The Devil's Rosary

by Seabury Quinn

  “I had barely sense and strength left to set the sampan’s matting sail before I fell half-conscious into the bottom again, still so sick and weak with liquor that I didn’t care particularly whether I ever made land again.

  “Just how long I lay there asleep—drugged would be a better term, for that Eastern liquor acts more like opium than alcohol—I haven’t the slightest idea. Certainly it was all day; perhaps I slept clear around the clock. When I awoke, the stars were out and the boat was drifting side-on toward a rocky, jagged shore as if she were in a mill-flume.

  “I jumped up and snatched the steering paddle, striving with might and main to bring her head around, but I might as well have tried paddling a canoe with a teaspoon. She drove straight for those rocks as if some invisible hand were guiding her to destruction; then, just as I thought I was gone, a big wave caught her squarely under the poop, lifted her over a saw-toothed reef and deposited her on a narrow, sandy shingle almost as gently as if she’d been beached by professional sailors.

  “I climbed out as quickly as I could and staggered up the beach, but fell before I’d traversed a quarter-mile. The next thing I knew, it was daylight again and a couple of ugly-looking Malays were standing over me, talking in some outlandish tongue, apparently arguing whether to kill me then or wait a while. I suppose the only thing which saved me was the fact that they’d already been through my pockets and decided that as I had nothing but the tattered clothes I lay in, my live body was more valuable than my wardrobe. Anyhow, they prodded me to my feet with a spear butt and drove me along the beach for almost an hour.

  “We finally came to a little horseshoe-shaped cleft in the shore, and just where the sandy shingle met the jungle of lalang grass was a village of half a hundred or so white huts clustering about a much larger house. One of my captors pointed toward the bigger building and said something about ‘Kapal Besar,’ which I assumed to be the name of the village headman.

  “He was more than that. He was really a sort of petty sultan, and ruled his little principality with a rod of iron, notwithstanding he was nearly ninety years old and a hopeless paralytic.

  “When we got into the village I saw the big house was a sort of combined palace and fortress, for it was surrounded by a high wall of sun-dried brick loopholed for cannon and musketry, and with three or four pieces of ancient ordnance sticking their brass muzzles through the apertures. The wall was topped with an abatis of sharpened bamboo stakes, and a man armed with a Civil War model musket and bayonet stood guard at the gateway through which my finders drove me like a pig on its way to market.

  “Inside the encircling wall was a space of smooth sand perhaps ten or twelve feet broad; then a wide, brick-floored piazza roofed over with beams of teak as thick as railway ties laid close together on equally heavy stringers, and from the porch opened any number of doorways into the house.

  “My guards led, or drove, me through one of these and down a tiled corridor, while a half-naked boy who popped up out of the darkness like a jack-in-the-box from his case ran on ahead yelling. ‘Kapal Besar—hai, Kapal Tuan!’ at the top of his shrill, nasal voice.

  “I was surprised at the size of the room to which I was taken. It was roughly oval in shape, quite fifty feet long by twenty-five or thirty at its greatest width, and paved with alternate black and red tiles. The roof, which rose like a sugar-loaf in the center, was supported on A-beams resting on columns of skinned palm tree boles, and to these were nailed brackets from which swung red-glass bowls filled with coconut-oil with a floating wick burning in each. The result was the place was fairly well illuminated, and I had a good view of the thin, aged man sitting in a chair of carved blackwood at the farther end of the chamber.

  “He was a cadaverous old fellow, seemingly almost bloodless, with skin the color of old parchment stretched tight as a drumhead over his skull; thin, pale lips, and a long, straggling white beard sweeping over his tight green jacket. When he looked at me I saw his eyes were light hazel, almost gray, and piercing and direct as those of a hawk. His thin, high-bridged nose reminded me of a hawk’s beak, too, and the bony, almost transparent hands which clutched and fingered the silver-mounted bamboo cane in his lap were like a hawk’s talons.

  “My two guards made profound salaams, but I contented myself with the barest nod civility required.

  “The old chap looked appraisingly at me while my discoverers harangued him at great length; then, with an impatient motion of his cane, he waved them to silence and began addressing me in Malayan. I didn’t know a dozen words of the language, and made signs to him that I couldn’t understand, whereupon he switched to an odd slurring sort of Spanish, which I was able to make out with some difficulty.

  “Before he’d spoken five minutes I understood my status, and was none too delighted to learn I was regarded as a legitimate piece of sea-salvage—a slave, in plain language. If I had any special talent, I was informed, I’d better be trotting it out for display right off; for, lacking something to recommend me for service in the palace, I would be forthwith shipped off to the yam fields or the groves where the copra was prepared.

  “I was at a loss just how to answer the old duffer when I happened to see a sort of guitar lying on the pavement near the door leading to one of the passages which radiated from the audience chamber like wheel-spokes from a hub. Snatching up the instrument, I tuned it quickly, and picking some sort of accompaniment on it, began to sing. I’ve a pretty fair baritone, and I put more into it that day than I ever did with the college glee club.

  “Juanita, Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground, Just a Baby’s Prayer at Twilight and Over There went big with the old man, but the song that seemed to touch his heart was John Brown’s Body, and I had to sing the thing from beginning to end at least a dozen times.

  “The upshot of it was that I found myself permanently retained as court minstrel, had my torn white duds replaced by a gorgeous red jacket and yellow turban and a brilliantly striped sarong, and was assigned one of the best rooms in the palace—which isn’t saying much from the standpoint of modern conveniences.”

  The young man paused a moment, and despite his evident distress a boyish grin spread over his lean, brown countenance. “My big chance came when I’d been there about two months,” he continued.

  “I prepped at St. John’s, and put in a full hitch with the infantry during the war, so the I.D.R. and the manuals of guard duty were as familiar to me as the Scriptures are to a circuit-riding preacher. One day when the disorganized mob old Kapal called his army were slouching through their idea of a guard mount, I snatched his musket from the fellow who acted as top sergeant and showed ’em how to do the thing in proper style. The captain of the guard was sore as a pup, but old Kapal was sitting in the piazza watching the drill, and made ’em take orders from me. In half an hour I had them presenting, porting, ordering and shouldering arms in pretty fair shape, and in two weeks they could do the whole manual, go right by squads and come on right into line as snappily as any outfit you ever saw.

  “That settled it. I was made captain-general of the army, wore two swords and a brace of old-fashioned brass-mounted powder and ball revolvers in my waist shawl, and was officially known as Rick-kard Tuan. I taught the soldiers to salute, and the civil population took up the custom. In six months’ time I couldn’t go for a five-minute stroll without gathering more salutes to the yard than a newly commissioned shavetail in the National Army.

  “I’d managed to pick up a working knowledge of the language, and was seeing the people at first-hand, living their lives and almost thinking their thoughts—that’s where I got the material for my book. That’s how I got Mutina, too.

  “One morning after drill Kapal Besar called me into the audience chamber and waved me to a seat. I was the only person on the island privileged to sit in his presence, by the way.

  “‘My son,’ he said, ‘I have been thinking much of your future, of late. In you I have found a very pearl among men, and it is my wish that you rear strong
sons to take your place in the years to come. Mine, too, mayhap, for I have no men-children to rule after me and there is none I would rather have govern in my stead when it shall have pleased Allah (praised be His glorious name!) to call me hence to Paradise. Therefore, you shall have the choice of my women forthwith.’ He clapped his thin old hands in signal as he spoke, and a file of tittering, giggling girls sidled through one of the doors and ranged themselves along the wall.

  “Like all Oriental despots, Kapal Besar maintained the droit du seigneur rigidly—every woman who pleased him was taken into his seraglio, though the old chap, being close to ninety, and paralyzed from the waist down for nearly twenty years, could be nothing more than nominal husband to them, of course.

  “Marriage is simple in Malaya, and divorce simpler. ‘Thou art divorced,’ is all the husband need say to free himself from an unwanted wife, and the whole thing is finished without courts, lawyers or fees.

  “I passed down the line of simpering females, wondering how I was going to sidestep this latest honor royalty had thrust upon me, when I came to Mutina. Mutina signifies ‘the Pearl’ in Malayan, and this girl hadn’t been misnamed. Believe me or not, gentlemen, it was a case of love at first sight, as far as I was concerned.

  “She was small, even for a Malay girl—not more than four feet ten, or five feet tall at the most—with smooth, glossy black hair and the tiniest feet and hands I’ve ever seen. Though she had gone unshod the greater part of her life her feet were slender and high-arched as those of a duchess of the Bourbon court, with long, straight toes and delicate, filbert-shaped nails; and her hands, though used to the heavy work all native women, royal or not, performed, were fine and tapering, and clean. She was light-skinned, too, really fairer than I, for her flesh was the color of ivory, while I was deeply sun-burned; and, what attracted me to her more than anything else, I think, her lips and teeth were unstained by betel-nut and there was no smudge or snuff about her nostrils. As she stood there in her prim, modest Malay costume, her eyes modestly cast down and a faint blush staining her face, she was simply ravishing. I felt my heart miss a beat as I paused before her.

  “There was a sort of scandalized buzz-buzz of conversation among the women when I turned to Kapal to announce my choice, and the old fellow himself looked surprised for a moment. I thought he was going to renege on his offer, but it developed he thought I’d made an unworthy decision. I’d noticed without thinking of it that the other women kept apart from Mutina, and old Kapal explained the reason in a few terse words. She was, it seemed, anak gampang; that is, no one knew who her father was, and such a condition is even more of a social handicap in Malaya than with us. Further, she was suspected of black magical practices, and Kapal went so far as to intimate she had secured the honor of admission to the zenana by the use of guna-guna, or love potions. Of course, if I wanted her after all he’d said, why, the misfortune was mine—but I was not to complain I hadn’t been fairly warned.

  “I told him I wanted her if she’d have me, at which he let out a shrill cackle of a laugh, called her to the foot of his throne and spoke so quickly for a minute or so that I couldn’t follow him, then waved us all away, saying he wanted to take his siesta.”

  “I MARCHED FROM THE AUDIENCE chamber to my quarters feeling pretty well satisfied. It really had been a case of love at first sight as far as I was concerned, and I’d made up my mind to pay real courtship to the lovely girl and try to induce her to marry me, for I was determined that, Kapal Besar or no Kapal Besar, I’d not have her as a gift from anyone but herself.

  “As I entered my quarters and turned to lay my swords on the couch, I was startled to see a form dart across the threshold and drop crouching to the floor before me.

  “It was Mutina. Her little, soft feet had followed me noiselessly down the corridor, and she must have been at my heels when I entered the room.

  “‘Kakasih,’ she said as she knelt before me and drew aside her veil, revealing her blushing face, ‘laki kakasih amba anghu memuji—husband, beloved, I adore thee.’

  “Gentlemen, did you ever take a drink of rich old sherry and feel its warming glow creep through every vein and nerve in your body? That was the way I felt when I realized what had happened. The rigmarole old Kapal reeled off in the throne-room was a combined divorce-and-marriage ceremony. Mutina was my wife, and—my heart raced like a coasting motor car’s engine—with her own soft lips she had declared her love.

  “Three weeks later they found Kapal Besar dead in his great carved chair, and fear that I would seize the government almost precipitated a riot, but when I told ’em I wouldn’t have the throne as a gift and wanted nothing but a prau and crew to take Mutina and me to the Philippines, they darn near forced the crown on me in gratitude.

  “Two members of the guard, Hussein and Batjan, with Jobita, Hussein’s young wife, asked permission to accompany us, so there was a party of five which set out in the prau amid the cheers of the army and the booming of the one of Kapal’s brass cannon which could be fired.”

  Young Starkweather paused in his narrative again, and a sort of puzzled, questioning expression spread over his face. “The day before we left,” he went on, “I came into the quarters to get some stuff for the ship and found Mutina backed into a corner, fending off with both hands the ugliest-looking customer I’d ever seen. He was a thin, cadaverous fellow, with slanting, yellow eyes and a face like a walking corpse. I saw in a moment Mutina was deathly afraid of him, and yelled, ‘Hei badih iang chelaka!’ which may be freely translated as ‘Get to hell out of here, you son of an ill-favored dog!’

  “Instead of slinking away as any other native would have done if addressed that way by Rick-kard Tuan, the man just stood there and grinned unpleasantly, if you could call his ugly grimace a grin.

  “Sabuah Sulu is a rough place, gentlemen, and rough methods are the rule there. I snatched one of the sabers from my cummerbund and cut at him. The fellow must have been extraordinarily agile; for though I don’t see how it happened, I missed him completely, though I’d have sworn my blade cut into his neck. That couldn’t have been so, though, for there was no resistance to the steel, and there the man stood, unharmed, after a slash which should have lopped the head clean off his shoulders.

  “Mutina seemed more concerned about my safety than the circumstances seemed to warrant, for the intruder was unarmed, while I wore two swords and a pair of pistols, and after he’d slunk away with a final menacing look she threw herself into my arms and wept as if her heart would break. I comforted her as best I could, then ran out to ask the guard who the mysterious man was, but the sentry swore by the teeth and beard of Allah that he had seen no stranger enter or leave the compound that day.”

  “U’m—a-a-ah?” murmured Jules de Grandin, twisting furiously at the ends of his little golden mustache. “Say on, my friend, this is of the most decided interest.”

  “We got to Manila without much trouble,” Starkweather continued as he shot a wondering look at the little Frenchman. “We passed through the Sulu Sea, landed on southern Luzon and completed the trip overland. We were married with Christian ceremonies by an army chaplain at Manila, and I cabled home for money, then arranged passage for our entire party.

  “Coming back to the hotel after making some last-minute sailing arrangements, I thought I noticed the shifty-eyed johnny who annoyed Mutina the day before we left Sabuah Sulu sneaking down the street, and it seemed to me he looked at me with a malicious grin as he ducked around the corner. It couldn’t have been the same man, of course, but the resemblance was striking, and so was the coincidence.

  “I felt a sort of premonition of evil as I rushed up to our suite, and I was in a perfect frenzy of apprehension when I opened the door and found the rooms empty. Mutina was gone. So were Hussein, Batjan and Jobita. There was no clue to their whereabouts, nothing to tell why or where they’d gone; nothing at all but—this.”

  From an inside pocket he drew a leather case and extracted a folded sheet of note
-paper from it. He passed it to de Grandin, who perused it quickly, nodded once, and handed it to me. A single line of odd, unintelligible characters scrawled across the sheet, but I could make nothing of them till Starkweather translated.

  “It’s Malayan,” he explained. “The same words she first spoke to me: ‘Laki kakasih amba anghau memuji—husband, beloved, I adore thee.’

  “I was like a crazy man for the next two months. The police did everything possible to find Mutina, and I hired a small army of private detectives, but we never got one trace of any of the three.

  “Finally I came home, tried to reconstruct my life as best I could, and wrote my book on the pirates as I had known them.

  “Just tonight I learned that Mutina, accompanied by Hussein and Jobita and Batjan, is living in Harrisonville, and that she’s an entertainer at La Pantoufle Dorée. I got her address in Algonquin Avenue from one of the club attendants and rushed out there as fast as I could. Just as I entered the yard I saw you scuffling with someone and—believe it or not—I’m sure the man who assaulted you was the one I saw in Sabuah Sulu and later in Manila. I’d recognize those devilish eyes of his anywhere on earth.

  “It was good of you gentlemen to bring me here and patch me up instead of sending me to the hospital,” he concluded, “but I’m feeling pretty fit again, now, and I must be off. Men, you don’t realize, Mutina’s in that house, and that slant-eyed devil’s hanging around. I’ve got to go to her right away. I must see Mutina!”

  “Then ye’ll be after goin’ to th’ jail, an’ nowheres else, I’m thinkin’, me boy,” a heavy Irish voice announced truculently from the consulting-room door, and Detective Sergeant Jeremiah Costello strode across the threshold.