CHAPTER II
THE GIRL ON TAO TAO
A GIRL stood on a veranda, scanning the sea with a tense, anxious expression. Her long hair hung in two heavy, braided ropes, which gleamed like burnished copper in the early morning sun. Her dress was white and loose, of the simplest cut, while her feet, innocent of stockings, were thrust into sandals.
She was undeniably beautiful, from the top of the high forehead on which a loose strand stirred in the gentle breeze, to the graceful curves of her neck. Her brown eyes were clear and steady, and her figure was straight and lithe. For the moment, at any rate, she looked all of her twenty-three summers. There was a tinge of something akin to grief stamped on her face—grief, or bewilderment, perhaps, but not fear. The girl's eyes, the set of her square little chin, and her very poise indicated clearly enough that fear, such as one may reasonably associate with her sex, had no part in her composition. And yet there were more than the elements of danger in her position. At best the lonely isles of the South Seas are places where there are perils for stout hearts to overcome, comforts which would satisfy few women, work which only men with iron wills and iron constitutions can hope to accomplish.
The air was wonderfully clear, even for those latitudes. Through a break in the trees, to the east, a small reef, three miles off, seemed to be scarcely more than a thousand yards distant. To the south, twenty miles from the silvery shore near where the girl stood, loomed the outline of another island. The girl trained a pair of binoculars on to this blur for full five minutes, and then swept the wide expanse of the ocean without finding anything to arrest her attention.
With a gesture of impatience, and a slight frown on her sun-tanned forehead, she lowered the field glasses and turned on her heel just as the sound of a guttural voice reached her.
"Marster Trent!"
Beyond the compound a kinky-haired black of alarming mien, who was, however, the "boss boy" on the plantation, and tractable for his kind, stood awaiting permission to cross the narrow clearing, which was sacrosanct.
"What you want, Taleile?" the girl asked, instantly assuming a more authoritative manner. "Come here."
"Want big Marster Trent," said the black, in the curiously unpitched voice of the South Sea islander.
"Mr. Trent he no back yet," replied the girl firmly. "He come bimeby. What for you want him?"
Taleile shrugged his shoulders, as though to indicate that the matter could wait.
"Plenty nigger lazy devil. Big Marster Trent he say clear um top patch. Um top patch plenty clear."
There was the subtle suggestion that in the absence of the planter, and definite instructions from him for the gang, they might as well loaf. Your South Sea islander seeks work neither for himself nor for those under him. When he is driven, by fear or by the magnetic power of a white man, he will just about earn the few dollars a month he is paid.
"Let plenty gang work on the one-year trees, savvy?" the girl replied without a second's hesitation. "Whole lot of work must be done there. Keep them at it, no stop, till Mr. Trent come back."
With a gesture she indicated that the interview was finished. Taleile, however, stood his ground, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other, and grimacing after the fashion of an ape. The girl was on the point of ordering him to go when it struck her he might want to say something of importance.
"What you want now, Taleile?" she asked, half suspiciously.
Taleile had been the "boss boy" on the plantation ever since she first saw the island, four years before. He had been "recruited" originally from New Guinea. His brothers and sisters and mothers-in-law were all, doubtless, raw cannibals, and Taleile had bred true up to a point, but he had had little opportunity lately of indulging any cannibalistic tendencies inherited from his forebears. This was the second plantation on which he had worked. For a New Guinea native he had a certain amount of common sense, and that had shown him the infinite wisdom of being on the side of law and order as prescribed by the white man. There were occasions when Taleile had been almost human.
There was nothing to encourage the girl in his little beady eyes, which glittered and shifted, but at the moment the fact remained he came the nearest thing to being a protector of any kind that she had. Not that she felt desperately in need of protection. On a peg, within easy reach, hung a .45 Colt with which she could pierce a match box six times in ten seconds at fifteen paces, and not a black on the island was ignorant of that significant fact. But Boris, her Great Dane, had died mysteriously the previous day; and in the presence of Boris every black had felt the necessity of circumspection if not even politeness. More than once Taleile had gone out of his way to show that his sympathies were not altogether with his kinky-haired brethren. The girl remembered that before she put her question. He squirmed and grimaced for a few moments while the girl stood imperiously waiting.
"Um nigger he give big dog kai-kai," he said mysteriously at last.
There was a catch in her breath which she endeavored to hide. One of the men, then, had fed Boris and, as she had shrewdly suspected, poisoned him.
"What nigger?" she asked, going a step nearer the black, her blood boiling.
"Um nigger," he repeated foolishly, either not knowing or not caring to air his knowledge for reasons best known to himself.
The girl, too well versed in the ways of the breed to press more closely, signalled him to go. In all probability Taleile was not lying, nor merely voicing a guess. That gave a sinister aspect to the dog's death. Of course it might have been simple revenge for some casual bite earned and administered. If she had not been alone that theory might have satisfied her; but she was alone, and doubly alone since Boris was no longer following her like a shadow. She felt that the clouds were indeed gathering.
For a time, while her brain raced over events of the last few days, the girl busied herself with simple duties in the bungalow, and the giving of orders to the house boy, until a black, clapping his hands at the wicket gate on the far side of the compound, attracted her attention.
She beckoned him toward her.
"What you want, eh, Baloo?" she asked.
The nigger opened his vast mouth, and pointed to a tooth.
"Um plenty sick. Want terback," he said in a tone that made her look at him sharply.
"Toothache?" she observed. "You take um medicine."
Leaving the man on the veranda, she turned into the bungalow and, opening a small case, selected a bottle. She glanced through the open window at Baloo, wondering momentarily whether he had consciously spoken insolently. Her eyes wandered to the long whip which hung just within the door in case of emergency. Hitherto she had never used it, though the thing was used occasionally as a means of assisting a native to distinguish between right and wrong.
With a wad of cotton wool in one hand and the bottle in the other, she returned to the veranda.
Baloo, whose tooth did not ache, scowled. Medicine was of no use to him.
"Want plenty stick terback," he said, with growing boldness.
"No get tobacco," the girl declared with an air of finality. "You take um medicine."
She met the creature's eyes squarely and saw something in them that stirred her unpleasantly. Had the Great Dane been there she would have had the man bolting like a rabbit. Baloo, who had never come into direct conflict with the girl before, misjudged her. He wanted tobacco, and knew there was plenty in the store. Moreover, he knew the planter was within neither sight nor hearing. He was a raw native, recruited but a few months before, with almost no ideas on the subject of restraint, and accustomed all his life to the doctrine of right and might being synonymous.
Without removing her eyes from him, the girl stepped backward, and unhooked the long, evil-looking whip.
Baloo knew that whip. His introduction to it was effected within a week of his being taken to the island, and the recollection was highly painful.
"Go," the girl cried, gripping the short handle and allowing the pliant lash to wave menacingly.
The black half crouched, but not cringingly. He was getting ready to leap, and as the girl divined this she became aware for the first time in her life of her own physical weakness. Thrashing blacks with a whip is not a woman's work. The mere idea of it was repellent to her, but without dallying further she sent the lash coiling against his shoulders. Baloo, who had anticipated this by the fraction of a second, sprang forward and seized the thick end of the lash, near the stock. She gripped the handle, but knew she was no match for the black in strength. The idea flashed across her mind of releasing her grasp of the whip and making a dash for the loaded revolver, but the black was now between her and the door.
He gave a wrench: her slender wrist barely stood the strain.
"Boris! Boris! Here!" she called; but Baloo well knew the dog's fate.
No further word was spoken, and the savage glitter of the man's eyes and the cruel smirk on his coarse face told the girl more plainly than words what dire peril she was in. Fear clutched at her heart as, clinging desperately to the whip, and still confronting the mutinous black with an expression of mingled courage, disdain and righteous anger, she strove to think of some way to safety.
Again the black wrenched at the whip, and, as the tug almost lifted her from her feet, her strained fingers relaxed and the weapon slipped from her grasp.
And then two things she saw simultaneously—the brutal triumph on the hideous countenance and the astounding figure of a white man, clad in shirt and trousers, hurling himself across the compound!
He was within ten feet of the steps before the black saw him. For a moment the latter was too startled to move. Then, as the stranger leaped up the steps Baloo dropped the whip and sprang to the rail. But he was too late. A pair of firm hands gripped him, and in a flash he was lifted above the veranda rail and sent crashing to the compound below.
For a moment he lay there, in the hot dust, stunned, bewildered. Then, with a malevolent grimace he scrambled to his feet and beat a hasty retreat.
The stranger, snatching up the whip, leaped down the steps and, overtaking the black at the gate, sent the lash hissing through the air. A shrill cry of pain rang out as the leather thong bit into the ebony flesh, and then the offender was gone in a rush of bare feet. The stranger crossed back to the steps.
"I hope you aren't hurt," he said, really seeing her now for the first time, when standing awkwardly below, as though he were an intruder, he looked up into the still surprised eyes of the girl. The surprise was mutual, for, while he had been prepared to find a few blacks, breech-clouted and odoriferous, or, if fortunate, a white planter, pajamaed and rum-soaked, such a brown-eyed, slender vision as gazed down on him from the veranda had been far outside his imaginings. A sense of inadequacy as to his attire troubled him, for his water-soaked shirt and trousers seemed sadly out of place just then.
"No. Thanks—no, no, I'm not," she said, bewildered. "Who are you? Are—are you from a trading steamer?"
"Why—yes, that is, a tramp," the man replied.
Her face cleared.
"The best anchorage is off here," she said, pointing down to the stretch of water between reef and island. Then her eyes fell on his clothing, steaming in the hot sun. "But—but you are wet through," she added. "You never swam ashore!"
"There wasn't anything else to do," he said. "They did not hear me after I fell overboard."
"Where was that?" the girl asked solicitously.
"Away off there," he replied, pointing vaguely: and then, feeling strangely weak, it dawned on him suddenly that he was ravenously hungry.
"Sit down on the veranda," she urged. "You must be starving."
As she turned into the bungalow he heard her giving orders to the house boy in beche-de-mer English, the strange polyglot spoken wherever whites and blacks commingle in the South Seas.
"My word, Maromi, you fetch kai-kai and coffee plenty quick. White marster plenty too much hungry."
Soon the unmistakable sizzle of frying ham set the guest's mouth watering, and the rich aroma of coffee reached his nostrils tantalizingly. It seemed an age, though it was really only a few minutes, before he found himself seated at a table spread with white linen, before a breakfast such as a prince might have hungered for. The girl left him while he ate, for he was clearly famished, and he had nearly finished when she came back.
"How long had you been without food?' she asked.
"About thirty hours. But I shouldn't have minded so much if I'd known there was a breakfast like that waiting for me. I'm up to the neck in debt to you now."
"I am afraid the balance is still a long way in your favour," the girl replied. "When my brother returns I hope he will be able to thank you better than I can and help me to repay you still further. Our name is Trent," she said. "My brother is Chester Trent. I am Joan Trent."
A flicker of embarrassment passed over .the man's face.
"Mine is—is Keith," he said awkwardly. "I'm—I'm a sea-going man, with no visible means of support for the moment, as you see, and my ship is some hundreds of miles away by now."
She gave him a quick, feminine, comprehensive glance which revealed ten times more to her than a man would have seen in an hour. Even with his face bristling with a two days' growth of beard he was, she decided, not unattractive as to countenance, while he was tall and evidently strong, as witness his treatment of Baloo. His dark hair was tinged at the temples with grey, though he could not yet be thirty. He had a firm mouth about which were humorous lines, and his grey eyes suggested determination and quiet power, but could twinkle pleasantly enough at times. He neither spoke nor acted as did the only deck hands she had ever seen, and yet there was no reason for disbelieving his story.
Where Joan expected her brother to return from did not immediately become clear to the man who called himself Keith. Obviously the planter was not on the island, for it was only three miles across and the visitor learned that Chester Trent had been absent several days. Without being unduly inquisitive, Keith was puzzled to know what pressing business had called him away, leaving his sister alone with a gang of natives in charge of a "boss boy," who was a South Sea islander himself, and a house boy who, in the event of trouble, would naturally join his black brothers. Joan, however, avoided the subject as though reluctant to allow blame to rest on her brother's shoulders; and Keith, anxious though he was to do anything in his power for this unprotected girl, refrained from questioning her. During the day she took him over the plantation, which struck him as being woefully neglected. There was missing from it that air of prosperity and order which he had seen on many island plantations in the course of his trading experiences in the Sulu Sea and all along the other rim of the equator away to the south, even as far as the far flung Solomons. He concluded that as Trent had had the place four years he was either singularly incompetent as a planter or that he had other fish to fry. And as there are many different kinds of fish in the South Seas, some reputable, some doubtful, and some frankly disreputable, Keith decided to accept the position without making the girl uncomfortable. For her part, Joan asked little or nothing about his world from which he had appeared so surprisingly, and their talk was chiefly of plantations, and trade, and freights, concerning all of which she had considerable knowledge.
"To such hospitality as we have to offer you are very welcome," the girl said after the simply furnished guest room had been prepared for him, "but I am afraid you will be a sort of prisoner on Tao Tao for several weeks. Tramps and schooners do call occasionally on the off chance of picking up cargo, but they are infrequent."
Keith pondered the statement for some time after he stretched his great frame between the sheets, and gave vent to a sigh of utter contentment. For reasons of his own he did not desire to become too closely associated with any members of the shipping fraternity for the present. The longer he remained buried in obscurity the better it would suit him. His needs, for the present, were few, and at any rate he would have no difficulty in making himself sufficiently useful about the place to balance the cost of his keep. But apart from his own convenience in being precipitated into this elysium, he reflected, as he buried his head deep into a pillow softer than any that ever touched his head on the Four Winds, it occurred to him that he was peculiarly fortunate in having arrived there, for Joan Trent's sake. Yes, and also for his own sake because Joan Trent was there. Musing over this fact contentedly, and without a thought for the morrow—the morrow of months hence when Tao Tao would remain but a pleasant dream for him, to be recalled through the long watches of the night on some steamer's bridge in far-off seas—he drifted off to sleep.
But his sleep was not dreamless. The last forty-eight hours had been crowded with too much adventure for placid slumber. He was back on the Four Winds, where everything was topsy-turvy. The ship would persist in going backward though the engines were driving her full ahead; and the man at the helm was a deaf mute. But he must keep on swimming at all costs, though the water got into his mouth and was choking him. Drifting seaweed had become entangled round his throat, tighter and tighter. He could hardly breathe … Then he was suddenly and horribly awake in the heavy darkness of the unfamiliar room, awake to a vivid consciousness of pain and danger. In his nostrils was the reek of a black body, and at his throat two hands were fastened like steel bands.