Jerry & Michael - Two Beloved Adventure Novels for Children. Jack London
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queer, perky way;
“No kai-kai ’m Su’u fella boy suppose walk about along you?”
“No fear,” the dandy answered. “Suppose ’m Su’u fella boy, all right. Suppose ’m no fella Su’u boy, my word, big trouble. Ishikola, big fella black marster along this place, him talk ’m me talk along you. Him say any amount bad fella boy stop ’m along bush. Him say big fella white marster no walk about. Him say jolly good big fella white marster stop ’m along ship.”
Van Horn nodded in an off-hand way, as if the information were of little value, although he knew that for this time Su’u would furnish him no fresh recruits. One at a time, compelling the others to remain in their places, he directed the return boys astern and ashore. It was Solomon Islands tactics. Crowding was dangerous. Never could the blacks be risked to confusion in numbers. And Van Horn, smoking his cigar in lordly indifferent fashion, kept his apparently uninterested eyes glued to each boy who made his way aft, box on shoulder, and stepped out on the land. One by one they disappeared into the runway tunnel, and when the last was ashore he ordered the boat back to the ship.
“Nothing doing here this trip,” he told the mate. “We’ll up hook and out in the morning.”
The quick tropic twilight swiftly blent day and darkness. Overhead all stars were out. No faintest breath of air moved over the water, and the humid heat beaded the faces and bodies of both men with profuse sweat. They ate their deck-spread supper languidly and ever and anon used their forearms to wipe the stinging sweat from their eyes.
“Why a man should come to the Solomons—beastly hole,” the mate complained.
“Or stay on,” the captain rejoined.
“I’m too rotten with fever,” the mate grumbled. “I’d die if I left. Remember, I tried it two years ago. It takes the cold weather to bring out the fever. I arrived in Sydney on my back. They had to take me to hospital in an ambulance. I got worse and worse. The doctors told me the only thing to do was to head back where I got the fever. If I did I might live a long time. If I hung on in Sydney it meant a quick finish. They packed me on board in another ambulance. And that’s all I saw of Australia for my holiday. I don’t want to stay in the Solomons. It’s plain hell. But I got to, or croak.”
He rolled, at a rough estimate, thirty grains of quinine in a cigarette paper, regarded the result sourly for a moment, then swallowed it at a gulp. This reminded Van Horn, who reached for the bottle and took a similar dose.
“Better put up a covering cloth,” he suggested.
Borckman directed several of the boat’s crew in the rigging up of a thin tarpaulin, like a curtain along the shore side of the Arangi. This was a precaution against any bushwhacking bullet from the mangroves only a hundred feet away.
Van Horn sent Tambi below to bring up the small phonograph and run off the dozen or so scratchy, screechy records that had already been under the needle a thousand times. Between records, Van Horn recollected the girl, and had her haled out of her dark hole in the lazarette to listen to the music. She obeyed in fear, apprehensive that her time had come. She looked dumbly at the big fella white master, her eyes large with fright; nor did the trembling of her body cease for a long time after he had made her lie down. The phonograph meant nothing to her. She knew only fear—fear of this terrible white man that she was certain was destined to eat her.
Jerry left the caressing hand of Skipper for a moment to go over and sniff her. This was an act of duty. He was identifying her once again. No matter what happened, no matter what months or years might elapse, he would know her again and for ever know her again. He returned to the free hand of Skipper that resumed its caressing. The other hand held the cigar which he was smoking.
The wet sultry heat grew more oppressive. The air was nauseous with the dank mucky odour that cooked out of the mangrove swamp. Rowelled by the squeaky music to recollection of old-world ports and places, Borckman lay on his face on the hot planking, beat a tattoo with his naked toes, and gutturally muttered an unending monologue of curses. But Van Horn, with Jerry panting under his hand, placidly and philosophically continued to smoke, lighting a fresh cigar when the first gave out.
He roused abruptly at the faint wash of paddles which he was the first on board to hear. In fact, it was Jerry’s low growl and neck-rippling of hair that had keyed Van Horn to hear. Pulling the stick of dynamite out from the twist of his loin cloth and glancing at the cigar to be certain it was alight, he rose to his feet with leisurely swiftness and with leisurely swiftness gained the rail.
“What name belong you?” was his challenge to the dark.
“Me fella Ishikola,” came the answer in the quavering falsetto of age.
Van Horn, before speaking again, loosened his automatic pistol half out of its holster, and slipped the holster around from his hip till it rested on his groin conveniently close to his hand.
“How many fella boy stop along you?” he demanded.
“One fella ten-boy altogether he stop,” came the aged voice.
“Come alongside then.” Without turning his head, his right hand unconsciously dropping close to the butt of the automatic, Van Horn commanded: “You fella Tambi. Fetch ’m lantern. No fetch ’m this place. Fetch ’m aft along mizzen rigging and look sharp eye belong you.”
Tambi obeyed, exposing the lantern twenty feet away from where his captain stood. This gave Van Horn the advantage over the approaching canoe-men, for the lantern, suspended through the barbed wire across the rail and well down, would clearly illuminate the occupants of the canoe while he was left in semi-darkness and shadow.
“Washee-washee!” he urged peremptorily, while those in the invisible canoe still hesitated.
Came the sound of paddles, and, next, emerging into the lantern’s area of light, the high, black bow of a war canoe, curved like a gondola, inlaid with silvery-glistening mother-of-pearl; the long lean length of the canoe which was without outrigger; the shining eyes and the black-shining bodies of the stark blacks who knelt in the bottom and paddled; Ishikola, the old chief, squatting amidships and not paddling, an unlighted, empty-bowled, short-stemmed clay pipe upside-down between his toothless gums; and, in the stern, as coxswain, the dandy, all nakedness of blackness, all whiteness of decoration, save for the pig’s tail in one ear and the scarlet hibiscus that still flamed over the other ear.
Less than ten blacks had been known to rush a blackbirder officered by no more than two white men, and Van Horn’s hand closed on the butt of his automatic, although he did not pull it clear of the holster, and although, with his left hand, he directed the cigar to his mouth and puffed it lively alight.
“Hello, Ishikola, you blooming old blighter,” was Van Horn’s greeting to the old chief, as the dandy, with a pry of his steering-paddle against the side of the canoe and part under its bottom, brought the dug-out broadside-on to the Arangi so that the sides of both crafts touched.
Ishikola smiled upward in the lantern light. He smiled with his right eye, which was all he had, the left having been destroyed by an arrow in a youthful jungle-skirmish.
“My word!” he greeted back. “Long time you no stop eye belong me.”
Van Horn joked him in understandable terms about the latest wives he had added to his harem and what price he had paid for them in pigs.
“My word,” he concluded, “you rich fella too much together.”
“Me like ’m come on board gammon along you,” Ishikola meekly suggested.
“My word, night he stop,” the captain objected, then added, as a concession against the known rule that visitors were not permitted aboard after nightfall: “You come on board, boy stop ’m along boat.”
Van Horn gallantly helped the old man to clamber to the rail, straddle the barbed wire, and gain the deck. Ishikola was a dirty old savage. One of his tambos (tambo being bêche-de-mer and Melanesian for “taboo”) was that water unavoidable must never touch his skin. He who lived by