White Fire Part 14

"Do try it, auntie! I'm sure you could manage it if you tried hard."

"And if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, Aunt Jannet!"

laughed Blair.

They left her still gazing, and scattered, Jean and Mary Stuart and Alison Evans diving into the undergrowth after armfuls of greenery and trailing vines, and twittering like escaped birds when, now and again, they came on treasure-trove of scarlet hibiscus blooms glowing on the green like fiery stars--or splashes of blood.

The men pressed on at once up the ridge to get a general view of their surroundings, and Captain Cathie, with a couple of his men, pulled slowly down the lagoon in search of the village.

He heard the merry calls of the explorers, and wondered at the absence of any sign of life on the island. The very sight of an approaching ship used, in his time, to bring the population to the beach. But things had changed of course since then, and byways had become highways.

The white boat jerked slowly along round the bend, and the voices ash.o.r.e grew less distinct. And suddenly his lips pinched and his brow crumpled, and he gazed ahead with a fixed, angry glare which set his men wondering what they were coming to, and carried their chins to their shoulders unconsciously.

A stretch of white beach, a bristle of black posts jutting out of the cleared ground above--that was all. But Cathie's experience read them like three-feet letters on a city h.o.a.rding.

He threw up one hand and jammed the tiller hard down with the other.

"Round with her, boys!" and they were swinging back up the lagoon to get the women aboard again. For there might be sights in the brush along that ridge to shock the souls of men.

Blair, Evans, and Stuart, with Matti, the Samoan, and the rest of the boat's crew, climbed the backbone of the island, whose highest point attained an alt.i.tude of perhaps thirty feet.

They were standing looking across the flawless mirror of the central lagoon, when the Samoan broke out suddenly, "Sirs, I presume advice.

Return fortwit to ship. This place is not good," and when they all turned on him in surprise, they found his brown face strained and pallid with fear, his eyes starting, and his nose dilated like a startled stag's.

"Why, Matti, what's wrong?" said Blair.

The brown man shook his head.

"I know not, sirs," and his white teeth chattered so that his chin wagged visibly. "There is evil abroad. It is in the air, in the tree-tops."

They looked up for sign of the evil, but saw only the heavy plumes of the coco-palms nodding mournfully in the breeze. Down below the air seemed heavy and somewhat sickly, and so far they had seen no sign of life on the island.

"The place seems deserted," said Evans.

"We will go on along here a bit further," said Blair, "and if there is nothing more to be seen, we'll turn back I'm afraid it's a poor look-out for fruit and vegetables," and they tramped on in silence, Matti well in the rear, reluctant to go, still more reluctant to be left.

And presently the brush thinned, and they came out on the clearing, and Blair stopped abruptly with a face as strained as Matti's, but grimmer and whiter, and Matti, stumbling up to the rear, gave a groan as though to say, "I knew it."

"G.o.d help us!" said Blair through his teeth, for they had found what Cathie had feared.

The blackened posts of the houses stuck up starkly through the sand as though in mute and pitiful appeal. Beneath them were heaps of wind-blown ashes barely covering that which they had mercifully hidden.

And among the mounds as they drew near was a sound of rustling and stealthy movement, and here and there monstrous crabs, too gorged to move almost, essayed escape into their temporary burrows.

The newcomers stared wide-eyed and horror-stricken. Blair had seen it all before, and the grim white of his face gave place to grim red and black as his heart drummed furiously with righteous indignation.

"This is the horror we have come to fight," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "This is what I told you of. Now you see it with your own eyes. The place has been swept bare by kidnappers. These died in defence of their homes and wives and children. Let us get back. It is no sight for the women."

He waved them away, but something caught his eye, and he went forward and bent over it with tight-pinched face for a moment, and then turned abruptly and followed the others.

But, even as he turned, a shriek from the lower brush told that it was too late to save the women from some visible knowledge of what had taken place. They turned and ran back along the ridge.

Mary Stuart, reaching for a flower, saw at her feet what she took for a fallen coco-nut, and stooped to pick it up, and then screamed aloud and sat down suddenly with a sick, white face. The others hurried up, Alison Evans and Aunt Jannet Harvey reaching her first.

"What is it, dear?" asked Aunt Jannet, and then she saw, and sat down heavily beside her.

Alison had her nerves under better control. She had seen little dead bodies before, but the sight of a murdered child is a shock to any woman. Her face was white and rigid, but she had her wits about her also.

"Take them all away," she whispered fiercely to Aunt Jannet Harvey, and Aunt Jannet, just needing that spur, scrambled up and gripped Mary Stuart by the shoulder and dragged her away as Jean came running up, asking, "What is it? What's the matter?"

"Come away, child!--come away! It is a little murdered baby. Alison is seeing to it, but it is quite dead. Let us get away. Here is the boat and Captain Cathie."

Everything was changed as the white boat plunged back across the lagoon to the ship. The men's faces were hard and angry, the women's white and pitiful. Alison Evans wept silently now. She had seen more than the others, and that soft little head, crushed in by one murderous blow against the tree, would haunt her dreams for nights to come.

The sun shone as brightly as before, but there was something pitiless in his unwinking glare. The sea was as placid and sparkling as before, but there was a fawning treachery in its very smoothness. The palms behind waved their feathers just as before, but now they were funeral plumes. The very oars no longer chirped merrily in the rowlocks, but croaked in a way that got on the women's nerves. And not one of them spoke till they were safe aboard the ship.

"Yes," nodded Blair to Cathie's look of interrogation, "we will go on at once," and the anchor chain rattled up hoa.r.s.ely, and they went slowly and silently on their way, and left the beautiful island to its dead.

"I saw it from the water," said Cathie later to Blair, "and turned to get the ladies away, but I was too late. Did you see anything to give you any hint as to who it was, sir?"

"Yes. Peruvians, I should say. There was one yellow man among the dead, and they recruit mostly from these outer islands. Before G.o.d, captain, I will put a stop to this kind of work, whatever the cost may be."

"We're with you, sir, every man of us. See those men's faces!"

And grim and determined enough were the men's faces as they went about their work. For those who had seen had told those who had not seen, and the impression was a deep one.

That night Blair called them all together, and spoke of the matter in a way that went home and confirmed the spirit that had been roused in them by that holocaust on the island.

"It is devil's work, men," he wound up, "and, please G.o.d, we'll stop it. Are you with me?"

"Ay, ay, sir!" "That we are, sir!" "All the way, sir!" and so on, in tones that left no mistake about it.

"You can understand the effect of that kind of work on these islanders.

It is not often so clean a sweep is made as the one we saw this morning. And where part are taken and part are left, can you wonder that those who remain hate and fear the very sight of a white face?

Have they not reason? It will be our endeavour to stop these raids, and, by protecting the islanders, gradually win them over to better ways. Once we can make them see that we care for them, and think of their welfare and not our own, half the battle is won. On the one side we may have to fight--not our own countrymen, I am glad to say. These raiders come mostly from the west coast of South America, and they go to lengths which the Queenslanders rarely do. And, on the other hand, in our dealings with the natives, we must remember what they have suffered, what reason they have to mistrust us, and we must be very forbearing and longsuffering. On the one side I want you--and I shall need the whole-hearted a.s.sistance of every man of you--I want you to be bold as lions, and on the other side as mild as milk. Only so can our work be done, and it is a mighty work."

CHAPTER XI

TOO LATE

Following instructions, Captain Cathie shook out every st.i.tch of canvas the _Torch_ could carry, and laid her course dead for the Dark Islands.

They made good way, but their progress still seemed slow to Kenneth Blair; for his fears outstripped the flight of the little ship, and, anxious as he was to reach the Islands, he still almost dreaded the cry that should tell of their sighting, in fear of what he might find there.

And grounds for fear were not lacking. The Dark Islands lay some five days distant, east by north--on the line, therefore, of the marauders'

way home. From the atoll they had already raided, he judged, from the number of dwellings and general appearances, they might have got some fifty or sixty souls, not more. Their holds would still be far from full. If they had invaded the Dark Islands in similar fashion, it was a stormy reception the next comers might expect. At best it would be a negative welcome, and a matter of slow and cautious approach to their few good graces; but if the islands had been raided, the work would be thrown back for years, and all his hopes with them. He could scarce eat or sleep for thinking of it, and the p.r.i.c.king off of their position each day on the chart, and the calculation of the hours that still intervened between them and full knowledge of how matters lay, were matters of supremest interest and absorbing anxiety.

He could settle to none of the ordinary routine, and his evident upsetting, the causes of which they perfectly understood, disturbed them all in like fashion.