ADVENTURE TALES #5

by John Gregory Betancourt

  She saw by his hurt face that she had gone farther than she intended. And she had not yet made her point.

  “Captain Harper has taken the lease of the island off my hands,’’ she said. “It is very satisfactory. It was only twenty-five pounds a year, but I am very thank­ful. That was the business he came about.’’

  Here was Fleming’s opportunity, an explanation, almost an apology, cer­tainly an opening. But his eyes nar­rowed. What game was Harper up to now? The island that the late but not lamented Starkey had leased from the government for ten years, and for seven years un-expired rent of which the wi­dow was responsible under the lease, was not good for anything. Starkey had tried to plant coffee and then started a tea plantation, but the soil and Starkey’s meth­ods were both poor. He had got out the pearl shell from the shallower spots of the lagoon and found even that of poor quality without a pint of baroques or seeds in the whole lot.

  And now Harper was pledging himself to spend one hundred and seventy-five pounds — that is, eight hundred and seventy-five dollars — on a barren islet. Was it for the widow’s favor? That, Flem­ing was posi­tive, would only be be­stowed in a manner too honorable for Harper to understand, desire, or — considering other alliances — be able to re­spond to.

  What was he up to? There was a joker somewhere. Harper wasn’t spend­ing nearly a thousand dollars for phil­anthropy or for the mere pleasure of cit­ro­nade and cigarettes on Helen Star­key’s veranda.

  “What’s the idea?’’ asked the widow. “Don’t you approve?’’

  “No, I don’t,’’ he answered, flatly and foolishly.

  “Why not?’’

  He was dumb.

  “You men are all alike,’’ she flung at him. He guessed what she meant. He was jealous, and his jealousy had tinged his judgment., But he was no pincush­ion, and he considered he had been pricked sufficiently.

  “If it’s a check he’s given you,’’ he said, “or even bank-notes, I’d advise you to change ’em.’’

  “Thank you. And now you’ll have to excuse me. Captain Harper came early, and I haven’t even touched my housework. If you’ll wait and make yourself comfort­able?’’

  It was the last straw. The housework put aside for Harper, but Fleming could sit around like a house cat waiting to be noticed!

  “Thanks,’’ he said. “But I’m busy too; I just dropped in.’’

  She smiled at him as she gave him her cool, slim hand, and he interpreted it as a laugh. He had been idiotic. The widow’s house was too far out of the way for any visit not to be purposeful. He strode down the garden, unaccompanied, undecorated with stephanotis. The wid­ow had disappeared inside before he reached the crotons. Fleming went on down the hill with clenched fists, clenched for Harper, aching for a chance to use them. He saw a trim, white whale-boat shoot out from the wharf, the four native boys stroking beautifully, Harper in the stern with the steering-oar, graceful as a gondolier, the boat speed­ing out to the Manuwai — Sea-bird — Harper’s schooner, sweet-lined, seaworthy, and the fastest thing under can­vas in the Fijis.

  Fleming stood for a minute or two and mopped his forehead, noting the pre­cision of the rowing, the snappy way in which the oars were tossed up at the schooner’s side while Harper stepped on deck, the quick attachment to the falls and the up-sway of the tender. When he reached the beach the Man­uwai had up-anchored and under jib, stay, and mainsail was sliding out on a reaching tack through the reef-channel, held up ag­ainst wind and cur­rent by Harper at the wheel, using perfect judgment. Once more he watched with a swift envy a sweeping return of his love for the open sea and a slanting deck, regrets for his own sold schooner Tamotu. Out­side the reef Harper’s boys raced to sheets and halyards. Up went the foresail, the kite topsails slipped up without a hitch, set­ting precisely. Splintering the crisp blue seas beneath her forefoot, the Man­uwai with started sheets seethed westward.

  “He’s all a sailor, him!’’ said Flem­ing, and he mopped his face again and went on to complete preparations for the ship­ment of his vanilla.

  *****

  BUT the joy of success had died. Its grave lay up in the widow’s garden. He hadn’t even told her about his victory. Probably she wouldn’t care to hear about it. And he wasn’t going to take the chance of getting snubbed.

  The widow had dismissed all the na­tive help from the island enterprise when her husband died, paying them their back wages out of what little was salvaged from Phil Starkey’s handling of affairs. One man had remained as a sort of caretaker without wages, staying on the is­land at his own request. This was a Fij­ian named Tumba, an ancient, with eyes red­dened by much drinking of yanggona — kava — and memories that led back to times when the week was considered wasted that did not see human flesh served at one meal at least.

  Coming out from a merchant’s hot and smelly warehouse-office, Fleming saw Tumba, drunk, not with yanggona, which paralyzes the limbs, but with trade gin. His red-rimmed eyes were mur­der­ous, shifty. He was dressed only in a red sulu — kilt — and he swaggered down the sand, his old but still efficient muscles bunching as he swung his arms and moved his shoulders, chanting in Fijian:

  “Eh, but I am hungry! I want to eat a man!’’

  He lacked only a club to look the cannibal. But he had no weapon, and nobody took any notice of him. If he left the beach and annoyed any one, he would be arrested by the member of the native constabulary who stood eying him tolerantly. But the sun and the gin would probably put him to sleep in the shade, and Tumba was allowed the uneven tenor of his way. Fleming recognized him and wondered where he had got the money to buy the gin. Harper must have dismissed him and given him a gift. But Harper had only just acquired the lease. Had he presupposed the wid­ow’s acquiescence in the deal?

  It was like his infernal impudence, thought Fleming, to do a thing like that. And he had turned off Tumba because the man was too old. Fleming called to the drunkard, “Hi, there, you Tumba, you come along here!’’

  Tumba stood and stared. His rheumy eyes saw nothing but some vision of mem­ory. Perhaps he really believed what he was chanting, his youth mockingly re­stored by the gin. Who was this white man who called? Tumba was his own master! He had money yet to spend after this drunk had worn off! Tchah!

  “Eh, but I am hungry! I want to eat a man!’’

  Fleming let him go. There was no­thing to be got out of him. Tumba might have left the little island of his own ac­cord. There was nothing to keep him there. Fleming forgot him, worrying about some new machinery that seemed missing but which turned up at last and was shipped on his sloop, crowding both cabin and cockpit.

  *****

  IT WAS the third morning before he sailed out of the harbor and started for his own holding of Tamotu — named after his schoon­er appropriately, for ta motu can mean “the ship’’ or “the is­land.’’ His sloop was called Lelemotu, which means “the little ship.’’ It sailed well enough but had no great speed.

  Good enough for a planter, thought Fleming, regretful always of his well-found schooner that had once sailed the western archipelagoes. All he wanted now was a vessel big enough to convey a couple of tons of beans and some provisions back and forth. He had only one man with him, a Tanna man from the New Hebrides, a black and ugly-looking savage, but faith­ful, courageous, in­debted to Fleming for his life when the latter had picked him up off the Tanna beach in the face of the arrow-fire of a hill tribe bent upon making boloko — human meat — out of Ngiki.

  Ngiki swam like a fish and sailed by instinct. He was as good a man aboard, save for navigation, as Fleming himself. Strong as an ox and cheerful, he was the prize of all the Tanna men who helped to plant and train and weed Fleming’s van­illa. The fertilizing and the scalding and the sweating in the sun, Fleming at­tended to himself. It was a little too much, with the necessity of constant over­seeing of the men.

  He had hoped — Fleming sighed a little and frowned a little as he thought of his aspirations — that he could h
ave got a partner to fertilize the flowers. A light-handed partner, with the deftness for the pinch and the touch with the toothpick that was all the work de­manded in the early morning hours of coolness. The widow — but that was over, and Flem­ing steered the Lelemotu between spoke and spoke while Ngiki sprawled out forward in the full blaze of the sun like a lizard, sleek with coconut oil against blis­tering. He was breaking in a new pipe, his tobac­co box of brass stuck into the lobe of his left ear, stretched into a loop by such usage, the right lobe decorated with a small round vanity-mirror of which Ngiki was inordinately proud, using it as much as any haughty beauty of the gentler sex.

  East of Ovalau the Fijis break up into scores of islets circling about the Koro Sea. Some are volcanic, most of coral formation. Many are uninhabited, visited only by some wandering schooner, blown out of its course perhaps, looking for fresh water or drinking nuts. Flem­ing had picked his own leasehold of Ta­mo­tu because it had water and a mount­ain peak that formed its core and mothered two sheltered valleys where the heat was tempered, and that by its trends thwarted the havoc of the oc­casional hur­ricanes.

  The sloop took it easily, the wind holding steady, sailing on between blue and blue, the cobalt of the sky and the ultramarine of the sea with its indigo shadows. The dis­tant islands and the main­lands showed as humps and juts of deeper blue than the horizon, with here and there a faint gleam of green, opal-wise. There was nei­ther fleck of foam nor cloud. The Lele­motu slapped along nicely, the water chuck-chuckling to the shouldering thrust of her bows and hiss­ing away astern with the delightful sug­gestion of coolness in the sound of ­aerated water. Ngiki finished his pipe, knocked out the ashes, cursing softly at the bite of the applewood, and went to sleep like a black cat. Fleming drowsed. He knew every fathom of the way by in­stinct, every shoaling of the bottom where coral atolls were slowly growing up to the surface, showing as patches of discoloration more or less distinct, accord­ing to wind and tide and submersion. The sloop almost knew its own way home. Fleming, know­ing the feel of breeze and current and what the sloop could do, could have guessed his position within a quarter of a mile. He was on a long tack. With luck he would fetch Tamotu without shifting, somewhere about midnight.

  NGIKI’s flattened nostrils twitched in his sleep as a dog’s will twitch. The Tanna-man had the full sense of smell that in most of us has atrophied so that it no more answers the purpose for which it is intended than do the eyes of an astigmatic person. When Ngiki’s eyes were closed his ears and nose played sentinel, together with his sense of touch. What disturbed him now was only a hint, the suggestion of something un­pleas­ant, not strong enough to set up the correla­tion between sensatory nerve and memory cell. It wasn’t strong enough to mean anything to him yet. Flem­ing knew noth­ing of it at all, though he was still awake.

  The sloop was sailing close-hauled on the starboard tack, and the odor was wafted over the port bow. They were heading up to it and at the same time falling off in leeway. But it got stronger. Ngiki sat up and snuffed disgustedly, angry at being awakened. Then the white man got it. Both of them knew instantly what it was.

  There are several smells in the South Seas that, once inhaled, are never forgotten. The smell of a dead whale to windward, the reek of sugar in the hold, that will permeate even the shell of a hard-boiled egg, the stink of guano and — and this would make a glue factory fragrant by comparison — the stench of rotting-out pearl-shell. It will travel down the wind for miles and salute a vessel leagues away, far out of sight of the offending beach. It gets into the hair, the clothes, tobacco, food, water, everything but an unopened coconut — and that must be swallowed instanter or be tainted. It is thick and it is sticky.

  “Wah!’’

  Ngiki spat over side. Then he looked ex­pectantly along the deck to the cock­pit, hoping that Fleming would tack, even if they did get home later. They might crisscross that stinking lane in­stead of sailing almost straight up it, as they were doing.

  “Faugh!’’

  Fleming’s face exhibited disgust fight­ing with curiosity. He stood up and gazed around him to the blue humps and specks of far and distant land, each of which he knew by name, and approximated their distance.

  “No good that smell, saka [sir],’’ said Ngiki. “Too much big fellow stink. Bet­ter we make turn back?’’

  Fleming shook his head.

  “You take wheel, Ngiki,’’ he said and dived into the cabin when the Tanna man came aft.

  He came out with a chart that he had compiled himself in his trading days and added to from time to time. He cocked his eyes at the angle of the sun, made a brief calculation and chucked the chart down on to the transom cushions.

  “All right, Ngiki,’’ he said. “We come about.’’

  The one jib was self-working, on a club-boom. Ngiki took in the mainsheet smartly and hitched it once about the cleat, looking to his master to see if the sail was too taut or too slack. Flem­ing nodded and Ngiki completed his hitch. For a moment Ngiki was happy. Then he sensed the reason for the tack. They were to head well to windward to offset leeway when they came back once again to close-hauled sailing. For the time they would be only on the edge of the smell, but they would work back into it, nosing along it as a hound on a trail. When Fleming once more gave him the wheel and again went below Ngiki grumbled aloud and to himself.

  “What name (why) Falemingi go along that big-fellow smell? My word; it make my belly too much walk about. Spoil smoke.’’

  He eyed Fleming curiously when the latter emerged on deck with a Colt auto­matic, carefully cleaned and oiled it, filled the clip after one cartridge had been in­jected into the breech, filled up two extra clips, and tucked them away in his hip pocket.

  Ngiki’s eyes held anticipation and lust of battle. Through the reek of the rotting shell his mind smelled blood. It was a long time since Falemingi had been in action, a long time since Ngiki, in the too peaceful plantation life, had smelled powder. He did not know whether he would be in on the fighting or not, but the sight of the auto­matic, a murderous, heavy .44, was as the sight of a shotgun in the Fall to a setter.

  Fleming put the pistol away in a holster attached to his belt and sat through the tack with his eyes half-closed, think­ing. Some one was rotting pearl on Par­uki. Paruki now belonged, under its lease, to Harper. But the lease was ex­changed only three days ago, and this shell had taken time to be brought up by the divers and laid on the drying-beaches. Starkey had tried the lagoon with poor results, but Fleming remem­bered that Starkey, char­acteristically, had worked only the shallows.

  The deeper stretches might have panned out rich in shell and actual gems. People didn’t rot out without some prospects of success. Harper wouldn’t. And this must be Harper. If so, he had practically stolen the shell before he saw the widow. If she had refused to let the lease go Harper would have been in the position of a thief. Not that that would have worried Harper overmuch. It was not the first time he had been suspected or accused of crooked­ness. He would wriggle out of it some way with the pearls if he was given half a chance.

  Tumba? Tumba’s presence on Ova­lau was better explained now. The diving and spreading had started the moment Harper left the island with Tumba aboard. Tumba could not be trusted. He might spill the news at any time. So he was removed before operations began. Fleming did not think there were any natives on Paruki, outside of Harper’s crew, who were Malaita boys and not divers. Harper used modern methods for getting his shell, a diving-suit with an oxygen tank, a quick clean-up and away.

  That was his style, whether he held a lease and was on the windy side of the law or was pirating a lagoon. It took white men to use a suit. The natives didn’t like it. There were probably four or five white men on Paruki, aside from the Solo­mon Islanders from Malaita.

  It was big odds and necessitated care­ful plans, but Fleming did not hesitate. He was not going to see the widow robbed, and he intended to show up Har­per. The memory of that quarter of an hour on the wid
ow’s veranda still ran­kled. He leaned against the weather stays, his big, athletic body pliant to the pitch and toss of the ship. The breeze was freshening a bit, and the sloop was making good time reaching. Fleming’s eyes were half closed but Ngiki caught the gray gleam that shone from them, noted the vertical lines between the brows, the bossing jaw muscles, and nod­ded and winked to himself.

  “By and by big fellow trouble he walk along,’’ he murmured happily.

  “ ’Tend sheets, Ngiki; we’re going about!’’ said Fleming suddenly.

  Ngiki jumped and Fleming spun the wheel. Up came the sloop, catching the wind in flattened main and staysail-jib, tossed her bows, and dug into the seas, plowing on to Paruki, into the heart of the stench. Fleming got his binoculars and kept them focused for the first sight of the island peak.

  Paruki boasted one cone, sloping abruptly down on one side, its ridges largely barren, denuded of soil and vegetation. Much of the islet was marsh; and the lagoon bit deeply into it, fringed by mangroves. On the northern side there were steep cliffs, part of the lone mount. The water came up close to them and landing was difficult. The cliffs mounted in sheer palis — preci­pices — to the serr­ated summit of the cone, and then the land pitched down toward the la­goon and the leeward beaches, broad stretches of sand where the shell was rotting. Fleming knew that even if there were men on the lookout by purpose or accident, he could sight the loom of the peak before they caught a glimpse of his sail, unless there was some one on the cone, which was most improbable — and had to be chanced. He intended to effect a landing and make at least a reconnaissance before sunset. Much of the pith of his plan depended upon circumstances.

  But something had to be done be­fore the shells were stripped and a clean-up of the pearls effected. And done with­out warn­ing. Pearls were easy things to hide, hard to identify. A little while and no one could prove the rotting had not taken place within the term of the transferred lease. The fact that Harper had troubled to get the lease at all and to pay for it was to Fleming proof positive that the haul was likely to be so rich that Harper, discovering how the shell was running, re­solved to cover himself in case of future trouble. If the news ever leaked out that he had pirated a widow’s lease the Government would be after him hot foot. But he knew what he was handling be­fore he put up his eight hundred and seventy-five dollars.