by Grant Allen
On, on, we rode, in fear and trembling. The volcano now was all in full blast. Ashes and pumice stone kept falling around us. Smoke and steam obscured our way. But the dangers of nature frightened us little in comparison; what we dreaded most was the desperate onslaught of the enraged Hawaiians.
As we drew near the fort however I breathed again more freely. Not a sign of Kalaua was anywhere to be seen. We rode along, cautiously, under the overhanging rocks. No Hawaiian showed his grim black head above or below us. Then Kea, with a shriek, guessed in a moment exactly what had happened. “The lava has overwhelmed them!” she cried, clasping her hands together in girlish trepidation. “They are dead! They are dead! My uncle! My people! Pélé will not be robbed of her victim at any rate. The lava has burst forth in one great flood and swallowed them.”
And indeed, when we reached a turn in the bridle path, and looked up the ravine down whose rugged centre the other road descended tortuously, a terrible sight met our astonished eyes. The summit of the mountain was now one red and lurid mass of living fire. Through the gully along whose course Kalaua and his followers had plunged in the first darkness of the total eclipse to cut off our retreat, a vast river of red-hot lava was pouring onward resistlessly in huge fiery cataracts. We could see the fierce stream descending apace over ledges of rock like a flood of molten metal poured forth from the smelting-bowl; we could see it engulfing trees and shrubs and stumps and boulders in its plastic mass; we could see it overwhelming the whole green ravine with one desolating inundation of fire and ashes. “Quick, quick,” I cried; “ride, ride for your lives. You may think volcanoes are nothing much to be frightened of; but, I tell you, a volcano in such a temper as that is not by any means a thing to be trifled with. She’s mad with rage. The stream’s coming down the valley straight for the fork; take at once to the ridge, and ride on for your lives. Ride, ride across country, anyhow, to the Hornet at Hilo!”
“And me!” Kea cried, looking back at me appealingly, for she headed our little hasty procession. “What’s to become of me? Of me, who have brought it all by my sin upon you! Of me, for whose sake Pélé is so angry! Of me, who roused her wrath by stealing away her victim! Leave me here to die! Kalaua is dead! My people are swallowed! I meant myself to die in their place, but you wouldn’t let me! Leave me here to perish! If you don’t leave me, Pélé in her anger will pursue you on your way to the sea itself, to the foot of the mountain!”
“Ride on!” I answered. “Ride on to Hilo. Is this a time to make plans for the future? We’ll discuss all that, Kea, on the deck of the Hornet.”
That evening, on board the British gunboat, lighted up by the terrific glare overhead, we had time to reflect what it all meant, and to feel ourselves free to think and speak again.
“What will you do now, Kea?” I asked the poor girl, as she sat there, trembling, in a small cabin chair, while the red flames still illumined for miles and miles the summit and flanks of Mauna Loa. “Do you wish to stop here in your own island?”
Kea looked up at me with a half terrified glance. “I wish,” she said in a low voice, “to be as far away from Pélé and Maloka as possible..... Kalaua is dead. Pélé has devoured him..... I will leave my husband on my wedding night. I will go home to my father’s people.”
“That is best so,” I answered quietly. “Hawaii is no place for such as you. I don’t think Maloka will ever miss you. We will go on the Hornet away to Honolulu. There you can take passage with Frank and me on the next steamer for San Francisco, on your way home to dear, peaceful England.”
“Why,” Frank exclaimed, with a look of immense surprise, “you don’t mean to say, Tom, you’re going to turn your back upon a volcano — and in actual eruption, too, into the bargain!”
“Bother volcanoes!” I answered testily. “One may have too much of a good thing. I don’t care if I never set eyes on another eruption as long as I live. So that’s flat for you.”
“Nonsense!” Frank promptly replied with spirit, refusing to desert an old friend in a moment of vexation. “That’s all very well now, when you’re annoyed with Pélé for misbehaving herself; but I’ll bet you sixpence, in spite of that, you’ll be off again before twelve months are over, exploring some other jolly crater in Sumatra or Teneriffe, or the Antarctic regions.”
And sure enough, as I put the last finishing touches to these lines for press, the post brings me in a letter in an official envelope, “On Her Majesty’s Service,” informing me that the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty have been graciously pleased to accept my suggested appointment for three years on a scientific mission to investigate the volcanic phenomena of Cotopaxi and other craters in the chain of the Andes. By the same post, I have also received a note from my sister, who is now stopping down at the Kentish rectory where Kea lives with her English relations, and who says, among sundry other pieces of domestic criticism, “What a dainty, charming, lovable girl your pretty little Hawaiian really is, Tom! So gentle and good-natured, and so sweetly pensive! I can hardly believe, myself, there’s anything of the cannibal Sandwich Islander in her! She’s as fair as I am, and quite as European in all her ideas and thoughts and sentiments. When she doesn’t talk nonsense about Pélé, in fact, I almost forget she isn’t one of ourselves, she’s so perfectly English. But the rector says he can’t allow her to teach in the Sunday school till she’s quite got over that heathenish rubbish. By the way, I shouldn’t be surprised if she and her Cousin Hugh were some day to make a nice little match of it, if only Hugh can ever persuade her that it wouldn’t be bigamy, and that she isn’t already duly married to some ugly, mythical, humpbacked creature of the name of Maloka.”
The Jaws of Death
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
The original frontispiece
CHAPTER I.
A PIONEER OF COOPER’S PIKE.
Enjoy the spring of Love and Youth,
To some good angel leave the rest;
For Time will teach thee soon the truth,
There are no birds in last year’s nest!” — LONGFELLOW.
WHY, certainly. A great many folks ask me what it was that turned my hair white. And you don’t often see a young man of my age with snow-white locks like these, I’m aware. I consider it a spécialité. Well, it was that awful night at San Francisco that did it, if you want to know. I tell you, gentlemen, if ever any fellow was rescued from the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth, it’s the individual that now stands before you. But it’s a long yam, and a dry yam, and it’ll take some time to tell it properly. Let’s adjourn to the billiard-room, and have it all out over a brandy and soda, since you will be inquisitive. I always require a brandy and soda myself when I tell that tale, just to keep my mouth moist; the horror of the thing comes back to me so still, that it somehow seems to dry my blood up.
But first, before I begin to reach the tragedy of it — for you may guess it was a tragedy, and no mistake — let me start fair with the story how I came at all, an Englishman born and bred, and one of the Frekes of Devonshire, to go to San Francisco.
You’ve had a cursory look round Cooper’s Pike this afternoon in my buggy, and you can see what sort of a city it is nowadays. There isn’t another manufacturing town on the Pacific slope that can hold a candle to Cooper’s Pike this minute in the matter of industries. We claim to do the biggest trade in hardware of any city in the State, and our population ran out to over seventy thousand souls at the last enumeration. But the Pike was a precious different sort of a place when I first came here, ten years since.
A more one-horse affair than it looked then you never saw.
It was a miserable village of a single long street, and low at that, consisting in about equal proportions of a hotel, a dancing-saloon, three American bars, a provision store, a shooting-gallery, and a Chinese laundry. People sai
d, those days, it was better to live in vain than to live in Cooper’s Pike City. The inhabitants reckoned about forty men and three women; and so far as I could see they didn’t appear to have a single immortal soul among them. “Hallo!” said I, when I first set eyes on the town of Cooper’s Pike; “here’s a pretty sort of place indeed for me to bring Edith to!”
And that reminds me that I’d better start fair at the very beginning, and tell you who I was, and who was Edith.
Well, I’d come fresh out from the old country in those days, like many another young fellow of good family and insufficient brains, to seek my fortune in the Western Territories. I’d been a couple of years a medical student at Bartholomew’s before I left home; but Bartholomew’s and I didn’t get on together, somehow; and Bartholomew’s had the meanness to insinuate it was my own fault rather than theirs, for being a lazy young vagabond, and neglecting anatomy and physiology with impartial carelessness. Perhaps it was; for I was never a dab at books, and I didn’t take enthusiastically to dissecting, either; but anyhow, my mother went on Bartholomew’s side, and shipped me off to America to shift for myself on a ranch or something. The dear old lady meant to do her best for me, I don’t doubt; and so she did in the end, as I guess you’ll judge if you look around my residence here; for we’re not what you call indigent; and by way of settling me down in life as a complete rancher — why, she bought me a small town lot for a nominal price in Cooper’s Pike City. Cooper’s Pike wasn’t then on the boom; but a land company in England was doing its best to boom it. She bought it, on paper, at an agency in Pall Mall; and I, who didn’t know a ranch from a ten o’ spades in those days — I went readily enough wherever the mater chose to send me. “Honor your father and your mother,” was good enough for me; and, as my mother wished it, I was prepared to run my own ranch undisturbed on a fifty-feet frontage right here in Main Street.
So having nothing to live upon, and no prospects in particular to look forward to in life, I need hardly tell you that the very first thing I did on my way out, on board the Scythia, was to fall in love with the prettiest and most delicately nurtured girl in all England.
Her name was Edith Deverel — the Devonshire Deverels, too — and she was going out with her father, who was in the consular service, to spread sweetness and light in Yokohama.
As they were bound for Japan, via San Francisco, and as I was going in the same direction as far as Carson (where I was to branch off for my property on the Cooper’s Pike trail), we naturally chummed up from the very first day we met on board; and I’ve always noticed that when a young man and a young woman chum up together on a Cunard steamer, you may smell wedding-cake looming up indefinitely in the dim distance. A mixed metaphor, is it, sir? Well, perhaps it is; we’re not particular about mixing our liquors, right out here in the West. As long as we make ourselves understood, we let the rest slide. And I fancy you more or less comprehend my meaning.
So, to cut a long story short, and get into the thick of things at once, as Horace recommends — you see, I still retain reminiscences of the dear old Charterhouse — before we reached New York, we were regularly engaged; and likely to remain so for an indefinite period.
At the moment, however, that didn’t trouble me much. I was happy enough in having induced Edith to be mine for life; and the mere trifling fact that she was to be mine at Yokohama, while I was to be hers in the territory of Nevada, six thousand miles away, didn’t seem to interfere in the very least with the depth and serenity of our youthful transports. Young people don’t duly appreciate at first the importance of contiguity in matters of this sort. They think you can love one another equally well in spite of space relations; which, as Euclid would say, is absurd and impossible. If I was one of the Bureau of National Proverbs, I’d make the children write at the top of their copy-books, “Propinquity is the mother of intersexual affection.”
However, as far as Carson City we went together very happily over the Union Pacific line to our various destinations. The very name seemed to give us a fortunate omen. The Union Pacific line! Could anything on earth be more delightful? Yokohama and Cooper’s Pike united together in the bond of love and fortnightly correspondence! We gloated over the idea, and I almost fancy I made it a subject of my muse’s first and only sonnet.
But when I left the cars at Carson City — yes, sir, I have got Americanized, some, in ten years at Cooper’s Pike; I frankly admit it; the Pacific slope is surprisingly assimilative; nowhere like it on earth for absorptive power — when I left the cars at Carson City, I began to feel in a vague sort of way that perhaps I’d done rather a mean thing in asking Edith to throw herself away on a good-for-nothing emigrant, who hadn’t a prospect in the world or a red cent to bless himself with. As I drove across country on Jim Fletcher’s stage to Cooper’s Pike, three days’ journey over a road which would make an Irish carman’s hair stand on end with horror, this feeling gradually deepened upon me. And when at last I reached Pike itself, and examined life near the setting sun, on the site of Edith’s future home, I felt in a moment I could never ask that ethereal creature to come down from the clouds and partake of hash daily in a lumber-built shanty.
For there wasn’t a stone house anywhere in Cooper’s Pike in those days, nor a house of any sort except right here on Main Street. There wasn’t a sidewalk, or a horse-car, or a respectable woman. The cross streets were staked out to be sure, at regular angles, in very good style; the company did that; but only the stakes themselves as yet were visible; and as the boys used them for firing at in revolver practice, they tended to deteriorate before the city grew up and obliterated them entirely.
However, I was never one to be daunted by hardships. I set to work at once, with the aid of Joe Ashley, the barman at the saloon, to construct myself a hut on my fifty-foot frontage. It wasn’t much of a hut, I allow, for it was built entirely of broken cracker-boxes — I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I forgot you were from the other side — packing-cases for biscuits. I bought them at the grocery store for two days’ labor, splitting firewood; and when the hut was built, a neater or more commodious shanty of its sort you never saw; if only it had been watertight, it would have been replete with every modern convenience. But the rain dropping through where the shingles misfitted did keep one awake a bit at night sometimes; and I must say the absence of a floor was a distinct disadvantage, whenever one had to sit with one’s feet in a puddle. But bless you, you can’t expect to have French cookery and lectures on Esoteric Buddhism in a new settlement; you’re not fit for Nevada if you can’t put up with a little gentle roughing it.
Well, of course I didn’t like to worry my old mater at home with small details of that sort — she might have thought I’d catch cold if she knew I had to lie with the drip from the roof falling on to my blanket; and she’d have had her fears for my morals, I expect, if she’d learned the antecedents of the only ladies (all three of them unmarried) then located in the Cooper’s Pike settlement.
So, just to let her down easy, I put the best face upon it. I wrote home as cheerfully about things generally as I could honestly write. I told her I’d got myself a neat small house built on the lot she’d bought me; that I was on intimate terms with the best society of the place; and that I hoped before long to find some business opening in the lumbering interest. And indeed, Joe the barman was very good society; and the demand for steady hands to split firewood and drive teams to the mines was regularly increasing with the pan-out of the silver.
For about three months I went on picking up odd jobs here and there, and living from hand to mouth in a way that afforded me lots of fun for my money; and I also kept on writing to Edith at Yokohama, assuring her always of my undying affection, and of the absolute impossibility of its ever assuming a more tangible shape than that afforded by a long fortnightly letter. But at the end of three months, as I was washing out molasses barrels one day (at twenty cents an hour) for my friend at the grocery store, up comes the stage from Carson City, and Jim Fletcher jumps off and steps
along quite important-like— “Howard Freke, Esquire,” says he, with a polite bow, “I’ve got a letter for you, sir. Boys, this is an event that inaugurates a new era. First United States mail that ever entered Cooper’s Pike City!”
Naturally, the boys all crowded round me; and naturally, too, they shook my hands, and congratulated me and themselves warmly upon this auspicious occurrence. They felt it was an occasion for glasses all around; and on the strength of my letter, I treated the company. After that, I retired to my own hut, to read the mater’s letter in peace and quietness.
Well, I don’t want to say anything disrespectful about my mother, but I must confess the contents of that first communication from home, read in the gloom of my biscuit-box hut, did rather amuse me. My mother hoped I was very particular what society I picked up with, and that I attended divine service twice regularly on Sundays. (The nearest church, those days, was three days off, you must recollect, at Carson City.) She hoped also I had furnished my house quietly and inexpensively, and had been very careful about sanitary arrangements, and gone in for nice, light, cheerful papers. She hoped I would look after the housekeeping accounts with rigor, and not let the cook buy fresh meat for stock, which could be made every bit as good from bones, and so forth. She was surprised I had got on so well at the lumbering in so short a time; but she knew men got good appointments easily in the far West; and she was always sure I’d do really well, like a true born Freke, if once I put my heart thoroughly into it. And then came the chief point of all in the whole letter: “As I wish to mark my pleasure at your earnest desire to help yourself in your new home, and as I think it highly desirable you should as far as possible keep up your music — you play so nicely, and musical evenings are such a resource to young men away from home — I have decided to contribute to the furnishing of your house” — well, what do you think, gentlemen?— “a new grand piano.”
