THE next pressing business of Henry Harrington, taken up immediately after luncheon, was to pay his friend Adam John five thousand dollars for an island worth fifteen hundred. This was a pleasant task. All his life now, it seemed, was to be made up of pleasant tasks. A word from Quackenbaugh provided a motor launch and Henry was soon chugging eastward on the channel called South Inlet, but really the middle inlet, which was here a quarter of a mile in width.
Where this inlet entered Harper's Basin lay a flat island with a stand of rather poor timber upon it. This was Hurricane Island; less than two hundred yards separated it from the mainland on the south and it was less than six miles from North Street, so that within thirty minutes, say about two-twenty of the afternoon, Henry was stepping off upon a beach of wave-packed sand.
Another small motorboat was moored upon this beach, but it was old and temporarily disabled, with the engine opened up and parts of it scattered about in the bottom of the craft. Evidently, Adam John's trouble with his motor had overtaken him while fishing, for there was tackle lying about and a smell of smoking salmon in the air. Indeed smoke appeared drifting lazily from an almost flat roof barely visible one hundred yards away above the bushes. Adam John no doubt was there curing his fish.
Henry, in the bright sunlight of the June afternoon, loitered, drinking in the details of the scene. There were actual signs of an intent to chop out the forest and make the beginnings of a farm. Amid stumps some struggling stalks of corn were tasseling. Beside them appeared a small patch of thrifty-looking potatoes. A cow browsed near, tethered safely from the corn, and a runty horse whinnied from a yard of poles behind a little log stable. Signs of humble thrift, signs of domestic aspiration these, springing from the soul of a red man.
But then two things had happened to make Adam John superior: the Mission School—now taught by Miss Marceau—and the army.
Harrington raised a shout. A swart, sturdy figure emerged from the lodge and stood peering, then gave an answering shout, and Adam John walked straight down to Henry. He was wearing overalls and boots, with an ex-army shirt and a nondescript hat! A man below the medium height whose features had a half-emerged look; yet the sloe-black eyes were expressive of keenness and tenacity as his manner was of dignity.
"How!" greeted Henry, and outstretched a hand.
"How!" smiled the Indian with a kind of solemn joy. "You come see my place?" Plainly he was as proud of his island as a monarch of his throne. "You t'ink I make farm here—mebbe so?" he queried, indicating fondly his struggling corn and potatoes.
But Harrington shook his head. "You're a skookum Indian, all right, Adam; but it's too much of a job," he announced, surveying the timber. "Besides, I've got a better prospect for you than that. Mr. Boland wants your island for a shingle mill. Oh, but he will give you a fine price for it," Henry smiled reassuringly—when Adam's face became sealed and uninviting. "That's my job—to buy it from you. I'll give you five thousand dollars for it."
This should have made the Indian brighten, but: "Me no like sell," he replied, surprisingly.
"But Mr. Boland wants it for a shingle mill," expatiated Henry.
"Me want for farm," announced Adam simply, quite as if what he wanted was as important as what the great man wanted.
"But you can take five thousand dollars and buy a much better farm, cleared and with buildings on it—all the hard work done," Henry expounded.
Adam John contemplated the face of his former commander soberly, anxiously, almost as appealing to him to understand the longings, the yearnings, the aspirations of a new-made citizen of a great country in whose behalf he had freely shed some tricklings of his mongrel blood.
"But I like do all hard work myself," he urged with a weak attempt at a deprecatory smile. "My father born this island; he die here. 'Sides, Great Father at Washington give me island for fight the Boche. She mine." He added gravely: "Look—flag! Look!"
Harrington followed Adam John's pointing finger to where upon the end of the smoking lodge was raised a small American flag. Henry smiled at the odd conceit, both touched and gratified. "Yes, yes; it's yours all right, old fellow," he assured; "but—but you see, Mr. Boland wants it!"
"And is Mr. Boland God?" demanded a pert voice from somewhere behind and above.
Henry turned, startled and amazed, yet a trifle thrilled—for he had recognized the voice. It was Lahleet, playing Indian again. Fifteen feet behind him she sat half-cradled in the limbs of a freshly felled madrone tree, smiling mockingly, one graceful arm clutching a branch above her head, one moccasined foot swinging idly and unsupported, while with the other she teetered gently like a child at play.
"Eavesdropper!" Harrington reproved, yet welcomed her as an ally; for in their last meeting she had covenanted to help him in a far more important project of Mr. Boland. "Look here, Lahleet," he began at once as losing no instant of time. "If you've been here long you can see that I've rather a job on my hands. I'm here on a very important mission—important to Mr. Boland because his engineers have recommended this island as the best, in fact the only feasible site for the new shingle mill; important to me, because it's the first commission of this kind Mr. Boland has ever entrusted to me, and I want to make good on it; important to Adam John because it's a chance to get five thousand dollars for his island. Won't you—won't you make him see reason?"
But as her tone had indicated, the girl was seeing Adam John's side of it. "What do you mean—reason, Mr. Harrington? Adam John has accepted the white man's ideals—some of them. It seems to him a fine feat, a proof that he is redeemed from savagery, if by painful labor he can turn this wilderness of his fathers into a white man's farm."
Adam John threw his foster-sister a grateful look. Her glib tongue was saying the things his slow lips could never have managed.
"But Mr. Boland will pay him such a generous figure that he cannot afford to indulge a—we must not encourage him to indulge a mere whim like"
The black eyes of Lahleet were grave with the gravity of the centuries, as she interrupted with: "To us poor aborigines, there are some values that cannot be expressed in figures. The satisfaction of making a farm here out of this tree-covered, root-tunneled soil is a profit to Adam John that cannot be expressed in dollars."
"But, Lahleet!" Henry expostulated." It just isn't common sense for"
"That is what ownership means, isn't it?" the girl inquired coolly, holding him at arm's length, as it were. "Freedom to do what one pleases with one's own, to sell it or keep it, lease it or refuse to, improve it or neglect it? That's all in the ownership idea, isn't it?"
"Certainly," admitted Harrington, baffled by the girl's perverseness.
"Then I repeat: Is Mr. Boland God?"
"Lahleet," rebuked the exasperated lawyer, "of course not. You know as well as I that Mr. Boland is a great big constructive genius who"
"Oh, I shall help you with Adam John," interrupted the girl coolly; "but let me understand one thing. Adam John the little and John Boland the great—they are both the same size before the law?"
Harrington nodded, smiling at the girl's odd conceit.
"And if John Boland wants to buy this island he can want to and offer a million dollars for it; but if Adam John wants to kecp it, he can refuse the million?"
"Why certainly—if he wants to; but we must not let Adam John be so foolish."
"No, I think not," agreed Lahleet; "and since you admit the principle, I will talk to Adam John; but it is his island—not mine. I will try to persuade him to yield his whim of a private purpose to the general good as contained in a shingle mill; but that is a hard proposition for a savage to grasp. I fancy if conditions were reversed it would even be a hard proposition for Mr. Boland to grasp. But Adam John is more hopeful soil for the development of a social conscience."
Harrington, having gained her consent to help him, could afford to be merely amused at the girl's acid subtleties, and turned seriously to Adam John.
"Old fellow," he said, "you're getting off wrong on this. I want you to think it over tonight—talk it over with Lahleet."
"Aw ri', me t'ink!" replied Adam John, but his lower lip was thrust out stubbornly. However, Harrington laughed hopefully, as he bade the two good-by. Even though Lahleet failed, he meant to get round the half-breed somchow—for Adam John's good, of course, as well as his own; and was rather full of this determination when he met Billie Boland just getting into her coupé in front of her father's office, whither he was bound to report to Quackenbaugh.