Part 12

"I didn't come all this way," explained Tunstal, "to waste my opportunities with a lot of fat koopmans who talk of nothing but calicoes and the rate of exchange. I'm a humble seeker after truth, right enough, but I want it fresh and snappy. I've got the price and, believe me, chief, I've got the appetite.... What port is this?"

Nivin told him. The name does not matter. It might have been one or another about that coast. It meant little to Tunstal beyond the fact that they would lie there till midnight.

"And plenty long enough, by the looks. I'll just collect three thrills and a shock and be back for tiffin. All I want from you, chief, is the wise tip. Tell me, chief, tell me. Is there anything--you know--anything specially worth seeing hereabouts?"

Thus spake and thus queried Alfred Poynter Tunstal, and Nivin examined the figure he made there under the dawn. Quite a pleasing figure. His suit of cream-colored silk fitted sleekly upon his well-fed person and his tie was a dainty scrap. He carried a dove-gray sun helmet with not more than three yards of bright peacock puggree. His buckskin shoes were fleckless. Also he wore a smile, which requires to be noted. It began in dimples and circled chubbily. A captious eye might have marked it as somewhat lacking--somewhat too round and ready, like the ripple on a pan of water. But it was brisk, forward, and perfectly assured.

"Anything worth seeing?" repeated Nivin, considering that smile.

The mate had sailed with globe-trotters before, though possibly with none quite duplicating Mr. Tunstal. This man Nivin was one of a type not so rare in outlying lanes and obscure corners as might be thought, into which something of the sun and the air of warm seas has penetrated. A bit of a dreamer, perhaps, mellowed by service under softer skies, among softer races. To such an officer any passenger is apt to become an object of real concern, aside from the strictly professional value thereof. He had overheard Mr. Tunstal's hectic memoirs in the smoking room and simply, laboriously, he went about to convey a certain warning....

"I should hardly think so--for a gentleman of your experience. The fact is, sir, you're off the traveled track here, so to speak. A town like this has no use for tourists and provides no class to fatten off the likes. Music, dances--all the giddy frolic made up for a show--they don't lower theirselves to that cut o' business."

"Why, they're only natives, aren't they?" asked Tunstal, and the whole philosophy of his kind was rolled in the phrase.

"Only natives, as you say, sir," returned Nivin slowly--"which is Malay and poor to jest with, besides frequently carrying a creese. They're a sober-minded breed, sir. Quite superior and fit for respect in their way."

* * * * *

But Tunstal had been leaning to watch the river traffic, and here he prodded the other to look. Just passing them at the moment came a clumsy proa that had worked upchannel on the last of the tide under sweeps--a singular blot of color. Alow and aloft, from her tub cutwater and forward-sloping rail to her languid wings of matting, she was grimed an earthy, angry red. Her sailors were smeared with the same stain, their head rags and kilts and their bare arms and knotted fingers at the oars, so that she and they seemed to swim in a sullen, an infernal conflagration, and the sunrise slanting across the river reaches picked spar and rope and savage-dyed group with dabs of ruby and vermilion and dull citrine.

"It's a cinnabar boat," said Nivin as they stared down at that silent crew of ensanguined devils.

"From the mines. I know," nodded Tunstal. "Up the river--what? I heard about those mines. Van Goor, that pop-eyed little chap--an agent for some mining company, I believe--he was telling us last night around fourth-drink time. It appears these mercury miners are imported Kwangsi coolies. About as low a race as crawls, with peculiar customs of their own. They trade with the country people for supplies, and they drive some queer trades. Did you ever happen to hear yourself, chief?"

"There's no lack of tales."

"Maybe, but this is the only real one I got a smell of--pity Van Goor wasn't a bit thirstier. He said a famine has been raging in some coast district or other and the villagers are keen to sell. At the same time the commodity naturally loses weight, through starvation, and the coolie gangs buy by the pound. So a canny village will pool its food to fatten up a few--Ah!"

The ore boat had drawn level with them, so near they might have tossed a biscuit to the rude decks. And there under the break of the poop they saw three women, scarcely more than girls, crouched against the bulkhead. One raised her face for an instant, a face struck out like a pallid, sharp-carven cameo from its ruddy setting--struck out with the poignant, mute intimacy that sometimes springs between craft and craft across a widening gulf. A vivid and unforgettable face!

* * * * *

The head boatman snarled, and the ragged creatures huddled from sight like nestlings under shadow of a hawk, while the proa swept in toward an upper jetty.

"Couldn't ever be proved," muttered Nivin at last.

"Of course not," agreed Tunstal genially. "Who wants to prove it? And anyway the commodity is still in transit--coming in from those coast villages, very likely."

"What would they be doing here?"

"Oh, they probably have a local clearing house for the trade," said Tunstal, learned in wickedness.

"Why should you think so?"

"Well, observe the commodity again. It hasn't been delivered, has it? You'll notice it shows no stain of cinnabar--_yet_!"...

The mate's face was stony as he stood gripping the rail, but Tunstal only smiled with the proper cynical detachment of the globe-trotter. From a silver case he drew a fat and sophisticated cigar to adorn that smile.

"And so much for your superior Malay. Chief, I'm surprised at you, trying to string me. Fancy a native how you like, but don't put it on grounds of respect--because I know 'em. I've seen 'em pretty much, and I've no more respect for any coffee-shaded tribe using two legs instead of four than I have for so many monkeys. Monkeys--that's what they are. Apes!

"Play with 'em? Sure. It's all they're fit for--cute little rascals sometimes too. But they simply have no moral sense. I take 'em as I find 'em; always ready for any of their cunning little games, you understand. Now here's this burg. I don't expect a complete Arabian Night's Dream, but I'm dead sure of finding a joint of some kind, and I mean to look it over--the place where the monkeys perform for you."

"I can't help you," said Nivin, tight-lipped. "You may be right--and yet I'd swear these people have never been spoiled. There's so few whites come here. You see, sir, you're pretty far East--"

"Too far for a 'sailor's rest'?" laughed Tunstal. "Pshaw! Come now; are you going to turn me loose on my own or will you steer me up to the local tropic drink, at least?"

Nivin might have been seen to wince a trifle, as one sorely tried, and his melancholy gaze sought the shore. Was there or was there not the beginning of a twinkle in the gray depths? He would have denied it--he afterward did deny it.

"A drink?" he murmured. "A drink? Oh, aye, I could name a drink if that would fill your need. Look over yonder on the slope beyond the Government House, that purple blaze. It's a big bachang tree in bloom, and if you should take the path that climbs beside it you might find such entertainment as perhaps you're seeking. Local I believe it is and quite tropic. Keep always to the left till you reach a pair o' green gates--three turns, or it may be four--and mind your footing as you go, sir--"

So this was the way Mr. Tunstal won his wish in the early morning when he came to the garden of Lol Raman, up from terrace to terrace above that far, that very far Eastern town.

He met his first thrill where Ezekiel met his in the vision, within the threshold of the gate. The high wall he had been following gave suddenly under an arch. There were the double green doors, standing open, and he entered a sort of open-air conservatory. At least he had no better word for the place so crammed with color and scent, and no word at all for the strange flowers and improbable trees that clustered along the walks. Down by the farther end of the inclosure stood a low house almost lost in shrubbery. An arbor with some chairs and tables seemed to invite the passer-by. And just before him, in Buddhistic meditation under a palm, squatted the reception committee of one--a monstrous orang-utan, the true red-haired jungle man, with a face like a hideous black caricature of Death.

Things happened. At sight of a visitor the huge beast reared himself, and sprang abruptly into vehement life, bouncing on bent knuckles. He started out to the limit of his chain until the bright steel links snicked ominously behind him and the leather harness drew taut about his shoulders, pumping and roaring in the great cavern of his chest to top a gale of his own forests. He scurried around the trunk and snatched at something--a packet of leaves. He ran around the other way and retrieved a little lacquer box. Crouching over these treasures with every appearance of the most frantic rage, he began, swiftly and incredibly--to roll cigarettes!

And meanwhile, impassive as a wax manikin, a white-jacketed, white-saronged servitor glided from space somewhere to prepare a table and to offer a chair in the arbor, to set out a square-faced bottle, to pour a glass of golden yellow liquor, and to collect the tiny, fresh cylinders of tobacco which the earnest ape was shedding about him in a shower--all with the gesture of conjuring.

Tunstal sat down hard. He succeeded in lighting one of the cigarettes. Exquisite. He gulped the glass of liquor. Delicious....

"I seem," said Tunstal, mopping his brow--"I seem to have landed as per invoice."

And yet these portents were valid enough too, as Nivin could have told him--the customary welcome at Lol Raman's. For even among the byways a resort must have its features, though it boast no café chantant and hang no battery of conscientious nudes. In the warm, clammy evenings when the fog crept up from the river marshes it was nothing unusual for Lol Raman--whoever or whatever he might be--to entertain as many as a dozen patrons in his garden on the hill. They gathered about his tables and admired his pet orang-utan, they smoked his cigarettes and more particularly they fortified themselves with his private stock, which was arrack. A very potent safeguard against the seasonal fever is arrack, being country spirit of a golden tint and undisciplined taste. But Lol Raman's owned a private recipe, and hither came the initiated--traders, wanderers, officials of the island government, officers of passing tramps. Here they came, and here they often remained until their friends bore them away again, thoroughly safeguarded to the point of petrifaction.

Nivin might have explained these matters, but he had omitted so to do, and Tunstal's was the sheer delight of discovery.

"_Stengah_," he observed, reaching for the bottle. "_Manti dooloo!_"

The waxen gentleman looked a trifle more intelligent than an eggplant. Evidently his island Malay was not up to the classical standard. Tunstal tried him in fragmentary Dutch to the same effect and with the same result.

"Damn it--I say I want more and never mind taking that bottle away!"

The manikin's face opened.

"Oh, sure. Three dolla' hap'."

On being paid in Singapore silver he vanished into space once more while Tunstal philosophized.

"Too bad about the simple native that has no use for a tourist!"

The garden had fallen to a drowsy hush. Within its four walls only the great red ape stayed to do the honors, and he had subsided, applying himself seriously now to the cigarette industry. He sat cross-legged, workmanlike, with a bobbing of his ugly head and a ridiculous curling tongue above the delicate task. Selecting a leaf of the natural weed and adding a pinch for filler, he would somehow twist the spill and nip under the ends with flying fingers. Curious fingers he had--long and black and muscular--sinister talons that yet were nimble enough to trick the eye. It was amazing to watch him. As if a fiend from the pit had been trained to do featherstitch!

* * * * *

Tunstal watched for a time and drank for a time and chuckled like a parrot over sugar. The adventure suited him; it developed well. There was promise in it of something different, something quite local and tropic indeed.

A smooth exhilaration began to crawl through his veins, a heightened sense of power and perception. He found a special charm in each detail about him, each to be separately savored. The sunlight, he noted, was singularly rich and fluid. The yellow lights in his glass seemed to wink with recondite confidences. A tender spray of vanna showered its tribute of orange stars upon him; some glorious rose-pink rhododendrons drooped seductively toward his shoulder. He reached to reap them, and at that moment--the leaves parted and he saw the girl....

If the event had only transpired a trifle later, as the bard so nearly says, it would never have transpired at all. Two glasses more of the golden arrack, one glass even, and the subsequent proceedings could hardly have interested Mr. Tunstal or anybody else, except possibly Nivin--Nivin, who had laid his innocent plot to that end. So narrow is the margin of trouble! He should have blinked at the lovely vision and slept peacefully safeguarded beside the square-faced bottle until carried thence aboard the steamer and gone on to tell another globe-trotting yarn. But he was just a snifter short on that potent and undisciplined drink. And here was the girl.... "By jing!" breathed Mr. Tunstal.

Truly by any standard East or West, she was very fair. Of her face he marked only the oval, the delicate bisque-tinted skin that shames mere white, and the straight brows, not too broad for a tight-drawn casque of hair. A striped sarong clipped her waist below the jutting front of her little green jacket, and he saw the soft swell at her throat and the fine, free swing of lines as she leaned forward, startled, downward-looking. An alluring and timely apparition!

Tunstal thought so--to call it thinking. "You pippin," he remarked as he pulled himself to his feet by the table. He fumbled at his helmet with some confused notion of beginning gallantly, but it fell from his fingers, and he stood flushed and staring. "You pippin!" he said again.

She belonged in this garden, in the checker of light and shadow and exotic color, slender like a young bamboo and rounded as a purple passion fruit. She belonged with the whole affair. She was just the thing he had been waiting for. He took an unsteady step, and another. She made no move. She still regarded him as he stayed, swaying. Through the play of sun-threaded foliage she seemed even to smile, provocative, as if to mock him for hesitating on his cue; and at that he lost his head altogether--what was left him. Thrusting aside shrubs and creepers, he reached for her as he had reached to pluck the rhododendron.

"D'you--d'you come seeking me, m'dear?" he stammered fatuously. "Come right along, then, you beauty--and gie's a kiss, won't you?"

He did not do it well--in fact by the time he arrived at the gesture he did it very badly.

* * * * *

Smoking-room audiences that had hung upon the fervid tales of Tunstal, globe-trotter; his fellow passengers, instructed in speed by the same--they must have felt somehow cheated if they could have seen him then. They must have suspected the sad, sad dog, a wolf for theory but a pug for practice, whose snap and dash in outlandish parts had been harmless enough after all. There is a technique to such affairs. Even arrack cannot supply the deficiencies of the amateur--as Tunstal was, and as he presently knew himself to be....

He recognized her. His arms were about the lithe figure, drawing her close when he became aware of the clean-carven cameo face so near him. She was the girl of the cinnabar boat, the girl that had glanced upward from the evil decks. Yet the shock of discovery was not his chief reaction, neither amazement at her presence in the garden and her changed attire. He was looking into her eyes.

They were wide and brown, deep as grotto pools, and strange, with a hint of obliquity alien to him by untold centuries. But he could read--as they blazed into his own--he could read their language. Terror was there and bewilderment. But pride too--pride of soul like the chill purity of mountain peaks. And from that height she feared and loathed him, the brutish creature of another race who dared to lay his defiling and incomprehensible touch upon her.

These things he saw while he stooped, while his lips pressed her bud of a mouth. For he kissed her. After a fashion he did kiss her--though the fume was clearing from his brain as haze lifts on the channel, though he understood how abhorrent was this caress unknown to Orientals--beginning to feel pretty much ashamed of himself.... But a bit too late.

The same instant she broke away from his hold, spurning him, and as he reeled a bunch of hairy great fingers closed on the back of his neck.

He screamed once and clutched a stout, hanging creeper and clung there while his cry throttled down to a gasp. Behind him he could hear the click of steel links; before him the sunlight swam. Helpless as a kitten nipped by the scruff, he fought for life.

Because the chain was fastened high and because the beast was yoked between the shoulders he had come within the grip of only one murderous paw, which was mere luck. But through a long moment while his blood beat thick and his eyeballs started from their sockets he knew the agony of those that die by the garrote. A claw tough as a metal ring dug into his flesh, working for a firmer span, gathering the cords and muscles, tightening slowly. He could only stare at vacancy and dance upon the air and clench the creeper that brought down around him a little snowstorm of flower petals from the quaking branches overhead.

The creeper held. So did not his collar when the eager fingers shifted and found a purchase whereby the half of his coat was stripped like a husk of corn. At the sudden release he lost footing....

He was like one overtaken in a nightmare, too faint and clogged to will an effective movement for escape. With safety a matter of inches he floundered on the verge, entangled by vines and grasses, tugging madly at his hip. And the nightmare was very close, a horror not to be faced, a red fury with gigantic arms that came flailing and picking at him and tearing his clothes to ribbons as he groveled!

It lasted until the ape took a trick from the man, swung up on a liana, and from the vantage caught him about the body with his feet. Then Tunstal's revolver came free. Crushed in that dreadful embrace, he began to shoot!

When he stood up above the quivering heap and looked about him he was alone. After the frenzy of his struggle the silence dropped in upon him like a ram. The walks were empty, the thickets were quiet, the house at the end of the inclosure seemed deserted. He turned to the spot where he had seen the girl. She was gone. He turned toward the gates. They had been closed. He ran stumbling and flung against them and found they had been locked as well. No one came, no one called. And the garden drowsed in the warmth of a forenoon brilliant, heavy-scented, tropical!...

The last Tunstal remembered was raving back and forth within those four walls with a useless gun in his fist and the pitiless sun beating upon his head.

* * * * *

There is no tradition of the mercantile marine that provides for following the fortunes of travelers who step ashore to enjoy the scenery or other benefits. But a traveler who carries an important letter of credit and a through passage ticket may present something of an exception. In the early evening of the _Lombock's_ stay at the port by the river mouth her first mate found time and occasion for a cryptic word with her captain. And the captain was exceeding wroth, for the _Lombock_ would finish her landing on the ebb and he had no mind to miss a tide.

"Who d'y'say? Him? Not back yet, d'y'say? Well, what's that to me? Have I got to drynurse every glorified pup of a globe-trotter that takes a sanctified notion to soak hisself?"

Nivin explained at some length.

"To hell with all passengers!" wished the captain then, a man of strictly professional temper. "Here's this little rat Van Goor been devilin' me all day about the grub we fed his blessed coolies in the 'tween-decks. He says he'll lose a week's labor off the lot before they're fit for work.... Well, go on, go on. If your blighter's such a fool as you say, you better go get him. But I'll not wait past midnight--mind that. And I wish you joy of the job."

So Nivin came ashore at dusk to wander through the same streets and alleys to which he had directed another's erring steps at dawn.

* * * * *

He sought a handsome young stranger in a suit of cream-colored silk and a dove-gray helmet with peacock puggree. Drunk, probably. Even very drunk. Possibly violent and uproarious--this was Nivin's fear. More likely to be fever-proofed and solidified--this was Nivin's hope. Had any seen such a wonder? None had, though a boatman remembered landing the white tuan from the _Lombock_, and there was plain testimony that he had purchased a bottle of arrack for three dollars and a half Singapore silver. Beyond that point the trail evaporated. Apparently the person of Alfred Poynter Tunstal had dissolved in local liquor.

It was the hour of lamp lighting when the mate arrived at Government House to lay his quest before a genial and elephantine official in white ducks who was by way of being an acquaintance and who beamed upon him from the step. "You los' somebody? Here? My dear fallow, do you sink you are in Calcutta or Kowloon? Nosing happens here to sailormen or whoever. Why, zis is not even semicivilize', wizout one coffee shop!... Unless, of course, he actually injuries ze people."

"Ah," said Nivin.

"In zeir pride," added De Haan reflectively.

"And if he did?"

De Haan smoothed a glossy beard with a deliberate hand the size of a spade. He was controller in a district of some tens of thousands of brown population and long had been, and his father before him.

"If he did--I cannot say," he answered. "In such affairs we always remember zese folk haf been alife in ze land a few years before us. Who shall say? But it would be somesing fitting--mos' fitting and op-propriate. Zere was once a man came to steal liddle stone pictures from old temples in ze hills. He wanted ze heads for souvenirs, you see?" He rocked complacently. "I haf seen his head, nicely smoked. Which was alzo a souvenir."

But he met Nivin's melancholy gaze and his tone changed.

"You tell me you los' your frien' at Lol Raman's? Haf you been to look?"

"Three times. There's no trace. I found a servant who sold the lad drink; no more."

"Come wit' me, zen," said the controller. "And do not half such trouble at heart. We will find him. He is only schleeping off zat fever cure."

They searched high and low, among the terraces and through the water front where De Haan questioned all manner of natives: stolid, self-possessed little men who looked him between the eyes at answering--but they found no nook wherein Tunstal might be slumbering, nor any clue, and Nivin's lean jaw lengthened.

"Your fren' was come alone?" asked De Haan, puzzled.

"Alone and early. There wouldn't likely be any other customer at that time. No witnesses."