Where the Pavement Ends Part 40

There were two great carven figureheads guarding the gate, and Andrew Harben even saw the name under one of them, a most calm and beautiful white face looking down on this rascal crew. _Witch of Dundee_ it said. And where was the _Witch of Dundee_ now, and where all the hearty men which sailed with her? Gone down in Maca.s.sar long since. Here were her bones, what was left, and for theirs the monkeys would be rolling them on the mud flats at low tide....

Well, Andrew Harben saw these things and he understood quick enough that the kindly Bugis were no more than wreck pirates who drove a rich trade whenever for any good and sufficient reason the light failed. They must have been at it for years, very quiet and cautious so the keepers would have plenty of time to go mad and get eaten by the crocodile, as the skipper said. Of course they would not kill the keepers in any uncrafty way lest the news should get out and spoil their graft, and a white man with a spear through him is hard to keep secret underground in any native country.

However, they would have made an exception of Andrew Harben. They spied him standing there in the dusk, and they knew their game was up unless they nailed him. They chased him hard through the swamps, but he gave them the slip and reached home a jump ahead. They were not anxious to follow while he could sweep the bridge with his fowling piece and so they stood on the sh.o.r.e and howled.

"Ya--ya!" they said, meaning d.a.m.n him.

Andrew Harben was the angry man. He'd been pretty much fed up with natural history by this time. About everything that flew or crawled in Borneo had sampled him, and he was bit and stung all over. Meanwhile he considered the wickedness of these Bugis that had been carrying on serial murder here all unbeknownst and how nearly they had added him to the score by playing him for a scientist and a sucker. And he considered too that he was now shut off from all help in the matter of the lights and what a responsibility of life and property rested on him to keep them going.

"When I thought of that," he said, telling me, "--when I thought of that I jumped up and fired into the trees till the gun was too hot to hold.

Curse 'em! D'you know I had to take what was left of my pants to patch up the wicks that night?"

He would have given all the honorary letters of the alphabet for the use of a rifle, but he might have saved his rage, for the Bugis minded bird shot not at all. They only danced in the mangroves and mocked him.

"Ya--ya!" they said, which meant they'd get him yet....

He began to think so himself the next day when his water ran out. The tender was due in three more days. He thought his wicks might last that long, with nursing. But he would be dead a dozen times over with thirst.

After a blazing torture along toward evening he couldn't stand it any more. The woods were quiet and there was just a chance that the enemy were napping. He took a pail and sneaked ash.o.r.e over his bridge to the water barrel under the mangroves that they had always kept filled for him. It seemed they must have forgot to cut off supplies--the barrel was br.i.m.m.i.n.g. He drunk a pailful on the spot and started back with another,--and he got as far as his shack before he collapsed, all curled up in knots quite picturesque. Those simple Bugis had dosed the water with a native drug made from the klang berry.

Now, it is a singular thing about klang, as Andrew Harben told me, that it will mostly kill a brown man and seldom a white, but if it does not it sends him crazy. By that he meant crazy in the Malay way, which is quite different. The klang did not kill Andrew Harben. It laid him cold at first, and for many hours he lay without sense or speech.

When he came to be was stretched in a corner of the shack. The cupola overhead was dark and the shack was dark except for one tiny dish lamp on the floor, and around and about squatted the tribe of Allo having a high old time.

They were naked, being hopeful of a chance to swim before the night was done, and they smelt like swine. A big wind was raising in the Strait and the waves roared and bubbled underneath among the piles while the Bugis watched for results. By way of keeping their patience they were at the pickle bottles, being hindered not at all by the curious specimens therein and highly pleased with the alcohol. It is another singular thing that if klang was not made for a white man alcohol was never made for a brown.

Andrew Harben roused up in the corner where they'd chucked him, meaning to feed him to the usual alligator for breakfast. He saw them sitting there and celebrating so very joyful, and he saw something else. Through the smother off to windward toward Celebes he saw the twinkle of at least two ships standing off most bewildered and marked for their graves among the reefs and currents they couldn't place. These ships were going down to his account because his lights were out. And meanwhile the Bugis were sitting around and tearing up the lantern wicks.

Yes, that was just what they were doing. They had took out the wicks so there should be no more light that night at any price. They had snaffled the poor little shreds that Andrew Harben had made at the expense of decency--his wicks, his precious wicks! They tossed the strands about, and the wind s.n.a.t.c.hed them away inland into howling s.p.a.ce, and the Bugis laughed.

"Ya--ya!" they said, which means good business.

Andrew Harben rose up all so quietly in his corner. Did I tell you he was a fine, big man? He was, and they were also eight fine, big men--old Allo and his seven sons. Before they noticed, he was able to reach his shotgun. It was empty, but he wanted nothing, only the barrels, which furnished a short and very hefty club. What happened after that n.o.body can say exactly. Which perhaps is just as well, for it could not have been a pretty thing to see. But Andrew Harben, who was crazed with klang, ran amuck among the Bugis, who were crazed with alcohol, and most queer were the doings in the lighthouse by Maca.s.sar. And when morning came there was no wreck in that strait.

"So you have not got mad," said the half-caste skipper when he climbed up to the shack in the smoky dawn two days ahead of time. Then Andrew Harben came out to meet him wearing few impediments to speak of and not much skin either; so he added: "Anyways, you have not been eats by z'

crocodile."

"No," said Andrew Harben, all unashamed.

"_Zat_ iss awright, but my G.o.d why did you not show your light till midnight?" asked the skipper. "I tell you I was out zere last night and z' light wa.s.s dark and z' devil walking abroad on z' waters. Almost, almost we went ash.o.r.e with zese dam currents. But just as we would run on z' Poi Laut reef you lit up again. Not one little minute too soon did you show z' light? Why iss zis?"

"I lost my wicks!" said Andrew Harben, quite cool.

"Loze z' wicks?" shouted the skipper. "For why have you lose z' wicks?

Did you find zem again?"

"Come and see," said Andrew Harben.

He took the skipper into the shack where the lights in the cupola were still burning broad and yellow. They were eight in number, as I said, and no man ever saw the like of them before nor will again. For every light there hung a Bugis from the iron framework by the long hair of his head. One lock of his hair held him up. The rest was twisted into a cue and looped so that it floated in the oil tub and then pa.s.sed through a burner.

By the hand of Andrew Harben that did it, those eight Bugis were the wicks of Maca.s.sar that kept the strait clear!

Meanwhile Andrew Harben went whistling about his work, climbing around the frame and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g all so careful and moving the thumbscrews a bit here and there and ladling oil in a gourd to keep the flow rising well.

"I have made a remarkable discovery," he said. "It is a fact in nature that human hair can be used for a lamp wick. Of course you have to keep wetting it, for hair will not draw oil fast enough by capillary action.

But it serves."...

The skipper looked at the Bugis and looked around at the broken pickle bottles and the scattered specimen cases and the other remnants, and the skipper understood partly, being a highly intelligent man for a half-caste.

"Zis," he said, "_zis_ is mos' natural. Only it iss no good for 'istory.

You will never write z' natural 'istory of your great discovery, my friend, because it is too dam natural for anybody to believe."

And he said true, and that's why I'm telling you the story free gratis as Andrew Harben told it to me, which you may write yourself if you got the nerve. Andrew Harben he'll tell you the same if you find him hammering rust by the Cape Town breakwater. He's all right now, but for a long time after they took him away from Borneo he was just a little peculiar one way. It wasn't bugs nor snakes nor natives nor any such vermin that excited him, though you might think so. No, he was cured of all that. But whenever he chanced to see a lamp anywhere that was carelessly tended, spattering or smoking and the flame burning low and foul, then Andrew Harben would begin to carry on.

"Ya--ya!" he would yell, meaning why the devil don't you trim your wicks?

Which, when you think of it, was no more than natural, as the skipper said.

DOUBLOON GOLD

I remembered the big chap with the China-blue eyes and the great mop of tangled fair hair. I had seen him one night, a month or so before, at Monte Carlo, where he wound up a run against the red by snapping the sovereigns off his cuff links. And here, in the Casino Pavao, at Funchal, I remarked him in almost the identical gesture. He fumbled through all his pockets before he found and tossed out upon the board a goldpiece, broad and ruddy as his own openair face. Now, as then, I saw him summon his last reserve for a final plunge. The coin fell on _manque_, and there he let it lie.

We were in charge of a highly superior banker at that table--a model banker, a window model of a banker, with spade-cut beard, jet brows, waxen face, and perfectly faultless armor of full dress. Throughout the evening he had been spinning the wheel and shooting the little marble along its saucer rim with the detached regularity of an automaton. But when this strange token dropped shimmering beside him he stood like one transfixed, then bent over to stare, and presently pa.s.sed a signal to the fat croupier across from him. And both of them stared at the thing, which shone like a full moon on the smooth green pool of the table.

I was not so sure of the rest. But it seemed to me that a sudden flame lighted their professionally indifferent eyes, that the spark of some swift excitement leaped between them. I say I could not be sure, because I was tiptoe with eagerness myself.

n.o.body else was paying any noticeable attention to the big gambler or to his fortunes. A silent crowd jostled stiffly about the board, three deep, unmindful of the heat, the puddled air, the aching blue-white lights--a cosmopolitan crowd, such as one finds in the season at a minor crossroads like Madeira, where types are varied, if not extreme.

There was the English invalid contingent, of course--the prop and frigid corrective of so many subtropical resorts; and the local social element, dark, dapper and Portuguese, playing a wary and penurious stake; and the casual commercial, chiefly Teuton, playing high and stolidly; and the whole hodgepodge of chance tourists from the steamers in port--South Americans, South Africans, lean and yellowish administrators from the West Coast, one or two frock-coated Arabs with the fez, Spaniards from Canary, and Hebraic gentlemen from the ends of the earth. In short, a Casino crowd, solely intent upon the game, and restrained from any common human sentiment like curiosity by its own multiplied strangeness.

And I rejoiced that this was so; for I desired no compet.i.tion, and I meant to get that big gambler's big goldpiece, one way or another.

"_Faites vos jou'!_" The banker had recovered sufficiently to make his spin, droning with guttural accent the familiar phrase: "_Faites vos jou', mess'h!_"

I suppose every traveler likes to esteem himself rather a dab at collecting. How else account for the populations that live by the sale and the manufacture of a.s.sorted relics? I had lugged a bag of ancient coins half round the world, and I desperately wanted that particular coin, so large, so curious--and genuine--being offered as a bet. But there was something more to my temptation.

The day had been tinged for me with the charm and color of this Old World island town, lying like a flower wreath on a mailed breast, with its rioting gardens, its twining streets, its grim basalt barriers and savage beaches. I felt the lure of authentic adventure in pursuing such a memento, a goldpiece possibly historic, stamped with the flourish of dead kings. One has the sense at times of spying from ambush upon a promise of emprise and some great gain. It is the glamour of things, a magic flush on dull and sordid fact. It starts up anyhow, at a face, a whisper, a strain of music--a stock quotation. True, in the present state of a fallen world it often proves counterfeit--and expensive, too often. But what of that? One follows still; if only for the sake of the story....

"_Faites vos jou'_!" advised the banker, who himself presided over romantic possibilities at a dollar a throw.

By the judicious use of an elbow I worked my way through the press.

There fell the usual interval of suspense while the marble circled low.

It gave me my chance to lean over the shoulder of the big gambler, who sat glowering and expectant, and to murmur in his ear.