CHAPTER XVI
A THRUST IN THE DARK
IT was the darkest hour of the night, preceding dawn. Tao Tao remained wrapped in slumber. The hot breath of the Pacific still soughed amid the palm tree leaves and set them a-rustling.
Keith stirred uneasily in his sleep. Perhaps some prescience of danger was calling him back to consciousness. Certainly there had been no sound in the bungalow louder than one slight creak, as though something had blundered against a chair. For the space of thirty seconds he breathed deeply and regularly again; and then he awoke with a start, lay still, and strained his ears. When wakefulness comes to a sailor in such a manner there is generally a reason. It may be that the wind has shifted a point or two, giving the vessel a slightly different motion. Or it may be that inexplicable sense, rarely given to the landsman, which makes him feel the imminence of danger when there is no apparent sign of it.
The soft wind was making a leaf outside tap-tap against the thin woodwork like the beating of a great moth's wings. Keith remembered he had heard it before, and, closing his eyes, decided to snap off part of the vine next morning, so that it would not disturb him again at such an ungodly hour. It must have been that tapping which awoke him, and yet, though he closed his eyes, he was just as wide awake. Odd! Surely he wasn't cultivating nerves!
A creak in a floor board. It was within a few feet of his bedside. With one swift movement he grasped the cover, throwing it aside, and raised his head from the pillow. Death, swift and sure, would have followed had he been a fraction of a second later in rising, for a keen-bladed knife, impelled by an arm with the strength of steel, was thrust downward at the spot where his breast had been. The hand round the haft grazed down the spine of the man from the Four Winds.
Like a shot from a pistol, Keith leaped out of bed, with a vivid memory of what had happened the last time a murderous attack had been made on him in the same room. In three strides he was at the window, to cut off his assailant's escape; and with a roar that might have been heard a mile away, he was bellowing for Chester Trent. He always kept a loaded revolver under his pillow, but in his haste he had forgotten it. He could not see a thing, and any moment he expected to feel the thrust of steel into his flesh, but he was risking that. Whatever happened, the black was not going to escape the same way this time.
There was a thump on the floor in the adjoining room as Chester jumped right out of bed.
"Yes—yes—hello!" he called through the partition, dazed for a moment.
"Listen to me," Keith replied. "First strike a light. Then get your gun. There's some one in here. Hurry!"
In less than half a minute Chester emerged from his room with a candle, and as he did so Keith swore, for he saw his own bedroom door was open. He was alone. The black had entered the bungalow by a window in the living-room, and bolted out the same way.
Joan was up now, with a kimono thrown round her shoulders, and as she came from her door Keith noticed that she had her own formidable revolver for emergencies.
"What is it?" she asked tremulously.
"My God!" Chester exclaimed, glancing round the living-room.
The place had been ransacked. Every drawer was open, their contents spread on the floor. And yet, so far as they could see at a glance, the object of the intruder had not been the theft of stores or other things which one would naturally expect natives to take. It looked more as though a systematic search had been made for some definite object.
"The pearls!" cried Joan. "That's what they were after."
Keith had dived back into his room for his gun, and to slip on a pair of shoes. Chester ran to the place where he had hidden the two large pearls, but they were undisturbed.
"Quick," Keith cried, reappearing. "You come too, Miss Trent. It isn't safe for you to be left here alone."
"What're you going to do, man?" asked Chester, still slightly bewildered by the suddenness of events, as he found himself taken by the arm and urged toward the door.
"The shed! For the love of Mike, hurry! There must be a nigger missing from where they sleep, and when we've found out which one—"
It was not necessary for Keith to explain further. The man who had attempted murder had jumped out of the window that was open. Opposite it, and immediately beyond the compound, was a clump of trees. Unless the culprit had the presence of mind to bolt straight back to the sleeping hut to avoid discovery, he would seek cover among the trees.
Holding a lantern high, and urging Joan to keep near him, Chester followed Keith, who found Taleile standing perplexed, in the doorway of the men's hut.
"What name? What name? What for you shout?" asked the black in alarm.
"Nigger he just come in um hut. What name him, eh?" Keith asked breathlessly.
"No nigger he come in here," Taleile replied confidently. "Me hear one plenty big damn row and come out, allee same stop here."
"Then we've got him," Keith snapped triumphantly, "or at least we can find out who it was. This chap has been here like a sentry ever since I yelled. Here you, Taleile. One nigger maybe two not in hut. What name, eh? Call 'em out."
"Oya, oya," shouted Taleile, putting his head inside the doorway; and out tumbled the black crew, some blinking and rubbing their eyes, others craning their necks in every direction, seeking the cause of this unusual proceeding. Taleile soon had them assembled in a line, and in the light of the lantern he inspected their faces one by one.
"Isa, he no here. Baloo he no here," the "boss boy" declared at last.
Chester meanwhile had been counting the dark figures and he found that only two were missing.
"I half suspected that vicious looking brute Baloo had a hand in it," Keith declared. "Well, Trent, what d'you suggest?"
"Can't do a thing till it's light, Keith. The pair of 'em may be a mile away by now, but I give you my word, there won't be a stroke of work done on this place until we've roped those beggars in. Taleile, you come along, bring Peter Pan and Maromi."
The rest of the hands, greatly puzzled, and chattering like a flock of magpies, went back into their sleeping-house, but the three blacks chosen were stationed outside the house as a sort of bodyguard, lest another attack should be made. The first rays of the sun began to glint through the trees an hour later while Joan and the two men were finishing an early breakfast. Already the black crew had finished their morning meal, and were squatting round their hut, awaiting orders.
"It's ten thousand to one they're hiding in the Wilderness," Chester declared. "so we should be wasting our time looking anywhere else."
The Wilderness, a patch of rough land embracing perhaps a square mile all told, lay to the extreme north-west of Tao Tao. For plantation purposes it was almost useless, so it still remained in its virgin state—wild, covered with coral dust and sand, and overgrown with a mass of brushwood. Here and there were natural clearings where even the pando bushes failed to make a successful struggle for existence, but there were patches of tangled shrub which offered a far better hiding place than the cultivated groves of palms.
"We can drive the whole district," said Keith.
"That's the only way," agreed Chester. "Pity old Boris isn't here now. He'd have had the time of his life. A nigger hunt would have tickled him to death. Taleile," he went on, going to the veranda, "you go along and tell all them plenty fella what I want, see?"
He explained his programme at length. The blacks were to spread out in a line at that side of the Wilderness, and close in, driving the fugitives to the shore where the island came to a point at its westernmost extremity. They were to arm themselves with sticks, as Isa and Baloo would probably put up a fight when cornered. The culprits were to be taken alive or dead. If they were killed that was their own lookout. But the men who took them were each to receive six sticks of tobacco and six yards of calico.
This news was received by the natives with a buzz of satisfaction. Such a lavish offer of tobacco would, in itself, have stirred all their enthusiasm for the chase, but the calico was an added spur, for calico was scarce on Tao Tao, and the black who will not go through fire and water for a strip of such material has yet to be born.
The whole force trooped to the Wilderness, four men only being left behind to guard the bungalow in case the planter's calculations should prove wrong. Chester and Keith, with Joan, were in the centre of the line, Taleile going some distance to their left, Peter Pan a hundred yards or so to their right. In this order they advanced half way through the scrub without coming across any sign of their quarry.
"There's only one thing I'm afraid of," said Chester. "They may possibly have swum for it before sun-up."
"Where to?" Keith asked dubiously.
"They could get to the reef, anyway. I'll have 'em, though, even if they swim for it now."
The black line was going forward steadily. It was shorter now, for the island was narrowing.
"Oya!" yelled Peter Pan suddenly, and in a few moments the two white men were at his side. The black pointed to footmarks in the sand leading into a tangled clump of bushes, and then to a twig which had obviously only recently been broken.
The meaning was clear enough. None but the fugitives could have left these indications, for nobody ever went there. Hearing the sound of their pursuers approaching, they had sought shelter in the clump, and there, in all probability they were still hiding.
Keith and Chester held a hasty consultation and decided to swing forward their right and left flank until this particular thicket was surrounded. Five minutes later there was a living ring round the spot, and two or three of the more courageous blacks pushed their way warily into the bushes. Wild cries of exultation rose from the natives—a savage roar calculated to inspire fear in the heart of any living thing at their mercy. A hunt such as this was just what appealed to them. Against Isa and Baloo they had no personal feeling. What the fugitives had done was of small concern to them. Sufficient that there was an excuse for exciting sport. The affair was becoming a little too brutal for Chester's liking. He had all the Englishman's love of fair play, and this promised to develop into cold-blooded murder. It would have been next to impossible, however, to call off the yelling horde. Suddenly the noise among the men nearest the beach rose to a scream of delight, and Keith, rushing round, revolver in hand, arrived there just in time to prevent the spirit of Isa joining those of his forefathers by a most painful route. The diver, seeing that he was trapped, had attempted to bolt, and had been caught in the human net. Heavy blows fell on every part of his body, and but for nature's provision of a thick skull he would probably have been unconscious before Keith, after discharging his weapon twice into the air, succeeded in driving the horde off. Isa was then taken prisoner, his arms being bound tightly with creeper stems.
A few moments afterwards there were signs of a fierce struggle in the thick of the slump. Peter Pan, creeping cautiously, had run Baloo to earth, and the pair of them were engaged in a battle royal. More excited and out of hand than ever, the assembled blacks surged into the bushes. Keith's attention was fully occupied at the moment with superintending the pinioning of Isa. Wielding a heavy stick, Baloo was warding off the blows which Peter Pan aimed at him, while another black was crawling toward him in the rear. Chester, struggling through the tangled growth, arrived on the scene, and with his gun pointed ordered all three to throw aside their sticks. Baloo looked round in desperation, but after a moment's hesitation obeyed, seeing that the odds were against him, and, rather than be pierced by a bullet, stood still while he, too, was pinioned. The prisoners were then escorted back to a clearing near the bungalow, where Chester Trent took steps to impress the rest of the crew against similarly lawless outbreaks.
The blacks squatted, native fashion, in a semi-circle, the two culprits being compelled to stand in the centre. Chester then harangued the crowd, telling them just what had happened during the night, and how the rule of the white man exacted penalties for crime of that.order. He sentenced each of the prisoners to twenty strokes of the lash and six months' imprisonment without tobacco, together with one year's loss of pay. Also he was careful to make it clear that if any one else were guilty of similar crime the penalty would be even more severe.
Isa and Baloo were then tied to a tree and in the presence of the entire black crew, were flogged by Taleile. The other natives watched this proceeding, curiously unmoved. It was a display of power that appealed strongly to their cruel natures, lacking a little, perhaps, in piquancy, because it did not involve the cracking of joints, which is an accepted method of punishment by the South Sea islander when he wishes to set a powerful example, but interesting—decidedly interesting.
The triced savages howled with pain, for the thong cut deeply into their black skins, and raised a wale wherever it struck. With extreme distaste, the white men watched the performance to the end, and then saw Isa and Baloo fastened up in the hut that was to act as their prison.
"Beastly business!" said Chester. "I hate this sort of thing, but there are times when it's absolutely necessary."
"You've got to make 'em understand," agreed Keith, "and the thing doesn't penetrate to their brains till you wade right into 'em properly."
"Why, man," said Chester, "you look almost as though it was you who had been flogged. Nothing wrong, is there?"
"A touch of fever, I think," Keith replied wearily. "It's an old friend of mine. Maybe it'll pass off soon. Guess I'll lie down for a spell. You've got some quinine around, I suppose? You might give me fifteen or twenty grains. It's got to be kill or cure with me when it starts."
His face was drawn and pinched, with a hectic flush on the upper part of the cheek bones. All morning he had felt the symptoms of a bout of malaria. Now his head was aching severely, there seemed to be a distance of about ten feet from his eyes down to the ground, and his legs, which had become heavy as lead, almost refused to do his bidding, while the rest of his body felt as though it were ready to float off airily into space.
Joan viewed this sudden change in Keith with alarm, and insisted on his going to bed instantly. Keith was in no state to resist such peremptory orders.
"You're very good," he said. "I'll be all right in an hour or two."
A stone jar filled with hot water was placed at his feet, and blankets were piled onto him. For hours he lay suffering the torment of the malaria patient, but before the morrow the perspiration came, and he fell into a placid sleep.
Next morning he felt well enough to get up for breakfast, and then he was told that Isa and Baloo had escaped during the night. The hut in which they had been fastened was a strongly built place, from which it had seemed a couple of almost naked men would not be likely to break out. They had, however, either found a weak place in the structure and forced some of the beams apart, or had been helped by someone on the outside.
"They're still on the island, though, I suppose?" said Keith.
"No, confound 'em," replied Chester. "That's the worst of it. They've cleared out—swum to the Kestrel and rowed off in the ketch's small boat. God knows where they've gone to, but I hope they fall into the hands of some hungry cannibal king—"
"Don't say such horrible things, Chester. You know you don't mean it," Joan protested.
"Well, I'll cut out the cannibals then," the planter replied with a laugh, "but boats like that don't grow on bramble bushes out here, and if ever those two cut-throats fall into my hands again they'll have occasion to remember it as long as they live—"
A long-drawn-out call from a vessel's siren interrupted him.