CHAPTER II
THE STORY OF THE SOUTH SEA ISLANDER
SAYERS spoke first, chewing his words as if his mouth were half full, his eyes half closed in scrunity of Chalmers.
“How long have you been here?” The tone was full of suspicion.
Chalmers put his finger to his lips and motioned with his head toward the bed.
“He's dead,” he said.
The native woman brushed by Sayers with a loud wail of Auwe! The next instant she had thrust them both into the inner room, and shut the door upon them. Chalmers heard the outer door thrown open; another cry of Auwe! Then came the swift scurrying of curious feet upon the porch. In the confusion he slipped the pearl into his vest pocket.
“Let's get out of this,” said Sayers. “She'll attend to it. The whole crowd of them will be howling all over the place in two minutes.”
He led the way through the back door, down a flight of steps and through a gap in the ragged hibiscus hedge to the road. Aloha Alley was wide awake now with all the native excitement of hysteria over death.
“Where do you want to go?” asked Chalmers. “Make it somewhere close by.” He was in no mood to walk far with Sayers at any time and his distaste of the man had heightened with the look of fear the dead man had shown at the sound of his voice. “Isn't there something we can do for him?”
“I'll 'phone the coroner,” said Sayers callously. “She'll handle the rest of it. He came from the same place as she did. Let's go to the Art Saloon. I want to have a talk with you.”
As they went, Sayers surveyed Chalmers with constant side looks of suspicion. Chalmers realized that this was bred of the doubt in Sayers's mind as to how much of his talk with his wife had penetrated the door. This advantage he determined to keep. There was no doubt in his mind now that there was a real story that tied up with Sayers's unusual hospitality to Taroi and the pearl the dying man had given him.
Arrived at the Art Saloon they took one of the private snuggeries and Sayers called for drinks. At his request, the Chinese boy brought two bottles, gin for Sayers and beer for Chalmers.
Native fashion, Sayers drank his liquor neat, avidly, with a desire to get not so much the taste but the kick of the raw spirits. Excess had already trade-marked him. Powerful of build, still of some athletic prowess, his general condition was typified by the white duck suits he wore, constantly renewed by his wife's laundering, yet always limp and crumpled as if he slept in them.
His head, nearly bald, was frizzed with ginger-colored hair, his eyebrows showed faintly and the eyelids were scant in the red rims that framed shifty eyes the color of dishwater. Freckles and blotches covered the skin of face, neck and hands, the latter to the last joint of the stubby fingers. Broken veins showed purple along the lines of his jaw and flecked his nose, which had been battered in boxing contests. His teeth were yellow and distinctly apart behind full lips, half colored by a bristly sandy mustache. He walked and sat with a slouch.
Occasionally he showed flashes of good breeding. His articles, despite their sporting slang, had all the distinctions of an educated man. One quality that showed strangely amid his sordidness was a love of music coupled to an intimate knowledge of the art that had seen him detailed as critic to whatever musical affairs were given that were really worth while.
Chalmers, with the rest who gave any thought to the matter, set him down as the ne'er-do-well of a well-bred Australian family, who had developed the degenerate streak in his nature by self-indulgence, slumping year by year as he lost caste with his own race.
He was game. Chalmers knew that from yachting episodes. But his sporting instincts had deteriorated to shiftiness, though he kept up in talk and writing an appearance of playing square and, as a judge of sporting events, he was eminently an expert.
A love of fair play held Chalmers from a close analysis of the other's faults. There were fifteen years between them, and their thoughts and modes of living held little in common. At present he enjoyed the game he was playing, to outwit Sayers in craftiness and get lie story he was convinced was in existence.
“You didn't tell me how long you were in the room,” said Sayers, elbows on the table, his tumbler in his hand, a quarter full of raw gin, his colorless eyes covertly watching Chalmers' face.
“I hardly know. Several minutes. I heard you talking and was coming through when Taroi called for water. He was in a bad way, as you know, and died practically in my arms.”
“I thought you were on your vacation. Funny I didn't hear you.”
“You were talking pretty loudly.”
Sayers grunted.
“I didn't suppose any one was in my front room, listening.”
Chalmers ignored the suggestion. He took the pearl from his pocket and set it between them on the dark wood of the table. Under the electric lights it seemed to give off a shimmer of iridescence, as the down shows on a peach. Sayers' eyes glittered greedily and his fingers twitched as he reached to take up the gem. Chalmers forestalled him by putting it in his own palm.
“Taroi gave me this,” he said.
“He meant it for me.” Sayers put out his hand.
“He said it was not for you. He was afraid of you. What had you been doing to him, Sayers?”
“Doing! Didn't I take him in from those charity-mongers at the Home and treat him like a white man? I got a doctor for him, my wife waited on him hand and foot and the ungrateful Kanaka dog held out on me. That pearl belongs to me by all rights, Chalmers. I want it.”
He thrust his face across the table, his jaw stuck out, his fists clenched, his eyes narrowed, every inch the bully. Chalmers had no fear of him physically; mentally he felt himself the superior of the two.
“He didn't want you to have it, Sayers. I don't know why he gave it to me except that he knew I was friendly. You must have done something to make him dislike you.”
“I did nothing, I tell you, but look out for him. The beggar didn't want to talk—I may have coaxed him a bit.”
Chalmers mentally glimpsed Sayers urging his wife to bully all he knew out of the dying man, burning up with fever and desire for rest and quiet.
“Who's going to pay for his funeral, I'd like to know?” blurted Sayers. “Who's going to pay for the doctor and his medicine?”
“I fancy you got enough out of him to make it worth your while,” said Chalmers. “But the pearl will pay for his funeral. I'll see to that—and a good one. It must be worth a hundred dollars or so.”
Sayers snorted in disgust.
“A hundred. It's worth five if it's worth a cent. And—” He broke off short. “There's no need to waste expenses on him; it wasn't his pearl.”
“How do you know it wasn't?”
Sayers sat back, emptied his glass, poured himself another measure, emptied that and once more leaned across the table confidentially.
“I don't know how much you know, Chalmers,” he began, “or how much you've guessed. But I've had you in mind already over this affair—there's nothing crooked about it,” he said hastily, as he noted Chalmers' face. “It's a clear open and shut proposition. I don't imagine you want to grind away for the Times all your life, do you?”
“What is it?” asked Chalmers.
“It's your big chance and mine,” answered Sayers. “The chance of a lifetime.”
“Go ahead,” said Chalmers.
“You can navigate, can't you?” asked Sayers.
The question seemed irrelevant, but Chalmers answered it.
“You ought to know,” he said. “I took the Manuahi up to the coast and sailed her down in the trans-Pacific race, trick and trick with Captain McFarland. I passed the Board in San Francisco for the fun of the thing and I hold my ticket. Why?”
“That's where you come in. I've got to have some one who can navigate and one who's interested in the deal,” answered Sayers. “You'll see why, in a minute.”
Chalmers lit his pipe and sat back comfortably. His news sense had justified itself. Already he felt himself crossing the threshold of the commonplace, sure that the story held for him a personal element, subconsciously inclined already to listen favorably to the proposition that Sayers, his voice lowered and full of concentration, was unfolding.
“I WAS at the wharf when the Lehua came in, that trip,” said Sayers. “Honamaku was on board, coming over for the swimming-races next week; but I passed up a talk with him for the story of the wreck. I knew enough of the Solomon dialect to talk to Taroi a bit.
“The others were too near being make to talk, but Taroi had chirped up with the soup and champagne they'd been feeding him. They took him up to the Sailors' Home and the others to the Queen's Hospital. One of 'em died that night and the two others next day. I volunteered to get Faleta—that's my wife—to interpret, and they were glad to let her.
“The Lehua people didn't know much outside of having picked them up, drifting in the Molokai Channel, Taroi trying to signal with an oar he was too weak to lift and the rest in the bottom of the boat, starved and nutty with thirst. No name on the whaleboat, no papers, nothing for identification.”
Chalmers nodded as Sayers poured himself a drink.
“Seventeen days from French Frigate Shoals—four hundred miles,” he comment ed. “They must have been blown down by the trades and then back again in the kona.”
“Here's the part of the story you don't know,” continued Sayers, “aside from what you may have overheard today. Taroi got delirious up at the Home. By the time I had Faleta up there he was talking rot, but I got enough sense out of it to wise her up to listen and keep quiet herself. He was rolling his eyes and chucking himself over the bed with his temperature getting higher all the time, and the doc' told us to come back when he sent for us.
“That was in the evening. Taroi was quiet then and Faleta just translated answers to the questions they put. He wasn't much good at that. Didn't even know the skipper's name—just called him ‘kapitani.' Didn't know where the schooner was built or chartered; naturally enough, he didn't bother his head about it. He'd been hired as extra hand at the last minute to take the place of another Kanaka who got sick. What the hospital super didn't ask for, we didn't tell; and that wasn't all that Taroi talked about by a long shot. He seemed a lot better and they gave us permission to take him to my place—glad to get rid of him. Early this morning he got worse again and—well, you saw him die.”
“What about keeping back information from the authorities, Sayers?” asked Chalmers. “I thought you said there was nothing crooked about this.”
“There isn't. What I found out wouldn't do them any good without what Faleta happened to know. I'm planning to do more than the authorities would. If I told them what Faleta knows they wouldn't thank me for it, even if they acted on it. I'll tell you the yarn in five minutes if you'll listen:
“The schooner was called the Manu. That's South Sea for bird and doesn't tip off where she comes from. There are fifty schooners named Manu in the trading line. I've a notion she was Australian, but I don't know for sure. Anyway, her captain owned her. He had got wind from some native he'd helped out of a hole of an island with a lagoon full of pearl-shell, way off by it self, not on the charts or in the directory. He started out to clean it up in a hurry. You know how that is. As I said, it isn't on the map and it hadn't been touched, but once let a hint of a find like that get out and you've got a government gunboat on top of you, claiming it. The Japs 'll swipe anything and you can't argue with four-inch guns; or else it's the British or the Dutch.
“Anyway it's first come, first served with pearling; and this was a virgin lagoon and rich. They ran into the tail-end of a hurricane making the island, and the schooner got blown 'way out of her latitude and got pretty badly banged up. And they ran short of grub.
“Coming away in the rush they did, they were short on grub and equipment. They didn't dare buy any special stuff before starting. With a fortune lying in the open sea for the first one who grabs it, you can't be too careful not to tip it off. All they had with 'em was one diving outfit and not even a pop-gun on board to make a bluff with, in case they were trailed. And they were.
“A schooner followed 'em and they saw smoke on the horizon the day of the storm that might or might not have been a gunboat; they were 'way off the steamer routes. It threw a scare into the skipper, though he figured the gale would have covered them up.
“They tried out the lagoon. It was a big one—and rich. First day they found a dozen pearls, and Taroi either swiped one of them or found one of his own and tucked it away in that mop of his. It's an old trick. The skipper didn't want to leave the island open and he wanted to make a big clean-up—shell and all. So he decided to stay with his find and sent the schooner kiting up to Honolulu for more equipment, more grub and guns, and ammunition.
“I imagine the mate wasn't the greatest sailor in the world, and anyway he wasn't the first to run afoul of French Frigate Shoals in nasty weather. It must have been a bad smash. You know the rocks shape up at nightfall for all the world like a square-rigger under full sail.
“They went crashing on to the coral with the wind blowing half a gale, and a lee shore at that. The mate got his head crushed in by the gaff falling on it when they struck. Next morning the schooner was still there, what was left of it, and they got the boat that was still in the davits and seaworthy, and started off for nowhere.
“None of them knew where to go, none of 'em had sense enough to save any papers. Seventeen days afterward the Lehua picked 'em up.
“The point is—” Sayers' voice fell to a whisper—“there's the captain alone on the island with four kings' ransoms in pearls, and no chance of getting away—unless some one fetches him, and I'm the only one who knows where he is.”
“The authorities would send after him from here,” said Chalmers. “You don't suppose they'd leave the man to starve?”
Sayers looked at him with scornful amusement.
“No more would I. But they don't know where to go. Taroi couldn't tell 'em. He knew the name of the island, but that wouldn't do 'em any good without the latitude and longitude, for there's a dozen of the same name and I told you it wasn't on the chart. I do know where it is from what Faleta found out.
“If you were a man alone with a fortune in the middle of the sea and some one came along and offered to take you off after your own crowd had been wrecked and killed, wouldn't you be glad to see 'em? Wouldn't it be worth something to you?” He watched Chalmers's face narrowly. “Wouldn't you give anything in reason for expenses and a reward rather than sit there and rot on the chance of some one turning up?
“Mind you, I might take the trip without any thought of reward if I had a ship, but I haven't, and ships and crews cost money. It's only fair to be reimbursed, ain't it? You'd do it gladly, I'll bet!”
Chalmers, looking at Sayers, wondered how far his generosity would take him without hope of gain, but the main argument seemed fair enough. The man would be glad to recompense them. He would, in his place, he decided.
“We'll treat him fair and square,” said Sayers. “There's enough for a dozen men according to what Taroi says, and if that pearl's any criterion of what the rest are, it's our chance to make a fortune and do a good turn.”
“Where's your ship and your money?” asked Chalmers.
The sudden prospect of adventure appealed more to him than that of wealth. This would be getting beyond the rim with a vengeance.
Sayers sat up, relaxing, and poured himself more gin from the now half-empty bottle.
“I'll get the ship and the money. You can put in what's left of the value of that pearl after Taroi's buried. That'll help some. That's your share with your work as navigator,” he said. “It'll take three of us. We don't want to noise this thing about or we'll all lose out. Some one'll suddenly discover the island belongs to the States or they'll just naturally grab it first. We'll keep it close. I've got the location of the island. That's my share. We don't need such a big schooner. A couple of Kanakas for crew should fix it. How much will it take?”
“We can't charter a schooner under five hundred a month for an unknown destination,” said Chalmers. “We could buy one outright for a thousand, probably—one of the firewood fleet might do. But there's the grub and wages, chronometers and other things. Call it a couple of thousand.”
“I've got the man who'll put up the balance of the money and go thirds in the deal. It's too bad Taroi didn't swipe a bigger pearl so we could do this on our own. But the man I've in mind is close-mouthed enough. What do you say?”
“We've got to give this captain a square deal, Sayers,” said Chalmers.
“You're going to have your say in the matter, ain't you? I'm not going to take advantage of the man. We'll settle that matter before we start. Are you game?”
“Who's your third man. Do I know him?”
“He's a Chinaman,” said Sayers; “a top-notcher. He's down and out in a way and he'll snatch at the chance. He'll keep it to himself and he can find the money. I don't suppose you know him.”
“Maybe I do,” Chalmers said quietly. “Is his name Tuan Yuck?”
Sayers looked at him in open, if grudging, astonishment.
“I don't know where you get your dope,” he said. “But that's the man. You know more than I thought you did about the whole affair. But you don't know the whereabouts of the island. I do! Are you on?”
“Have you seen Tuan Yuck yet?”
“Not yet. He was expecting to be back this week from Hawaii.”
“He came over on the Kinau with me. I had a talk with him. See him first and then I'll have time to think it over. You know where my place is?”
Sayers continued to look at Chalmers in wonderment. Hitherto, he told himself, he had underestimated the younger man. After this he would have to accord him a more prominent place in his plans. He got up, unaffected by the gin, save as to his breath and an extra cloudiness of the whites of his eyes.
“You're on,” he said. “You'd be a fool not to come. As soon as we all three shake hands on it, I'll tell you the name and place of the island and we'll get busy. I'm off to hunt up Tuan Yuck. Good-by!”
“I don't like you overmuch,” said Chalmers to himself, after Sayers left, “and I don't believe I'd trust you too far round a corner. But I can't stop you from going on the trip. And if I do go, I've a notion the captain will get a better bargain on account of being taken off. It's a real adventure. It's beyond the rim, all right.”
His blood began to tingle with the excitement of the prospect. To sail the uncharted sea as the master of a stout little craft; to play the part of rescuer to a marooned mariner, to share in a well-earned reward!
Chalmers was twenty-five. Destiny seemed to be dropping gifts into his lap. He refilled his pipe, squared his shoulders unconsciously and smoked on, seeing in the smoke-drift the palms of an ocean oasis rising above the horizon in the morning haze.