Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas Part 12

CAPTAIN ELIJAH COE

Puna Punou lies in 14th South exactly, though the writer keeps back the longitood for reasons that will soon be understood by the gentle reader--if the gentle reader is patient and won't skip. Not that there is any buried treasure there, or any foolishness of that kind; it's girls mostly, and pearl sh.e.l.l and cocoanuts, that Puna Punou produces, and you don't need no chart with red crosses from my dying hands to find any of them. But Mrs. Tweedie is still alive, and likewise Elijah Coe, and I'd be acting like the son of a sea cook if I did a hand's turn to hurt either. Of course it's an old story now, going back to the days before the bottom had dropped out of copra, and there was still money to be made in beach-la-mar and fungus. Oh, my, yes! a long time ago, before steam ever got into the Group, before law and order and compulsory vaccination, and an hour and a half of Deputy Commissioner every nine months.

It was always a mighty fine island to look at, rising sheer from the sea to basaltic cliffs, and high needlelike pinnacles, and forested solid from the water's edge to almost the top; and off the main settlement of Fale a Lupo there was good holding ground in six fathoms. A tidy little island, indeed, and I'd never raise it of a dawn, and all its palms and beaches and little basket-work houses peeping out of the deep shade, but I'd feel glad all over again that it was there, and breathe in the fragrant smell of it like a child happy at getting home from school. I guess the people there helped a lot, too, for they were the handsomest in the Pacific, and it was a regular port of call for the whalers to take in green stuff, girls, fresh water, and firewood.

In the old days it was the Rev. John Geer who ran the missionary mill, and taught the heathen to put their pennies in the plate and wear pants--not that they ever did the last to any alarming extent, except in the annual reports that were sent back to be printed East; while Mrs.

Geer she homeopathed the island and inculcurated the principles of female virtoo in the young. But after twenty-one years of it the Geers returned home to Connecticut, and the Tweedies were landed from the _Olive Branch_ barkentine, to take their places in that section of the world's vineyard.

Tweedie was a hay-colored little man, narrer chested and tallowy, but if ever there was a copper-riveted Christian from Christianville I guess he was _it_! Meek! Why he was happy to get slapped, he was that pleased to turn the other cheek; and if you took away his cloak, he was the kind of fellar who wanted you to take his panjammers extra. Had no spirit at all, and the Kanakas walked over him scandalous. But it was his wife I wanted to tell about, Alethea Tweedie; for if ever there was an angel from heaven, with the prettiest blue eyes, and hair like streaming gold, and the cherriest lips you ever saw out of a chromo, and teeth whiter than--than--(it don't sound right to say a shark's) it was that peerless creature.

How Tweedie could have captured such a bang-up stunner was hard to understand then, and harder afterwards. A king on his throne might have been glad to win Alethea Tweedie for his queen, and captains and supercargoes would have knifed each other for a single smile, if she had been the kind to lead them on--which, Lord bless me! was the last thought she had in her curly head. I suppose she came from one of them little places back East where it's all women for miles, and they rate anything a man that can raise a whisker! Thrown away, that's what the beach called it, and mis...o...b..ed whether Tweedie wasn't a girl, too, only with drill trousers instead of panties.

In all them brown faces and tanned leathery white ones you can imagine what a pink rosebud she seemed to be; and it wasn't like that she stopped at that, for she could sing like a nightingale and talk to beat the band; and her laugh itself was like music, sounding long afterwards in your ears at sea. Hit? Jimini Christmas, I should say I was. .h.i.t! Am still, for that matter, with just the memory of her, though twenty years have come and gone, and I loved the ground her little feet walked on.

Not that there was anything out of the way in that. We all did, down to Portuguese Joe, and Billy Jones's cousin; and as for Elijah Coe, he simply give one yelp and keeled over!

Coe was the captain and owner of the _Peep o' Day_ topsail schooner, and had been trading about the Group for a matter of eight years. In all my seafaring days I never saw his match for dare-deviltry or courage, though a quieter man to look at there never was. He was about forty years old, tall and lean, with a nose on him like a hawk; and to see him stripped you'd think he was a boy, he was that straight and well set up.

A fine man to look at, very quick on his pins, and kind of proud and silent in company like he was mostly thinking of something else. I reckon perhaps he likely was, for he was splendidly educated, with rows on rows of books in his cabin, and a cyclopediar six feet long. The mate said he knew everything in it up to R, not to speak of working lunars in a saucer of quicksilver, and reckonizing squid by its Latin name.

No one knew how he had got the money to buy his s.h.i.+p, which was a remarkable fine vessel and fitted up regardless. Some said there was once a name on the bra.s.s bell aft, which had been filed down careful and worked over with emery paper afterwards; but I never could see no sign of it myself, though I never went aboard but I took a good look; and others who said it was Labor. He certainly knew a lot about the Westward, and I heard him, one day, giving Captain Rick the directions to enter Port McGuire by. But you know what a place the beach is for talk, and, anyway, heaps of good men and highly respected have been Blackbirders in their time, and I never could see no harm in the trade myself. But the gossip was that he had flown the Peruvian flag and emptied whole islands, though I never believed a word of it myself. It was remarkable, too, how he kep his people, and how they looked up to him, which wouldn't have been the case if he had been like they represented. There was John Rau, the mate, a bullet-headed Belgian, who used to walk just like _he_ did and copy all his little ways slavish, reading the cyclopediar, too, and stopping at R from discipline. And Lum, the China cook, a freak of a fellar, with coal-black hair all round his head like a girl's, and who'd out-Coe Coe till you'd split. The rest of the crew was just the usual thing--Rotumah boys, an Highwayman or two, and some Nieues--sometimes the same, sometimes different--like on any island vessel.

It was some time before Captain Coe got on to the Tweedies, or Alethea, as I suppose I ought to say, for n.o.body ever took no particular stock in the _he_-Tweedie. He ran acrost her first when he was ash.o.r.e doctoring some of his native friends, and handing out pain-killer and salts unstinted. They walked home together to the Mission house, standing a long time at the door, and he talking with his hat off. He must have been well brought up and used to meeting ladies, for anybody could tell by her face that she was pleased. She didn't seem the least bit eager to let him go, and once she took his Tahiti hat and held it in both her hands like she would prevent him. And he didn't seem to want to go neither, though he wrastled for his hat, very perlite and gay, and I could see the glisten of her white teeth through the spygla.s.s.

The next day he called in state, with the skull of a shark in a silk handkerchief, and a man carrying a crate of onions. Oh, it may sound common to you, but it's like sending flowers to your lady-love in Puna Punou, and I've seen a year pa.s.s without the sight of one! I guess he walked in on velvet, and it is certain he stayed nigh two hours, for I timed him myself from the deck of the _Ransom_--the beach being a great place to take notice, as I have said already--and what was our feelings when next Sunday the captain marched into church--yes, sir--in crisp new panjammers and a polkadot neckerchief; and I'm blest if John Rau wasn't there, too, likewise polka-dotted; and that there Chinaman tagging along behind, rigged the same, only with earrings extra, and taking a back seat out of respeck! Afterwards they all went up to the Mission house in a body, Tweedie jumping in with an address, and everybody singing except the Chinaman, who was made to stop!

You mustn't think for a minute that we traders knew the missionary or that he knew us, or that the beach took any part in this except at a distance. There's no love lost between missionaries and traders. That's what made it so strange to see Captain Coe going the way he did, and taking up with all that n.i.g.g.e.r-loving and "Johnny, how's your soul?" We could only see one reason, and that was Alethea Tweedie; and the betting was about even whether he'd pull it off or not. But if we didn't _talk_ to the Tweedies, I guess there was mighty little that went on there we didn't know of--whether it was turtle steak for breakfast, or the tiff they had about her wearing too gauzy a dress at the party Coe gave aboard the _Peep o' Day_.

He did it up in style, with bunting and Chinese lanterns and the king, and afterwards there was fireworks. Oh, my, yes! a regular blow-out, with the crew in new jumpers and two boatloads of flowers and _moso'oi_!

We all asked one another where it was going to end, what with the picnic next day, and him always at the Mission house. But we might have saved our breath, as far as any scandal was concerned, for, instead of up stick and away, with the lady locked in his cabin, like some of the beach had fondly hoped, what did Coe do but turn missionary himself! Got religion, by G.o.d! till you couldn't have known him for the same master mariner; while John Rau and Lum, not to be behindhand neither, cavorted into the holy swim with a whoop and a bang! The captain went off terrific--like everything he did--making Billy Jones's cousin marry his wife, and Peter Extrum marry _his_; and there was more half-caste baptizing and squealing and certificating than I remember since the tidal wave of Eighty-one!

Coe put it all down to conviction and a change of heart, but anybody could see it was Alethea Tweedie who was _his_ religion. When he prayed, which he used to do tremendous, it was all the time to Mrs. Tweedie; and when he said the kingdom of heaven, you knew mighty well that to him it was the coral Mission house on the hill. He put her on a pedestal a mile high, and kept her at the top by wors.h.i.+ping so hard at the bottom. I guess she couldn't have got off without stepping all over him, and was just forced to be a saint whether she wanted to or no. Not but what she was as good as gold, and a pattern for any young white woman to go by, but her eyes always kind of melted when she looked at Coe; which was no wonder, as he stood six feet high and straight as a dart, and every girl in the island was wild about him; and she had an imperious little way of treating him like he was a favorite dog who she was proud to show off being master of. She sent him her canary, which was all she had in the world except her clothes, and wrote a little piece how it would sing to him at sea and soothe his rugged bosom.

This wasn't all he got neither, for she was a great one with her needle, and did texts better nor a Sailors' Home. Coe's cabin was more like a little Bethel than the inside of a trading s.h.i.+p, for there was six of them, and a red worsted dog extra, playing with a blue worsted ball, and "Jesus, Lover of my Soul" and "Where is my Wandering Boy To-night?" The biggest joke of all was in the trade room, where there was "Honesty is the Best Policy," and "G.o.d Sees You"; and the boys guyed Coe about it unmerciful till he laid out Tom Dawlish with a fancy lamp, and said a gentleman ought to know where to stop. He was an awful thin-skinned kind of Christian when it came to any remarks being pa.s.sed on Mrs. Tweedie, and Tom has a scar there to this day, though Coe made it up to him afterwards with a melodian worth nine dollars.

But Coe wasn't the only dog around the Mission house. Mrs. Tweedie started up another, a scamp of a chief named Afiola. In every community there's some fellar who's at the root of all the mischief that happens, so that if anybody gets speared of a dark night, or a girl is missing from home, you know just where to look for who done it. In Puna Punou you looked for Afiola, and the chances were you'd find him drunk on orange beer and laying for trouble with a gun. Oh, yes, indeed, there was two to his credit, to my certain knowledge, murders both, and I'll bet a ton of sh.e.l.l to an old hat besides that he had a hand in taking off the Chinaman at Oa Bay. A regular bad lot, and, like every big scalawag, every little scalawag had to tail along with him, too, for company and mutual protection; so his houses was the kind of Bowery of Puna Punou, with the whalers going to him to buy girls, and all that.

There were higher chiefs than Afiola in the settlement--five or six of them, at least, not to speak of the king--but none of them seemed able to do a thing to stop him. They were all a slack lot at any time, and thought excommunicating him enough, and taking away his communion ticket. I guess he had been out of the church for a matter of six years, and, as I said before, he was the scandal of the place and a terror.

They were all dead scared of him, that was the truth, and, though his following was small, they were ugly customers and well armed, and could line up a dozen rifles in the twinkling of an eye. We often talked it over among ourselves how to break the gang up, but, as he always left the whites alone, and was even a favorite with the worst, it ended like it begun--in smoke.

This Afiola wasn't of any particular age, because the natives don't know when they are born, and have nothing to go by like dates and sich. I suppose Afiola was somewheres around thirty, for he had two children, about eight or nine each, a girl and a boy, who lived with him in his house, together with Talavao, his old mother, Sosofina, his aunt, Oloa, his uncle, his brother Filipo, and a raft of other blood relations whose names I disremember. Like all the chiefs of Puna Punou, Afiola was a tall, fine-looking man, very vigorous, lordly, and pleasant spoken, and if it weren't for his pock-marked face and the wickedest eyes I ever saw in a man's head, you would have said he was a perfect gentleman, and handsome, as Kanakas go. I had never had a bit of trouble with him myself, and whenever I put business in his way he had always come down prompt with pigs and mats and _masoa_.

It was a long time before he took any notice of the Tweedies, not going to church, and always busy raising a little h.e.l.l somewheres. But when it came, it came with a bang and no mistake, and, my stars, if he didn't pull in the slack! He made up to the Mission house like he was their long-lost brother; threw fits of reformation till they took him back into church members.h.i.+p again; and not a blessed day pa.s.sed but it was pigs or chickens or sugar cane or pineapples at the Mission-house door, and please, might their servant Afiola approach their Excellencies! It was as good as a play to see the rascal winding them around his little finger and doing injured innocent on their front stoop. To hear him gas, you'd think there was a conspiracy to run him out of Fale a Lupo; and even when he owned up to some of his misdeeds, it was like a compliment to the Tweedies for having yanked in such a black sheep. I read somewheres that the road to success is to trade on people's weaknesses, and the soft spot with the Tweedies was their desire to make a thundering success and leave all their predecessors in the soup. After having captured the chief white sinner, Elijah Coe, they were now hauling in the boss brown one, Afiola, and I guess they felt as pleased as a fellar who's bought a ton of sh.e.l.l for a condemned army musket.

My, but they were good to that man, forever inviting him to breakfast or that, and sending for him first thing if they were in a fix! It was all Afiola this, and Afiola that; and he got texts, too, from Mrs. Tweedie, and red worsted dogs, and "G.o.d Bless Our Home." By the time they had engineered him into shoes and pants, no one daring to laugh for fear he'd shoot them, they promoted him deacon, and put him on the committee for reroofing the church. Of all mutton-headed proceedings, I never saw the like, specially as he hoodwinked them right along, and acted worse, even, than before. You can imagine Captain Coe's feelings when, rounding up a three months' cruise, he found this six-foot-three of black devil and hypocrite snugged in the Mission house like a maggot in a breadfruit. They say he went on awful, speaking out the truth before them all, and daring Afiola to deny it. But Mrs. Tweedie she got him outside on the veranda, walking up and down with her arm through his, and pleading and going on and begging to beat the band. It shows the power she had over him, that at last he went in and asked Afiola's pardon, and the next day sent him a case of kerosene by way of reparation. I suppose if she had told him to go on his knees he would have done it, being that crazy to please her in everything.

On second thoughts, however, and after hearing how Afiola had been kicking up, he went to the king and tried to stiffen him to take a stand against Afiola, volunteering to do the job himself, if supported, and proposing to exile the fellar to Makatea, and disperse the rest of the gang about the Group gratis in the _Peep o' Day_. He said otherwise he was afraid to leave Puna Punou with such a scoundrel loose, and threatened to write to Sydney for a man-of-war. But Maunga the king was a saphead and a coward, and he couldn't see it Coe's way at all; and not having the sense to keep his mouth shut, what does he do but traipse around the settlement, telling everybody what the captain said and wanted.

After that the Mission-house door was shut in Coe's face, and when Mrs.

Tweedie pa.s.sed him on the road it was with her pretty head in the air, and not looking. This nearly broke the captain's heart, and if you've ever seen a dog as has been kicked out by his master, you can picture Coe for yourself. He got very down and miserable, and talked some of chucking the Group altogether and going back to the Kingsmills, or even further, and how Henderson and Macfarlane were going to put on a steamer and run us all out. He tied up the _Peep o' Day_ at a hundred and forty dollars a week and nothing coming in, making the excuse she was foul and the copper needing cleaning; and when you saw nothing doing and asked why, he flared up and said you could go to h.e.l.l! And all this, if you please, for the privilege of seeing Afiola sailing up to the Mission house and being honored guest, and Mrs. Tweedie smiling her prettiest, _vice_ Elijah Coe, fired! We fully thought he'd backslide onto square-face and female society, but, if anything, he grew more missionary than ever, and nearly lammed the life out of Freddy Rice for speaking disrespectful of the Virgin Mary! You see, Coe's religion, being as it was Mrs. Tweedie, didn't make no proper distinction between sects, and he just stood up for anybody who had his name in the Bible!

Then thinking, I dessay, that absence makes the heart grow fonder, he went to sea again and put in a spell of two months about the Group; and when he got back he dressed up in his best with a red silk handkerchief around his neck, sailor fas.h.i.+on, and a crimson sash and patent-leather shoes, and the rest of him white drill, and went a-calling on the Mission house to see if he couldn't break into society again. But there was a wicked streak in Mrs. Tweedie, for all her pretty face and golden hair, and being too good a woman to love anybody but her husband, she found a queer kind of satisfaction in hating Coe, or pretending like she did, and driving him half-mad with the things she said to him. She regularly led on the captain to admit he loved her, and then jumped on him with both her little feet for saying it, till the poor fellar stumbled out of the house feeling he had disgraced himself awful and was never to come back no more.

She wrote him letters afterwards on scented pink paper, which made him spend days and days with his head leaning on the cabin table, wanting the worsted dog back, and the canary, and saying she would tell her husband; and then saying he might keep them and she wouldn't! If he had treated her just like a Kanaka girl who was dead stuck on him, I guess he would have found out that women are much the same, whether with golden hair or coal-black, and that there is much the same colored devil in every one of them. But to Coe, Alethea Tweedie wasn't no human being at all, but an angel straight from heaven, and to think the angel hated him was almost more than he could bear.

He turned crankier than ever, working off steam on Rau and Ah Lum, with twenty-five cents for every swear, and nothing at night but hymns. But I guess Rau and the China boy would have gone on their knees and kowtowed to a sting ray if Coe had told them to, for they didn't have no more wills of their own than a child unborn, and everything he said, went. If he had turned pirate, they would have followed him just as meek, and would have scuttled s.h.i.+ps and made pa.s.sengers walk planks with the same devotion and zeal to please him!

But all this was by the way, so far as it availed the captain with Mrs.

Tweedie, who pa.s.sed him on the road as cold as ever, and received the swear-money disdainful, and never said "thank you" for it, though there was eighteen dollars in the bag and the biggest share Coe's. Afiola himself had been getting out of favor for two months. He couldn't manage to be deacon of the church one day, and the next pirating along the coast mad drunk on orange beer; besides, the Tweedies were getting to talk native now, and got more the hang of what was going on around them. So they give Afiola a sort of drumhead court-martial, and bounced him unanimous, and all the pent-up deviltry of the man came out of him at one lick, like touching off a dynamite cartridge. Tweedie preached against him from the pulpit; the other chiefs, slow as they had been to move before, now waked up a bit, and there was a general feeling in the respectable part of the native community that he was pus.h.i.+ng things too far. You see, he had named one of his pigs after the king, and there was more scandal over that than for all the crimes he had been guilty of; and there was a razor-backed yaller one for Tweedie, and an old sow for the queen, and porkers for the princes, and he pa.s.sed insulting remarks on them till the Kanakas went wild--those that weren't of Afiola's own family, I mean; and Afiola would laugh and laugh till his great pocked face grew a dirty crimson, laying on a mat with a Winchester beside him, and sn.i.g.g.e.ring as they'd bring him orange beer in a calabash.

I guess he thought he'd wind up by pulling off the biggest thing yet, for he had a kind of pride of wickedness in him, and gloried in being the bad man of Puna Punou. He wanted to top it all now, and do something that tremendous that it would shake the whole island from Fale a Lupo to Diamond Rock. Anyway, whatever he thought or didn't think, what he did was to waylay Mrs. Tweedie one morning about ten, as she was going over to visit the native pastor's wife, who was sick; and, tying her hands and feet together with sinnet, he put her in a hammock and carried her off up the mountain; and this, if you please, in open daylight, with scores of people looking on, while she screamed and struggled and fought, and they helpless to do anything against the line of Afiola's rifles--and Tweedie himself not four hundred yards away, organizing a Y.M.C.A. for untattooed boys, and explaining how they was to play basket ball, and learn arithmetic nights!

When I heard the news, which was right off and the moment after it happened, I had only one idea in my head, and that was to reach Captain Coe as fast as the paddles could race me off to the schooner. It is in them moments that the strong man looms up like a mountain and one's cry is for a leader. But it seemed for a spell like it was a knock-out blow for Coe, and that he couldn't grapple with the thing at all, moaning and grinding his teeth, and tearing the red-dotted handkerchief off his neck like it choked him. When I tried to talk, he swore at me terrible, saying he wanted to think, by G.o.d! and I was to shut my b.l.o.o.d.y face; and ordering the mate and the Chinaman into the lazarette to get out the arms. There was a big store of them, which the pair got out on their hands and knees, the place being cramped and low and the guns furthest in; and they broke open boxes of cartridges on the cabin floor till they ran all over. Then Coe ordered the whaleboat cleared and went ash.o.r.e with nigh all hands, every one of them with a loaded rifle, and he with a twelve-bore gun; and if you ever saw the light of h.e.l.l in a man's eyes, it was Coe as he formed us up on the beach and headed inland in a crowd. The whole settlement was buzzing like a hornet's nest, and they were beating a wooden drum in front of the king's house, and everybody was running every which way, telling the news, and how Mrs. Tweedie had been carried off by Afiola, and all screaming out at once, like natives do when excited.

Finding Afiola would be about as easy as the needle in the haystack, and the crews of a hundred _Peep o' Days_, and all the warriors of Fale a Lupo besides, couldn't have tracked and cornered him up the mountain. I thought Coe was acting like a hot-headed crazy fool to try, for they were bound to see him first, and could always hide if we got too close, or fight if need be, with all the points of the game in their favor. But that wasn't what he meant to do, not he, but surrounded Afiola's two houses, and took out everybody in them--Talavao his aunt, Oloa his uncle, Filipo his brother (who was sick on a mat), and Afiola's two children, Mali and Popo, and a raft of men and women, to the number of twenty or more all told. They were scared blue at the sight of the c.o.c.ked rifles, and held up their hands like lambs for the Chinaman to rope them, which he did like las.h.i.+ng a chest and about as tender, the tears streaming down the women's faces. But there wasn't a spark of compa.s.sion in Elijah Coe, and he never give them a thought.

He was at a white heat, and his finger was just itching on the trigger of his gun, and he never started for the beach till all the Bowery was crackling in smoke and flame. Not that our eighteen or twenty was the whole of Afiola's family in the settlement. I guess there was several hundreds of them altogether, taking it fine and large, retainers, hangers-on, and connections of one kind and another; but Coe's boldness took them by surprise, and not being in the secret of Mrs. Tweedie's carrying off, they weren't prepared or anything. But even in the time we were tying up the prisoners they began to turn ugly and bunch together and hoot, and all the way back to the beach it was touch and go whether they wouldn't rush us.

Not a soul durst ask Coe what he meant to do as we pitched into the water and shoved off, him sitting there so grim and fierce, with his eyes smoldering in his head like coals; but there was no sound but the straining of the rowlocks, and a whimper or two from the women, and the swish and gurgle of the water along the keel. I'll never forget that boat ride if I live to be a hundred; the drums rolling and re-rolling around the bay, and that strange humming of voices behind us like the wind in the rigging of a s.h.i.+p, and Coe and the Kanakas and the Chinaman and John Rau and the men pulling. But as for Coe's plan, we weren't long kept waiting for what it was. The prisoners were bundled into the s.h.i.+p's waist, with Lum to stand over them, while the mate got out the kedge and brought the schooner broadside on to the mountain. Then they bent a noose and ran up old Oloa between the masts. It was no fancy hanging with a drop calculated to his height, but just the old-fas.h.i.+oned kind, slow and awful, and if the steward hadn't come round with a tray of gla.s.ses and some square-face I guess I would have just sunk right down where I was. The crew made one panic-stricken gallop for the side, and popped over, n.o.body trying to stop them, though Rau asked, quite calm, was he to shoot, and the captain said No. The Nieue steward was the only one that didn't go, but crouched down in the scuppers with his teeth chattering.

Then Coe leaned over the rail and talked to the prisoners in the waist; told them that he was going to string up one an hour, children and all, till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe; and he ordered Lum to cast loose one of the old women so that she might swim ash.o.r.e and carry the news. My, if she wasn't over that rail like lightning, and striking out for home with her skinny arms! Coe knew mighty well that Afiola had a string of people up the mountain keeping him informed of everything that happened--the Kanaka telegraph, we used to call it. Then, besides, up there they could see for miles, and Coe had kedged the schooner acrost the fairway so that Afiola might reckonize his relations in the rigging.

You might wonder that such an unmitigated black villain would care what Coe did, so long as he had his wicked way with Mrs. Tweedie, and a whole trackless mountain to lose himself in; but there's an awful soft streak in Kanakas for their own blood, and we had his whole family in our hands, not to speak of the two kids. It seemed almost like a waste of lives to look up and see not a speck, or the least sign whatever, that was hid under the tree tops, and it was hard to convince oneself that Coe was doing the right thing, and that from those rocky cliffs there was sharp Kanaka eyes taking us all in, with Alethea Tweedie tied hand and foot, and Afiola in a sweat about his children.

The captain sat on a chair at the forrard end of the house, smoking a cigar, and occasionally searching the woods with his binoculars. There was a stack of loaded rifles beside him, and a keg of dynamite with a loose lid to it. Some of the sticks had touch-and-go fuses to them, ready to throw if they tried boarding; and sometimes he would take out his watch and look at it hard, and every time he looked the people in the waist would set up a kind of a wail. At one o'clock we ran up Filipo, Afiola's brother, and settled down to another spell of waiting.

Somewheres along of three bells we saw them getting a boat out by Pita's house, and lo and behold! it was Tweedie, with the native pastor and a divinity student named Henry to pull him. When they were close enough to talk, he fell on his knees in the boat, though it was half full of bilge and slopped all over him; and he besought Captain Coe, by all that was holy, to stop murdering the innocent, and rattled on fast and scolding like he was in the pulpit. We was to leave it to G.o.d, he said, and went on like we was worse nor Afiola, the pitiful hound, like it wasn't his own wife we was doing our d.a.m.nedest to save.

Captain Coe let him have his say, and then he leaned over the s.h.i.+p's side, holding to the starboard shrouds with one hand and taking the cigar out of his mouth with the other, and told him, with a most deliberate spit, as how he was going on with one every hour till Mrs.

Tweedie was brought back safe and sound, and when he used up them he had aboard, how he was going to land for more. He didn't speak it particular loud, and you might have thought he was talking what a hot day it was; but there was that in his voice I've never heard before or since, and you knew he'd live right up to every word he said. I guess the pastor and the student understood a little English, for when Coe finished they laid on to their oars like mad, and headed the old sieve for sh.o.r.e again, Tweedie in the bilge and still protesting.

At two o'clock we turned off Sosofina, Afiola's aunt. We now had three aloft, and as we rolled gently broadside on to the swell they'd swing together and swing apart till you didn't care to look at them. That hour from two to three was the very longest I ever spent in my life. It was the hottest time of day and the sun beat down unmerciful, the pitch running in the seams, and the awnings being stripped off to better fight the s.h.i.+p, if need be. The steward pa.s.sed round sardines and b.u.t.tered biscuit, and I recollect the Chinaman wolfing his right out of the can and tipping it cornerwise to drink the ile. Bar Coe, he was the coolest customer of the lot, which was the more remarkable, as he was a mild-mannered man ordinarily, given to playing the China fiddle to himself, and very obliging if you wanted fresh yeast or the way he curried pigeon. Rau, the Belgian, with his hairy arms and stubby figure, struck one somehow as being more in his element in so wild a business, and you took his calm for granted, like a soldier serving a gun and doing what he's told. If Coe had ordered him to set off the dynamite and blow up the s.h.i.+p, he would have said "Aye, aye, sir!" and obeyed, respectful and willing, like the first-cla.s.s seaman and navigator he was. He had served in the Belgian navy, and the habit had stuck to him.

But in all of us, after all--me and Lum and John Rau and the Nieue steward--it was Coe's spirit that had raised us to this pitch, and he had blown a little of his own breath into every one of us. We were all Elijah Coe's that day, and it was only afterwards it came over us how different we had acted from our proper selves.

Well, as I said, it was drawing toward six bells, and we were keyed up tremendous, as we might expect to see the result of our work now any minute; and it was a shuddering thing to think of sending up another, and him a child. We all watched Coe out of the corner of our eye as he went on smoking his cigar, and every time he took out his watch and looked at it it seemed like my heart stopped beating.

"Three o'clock, boys!" he says, rising business-like from his chair, while Lum looked up expectant, and my gizzard seemed to shrink inside me. "Three o'clock, boys!"

He hadn't no more nor got the words out of his mouth when Rau ripped out there was a canoe coming off, and we all ran pellmell for the rail. Sure enough, there was an outrigger aiming straight for us, and the fellar in it was bent double and paddling that fast that the water spurted at the bow like it was a race. When he got within a cable's length he stopped, and waved something he had in his hand, and shouted a lot of stuff we couldn't make head or tail of. Coe made motions to him to come nearer, and Rau and me did the same, till the fellar got back something of his nerve, paddling with one hand and holding the little board aloft in the other (like he might a flag of truce), and venturing toward us slower and slower, till at last Coe reached down and took the thing from him standing up.

It was a slab of fresh-cut _fuafua_, about a foot long by three inches wide, and on it, written, as I heard afterwards, in blood and spit and gunpowder, was a message from Mrs. Tweedie herself--not many words on it, and them printed, for she only had a pointed stick by way of a pen, but saying as how she was unharmed and was being brought back fast, and please, he wasn't to trice up any more of Afiola's family.

The captain read it aloud to us about a dozen times, and then, his face working so he couldn't speak no more, he gripped hands with me, and then with John Rau, and not forgetting the Nieue steward, and then he went down the forward ladder, and I'm blest if he didn't put his arm round the c.h.i.n.k, and burst out sobbing--yes, sir, like a great overwrought girl, sitting on the tool chest, limp as a rag, and wiping his eyes with the cuff of his blue-striped panjammers, the Chinaman, patting him like he might a dog, saying, "Poor captain! Never you mind, captain! She all lite now, captain," while the prisoners broke out in a big gabble of how they were saved, and piped up with a hymn.

He wasn't the man to take anything for granted, however, and after he had sort of pulled himself together and got his second wind, so to speak, he cast loose a couple more with a message that he had to have a letter on paper from Mrs. Tweedie herself, countersigned by the king, that she was at home, safe, and no harm done. He might have saved himself the trouble, for they hadn't been gone ten minutes before she came off herself, queening it in the stern of the king's great _alia_, seventy feet long, with Tweedie and Maunga, and the princes, and eighty men chorusing to the paddles, with drums aft, and a young boy dancing in the bow and keeping time with a rifle. Except for her paleness, which was like marble, and the b.l.o.o.d.y marks of the sinnet on her pretty wrists, you wouldn't have taken her for much different than usual; and she skipped up the ladder as sprightly as you please, and made a bee line for Elijah Coe like a schoolgirl running to her pa for the holidays.

She wanted to throw herself on her knees and kiss his hands; and when he forced her up, she flung her arms around his neck and kissed him, saying he was her preserver, and how he had saved her from worse than death, and so overflowing and grateful and outspoken that n.o.body knew where to look, least of all the captain, who turned all colors, and couldn't say anything but "You're welcome," like a ninny.

We cleared a little s.p.a.ce for Tweedie to pray in, which was his way of celebrating, and couldn't very well be prevented, and the king followed with a speech what he'd do to Afiola when he caught him--the tarnation liar! The crew came off, swimming in ones and twos to beg for pardon, and the prisoners were unbound and given three crates of biscuit and three barrels of pork and some boat sails to wrap the corpses in, and there was more hurrah-boys and good feeling and port wine in the cabin than you could ever have thought possible under the circ.u.mstances.