Where the Pavement Ends Part 31

"You've got it!" He took two steps after a retreating wave, but the next drove him hopping. It was strange to see the fellow drawn by a frantic eagerness and chased again by the merest flicker of foam, lifting his feet as gingerly as a cat.

"What have I got?" asked Junius, standing at mid-thigh where the surf creamed in between them.

"It's the stuff! Chuck it over--wha-i-i!" Sydney's voice rose to a squeal as a frothing ripple caught his toes.

Junius came wading sh.o.r.eward, but he did not relinquish the lump when the other felt and paddled it feverishly, babbling.

"Look at that--look at that! All smooth an' soft--an' kind of slimy, like. Oh, no, we 'in't struck it fair rich this time, nor nothin'--oh, _now_!... Mytey, I tell you--by Gaw', I tell you it's the real stuff!"

"But oughtn't there be an odor--a perfume?"

"Not yet--not while it's fresh. That comes after. And any'ow, what else could it be--'ey?"

Junius shook his head.

"'Ere, I'll show you, you poor flat!" The larrikin raged about like a man in a strong temper. "Where's a nail? Gimme a nail, a long nail, or a piece of wire--'ell, I'll show you!"

He s.n.a.t.c.hed up a strip of planking from the sand and wrenched a rusty spike from it. With swift jerky gestures he gathered a few dry chips and splinters, whipped a match, and set them alight. In this brief blaze he heated the spike and then applied it to the lump. It sank smoothly, leaving a little melted ring around the hole.

"Ambergris!" he yelped. "Worth near two pound an ounce, right 'ere in Fufuti.... And the 'arf of it's mine," he added, with a startling shift to the most brazen impudence.

Junius regarded him, incredulous.

"What? That's wot! Wasn't I here? 'In't I been pallin' along of you?

It's a fair divvy. W'y, d.a.m.n your soul," he screamed in a sudden febrile blast of fury, "you don't think you're goin' to 'og my 'arf an' all!"

"_Your_ half!" repeated Junius. "Huh--nothing small about you, is there?

Why, you weren't anywhere near when I found it. Didn't you pa.s.s up the swim?"

Just here the Sydney Duck made his mistake. Had he proceeded with any finesse, with any understanding of his man, he might have done about as he pleased and it is likely that little of moment would have transpired on Fufuti beach that morning. But he acted by his lights, which were narrow and direct, and he hit Junius Peabody suddenly in the smiling face of him and knocked him reeling backward. The next instant he was running for the nearest palms with the prize tucked under one arm.

Junius sat on the sand and blinked, and at first he felt rather hurt, for he was not used to being treated so, at least not while he was sober. And thereafter he grinned, for such was his way of turning aside a casual unpleasantness, and the thing undeniably had its humorous aspect. But finally came the throb of a strange new emotion, as if some one had planted a small, hot coal in his breast.

It is a fact worthy of note that never before had Junius Peabody known the sting of a living anger. But never before had Junius Peabody been reduced to a naked Junius Peabody, dot and carry nothing--penniless, desperate, and now cheated of a last hope. That made the difference.

"Hey!" he protested. "See here, you know--Dammit!"

He struggled up and climbed anyhow into trousers, coat, and shoes, and set off at a shambling trot, with no clear notion of what he meant to do but keeping the larrikin in sight.

Sydney dodged in among the trees, found them too scant for cover, paused to fling a yellow snarl over his shoulder, and swung up the sh.o.r.e. He turned, questing here and there, shouting as he ran, and presently raised an answering shout from a hollow whence another figure started up to join him, a bearded, heavy-set rogue, whose abnormally long arms dangled like an ape's out of his sleeveless shirt. Junius recognized Willems, the third of their party the night before, and he knew where the interest of that sullen big Hollander would lie. He had a coalition of thievery against him now. The two beachcombers ran on together, footing briskly past the long boat sheds and the high white veranda of Bendemeer's place....

Under this iron thatch stood the man Bendemeer himself, cool and lathy in spotless ducks, planted there, as was his morning custom, to oversee and command all his little capital. And in truth it was a kingdom's capital, the center of a trading monopoly of the old type and chief seat of as strange and absolute a tyrant as the world still offers room for; rich, powerful, independent, fearing nothing between heaven and h.e.l.l and at once the best-loved and the best-hated individual in his sphere of influence.

Bendemeer, trader, philanthropist, and purveyor of rotgut, was one of those uncla.s.sed growths of the South Seas that almost const.i.tute a new racial type. n.o.body could have placed his nationality or his caste or his accent. His name was of a piece with the grim self-sufficiency that gave nothing and asked nothing: an obvious jest, borrowed from the Persian song of an Irish poet, but the one touch of fancy about him.

Somewhere, somehow, he had taken a cynic twist or a rankling wound that had turned his white man's blood once for all. They tell stories of such cases up and down the islands, and mostly the stories are very ugly and discreditable indeed. But not so concerning Bendemeer; against whom was no scandal, only curses and bitterness. For his peculiarity took the especially irritating form of fair dealings with some thousands of brown-skinned natives and no dealings at all with any man of his own color--except to beat him at strict business and then to sell him as much villainous liquor as he could at the highest possible price. As he leaned there indolently in his doorway with arms folded and cheroot between his thin lips he could measure his own land as far as he could see on either side, a small part of his holdings in plantations and trading stations throughout the archipelago. Offsh.o.r.e, behind the only good strip of barrier reef and near the only navigable channel on the south coast, lay anch.o.r.ed his _Likely Jane_, flagship of a smart little navy. His gang of boys was hustling cargo out of her in surfboats, and both boys and boats were the handiest and ablest that could be found anywhere for that ticklish work. He had only to turn his head to view the satisfactory bulk of his sheds and dependencies, solid, new-painted.

The house at his back was trim, broad, and comfortable, and in the storeroom underneath lay thousands of dollars' worth of a.s.sorted trade goods, all of which would eventually become copra and great wealth.

This was the man, decidedly in possession of his own legs and able to stand and to navigate on the same, to whom Junius Peabody appealed in his wretched need....

Junius stumbled up to the steps. The burst had marrow-drawn him, his lungs labored pitifully as if he were breathing cotton wool. It was hot, for the sun had sprung wide like an opened furnace gate, but he had not started a pore.

"I've been robbed," he wheezed, and pointed a wavering hand. "Those chaps there--robbed--!"

Bendemeer glanced aside up the strand after the disappearing ruffians and then down at the complainant, but otherwise he did not move, only stayed considering from his lean, leathery mask, with still eyes, outward-looking.

"What do you care?" he said idly. "You'll be dead in a month anyhow."

Junius gaped toward him dizzily. The fellow was the local authority and besides had taken his money. He could not believe that he had heard aright. "But, say--they've stolen my property!"

Bendemeer shot a blue ring of smoke into the sunshine. "In that case you've lost it. They're heading for the Rocks, and once they've gone to earth there you never could find them--you'd be torn to pieces if you did."

He nicked the ash of his cheroot in a pause. "I suppose you mean I might help you," he continued. "I might, but I won't. I've seen a good many of your kind before, drift stuff that gets washed up on the beach. You're not worth it. And now, since you have no further business with me, I'd be obliged if you'd kindly get the h.e.l.l out of my front yard. You're interfering with the view." ...

Junius Peabody found himself groping away through the sunlight on Fufuti beach once more. A dead calm held the air. Under the steady, low organ note of the reef he could hear only the drag of his own steps, the curious, unforgetable "shr-ring" of boot leather on coral.

It was borne upon him then that he had just acquired a liberal education, that he had learned more essential facts within the last hour than he had ever gained before in his twenty-odd years--a tabloid of life--and too late to be of any use. Such abstractions are sometimes valuable to a man, but they are not the sort that brings a lump in his throat and a winking in his eyes. The thing, the sheerly heartfelt thing that Junius Peabody said to himself, sniffling, was this: "And he didn't--didn't even offer me a drink!"

There was nothing to draw him any farther--no help, no promise of success, not even a single witness to shame with a grin or to urge with an expectant stare--nothing outside himself. Fufuti beach lay stark and aching white before him. The two thieves had long since lost themselves among the palms. Down by the water's edge a couple of Bendemeer's boat boys were salvaging odds and ends lost overboard in an upset in yesterday's heavy surf. They did not waste a thought or a look on him.

He was many degrees less important than a lot of other rubbish around there. He might just as well, he might much better, slump down in a sodden heap amid the rest of the jetsam. And yet he did not.... And he did go on. For some obscure, irrational human reason, he did go on.

Perhaps because of the tiny coal in his breast, blown red by Bendemeer's blasting contempt. Perhaps because, after all, no man ever quite achieves complete resemblance to a jellyfish.

On the southern tip of Fufuti stands Tenbow Head, the end of a rough little jut of land known locally as the Rocks. To speak by the book, there is neither rock nor head, but the abyss turned in its sleep once, and shouldered half a mile of Fufuti's sh.o.r.e line to a height of thirty feet--enough for a mountain in this sea of humble atolls. Incidentally it smashed the elevated reefs like chalk in a mortar. Tenbow is a wreck of shattered coral terraces, clad in the eager growths which profit by its trifling rise and which alone do profit. For the rest it remains the island jungle, a section apart and untouched, almost impenetrable.

Junius Peabody began his exploration of this cheerful region by falling on his face in a gully and bruising his nose very grievously. He found no trail to guide him up the slope. It was pitted like slag, deceitful as old honeycomb. The footing crumbled; tempting beds of moss and fern slipped away at his clutch; twisting lianas caught his ankles and sent him asprawl. The very ground seemed armed against him with a malignant life of its own. He had to creep among jagged teeth that sliced his flimsy garments and his putty-soft flesh. And when a loosened ma.s.s slid gently over at a touch and caught and crushed an arm he scarcely wondered whether any personal power had directed. It was all the same.

For a long time he lay looking at his pulped fingers and the driven drops of blood from the quick of his nails, sensing the exquisite pain almost as a luxury, hugging it to him. But at length he stirred and began to wriggle forward again.

"If I'm going to die anyway," said Junius Peabody, "I'm going to die doing this." Which was an extraordinary remark on all accounts....

And so by dint of following something and still following with unlimited purpose over a limited terrain, he ran it down in the end and came to the hiding place he sought.

A rooted instinct of the potentially criminal, which prompts them to be ready to flee though no man pursueth, had moved the beachcombers of Fufuti long since to prepare their snug retreat in the heart of the Rocks. On the inward sh.o.r.e of the promontory they had found a level bit of shelf screened by lush vegetation, with the green-stained cliff for wall and the sapphire waters of the lagoon below for forecourt. Hither they repaired in the intervals of lesser lawbreaking and free entertainment, always secure of hearth and shelter where the broad panda.n.u.s spread its shingles. And hither, straight as merry men to their shaw, they had brought the great treasure of the morning.

A truly homelike scene was that on which Junius Peabody peered from ambush above....

From the convenient branch of a tree the Sydney Duck had suspended by its middle a single stout stick. At one end of the stick he had slung the stolen lump in a fiber net. At the other he had attached a battered tin can of the kind that the beneficent enterprise of an American oil company had spread to most of the dark parts of the earth. On this balance of an ancient and primitive design he was engaged in weighing his ill-gotten gains, squatting to the task.

"A gallon of water weighs a good eight pound," he declared. "I figger five quarts an' a 'arf. And five is ten and the 'arf is one--"

Willems stood beside him in an att.i.tude of stolid skepticism. There was no mistaking the breed of this big derelict. He had managed to a.s.sert it on a Pacific isle by fashioning himself somehow a pipe with a clay bowl and a long stem of the true drooping line. He looked quite domestic and almost paternal as he shuffled his broad feet and towered over the little larrikin. But the fists he carried in the pockets of his dungarees bulged like coconuts, and his hairy arms were looped brown cables. A tough man for an argument was Mynheer Willems.

"Yaw," he was saying. "But how you know you got five quarts and a half?"