The Adventure Megapack

by Wildside Press

  The big war galley was within a cable’s length of the launch. Her prow was lighted by candlenut torches held aloft by half a dozen tattooed warriors. The wind-blown flares illuminated the repulsive, paint-smeared occupants of the galley, the steel-barbed weapons glinting with murderous intent.

  Sagon touched Palotta’s arm in the darkness; his voice was soft and wheedling. “Let Ganda come aboard,” he advised, “with Oke and Enos.”

  Palotta pushed him aside as she stepped to the rail. “How dare these people come armed to address me?” she challenged. “Speak, Ganda! Am I to cringe before the war irons of these Kanakas?”

  “We shall answer the queen’s question in the council chamber!” Ganda retorted fiercely. “The queen must reply to her chiefs. We have come to bring you and your brother, the sham warrior. We want the papalagi also, who hid from the fight under the Red Reef. Let him come, too.”

  Mace had been slaking his thirst from an oak cask near the saloon head, which contained fresh water and a cup for the use of the deck hands. Palotta translated Ganda’s message to him in an undertone, while he wiped the delicious water drops from his lips.

  “Ganda’s some bull chief,” he commented. “Maybe he’d like a silver band to play our funeral march.”

  Palotta flung back her answer to the waiting chief. “I will not return to be judged by your people, Ganda. I ask the freedom that is mine by right and birth.”

  The old doctor made a sign in the darkness. “You must return, O queen,” he chided. “The chiefs will compel you!”

  Mace moved forward slightly. “See here, Sagon,” he drawled. “Who’s who in this palaver—the queen or these banana merchants? I guess if she wants to leave these islands she’ll choose her own time and her own way.”

  Sagon recoiled, his old lips snarling a native imprecation. “You shall not leave these islands, dog with the white skin! You die here where the carrion fish can rend your body. Your breed must not escape!”

  Palotta interposed with a gesture. “Remember, Sagon,” she declared in an undertone. “I gave you my pearls so that he might go free. You shall not betray him now!”

  In reply the old doctor clutched the brass rail with his shaking fingers and called to the waiting chiefs in the war canoe. “Come aboard, my children! The white man is here. We must obey the law.”

  Mace’s right hand gripped his waist softly. In a moment Sagon was lifted from the deck and shaken as a lion shakes a vulture. The bones of the old schemer rattled like sticks in the white man’s clasp; his scream of protest was heard by the fierce-eyed crowd in the galley.

  Mace put him on his feet, still gripping him by one arm. “Those pearls, Sagon!” he ordered. “Which pocket? Quick!”

  The old man squirmed and struggled to get free and, with his disengaged hand, Mace rent the other’s garments and in a twist of the fingers had drawn the precious rope of pearls from a pocket of grass silk that was near Sagon’s heart. Then he released the man.

  With a vicious snarl Sagon made a plunge to regain the prize that had been wrested from him. In doing so he slipped and fell overboard.

  A soft, gurgling noise was heard down in the water, followed by a smothered yell of terror as a dozen phosphorescent wedges of fire darted under and over the struggling body. In a moment the water was dark again.

  Avian approached Mace. “We must fight or run from this war canoe,” he said quickly. “What does our friend say?”

  Mace shrugged. “No use having a mess when you can walk away,” he answered quietly. “There’s no gate money for beating this bunch of tinhorns. Shake up your engines and get clear!”

  Palotta nodded appreciation. “Let us go, Avian. We can reach the Marquesas on our oil fuel. The launch is well stored. I have always lived in a state of preparation,” she confessed hastily. “And now the hour has struck!”

  Ganda and the others seemed to guess Palotta’s intention. With savage cries they drove the big war galley beak onto the launch as Avian shouted a word to his helmsman to stand clear.

  “Make it a running fight!” Mace spoke near Avian’s elbow. “I’ll stand in the stern and deal with the black stuff if it climbs over the rail.”

  The launch maneuvered cleverly to avoid the slamming beak of the heavy galley. With shouts and thunders of paddles and spear butts it plunged onto the launch’s stern. Only a few seconds were needed for the oil-driven launch to get clear, but Avian had allowed the galley to come closer than was prudent. Her big-bladed paddles almost raised her from the water, hurling her towering beak to the launch’s stern rail.

  With incredible skill the warriors in the galley’s fore part locked their pronged spearheads to the brass rail of the launch, thereby forcing the launch to tow them in her wake. The locked spears, cunningly interwoven, formed a ladder for the first of their boarding party. It was Ganda, who, with shield held before him, crawled up the ladder of spears to the stern rail.

  His shaking head plumes and the red paint on his chest and face produced an uncanny effect in the torchlight. He leaped to the rail like a giant from an inferno, shield and spear swaying in his great hands, the spirit of loot and murder in his eyes. He knew now that the launch held the vast hoard of wealth which Palotta had inherited from her mother—gold dollars and gems from all the islands of the archipelago. One straight blow and his own sons would inherit the queen’s far-won treasures.

  A hose box stood near the stern rail; Mace skipped to it lightly, bringing his head level with the protruding jaw of Langos’ Herculean chief. In his day Mace had met the worst breed of fighters and saloon-bar bandits. To him circumstances never presented new factors whether the man struck with fist, knife, or bottle. His rejoinder had always been effective. There could be no room for argument when men strove to become his executioners. At other times he was genial and lovable.

  Ganda’s spear drove at him with the force of a shell splinter. Straight toward his heart it came, the black, sinewy arm bunched like a steel rope behind it. Mace leaned forward, his left and right hands touching shield and spear arms with the lightness of a cat; then his lithe body crouched as shield and spear deviated the matter of a hand’s breadth. The barbed weapon went wide, bringing Ganda’s profile almost to Mace’s shoulder.

  Ganda’s snakelike length of body, with its roots of muscles quivering, was for a fraction of time, “all mussed up,” as the ringmen say. His perfect balance was gone, his whole structure out of joint. Mace’s right fist smashed under the chin, and the neck of Ganda cracked like a twisted hinge. The blow seemed to generate to Mace’s toes, but the crunch and volt came from the lightning in his brain.

  Ganda went down the ladder of spears in a limp and spineless heap, his shield and his charms of brass clattering over the prow of the galley. Mace kicked the spearheads from the rail, and the launch shot away at torpedo speed for the open Pacific.

  CHAPTER VIII

  NOT EVEN A YEAR

  The launch throbbed through seas of palm-dotted atolls that stretched like gems of sapphire along the horizon. There were bird-haunted islands that called to them to stay, islands where the shimmering purple of valleys and streams faded like dream-mists from the eyes of waking children.

  Palotta, book in hand, reclined in a deck chair in the cool shade of the sun awning, the heavy pearl necklace which Sagon had surrendered drooping from her ivory throat. Mace and Avian studied a navigator’s chart inside the small wheelhouse aft.

  “To-night we fetch Nukahiva,” Avian declared with a side glance at his companion. “Perhaps you are sorry,” he added, studying the chart afresh.

  Mace sighed. He had spent five blissful days in a floating haven of peace and tranquillity. And it seemed to him that each beat of the propeller was bringing him nearer the end, to the last night when he must say good-by to the woman who had raised his mental outlook to a finer plane.

  Avian regarded him a trifle curiously, for in the last few days he had learned to trust the man who had stood by them in their hour of need. “I shall b
e sorry to lose you, Darrel Mace,” he admitted with boyish awkwardness. “It is a pity that friends must go different ways!”

  Mace nodded absently. “You see, Avian, I’m a partner in some coffee lands down in the Manono Archipelago, and I’ll have to get busy locating my territory. My partners were drowned on those reefs of yours. So I’ll have to pursue the venture alone.”

  His voice, although low, reached Palotta under the awning. She tossed her book aside and lay back in her chair, her eyes tight shut, listening to the beat of the small but powerful engines below. She was bound for a strange island and people who would know her only by repute.

  She had lived nearly all her life at Langos with Avian. As a child she had been almost worshiped by the natives until of late when Sagon and Ganda had stirred the chiefs against her. The coming of Mace had brought things to a climax. All her mother’s wealth and her own was in the steel-walled vault adjoining her stateroom. Her lands and house she surrendered to the people she still loved and remembered.

  Her great courage had been shaken by the events of the last few days, and the new life she was entering held many shadows and fears for her young mind. The world outside Langos was hard and ruled by tyrants more subtle and ferocious than Ganda or Sagon. Her brother, too, was woefully inexperienced in the ways of white men, although the blood of the white race ran pure in his veins. Palotta was lonely, and, for the first time in her life, afraid.

  Mace stepped from the wheelhouse, paused an instant opposite her chair to hitch a flapping guy rope to a stanchion. The bronze of his throat and face, the elastic ease of his young body were revealed in the tropic sun flare. Like a boy, anxious to make good in his reputation for tidiness, he picked up the discarded cushions and shawls near her chair and placed them in a dry corner abaft the skylights.

  She opened her eyes suddenly and regarded him with attention, for Palotta was gifted with a quaint sense of humor at times.

  “I once sentenced you to death,” she declared dreamily. “Now I discover that the death penalty has been overlooked. And neither of us appears jubilant,” she added with a sigh.

  Mace found himself staring into a tiny, lustrous spot between her half-closed eyelashes. “I’m sorry the trip is over,” he said. Then with a forced laugh he added: “It may be years before I catch up with that death penalty.”

  “But you are sorry the trip is over?”

  His reply was a fierce intake of breath as he bent over the rail. “I came near drowning on a reef once,” he admitted slowly. “It was just a holiday from my job compared to some things.”

  “Some things!” Palotta laughed mirthlessly. “You poor boy! There are truly many worse fates than drowning!”

  Mace felt like a quitter in love as he walked away to the wheelhouse, the fires of his confusion blazing on his cheeks and brow. Her voice sounded faintly behind him, blurred by the mad poundings of his heart. Avian had gone below.

  “Mr. Mace! Please come here!”

  He halted at the wheelhouse, swung around dutifully and returned to the chair. She was studying the jeweled pendant that hung from the pearls on her breast.

  “I am sorry you are unhappy,” she began in childlike tones. “Tell me how I can repay you for your devotion and courage. I feel that my life and the life of my brother are still in your keeping.”

  Mace knelt beside her chair, even though the eyes of the native steersman were staring through the window of the wheelhouse. “I go my way alone tomorrow,” he declared huskily. “I will forget to-day and yesterday. But you must tell me that it is well that I should go, and that I must not love even the memory of you. Say it now, and I’ll just disappear, for your peace of mind and my own.”

  For the first time Mace saw her lips tremble, and his heart leaped wildly. Her voice sounded like a wind reed in the warm silence. “Your country is far away, Darrel, and I do not want to lose you forever!”

  “For a year, Palotta?”

  She stared over his shoulder as though afraid of unseen hands and spears. The shadows of lonely islands crossed her eyes, and her soul shrank within her. “No, no; not a year!” she almost gasped. Then, with hands outspread, she smiled again. “I do not want you to go, Darrel. I, too, am very unhappy!”

  That night the glittering lights of Nukahiva twinkled across the sky line. Pier lamps winked with fairy faces at the dreaming couple standing hand in hand near the port rail.

  ANOTHER PAWN OF FATE, by F. St. Mars

  But a desert stretched and stricken, left and right, left and right,

  Where the piled mirages thicken under white-hot light—

  A skull beneath a sand-hill, and a viper coiled inside,

  And a red wind out of Libya, roaring, “Run and hide!”

  —“Jabson’s Amen” (Kipling).

  * * * *

  If you had killed, and what was worse, barely otherwise made use of, three colts, a heifer, twenty-one sheep and eleven pigs belonging to other people, so that four hundred dollars would not even begin to cover your debts—if, moreover, you had done to death two valuable dogs sent to interview you upon the subject, and spoiled the sleep of not less than two dozen stockmen for an uncounted number of nights, you might have expected consideration—but you would certainly not get it.

  All these things, and more, had the jaguar done, and he was beginning to reap his harvest. Things became hectic for him, and by the time he had escaped death by bullet and poison four times, and worse than death by trap upon nine occasions, he came to the conclusion that a change of air was for him imperative.

  The jaguar was like a large leopard, only with his spots run into rosettes. He was heftier than any leopard, though, and fiercer by some few fierces.

  The trouble was, where was there a refuge to go to for a hunted wild hunter upon all those desolate plains and sun-baked stretches? Where, indeed?

  The jaguar left home—the ruined tomb of the king of some long-forgotten race—in the almost intolerable glare of the full sun upon his journey. He would much have preferred to “flit” during the darkest night, but a pillar of dust as yet far away but approaching, warned him of the starting of a big hunt on horseback—for him.

  As the horsemen might be accompanied by dogs, he knew he would be found if he stayed. So he decamped—at a long, loose, padded, swinging trot, that hiked him over the rough ground much faster than it appeared to; and, of course, being a cat, a supercat, he hugged what cover he could get.

  This time, however, the stockmen were in earnest, and did not stop to think on the brink of a drink when the sun got hot enough to frizzle all things save the little lizards upon the rock-slabs. They kept right on going. So did the jaguar; but with the grim, slow realization that he was a sprinter, but no stayer, and that his ever growing thirst was worse than death.

  Thus it came about that by noonday he could not very well ignore the drumming of a bronco’s hoofs not far to his right rear, and another to his left.

  He heard also a shout, and threw an ominous snarl over his spotted, tawny shoulder in reply as he broke into a gallop.

  He was heading toward the coast. The smell of water, any water, in his nostrils made him do that. Water, said instinct, means forest in that land; and he was a forester by right, or his ancestors had been.

  Then came the lasso—the first one.

  The jaguar did not see it. He heard it fall short just behind, and make slithery noises like a snake. He set back his ears. His fangs bared.

  Then came the second lasso.

  The jaguar saw that. He had to jump over it as he flew—fairly flew now, in his last desperate dash to the shelter of some thick but shortish grass.

  He gained the grass-patch even as the third lasso hit, and slipped along, his back. Untamable, ferocious beyond compare, a dread that stalked by night, a terror among the Indians, intolerant, implacable, lonely, the jaguar dived to the middle of that slight cover quaking in every limb, a beast beaten and cowed even to inertia. It was the lassos that had done it.

  For
full ten minutes the jaguar lay there, spent, in the middle of the grass-patch, only his head visible, a picture of fury and hate, while the finest horsemen in the world circled around outside, trying to lasso that furious head—and failing.

  The broncos would not enter the grass, and the dogs thought that the reason the horses had was a good one—for a cornered jaguar in thick grass is several kinds of a deadly proposition. And in the end the stockmen set fire to the grass, and waited.

  * * * *

  The seared stems burned like tinder, the flames racing along before the wind in a crackling, reeking furnace, but the jaguar did not move.

  The red, dancing, leaping line fairly flew down upon him, chasing its own choking clouds of smoke, till they both together seemed to envelop him, and that terrible, great, spotted, broad head, still and motionless and grinning, faded, faded gradually out before the amazed onlookers—faded and was swallowed up.

  Not when the smoke fumes nearly asphyxiated him; not when the smell of his singeing fur mingled with the rest; not till the sting of the flames, actually licking up his legs, broke the spell, did the jaguar come to life, as it were back, and leap for that life ahead of the fire. By then he was invisible.

  If it had been a race before, it was a greater race now. The flames fairly tore along in that dry place, and he could not see a yard on either hand whither he was going. He only knew that the flames were gnashing at his tail, and that instinct shrieked in his ear—

  “Make for the sea!”

  He made for the sea accordingly, the sea he could not see—nor anything else for the first quarter of a mile, for the matter of that—but knew was there.

  The fire was far behind when the great spotted cat got to the shore by way of sandhills, and lay down, panting. It had stopped with the gutting of the grass-patch—but the stockmen were not far behind.

  They had spotted the jaguar at last, clear of the smoke, galloping like a great dog far across the blistered plain, and were now drumming down upon him, dogs, horses, and men, in a yelling cloud of dust, that—it seemed—must end with his end.