Where the Pavement Ends Part 33

He turned and tramped out through the rear without a glance behind him--and left Junius Peabody there alone before the bar.

He was gone perhaps five minutes, quite as much as that, an ample s.p.a.ce of time. When he came back there was no gla.s.s in sight. It had vanished, and the room reeked with the fumes of a very flagrant distillation of French brandy. He looked his customer up and down and his lids lowered a trifle.

"Well, how did you like the flavor?"

The face of Junius Peabody was like a death's-head, but the eyes in his sockets blazed with a light all their own, and, standing there erect, standing square on his two legs with his feet braced apart, he swore--somewhat inexpertly, it was true, but still quite heartily; good, crisp profanity such as one able man may use with another--until Bendemeer's puzzled gaze caught the sparkle of broken gla.s.s lying in a great splash of liquid in a corner of the floor. "I'm going to Nukava!"

cried Junius Peabody. "And you see--you see there are some sc.r.a.ps thrown up on the beach that are worth something after all, and be d.a.m.ned to you, Bendemeer!"

Bendemeer's grip shot out as if against his volition and after an instant's hesitation Peabody took it. He did not yet know all the trader had done for him, perhaps would never know, but on the inscrutable front of that remarkable man was a faint glow curiously unlike a loser's chagrin.

"So it seems," acknowledged Bendemeer. "So it seems"--and smiled a little, rather oddly....

Bendemeer was still smiling that way, all by himself, an hour or so later when he had watched the _Likely Jane_ lay her course for Nukava with the new agent on board and had gone down into his storeroom to put the place to rights. There was a clutter of odds and ends of cargo that had been spilled from an upset surfboat the day before. Most of it had been salvaged by his Kanaka boys along sh.o.r.e, but a certain broken tub containing tallow had lost part of its contents. However, he was able now to restore a large lump weighing perhaps eleven pounds or so, which made the tally nearly good.

THE ADVERSARY

In the good old days of Thursday Island there pa.s.sed as waif currency a certain local jest. When some pride of the pearling fleet was moved to approve himself, his company, and the pervading wickedness in general he was wont to state--more or less t.i.tubant on his pins the while--that the only honest men in that merry little h.e.l.l had come by land. It was a useful and a harmless jest, salted with the essential fact whereby legends are preserved and made historic. But from a date it lost its savor....

At the Portugee's one night--Sat.u.r.day, be sure, for it was always Sat.u.r.day on Thursday with the pearlers--a gentleman from Wooloomooloo who had just adorned the traditional witticism with profane fancy found himself confronted by a quiet stranger who laid down his coat and a new law.

"I don't mind so much what you call yourselves _to_ yourselves," he observed, while the circle shouted and spread about. "Nor your nice new magistrate, nor your missionaries, nor your artillery guard on the hill.

Maybe you've overlooked the modern spread of respectability and corrugated roofings. Or maybe you know 'em better than I do. But I've come to tarry with you for a time, my friends. And, as long as I'm in your midst, any chap that says I'm not honest--and can't prove it--I'll knock seven bells out of him."

Which he did, _seriatim_.

Now, there never was another place habitually so incurious as Thursday Island in its social dealings. It is the last raw outpost toward the last unknown continent of Papua, and those who resort to its blistering grid among the reefs are folks that have largely reduced their human complex to the simple thirst. Where every prospect displeases and man is only an exile the merest regard for etiquette will warn against prying very far into your neighbor's little eccentricities unless you are prepared to push the inquiry with a knife.

Also, there never was another place like Thursday for variations on a color theme. That season the islanders counted twenty-two races among the two thousand of them, including half-castes; and most of their common gossip was carried on in a lingo of rather less than two hundred words. You cannot do much abstract speculating in _beche de mer_.

Perhaps these points would somewhat explain the stranger's success.

n.o.body questioned his account of hailing from the Low Archipelago, or the curiously yachtlike snap to his craft, or his own odd employment on a pearling license. n.o.body wondered when he paid off and scattered his Kanaka crew--possible links with his past--and shipped a new lot from the motley mob on the jetty.

And a motley lot he picked! His cook was Chinese; his head diver a Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp, the name of b.u.t.termilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact--which again n.o.body noticed--that they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who do.

This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself might have filled a whole ill.u.s.tration; thewed like a colossus, crop black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an inst.i.tution....

"'Im? Cap'n of the _Fancy Free_, that flash little lugger out beyond.

'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on sh.o.r.e leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might ha' owed you--that's 'is sort. And--my word!--'e's got a jab to the boko you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im.

'Honest Wetherbee'--that's 'im."

For he lived to the t.i.tle. If it is honest to abide by every hampering regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices over a bit of inferior sh.e.l.l; to lose two weeks with your outfit in quarantine, voluntarily--that happened when the _Opalton_ brought a hot cholera scare and her pa.s.senger list camped on Friday Island--to share your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee played it. Amazingly--as a man might play an arduous game!

Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the harbor master and was calling various pilots, navigators, and odd fish of Torres Strait by their handier names--especially the pilots. These were the rewards of reputation, and they defined Thursday's acceptance of him up to that night in the wet season when his visit ended....

A Sat.u.r.day again. The northwest monsoon had broken with torrential downpour, and now the island reeked in a steam bath, as if the young moon had focused a sick, intolerable ray upon it. A high wind stormed the sands and brought no relief. The quiver of the surf beat on the senses like heat waves. A few thrashing pawpaws and palm tufts threw shadows like tormented sleepers along the beach. But up in the town Thursday took its usual "tangle," shouted and sang and drowned its fever without a.s.suagement in the periodic crisis of the fortune hunt. A Brisbane steamer lay ready to depart with the morning tide. Meanwhile her sh.o.r.e goers, "seeing a bit o' life," did their possible to keep up the prevailing temperature. Only the long jetty was quiet. Here a man might stand back and away from it all and hear the single note of its turmoil and peer into the mist of its lights like a contemplative Lucifer at the verge of some lesser inferno.

And in truth there stood such a man in much that manner. He had come down soft-footed from the streets and, lingering to a.s.sure himself he had not been followed, stepped out upon the jetty where he stayed motionless and attentive. His glance roved from point to point, noting, verifying. First the outward spread twinkle of the deserted lugger fleet at anchor; then the bulk of the Brisbane steamer at the T head, with her yellow cargo flares that showed loading still in progress: and the town, all unconscious of him. Something sinister seemed to detach this big, dim figure from the restlessness of the night; brooding apart there so coolly alert and contained. He regarded Thursday for a while, and at last, alone and with himself for confidant, he made a gesture as if to seal its folly and its whole destiny with final contempt and triumph.

He was turning away with a swing of broad shoulders when another figure slipped from the shadow and moved suddenly to confront him.

"Ah--Captain Wetherbee?"

Everywhere and always up and down the earth, and more particularly in rather unhealthful corners of it, are men who have to go braced for that questioning slur, that significant little drag before the name. It is a challenge out of time and s.p.a.ce, and at sound of it the big fellow drew up tense like a battler in a ring.

"Halvers," stated the newcomer without preamble or apology. "I'll take halvers, if you please, Captain Wetherbee."

He revealed himself as a long, weedy frame in limp linen. Both hands were jammed into his side pockets with a singular effect--against a hypothetical chill, one would have thought. Without his stoop he might have been as tall as Wetherbee, but he had shrunken like the sleeves tucked above his bony wrists. He had an air at once fearful and implacable--the doubly dangerous menace of a timid man ready to strike.

Wetherbee was aware of it, though incredulous.

"You spoke?" he inquired, from a lengthened jaw.

"I said--halvers," affirmed this extraordinary apparition. There was no mistaking the peculiar flavor in his husky voice--no mistaking, either, that at present its owner was deadly cold sober. "Don't move, captain.

I've got you covered from here.... And this time I'm not afraid to shoot!"

Wetherbee continued aware of it.

"Just my little device for holding your attention," explained the newcomer, between a cough and a snuffle, the remnant of polite affectation. "I thought it out very carefully."

"Ho! You did?" queried Wetherbee.

"You used to be such a d.a.m.nably abrupt sort of person yourself."

"Ho! Did I?"

"Even then. Even then, when we sat under the same pulpit--such time as you found it socially expedient to attend--it was a matter of grave doubt to me whether you took any real benefit. You were always a poor listener, Mr.--ah--Wetherbee. Whereas I--I was chosen deacon that winter, you may remember."

Wetherbee stared into the shaven, haunted face thus preposterously thrust at him across the years. Aside from the unimaginable oddity of the attack, there was cunning and unsettling purpose in it, but he yielded no nerve reaction, no start or outcry; not even a denial. And by this--had he been wise--the other might have taken warning.

"By Jove!" was all his comment.

"We've come a considerable distance," suggested the new arrival.

They looked in curious silence, each measuring that span from the edge of things. Thursday howled on one side of them and on the other wind and the sea, until the humor of it won Wetherbee to a grim chuckle.

"Well, what do they call you nowadays--deacon?"

"I'm usually known as Selden, thanks."