King Sullivan

by George Allan England

 

KING SULLIVAN

By GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND
AUTHOR OF "THREE HEARTS AND A HEAD," "FIRE FIGHT FIRE," ETC.

THE nipa shack roosted high on bamboo posts to clear the green-scummed ooze, all puffy with bubbles. Over it drowsed slender, ragged palms, rustling their fronds into speech as the trade-winds nodded them, approving the words of Bongao.

For Bongao, the ladrone, was still a power on the coasts of Malajacar Bay, even now that the blue-shirt swine had robbed him of so many things. As he squatted there on his brown hams, discoursing, his words were words of hope. Tinaka, the daughter of Kanabuhan, listened eagerly.

"These hogs go soon away into their own stye," he was growling in throaty Visayan, "and that is good. But others come. That is bad. Yet the change may profit us, who knows?"

He spat copiously of betel-juice, and blinked with reddened eyes off through the fever-smelling cane-brake toward the bay, which drowsed, quivering, in sunset glory. To his ears came the plaint of a few spiraling sea-birds, out yonder; the hollow thumping of a rice-mortar under the blows of Tinaka's mother in the second room of the hut; the grunt of a wallowing carabao. Evening was at hand.

"They go, they come!" he bitterly resumed, gesturing far across the liquid light to where a toothpick of a staff pricked up from the greenery over the bay. The staff was topped by a tiny dab of color—the execrated flag of swine.

Tinaka, cross-legged on the mat in her red and green camisa, blew the smoke of her cigarillo through her nostrils. She followed Bongao's lean hand with her eyes—fine eyes, dark and beyond fathoming, with only a slight up-draw at the corner of the lids; for Tinaka boasted a strong dash of Spanish blood.

"The change may profit us?" she murmured. Her speech was purer than his, as befitted a presidente's daughter. Not always had she and her mother lived in this thatch on the outskirts of Tagoloa; once theirs had been the ironwood house at the south of the weedy plaza. "And shall we have the reckoning at last? That day I keep my word. That day we marry, thou and I. Never before!"

Her fingers clasped eagerly at thought of the reckoning, her dream! She saw once more her father as she had found him that night when the Americanos had swept through the village—saw him lying in the harsh green cogon-grass, with his shirt all stiff and red. The red, the green—colors of the brotherhood!

"Say. thou, shall we have the reckoning?"

Bongao chewed a while before answering. Nothing hurries, eight degrees from the equator; not even love. Bongao was remembering, too, that skirmish with the swine. Kanabuhan had scouted a little in advance. Was it by accident that the ladrone's old smoothbore had fired low, that Kanabuhan had dropped with a veil? Bongao smiled to himself.

The presidente's death really had simplified matters, had it not? Divided authority was not good. Kanabuhan's ring, too, would help when the time was ripe—the massy ring of raw gold with the brotherhood mark, three crosses in an oval. The ring was safe now; nobody but Bongao could find it in a thousand years, midway through the Black Swamp. Bongao's inner smile broadened. Assuredly all things were well.

"The reckoning? It may be," he at length replied. "For the time draws nigh. In a score of days, the change. There will be confusion. The old pigs care nothing. They are going home. The new pigs know nothing. Only the old gray boar of a señor colonel remains to fear. But there will be found a way to hunt that boar!"

He gestured with a curious finger-sign. Tinaka nodded comprehension.

Another pause—long, heavy. The sun, sliding to rest, laid upon them a great weight. They watched the huge copper ball as the hills beyond Cayaban gnawed up into its lower rim. Finally Bongao spoke again:

"Only one thing is needful—one of the swine to hunt with us!"

The cigarillo dropped from Tinaka's fingers; her eyes widened.

"More than one, if that may be, but one at the least—to tell us the swine-ways, the weakness here, the opening there. Thus we shall win. Thus everything"—he swept his bare arm against the fantom turquoise of the bay—"shall be once more our own. Thus, over yonder, the red and green shall float on that same staff!"

Boom-m-mmm!

A hollow globe of sound broke from across the waters; its fragments rolled, rebounded down the jungled hills, puncturing the stillness.

"Soon shall there be no more sunset-guns," remarked Bongao sententiously. His ideas of the Americano army were nebulous.

"No, por Dios!" echoed the girl. "And the spirit of Kanabuhan shall no longer wander unsatisfied. Bid me what I must do!"

"Knowest thou some Americano—some hog of the white litter?"

She sat thinking, as the sea glowed and purpled with the phosphorescence of tropic twilight. Here, there, fireflies began to spangle the half-gloom; night-sounds were rising—the cheeping of a lizard, a feverish drone of insects, the soft slither of membranous wings as huge black bats rose from alongshore and reeled toward the heights behind the village. Somewhere down the grass-grown alley a nasal minor voice crooned into song; there joined it the thrum and twangle of a cracked guitar.

"Two I know, but only by the sight," Tinaka finally made reply. "With one only have I spoken. Yet—"

"He names himself?"

"I know not how he names himself; but he is the tall one of the so beautiful red hair. Sabe?"

"Eh, that must be the Señor Private Essullivam! To get that one would be well. It must be!" Yet as he pictured Tinaka trafficking with the tall one of the so beautiful red hair, his heart misgave him. He hastened to add: "Where didst thou have words with him?"

"In the market at Cayaban, six weeks past. A drunken Tagalo would have jostled me, but he thrust the man aside. I thanked him, and we had some speech. He speaks Spanish very badly, the Señor Private Essullivam."

"Was that all?" grunted Bongao.

"He asked my name."

"And thou didst tell?" snapped the ladrone. His jaw stopped while he listened.

"Am I a beach-comber's whelp, or the daughter of a presidente's house?" she flashed at him.

The answer stung; for gossip whispered that Bongao's father owed his rise in life to certain doings over on Namiguin, what time the steam-packet Conquistador had been lured to the reef by lanterns in the palms. Yet Bongao held his tongue, and only breathed the heavier as he waited for her to finish.

"I walked away from him. He stood there, broad hat in hand. He smiled after me. His teeth were like the lining of oyster-shell; the sun made his hair very red. That was the last I have seen of him."

"Or heard?"

"He must have learned my name; for twice has he sent me letters in his so very bad Spanish. By the hand of old Lagan, the carabao-driver, has he sent them. I have not answered."

"That is well. To-morrow, answer! The Señor Private Essullivam we must have. Shall I tell thee why thou must have none other?" He strained his eyes to catch the glimmer of her oval face. "Shall I tell the reason? Thou shalt see the very proof upon his hand!"

"What reason, and what proof?" Tinaka inquired.

"Listen while I speak! Thou knowest how thy father's ring of price and great authority was robbed from him at death. Who but the devil that murdered him. that left him lying dog-like in the grass, should have ravished it? Who else should have it now? This same Señor Private Essullivam it is, and none but he, who boasts to wear the raw-gold ring of Kanabuhan!"

II

Dr. Aylward stretched back in his long piazza-chair and squinted up lazily at the lazy flag.

"Just the same, I tell you, it costs like sin to keep that bit of cloth dangling on that particular pole!" he gloomily asserted.

The doctor was yellow and lean; with all his pills and powders, he had not dodged the fever.

"Oh, well," answered the colonel, "it's all in the game. It's what we're all living—or dying—for, to pay that cost." His gray brows pulled together as he sighted out across the parade. "But you've no right to grumble," he philosophized. "Your freedom comes next week, when the City of Hong-Kong steams out with most of my boys on board. It's we older men—" He checked himself.

"The price of power!" girded the doctor. "We pay; and the cash-box broods reap the harvest. We pay health, morals, reputation, life, what not? There was Snyder, now—another Danny Deever, as sure as you live! And Granniss, you recall? Softening of what little brain he had. To say nothing of such as hit the vino till the pink mice get 'em—or those that jump the outfit entirely!"

The colonel nervously fingered a button of his tunic.

"Serious business," he admitted, "soldiering alongside this climate!"

"Climate, water, jungle, native girls, everything! Why, colonel, the very sky is pathogenic to a white man. All so exotic! There's something deeper, too; there's a world of psychology in the way they go mad."

Aylward's glance roamed out over the shimmer of the sea to the yellow hills of Punto Tiburon.

"Psychology! Something that bites 'em, drags 'em down and out! That man Sullivan, E Company, for example—you know?"

The colonel nodded a grave head.

"A pity!" he passed judgment.

"Lord knows where he is. If he'd only hung on another week, this whole business would have slipped off him like a dyspeptic dream. And now—! Nothing but some psychological twist could ditch a man that way. A twist, I tell you—"

"Or a woman," murmured the colonel.

"Same thing! It is a woman this time, by the way. Connors told me. You really ought to hear about it, from Connors. He's inimitable!"

"Right you are. It might be just the thing, eh? Orderly!"

The colonel's command given, Aylward presently resumed:

"A snappy, hustling sort like Sullivan, born soldier and nervy to the limit—I just can't understand it. Hardly past his majority, either. Maybe that had some bearing on the case—that and his Celtic temperament, which could transform a charwoman's daughter into a princess, given proper lighting and scenic effects, tropic moon, stars, surf—"

The doctor waved an eloquent hand; the colonel smiled almost reminiscently. The colonel had worked up from the ranks, and his name was Brennan.

"Not far from his chevrons when he quit." The colonel changed the subject. "Well, maybe he'll take on again before he's been gone a really serious time. Of course, if he doesn't, why—"

The speech broke off as Connors marched up the piazza-steps, clicked heels, and came to the salute. Connors's left eye showed traces of a beautiful "shiner"—which is to say, a blacking.

"Connors?" The colonel shifted his chair slightly out of the sun. "Tell us all about it."

He smiled genially. A friendly soul the colonel was; almost as beloved as the doctor himself.

"'Bout what, sorr?" Connors's innocence was epic.

"Why, Sullivan, of course!"

"Oh, him, sorr? Well, he's gone, Sullivan is, that's all, sorr."

"The drink? The heat?"

"Nayther, sorr. It was—beggin' yer pardon—a lady, in a manner o' sp'akin', sorr."

Dr. Aylward slid down still farther in his chair.

"Well? How did it begin?" catechized the colonel. "He told you something about it, I assume?"

"He did, sorr—somethin'."

Connors was beginning to sweat more freely than even the humidity could sanction.

"Go on, let's have it!"

"Shall I begin wid Sullivan? My bunkie, sorr, an' a white man, if—"

"Begin with the lady."

"Yis, sorr. Well, the first was 'bout tin days ago, when Sullivan he drags a ring from his pocket an' shows it to me on the Q.T."

"'Lookee! ' says he, 'd'yez see that?'

"'Shure!' says I. 'What of ut?'

"'It's raw vargin goold,' says he, 'and a token from a prisidente's daughter. Ain't that somethin' like a quane, in these parrts? She's fair mashed on me!' says he. 'It's a mesallyance wid royalty! I'll be kind of a native king,' says he, 'or prince consort at the very least!'

"'Cut it out!' says I. 'These here pigeon-toed native gurrls is too brown an' rice-powdery fer a white man. Cut it, ye omadhaun! She's a naygur. an' ye're loco!'

"'Loco yerself!' says he, mad in a minute. 'She's almost white, an' one o' the swatest, natest, most fascinatin' little bunches of—'"

"We'll take her on trust," interrupted the colonel. "Quite on trust!"

The doctor turned a smile into a yawn; Connors licked dry lips.

"Well, sorr, annyhow, he tells me how he first seen this here lady, an' how she turned him down flat, but how she still kept botherin' his thoughts like the div—like annythin', sorr.

"'An' yet, afther all,' says he, 'she ain't unresponsive to me charrms! No! For, lookee, she sinds me this here joolry by that old spalpeen of a Lagan, him what drives that screechin' buffalo-cart; an' very secret I'm to kape it, too. But I'm to call on her,' says he, 'an' if this ain't romantic an' oryental an' Arabian-Nightsy. then I'm an Orangeman! Why,' says he, 'it's what I been lookin' fer all me life—a fairy tale come thrue! No more bum rations an' practise-marrches fer mine!' says he. 'I'm goin' to lay undher a pa'm-tree an' devour coconuts, wid—'"

"Where does the royal presence reign?" the colonel interrupted.

"Some'eres over there, sorr!" Connors swung a big arm eastward. The gesture relieved his tension, and he resumed more easily: "Wudn't let on just where. Said it must all be a secret, sorr. Seems like he ain't even to mention the ring to the lady; just wear it, that's all. To spake of it wud be rank breach o' manners. Lagan warns him special. So—well, annyhow, he jumps post, afther him an' me has argyfied a thrifle"—Connors apologetically indicated his empurpled eye—"an' that's all, sorr. Annythin' else, sorr?"

The colonel pondered.

"Look him up!" he commanded tersely. "That buffalo-chap is your cue. Take what men you need, and don't make the mistake of having too few, either. A bad place, down yonder! Got it? That's all!"

Another click of the heels, a salute, and Connors was away. The colonel folded one white-trousered leg over the other, and sighed.

"Hanged if it isn't worth seeing to a finish!" ejaculated Aylward. "I know one man of Connors's squad!"

"Well, I hope you get Sullivan, that's all," commented the colonel cynically. "Perhaps he'll come—if royalty isn't too nearly white, or the moon too nearly full."

"Or the Celtic psychology too rampant," subjoined Aylward slyly.

Silence fell. The two men, each thinking his own thoughts, sat gazing with somewhat more than official abstraction out over the shimmer of that wicked, tropic sea.

III

Down the white and sinuous road through the jungle that fringed Malajacar Bay hiked a score of men at the route-step, in charge of Corporal Connors. Dr. Aylward, in "fatigue," trudged with them. Flap-flop, the canteens wigwagged on their hips; the pendulous bayonets kept rhythm. Atomic dust enhaloed them, drifted on ahead in the mid-morning breeze.

"Another half-hour, docthor, dear," Connors confided. "an' faix, King Sullivan's princess-pipe will be nothin' but cold ashes, an' our little arrmy of anti-mesallyance invasion will be playin' wid the royal excheckers! Shure, that near-white quane will be surprised tremenjous when we—"

Zeu-eu-u-u-u! Pop!

A bullet's skreel went close overhead, blending with the echo of a shot, and clipped leaves zigzagged to the ground from the bamboo thicket behind. Connors wheeled, peering.

"There! Beyont the clearin'!" he cried, pointing at a filament of haze just on the edge of a palay-field whose flashing green pushed back the jungle at their right. "There 'tis! Down wid yez!"

His men blotted themselves in the roadside ditch; a spatter of louder firing broke out raggedly from the brush, crackled to a fusillade. One Tibbetts grunted and keeled over ungracefully into the lukewarm ditch-water, with a gush of bright, frothy blood from the mouth.

"Lunged him!" the doctor groaned, scrambling for the man. "Lagan must have put 'em wise—"

His words were swept away by the venomous Krags that spat swiftly all along the ditch.

"King Sullivan's wid 'em, the black rinigade!" yelled Connors, pumping lead. "An' a confounded bad shot, too—I'm fair 'shamed of him, afther all my trainin'! There! See 'em?"

Along the edge of the tangle stealthy figures were crawling; the high growth swayed with their motion. Here, there, flickered a gaudy shirt of red and green.

"They're afther flankin' us!" he bawled. "Av they do, we're all carpses! We got to rush 'em! Coom on, b'ys—ivery wan of us is worth fifty naygur divils! Coom on!"

So close the others followed that he had barely two yards handicap in that stumbling, panting race over the palay. Grotesque with dripping mud and water, they fired as they ran. Dix and Bowen fell sprawling before the plunging line was half across; three more had joined them ere Connors's little army crashed with barking rifles into the cane-brake, shrieking mad, each a death-engine incarnate.

"Look! The brownies won't sthop to have it out!" foamed Connors, lusting for Visayan blood. "Nah! They're only good fer runnin'! But here's wan—there's another—that won't run!" He glimpsed a crawling, blue-shirted figure. "Hey, yez! Hey! Coom back out o' that now, or—"

His Krag spoke the final word. The figure dropped.

"Anny wan else?" howled Connors.

Save for the tramplings, the blaspheming of his rookies, answer came not from the jungle.

IV

All adrench the island world was, blurred with mist, and the waters of Malajacar Bay had gone a dreary yellow, when the City of Hong-Kong trailed her sooty banner of smoke out past Tiburon with two hundred weary men of war aboard—no heroes, just plain proletarian regulars. A man was leaning over the ship's quarter-rail, cursing the land with fluency. It was Connors—Sergeant Connors now. Dix, standing beside him with swathed head, nodded approval.

"Gulpiest layout I ever seen," he added on his own hook, "when we fired that volley over Doc, an' listened to the blubberin' wind-jammer trvin' to sound taps!"

"He shure had the gizzard of a man," Connors eulogized. "Afther he was made, they bruk the mold. Tryin' to help Tibbetts, when there wasn't no help— Ochone, think of it, will yez? Doc bored through wid a naygur slug an' layin' face down in that ditch-watter, wid them oozy lilies tangled in 'is hair!"

Connors stopped suddenly and looked away, while the rain tattooed like funeral-drums on the awning overhead. The lift and heave of the big ship swayed both men slightly at the rail.

"And yet," Dix made shift to say—"and yet, even though that King Sullivan biz cost us him an' three others, you put in your good word to the old man—?"

"Darned if I know why, ayther!" retorted Connors defiantly. "Must ha' been Sullivan's eyes as done it. Afther I dragged him out, bleedin' like a pig, I swear his eyes wa'n't sane man's eyes. 'This is nothin' but loco doin's!' says I to meself. 'He's clean bughouse!' So my bunkie—"

"So King Sullivan would ha' went up against the real thing, only for you?"

"He wud that—an' this minute he'd be six foot deep on that same tropic isle where he wanted coconuts and—all the rest, 'stead of layin' ironed in the Hong-Kong's brig, wid ninety-nine years on Alcatraz ahead o' him!"

"Alcatraz—that's kind of a rotten lay, ain't it?"

"Rotten? Sa'ay! Av yez only knew about it!"

Both men glowered at the long trail of the transport, stretching back, back in crisping foam toward the rain-shrouded coast of Cayaban.

Out from a dripping nipa shack, perched high amid the reek of that coast, a man and a woman were peering through a little open space at the distant, silent off-drawing of the ship.

"For every bullet of ours, the swine shot a hundred, two hundred!" the man was growling. "Against devil-shooting, what can we do?"

He peered at the woman with sly craft, as if to read her thoughts. An air of uneasiness, almost of fear, clung to him like a shroud.

No answer came. A heavy silence weighed upon the pair. Water drizzled from the thatch, pattered into the scum-coated pool beneath.

"All that could be done, I did," he hesitated. "My word was kept. So now, when—when will you—when shall we—?"

She turned- on him a look of hatred and of loathing so cold that the words dried in his wizened throat. Twice he made as if to speak, but found no utterance. Then, suddenly, he heaved himself up from the mat, grimacing till the bluish gums showed, and sidled off down the plank, away into the steaming rain—a crooked, hideous little figure as he leered back at her with poison spite.

The woman did not move. She sat there all alone, huddled in her camisa of faded green and red. The camisa was fastened at her throat with a cheap gilt tintype pin, bearing the image of a genial and smiling young Irishman with exuberant hair.

Even after Tiburon had blotted out the ship from view, the woman still sat there, straining vacant eyes at the smoke-streamer that trailed suddenly across the darkening sky.