Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas Part 3

"The Chilaneans could do better nor you!" he cried.

"Jack," whispered a voice beside him, and there was Fetuao back again in a state of the sweetest contrition and remorse. He took her in his arms and kissed her; and then, like a pair of lovers, they held each other's hands and shrank close together as the sh.e.l.ls burst over the village.

The firing lasted for an hour, and then the flotilla of boats, preceded by the American launch, pa.s.sed in procession through the break in the reef, and headed for Jack's house.

"Oh, it's the flag they see!" cried Fetuao, and she besought Jack, with tears in her eyes, to haul it down.

"Never!" he said, grinding his teeth.

There were some three or four hundred men in the boats, and as they raced in, cheering and yelling at the top of their voices, Jack quailed in spite of himself. But outwardly, at least, he showed no sign of agitation, standing like a rock before his house and facing the storm that was about to burst.

It wasn't for himself that he was afraid, not so long as that puffing-billy of a steamboat held the lead, and the grand old flag streamed out behind her. The jackies would see him through this business, whatever deviltry they might inflict on the rest of the unfortunate village, for blood's thicker than water every time, and Americans stand together all the world over. He wasn't no politician nor side-taker, and it was all the same to him whether he had a missionary king or a benighted papist. All he asked of anybody, by G.o.d! was to be let alone, though this broadsiding of defenseless people made him sick at the stummick, it did.

The launch came b.u.mping into shallow water, blowing off clouds of steam as her crew jumped out with their rifles and waded ash.o.r.e, while the Tanumafili boats, dashing up in quick succession, amid a furious and ever-deepening uproar, discharged in their turn cargo upon cargo of shrieking warriors. In the indescribable commotion that followed there seemed to be no prearranged plan nor any settled order of operation. The Ta.n.u.s scattered in a dozen noisy parties, looting and burning the houses, barking the breadfruit trees, shooting the pigs and horses, devastating with diabolical thoroughness the inland plantations that sustained the village. The Americans, fearful of ambuscades, stuck to the sh.o.r.e and systematically destroyed the boats, which for a mile or two were drawn up on the edge of the beach. These boats, in a country without roads, are as much a necessity to a man as the house which shelters him. They often represent the h.o.a.rdings of years, and are not seldom the result of a stern frugality and self-denial; they const.i.tute, indeed, the only wealth of Samoa, and in them is invested the united savings of the whole population. In Oa these boats numbered perhaps a hundred, or a hundred and twenty in all, which, under the direction of a red-faced boatswain with a package of dynamite sticks, were one by one blown to pieces, and the shattered boards drawn into heaps and fired.

That day the whole of Oa went up in smoke and flame. Nothing was spared, not even the church, nor the school, nor the pastor's house; not a canoe nor a dugout; not a net, nor a fish trap, nor a float; not a pig, a horse, nor a chicken. The boundary walls, emerging black and desolate above the embers of the village, alone survived the universal waste.

Jack's boat, being the nearest, was the first to be singled out; and as the blue-jackets began to bore it with auger holes in which to place the dynamite, he walked down to the petty officer and roughly bade him leave it alone. "Hold on, there!" he said. "That's my boat!"

The boatswain looked him up and down. "You get out of this!" he said.

Jack twitched the auger from one of the seamen and flung it into the lagoon. Then, seizing a rifle from the heap lying on the ground, he whirled it round his head like a club and advanced furiously on the boatswain, who pulled out a six-shooter and leveled it at his head. Even as he did so, one of the officers came running up, waving his sword and shouting; while Jack, confident that he had nothing now to apprehend, dropped the rifle and turned to meet him. He had scarcely got so far as, "Please, sir, this boat is my property," when a scream from Fetuao warned him that the natives were rushing his house. Abandoning the boat, he ran back to face this new danger, which, of the two, was so infinitely the worse. His first instinct was to s.n.a.t.c.h a hatchet and kill one of the half-naked plunderers, but Fetuao, catching his hands, held him back, and the impulse pa.s.sed as he realized his utter helplessness. With smarting eyes and a heart that seemed to burst within his breast, he saw his house gutted of everything--his chests torn open, his tools taken, his wife's poor finery divided, and her twenty-dollar sewing machine the subject of a wrangle that ended in its being smashed under the b.u.t.t of a gun. It was horrible to look on, impotent and raging, and see the fruit of three years the prey of these yelling savages; to realize that he must begin again from the bottom; that all his labor, and care, and thrift, had gone for nothing. Not daring to leave Fetuao behind, he took her with him and started off to find the officer to whom he had at first complained. His protest had not apparently been very effective, to judge from the torn fragments of the boat now blazing in a bonfire, and he was hardly encouraged to make a second attempt. However, slim as the chance was, it was now the only thing left to do. Surely it was not possible that they would let his house be looted and fired with the others!

The officer, a thin young man with a cigar, was standing in the shade of a palm.

"Mister," said Jack timidly, for somehow all the fight had oozed out of him, "Mister, they're looting my house up there!"

"Well?" said the officer.

"I'm an American," said Jack.

"Well?" said the officer.

Jack regarded him helplessly. "Can't you do nothing for an American?" he asked.

"Not for a d.a.m.ned beach-comber," said the officer, turning on his heel.

Jack did not attempt to follow or to pester him. He knew when he was beat. He sat down on the nearest log, and making room for Fetuao beside him, drew out his pipe, filled it and began to smoke. The girl tried to speak to him, but he would not answer. She whispered to him that their house was burning, and he never even turned his head to look. She took his hand, but he s.n.a.t.c.hed it impatiently away, refusing to be comforted. Thus he remained for hours, sullen and half-stupefied, until the returning Ta.n.u.s embarked again, and the launch, with jubilant whistles, led the flotilla back to the man-of-war. It was only when the ship was out of sight that Jack rose, stretched himself, and breathed the profound sigh of a man who has endured and has survived the most terrible experience of a lifetime.

With slow steps, and many expressions of anger and resentment, Fetuao and he walked through the village, gazing with bitter curiosity at the ruins that everywhere surrounded them. They made their way to their own little plantation, to find it devastated like the others, the breadfruit trees ringed, the coffee bushes torn up by the roots, the _taro_, bananas, and vanilla cut to pieces. In the paddock the cow and calf lay dead in a pool of blood; of the dairy, half-set in the stream, nothing remained but some stumps and smoking ashes; under a felled mango tree they saw the protruding hoofs of Fetuao's mare, Afiola.

Returning with a few bananas they managed to find in the plantation, they built a fire and roasted them within a few feet of where, that morning, their house had stood. Though nothing now was left of it but some charred wood, the place was still home to them. As Fetuao moved forlornly about, picking up a few trifles that had been dropped or thrown away by the invaders--a comb, a spool of thread, a flatiron, a book or two with the covers scorched off--she lifted up a grimy rag and tossed it, with a little gesture of disdain, at her husband's feet. He spread it out and saw that it was the consul's flag, the flag he had flown above his house with such confidence in its protection; the flag which, until then, he had always reverenced.

Jack slowly tore it into pieces.

V

Nothing is stranger than the effect of the same misfortune on different natures. To Jack, arrested in the full tide of his petty activities, it was absolutely overwhelming. When everything he possessed was swept away, and with it the routine that for three years had kept him busy and content, he knew not what to do nor which way to turn. Sunk in apathy, he spent whole days in dully mourning for what he had lost. He would have starved had not Fetuao forced him to follow her into the mountains, where, under her direction, he dug _tamu_ and climbed the trees for wild chestnuts; while she, with deft hands and a little tangled bunch of weeds, caught prawns in the pools and streams. At her bidding he made a tiny hut of cocoanut branches, a clumsy canoe good enough to fish with, and nets from the sinnet she taught him how to twist out of cocoanut husks. She even sent him back to work in the plantation, for the bananas at least could be saved, and there was a well of sprouting yams and some _tingapula_ that had somehow escaped destruction. But Jack's spirit was broken; the old incentive was gone; he could not revive the energy, the zest, the interest that before had never failed him. He did what Fetuao bade him and no more, and the days, once so short, seemed now never to end.

One morning early he was awakened by the murmur of voices in the dark, and on going to the door of the hut he was surprised to see Fetuao's brothers, Tua and Anapu, Mele her uncle, Lapongi the orator, and a dozen others, some of them boys not yet tattooed. In answer to his questions Tua told him that a messenger had come for them with orders to at once join the Mataafa forces behind Apia.

"And thou also, Jack," said Lapongi the orator, "for every man now is needed to withstand the fury of the whites."

Jack, as usual, turned to Fetuao.

"We shall both of us go," said she, "I to carry water for the wounded, thou with the _muaau_, a rock of strength and terror."

Jack made no protest. h.e.l.l! what did it matter where they went? Munching the food that was handed him, he looked across the bay, now silvering in the dawn, and wondered whether he was not seeing it for the last time.

It was late at night when they pa.s.sed the outposts and reached the Mataafa camp, which stood on a high plateau overlooking Apia. Below them the search-lights of the men-of-war moved restlessly about, shining at times with a bewildering brilliancy into their very faces; and from the little war-encompa.s.sed capital there rose a distant drumming and bugling as the missionary boy king, unsafe even under the guns of Britain and America, took his precautions against a night attack. After the stillness of Oa there was something confusing in the stir and bustle of Mataafa's big camp--in the constant pa.s.sing of armed men, the change of guards, and the rousing choruses around the fires. There was, besides, an atmosphere of recklessness and gayety, engendered by excitement, by danger, by the very desperation of their cause, that could not long be resisted by even the most impa.s.sive recruit. Jack alone, of his whole party, remained indifferent and unmoved; but his wife, all of the savage in her rising to the surface, grew intoxicated almost to the point of delirium.

Ordinarily so demure and quiet, she became from henceforward a creature of another clay. Whirling her ax and dancing almost naked at the head of the Oa contingent, she led it wherever it was sent, daring bullets and sh.e.l.ls with smiling intrepidity. In her wild beauty an artist might have taken her for the spirit of war itself, as she moved undaunted along the firing line, or with biting reproaches drove up skulkers from the rear.

Like some untried actress bringing down her house, she was overborne with her own success; and the more she was praised the more extravagantly and unflinchingly she exposed herself. Under the stress of those fierce emotions her character in every way underwent a change for the worse. In war time, death, always in the air, seems to annihilate with its dark shadow all the bonds that bind society together. Life, hitherto so a.s.sured, of a sudden becomes the most transient of human gifts, to be enjoyed with a feverish heedlessness before it vanishes forever into the unknown. Thus Fetuao found and accepted a dozen lovers among her men, and while still according her husband the first place, she yet permitted them liberties and familiarities that they were not slow to take advantage of.

Deep in every woman's heart there is a love for the men of her race, a love motherly and pitiful, that will bring the tears to her eyes at the sight of a pa.s.sing regiment and cause her to pa.s.sionately mourn the unknown soldier dead. This sentiment, this instinct, is a thousandfold intensified on the b.l.o.o.d.y field itself. The pang when those brave fellows fall is inexpressible; her pride is strangely humbled, and in her mad exaltation she shrinks from nothing, and makes a virtue of her own abandonment.

Jack followed Fetuao everywhere, a despondent, woe-begone figure, who, amid the hail of bullets and the yells of contending warriors, lay or ran or advanced with the others in a black preoccupation. He had not a spark of interest in the struggle; his thoughts were forty miles away in that ruined home, with his plants, and trees, and shrubs, his cow, and his chickens. What victory could give them back? What terror had a defeat for one who had already lost his all! He lived in the past, in those frugal, thrifty, laborious years; for the present he had but an indifference, an apathy, that he had not even the desire to shake off.

He became the b.u.t.t of the warriors, who brought him their rifles to mend and called him a coward for his pains. They envied him Fetuao, who, for all her flirtations, slept every night by his side and was not happy when he was out of her sight. They nicknamed him her "Paalangi dog," and would whistle to him derisively and shout, "Come 'ere!" secure in the chronic absent-mindedness that had become a joke to them all. When he answered, as he always answered, "Eh, what?" and raised his vacant, moody face, there would be an outburst of laughter, in which he himself joined with a mirthless geniality, like a man unbending to a lot of children. If a sh.e.l.l went off some one was sure to cry, "Eh, what?" and this phrase, together with a mimicry of Jack's slow, dejected utterance of it, became the stock pleasantry of the camp humorists, who brought it out on all occasions.

The conflicts about Apia were mostly affairs of outposts, a pressing in and a pressing back of the pickets on either side. The naval commanders, in spite of repeated bombardments and the enormous havoc they wrought along the coasts, found themselves hardly able to do more than hold their own against the Mataafa army. The safety of Apia was constantly in jeopardy, though barricades were thrown up in the streets and three hundred men landed from the ships. A desperate night attack on the main guard at the Tivoli Hotel betrayed the weakness of the whites to friends and foes alike, and redoubled the anxiety of the admiral and captains.

It was plain that no decisive blow could be struck pending the arrival of the reenforcements that had been urgently cabled for from New Zealand, unless a better use were made of the missionary levies on the spot. These loose native organizations were accordingly broken up, consolidated into a single compact force of eight hundred men, well armed and well drilled, and placed under the absolute command of a naval lieutenant.

This fine force, supported by whites and Maxims, was counted on to retrieve the situation and drive Mataafa from his mountain stronghold.

The plan for a joint attack was accordingly drawn up. A quota of seamen and marines, with a couple of machine guns, was to form the center of the little army, while the native brigade on either wing was to advance simultaneously, lap round and outflank the Mataafas. This operation, covered by a terrific bombardment from the three ships of war, was forthwith begun; on its success was staked the hopes of the little clique who had so lightly adopted the cause of a divinity student of seventeen, against the vote and wish of well-nigh all Samoa.

On that day the Oa party held the center of the Mataafa line, a stone wall stretching across a wide clearing to the forest on either side. It was the post of honor, for it crossed the road up which the enemy were toiling with their guns, and guarded the headquarters of the patriot king, not a hundred yards behind. In the trampled gra.s.s two hundred men sat or lay with their rifles in their hands and listened to the measured periods of the orators exhorting them to remember their wrongs and die fighting. These old men, white-haired, scarred with the wounds of bygone battles, their wrinkled hands clasping the staves on which they leaned, never winced as the sh.e.l.ls whistled above their heads, nor abated by a hair's breadth their tone of strident warning and encouragement. At such a distance, and against a target six hundred feet above the sea level, the men-of-war made poor practice and did little more than waste their ammunition. But the shattering detonations of their guns, and the thundering echoes rolling and re-rolling round the bay, made pleasant music for their crews ash.o.r.e. It seemed incredible that such earth-shaking explosions could be wholly without effect, and the tired seamen sweating up the hill were kindled by the thought that the rebels were already suffering heavily and likely to run at the first encounter.

Sitting listlessly on a boulder, Jack scarcely took in the fact that anything out of the way was about to happen. His only concern was not to be too far from Fetuao, and so long as he had her in his sight he was dumbly content. He was as solitary among the thronging warriors as any castaway in mid-ocean, and his patient, stolid, inexpressive face, grown older in a month by a dozen years, was the only one which failed to reflect the coming conflict. Fetuao, on the contrary, was on fire from top to toe; her saucy tongue was loosened, and her bright eyes dancing in wild excitement. Joking and laughing in the roaring circle of her admirers, she matched her quick wit against them all in a victorious scream of banter and repartee.

Suddenly a shot rang out in the lower woods; then two, with a faltering third; then a scattered volley like a bunch of firecrackers going off at once. A score of men showed at the turn of the road doubling back for dear life, the pickets who had been dislodged and driven in by the advancing whites. They had hardly leaped the wall, panting, and crouching with the main body behind it, when the machine guns wheeled into the open and began to fire. In the first murderous crash it seemed as though nothing human could withstand them, and the blue-jackets, dotted here and there in the gra.s.s, raised an exultant yell, and some even sprang up in antic.i.p.ation of the call to charge. But the men that worked the guns had to stand exposed and helpless before a fire more galling than their own. They began to drop, and those who were unhurt disconcertedly turned and ran. A couple of officers sprang out of the gra.s.s to take charge of the abandoned guns, managing in their flurry to jam them both. For a minute they tinkered and hammered at the choked mechanism, exposing themselves, as they did so, to the concentrated volleys of a hundred Samoan rifles. Of a sudden, one clapped his hand to his breast and sank on his knees; his comrade caught him round the body and dragged him back, leaving the guns, now silent and useless, to shine innocuously in the sun.

All this while the woods on either hand reverberated with the volleys and the cheers of an extended battle, and a haze of powder smoke drifted above the tree tops. No one knew how the day was going, and the most conflicting rumors ran like wildfire through the Mataafa lines together with the names of such an one killed and such an one wounded.

Dodging the bullets, Fetuao flitted about with water for the parched fighters, pa.s.sing the news and rolling cigarettes for such of the wounded as were not too far gone to care for them. Occasionally she ferreted out a trembling wretch in the rear and drove him to the front with taunts; or, if he were too panic-stricken to get up, she had no compunction in thrashing him with a stick until he did so. The little savage was beside herself as she danced and sang like a wanton child in the rain--a rain of Martini and Lee-Remington b.a.l.l.s stinging the air all about her.

After the machine guns were put out of action the fight became a rifle duel, which went on briskly for upward of an hour. Again and again the whites rose in the gra.s.s, blundered forward and took cover, each rush stemmed by the Oas, who, darting up from their wall, gave volley for volley at point-blank range. Standing in a slop of blood, their great naked feet trampling the dead and writhing bodies of their comrades, they rivaled the rocky wall itself in the unflinching obstinacy of their resistance. It was then the battle reached its deadliest stage, more falling in those terrible minutes than during the whole previous course of the action. There was no shouting, no cheering, but with clenched teeth each man held his place and panted for the supreme moment that should spell either victory or rout. That moment came with the bugle call to charge, when the whites, rising for the last time, flung themselves forward with bayonets fixed. On they came, crimson-faced, mouths open, British and Americans in a pellmell rush like a rally of boys at football. Even as they did so, Fetuao leaped bolt upright on the wall, and swinging her carbine round her head, opposed her slender body to the whole attack. In an instant she was tumbling backward with a bullet through her throat, and as she lay coughing and strangling in the mire, Jack ran forward with a cry and caught her in his arms. There she died, amid the crash and roar of a hand-to-hand fight, jostled and stumbled on, her little hot hands clinging to his in the convulsive grasp of dissolution.

Jack sprang up like a madman. He had no thought in his dizzy head but vengeance--vengeance, sudden, b.l.o.o.d.y, and swift. He plunged into the thickest of the fray, cursing and raving as he opened a path with his brawny shoulders. A seaman tried to drive him through with a bayonet, but he caught the fellow round the neck and throttled him; he wrenched away the weapon and stabbed out with it right and left, with a strength, skill, and ferocity that nothing could withstand. He was fired at again and again; his ashen face was twenty times a target, once at so close a range that the powder burned his very skin. As the line swayed to and fro in that desperate final struggle, there was a hoa.r.s.e cry against him, constantly repeated, of, "Shoot that white man!" "Kill the renegade!" But Jack, seemingly proof against bullet and sword, stood his ground like a lion and clubbed the b.u.t.t of his gun into the faces of his foes; and when the whites, at last losing heart, began to weaken and fall back, it was Jack that led the Samoan charge, waving a dripping bayonet, and bellowing like a maniac for the rest to follow him.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "In an instant she was tumbling backward."]

He stopped beside the guns, laughing wildly to see the blue-jackets scattering like rabbits down the hill, and throwing away their rifles, water bottles, and accouterments in their precipitate flight. There were wounded men lying all about him, groaning, some of them, and calling out faintly for help; but, h.e.l.l! what did he care! Let them groan, the skunks; let them remember the women and children they had bombarded, and the houses they had burned, and the honest hearts they had broken! To h.e.l.l with them! Besides, for the matter of that, he was feeling sort of sick himself--sort of numb and shivery--and he staggered like a drunken man as he went slowly back up to the wall. It was all he could do to straddle the blamed thing, and then it was only with the help of a wounded Samoan who took his hand. The Kanaka, dizzily seen through a kind of mist, was no other than Tua; together, like men in a dream, they searched for Fetuao's body; and dragging it out of the shambles where it lay, they tried to clean away the blood with wisps of gra.s.s. Jack was sitting with the girl's head in his lap when he began to sway unsteadily backward and forward, feeling strangely sleepy and cold. He moaned. He gasped. h.e.l.l! they must have plugged him somewhere, after all. And then he rolled over--dead.

THE SECURITY OF THE HIGH SEAS