cursed his men in a whisper. He let the boat rock and roll in the darkness without a paddle lifted, and the following canoe went on past. And then the whaleboat sped on toward the shore to resume its course.

But presently the dreary splashing of paddles in the hands of exhausted men sounded once more in the darkness. A voice called, startlingly close. Maehoe’s voice. In a frenzy, Gleason shot at it.

And that shot was heard on shore.

In half an hour the heavens were echoing the dull, monotonous booming of a devil-devil drum ahead, and word was passing through the bush in the mysterious fashion of bush-wireless, of Gleason’s presence and his new course. And, of course, the sea was swarming with hunting war-boats.

* * * * *

Once, before dawn, Gleason had to fight. He got away by a miracle, but with only four paddlers left, and he had a fresh wound in his side and was literally mad with fear. A land breeze was blowing now and the whaleboat crept along under sail because four men could not handle it. It was so close to the shore that the splashing of waves among the mangrove roots was plainly audible. Also audible were certain hunting-cries upon the water. And--and this was the thing that crazed Gleason--in the whaleboat’s wake and growing nearer with desperate slowness there was the sound of paddles being dipped by exhausted, driven men.

When in fine irony the whaleboat grounded on the sandspit beyond Cape Kini and the sail cracked thunderously, Gleason sobbed. His remaining paddlers waited in apathetic despair. He saw the shore looming up darker and more forbidding than even the sea, and the whaleboat lifted giddily and crashed again on the sandbank, and a voice sounded behind him, nearer than the cries of the hunting war-boats....

Gleason splashed over the side, shaking in terror. He ran blindly, fighting the swells that tried to trip him, gasping hoarsely in sheer panic, fighting his way to the beach. There was little or no surf. The swells oozed up on the steeply slanting beach and retreated almost soundlessly. Gleason fought his way clear of them and plunged into the dark trees, sobbing as he ran. He tripped and fell and picked himself up, and ran and tripped and fell again.

The sound of the distant devil-devil drum filled him with horror. He ran on hysterically. He was still running at dawn, when the drum slowed up and stopped. And when the sun rolled up overhead Gleason was three miles inland, shaking, with his revolvers naked in his hands, staring wildly all about him.

He was up among the foothills of the inner mountains, by the bank of a swiftly flowing little stream. He was many days’ journey from the nearest white man, in the territory of the one native chief who would pay most lavishly for his head. Jungle surrounded him on every side. In that jungle, as soon as the deserted whaleboat was found, there would be eager hunting-parties searching....

Gleason wept hysterically. He raved. He very probably prayed. And very suddenly he slept, for the first time in two nights and two days.

* * * * *

He slept, it may be, for two hours. No more. There was a crackling of underbrush and a rustling of leaves. Gleason woke in a cold panic and stared with glassy eyes. He saw long, gnarly legs, astoundingly naked-looking, moving beneath a trailing cloud of foliage. Gleason’s revolver came up, held stiffly in a hand of ice.

He saw a frizzy, rounded head. A not particularly high forehead. The invincibly sad, dark-brown eyes of the Malaita bushboy. A wide, flat, and very black nose with a strip of dangling cartilage where Maehoe had discarded a nose-plug on his adoption of civilization.

Maehoe stepped forward, looking at footprints in the mud at the stream’s edge. He had a revolver in his hand, and there was a package strapped about his waist from which projected the ends of half a dozen dynamite sticks, all fused and ready. He stepped into the stream, to cross.

In pure hysterical rage, Gleason shot him, knowing that the shot would be heard and would bring Sunaku’s warriors eagerly to the spot.

[Illustration: Gleason raised his weapon to shoot again.]

Maehoe collapsed in the stream. He wallowed feebly in the water, then summoned superhuman strength and crawled ashore. Dead-white and rigid, Gleason raised his weapon to shoot again.

“One-fella marster,” gasped Maehoe, “he say fetch ’m one-fella Gleason ’m guns, ’m dynamite. Tell ’m shoot hell out of bushboy an’ give plantation money ’m one-fella white Mary _pore_.”

He struggled to hand over his bundle. Gleason gagged. Henderson had told Maehoe to give Gleason the guns and the dynamite and to ask him to quell the boys and sell his plantation and send the money to his daughter. This was what Maehoe had chased him for! This was what--“

“’M go away plenty damn quick,” gasped Maehoe, shoving the bundle toward Gleason. “’M bad fella bushboy come. I shoot, all same one-fella Native Constabulary....”

Gleason took the bundle in stiff fingers. Gleason’s eyes were glassy. Maehoe grinned at him, a pain-racked, desperate grin.

“Your nerves bad, Gleason,” he pronounced in a swagger, in Henderson’s own identical tones. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth. But no use staying in blue funk. Cherrup.”

And then he raised his revolver feebly as Gleason heard a crackling in the underbrush some little distance away. He thought he heard the pattering of feet.

He was right. He did.

* * * * *

Gleason fled. He fumbled with the dynamite sticks. They were wet. The dynamite was useless. He flung it aside. He plucked at the revolver shells. Wrong! For Maehoe had the revolver, and was essaying to hold off the pursuing bushboys as a desirous member of the Native Constabulary Force of the Solomon Island Protectorate should do. But Maehoe was dead before the first bushboy appeared.

An arrow slithered across the way before Gleason. It missed him by inches only. He snapped a shot from his own weapon and panted on. He saw a hideous face, tattooed out of all semblance of humanity, with goggle-like circles painted in white about its eyes. It vanished before he could fire. He saw another, and another....

Gleason began to scream. He emptied his revolvers and had no more shells. He flung the useless things aside and began to run. And suddenly he was laughing. Henderson had said, “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” He’d repeated it and re-repeated it until it became a tiresome saw. Henderson was wrong.

Gleason howled with hysterical laughter as he fled like a deer from the men who hunted him earnestly. Even Maehoe had quoted the thing at him. “The wicked flee when no man pursueth.” But they were wrong, now. He was fleeing, all right, but men were pursuing him. The jungle was full of the noise of the chase. Men were pursuing him, all right....

And they caught him.

[Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the February 1929 issue of _Adventure Trails_ magazine.]