Part 18

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 ashore 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 brimming. 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 snatched them away inland into howling space, 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 nobody 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 Macassar. 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 God why did you not show your light till midnight?" asked the skipper. "I tell you I was out zere last night and z' light wass dark and z' devil walking abroad on z' waters. Almost, almost we went ashore 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 passed through a burner.

By the hand of Andrew Harben that did it, those eight Bugis were the wicks of Macassar that kept the strait clear!

Meanwhile Andrew Harben went whistling about his work, climbing around the frame and trimming 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 passed 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.

Nobody 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 competition, 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 assorted 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.

"I'll take it up for ten pounds," I offered.

He nodded, without so much as looking at me; and I dropped five American eagles besides his stake....

"_Rien ne va plus!_"

But I had already effected my exchange; and I snatched away the big goldpiece just as the marble struck, hopped, and rattled into a socket.

"_Vint e uno_," announced the banker, surprised into his own native tongue; and I caught the unmistakable quiver of a live disappointment as his glance crossed mine with the flash of a knifeblade.

The gambler waited until a silver rake had swept away his eagles. With a visible effort, then, he braced himself against the table and rose. He turned to me, met my smirk of triumph with a frown, and plowed but of the throng to the natural refuge, the little barroom on the terrace side, where I followed him quite shamelessly.

* * * * *

The hour was early; we had the place to ourselves as we pledged each other in the quaint device they call a cocktail at the Pavao.

"You made a good bargain," he said, setting down his glass. "There must be at least twenty-five dollars' worth of pure gold in that slug if there's a penny--let alone its curio value."

His manner had a rough edge. Any one who has lost over the green cloth knows the spleen it can raise against all reason. I was the better pleased next instant when he broke through with a smile of sound good nature:

"Here's hoping it brings you better luck than mine."

I liked that smile, and the voice, easy and true as a bell, and the whole hearty, big-boned cast of him; and I marveled what twist had made a splendid great fellow like this, with his arching chest and walking-beam breadth of shoulder, the hanger-on at unhealthy gaming rooms. He was neither old nor young enough to be merely foolish. Forty would be about his age, I judged; but his eyes were new, like those of a child, and the only marks about them were the little sun crinkles of outdoor living.

"You were willing to sell," I reminded him with a half query.

"Of course!" he nodded. "When the game gets me running I'd stake my shoes if I could sell 'em. And ten pounds was more than the bank would have paid. All the same, you've got a rare piece, cheap."

"Just what have I got?"

"A doubloon--don't you know? One of those queer Portuguese cart wheels. Sink it! I made sure I'd found a lucky at last--anybody would."

I echoed that glorious old word:

"A doubloon?"

"Aye!" He smiled again. "Pieces of eight--what? The pirates used to cut throats for 'em."

On sudden impulse I risked a small experiment.

"I've no wish to profit by your misfortune," I said. "This is evidently very valuable.... Call the ten pounds a loan."

He glanced at the coin as I laid it before him; and then, with a widening of pupil, at me. I was startled to see him hesitate.

"No," he decided. "No. But look here, that's decent of you. I will say it's downright decent."

"Not at all," I protested virtuously. "It might be worth many times what I paid you."

"That wouldn't worry me."

But something was worrying him as he frowned down at the golden disk. I felt a trouble on the man that bit deeper than his losses. He had an odd, abrupt trick of passing a hand hard over his brow as if to brush away some constant irritation, a gesture at once naïve and passionate. At such times he looked about him with an uneasy air, puzzled and, I could almost say, resentful.

"You must be very much attached to the thing," I persisted.

He slid it back to me brusquely, with a jab of his forefinger.

"Thanks. Would you mind putting it out of sight?"

We were sitting at one of the small tables that lined the side of the little room. It so chanced that I sat facing the bar, which was not a proper bar at all but a long, low sideboard, whereon an attendant compounded drinks. My new friend was at my left and thus failed to see what now I saw--a detached head glaring out of the wall, sharp and definite as a cameo. I was slow to connect this singular phenomenon with a strip of mirror over the sideboard and regarded it merely with wonder, for the face was very much alive, convulsed and eager. Tardily, then, I recognized the jet spadebeard of the superior banker, and at the same moment felt a hot breath stirring in my back hair.

"Hello!" I exclaimed, and spun around in time further to recognize a pair of perfect coat tails; they were just disappearing through the doorway into the _salle_ behind me.

He could not have had ten seconds' start, but when I reached the doorway the fellow had vanished in a fringe of bystanders. Another banker, bald-headed and not in the least superior, was now in charge at roulette, and I noticed that the fat croupier had also been replaced.

I turned back to the attendant at the bar, a pop-eyed nondescript in a white jacket.

"Who was that?" I demanded indignantly. "Who is that man, and what the devil did he mean by blowing down the back of my neck?"

He stared at me, with fluttering lids, chalk-faced--I was to appreciate presently what terror rode that obscure soul.

"_Não compriendo_," he stammered, though I had heard him use good-enough English of a sort in wheedling for tips. Impatient at his stupidity and my own jumpy nerves, I flung away from him--or, rather, I started to fling and was halted there in my tracks....

Now the contact of a revolver is something that no man need be taught to identify. It is a part of instinctive knowledge. When a hard blunt nose snuggled suddenly under my lowest rib I required no verbal order to make me stand quite passive and obedient. So I did stand, while still mechanically resisting the furtive, tremulous fingers that came stealing round my wrist, trying to force my hand open.

I was not half so frightened as amazed, and certainly not half so frightened as the creature himself. I knew it must be the wretched little attendant who was tickling me with that revolver, and that he was trying to hold me up for something--what it might be I scarcely thought. If he had been respectable in any way through strength or skill or personality, I believe I might have yielded. But to be robbed by this miserable hireling, this pop-eyed dispenser of bad cocktails, himself in a state of the most abject funk, roused all the stubbornness of which I was capable. As if a sheep had assaulted me!

I suppose I should have allowed myself to be shot ingloriously had not the big gambler discovered what was going on. In two steps he was by me, pouched the weapon with a fist like a muff, and simply abolished Pop-eye....

"Easy now!" he warned him. "Don't yell!" It was an absurd anticlimax to see that bold, bad gunman being jammed upright to keep him from falling in a heap. "Reposo yourself, matey, if you know what's good. Be quiet--comprendo so much? Nobody's going to hurt you."

Somehow I found myself back at the little table. The gambler occupied the chair at my right this time, whence he could watch my late enemy, who hung collapsed over the bar. Except for these trifling changes, the whole incident might have seemed illusion.

"What was that for?" I managed to ask.

The gambler answered with a negligence that struck me in my condition of mind like an affront:

"Well, the lad's of no importance--don't you see? He had to do what he was told and he wasn't up to his job--that's all. But I thought we'd best keep him in view. No sense having him run off to report."

"How true!" I said with a faint attempt at emulation. "One concedes the frivolity of having the lad run off to report. After all, he could only confess that he had failed to murder me. But suppose I do it?"

"What--complain?"

"It occurs to me I might. I'm not vindictive, but I really don't care for pistols with my drinks."

"To whom?"

"Why, to the manager, I suppose; the maestro--the man who holds the gambling concession in this place."

"That's the johnny with the beard. He would be pleased to get a complaint from you!" he snorted. "Why, it was he who gave this poor fool his orders!"

"Oh!" I said, for lack of more adequate comment.

"And he, again, is only a lesser devil. And if you should call the police, or the military, or anybody, all the way up--the governor himself--you'd probably find the same."

I regarded him to know whether he was serious. He was; and his laconic method of statement had an extraordinary effect of bitterness. Action had lent him relief, but the cloud of some fixed discontent dwelt in his strong soul. Even as I watched, its shadow descended upon him again.

"From your account they seemed prepared to spare no pains in making the visitor feel quite at home," I observed--"up to the point of inducing him to remain permanently.... Was there any other object in the recent attention to me, do you think?"

"You've got it in your hand."

I unclenched my hand and sat blinking down, with some astonishment, at the thing I had held throughout and was still holding--the Portuguese doubloon. His smile was grim this time.

"Pieces of eight--what? They used to cut throats for 'em."

"Who wants the thing so badly?" I asked squarely. "Who's after it?"

"Number One," was his cryptic answer.

"Number One!" I cried. "Which Number One?"

"Do you think I'm trying to mystify you?" he returned impatiently. "Look here--I've had that confounded relic only since yesterday myself. They tried these same tricks on me until I got tired and wrung a little yellow viper's ears for him.... Well, Number One wants it. Number One is the cause, the source, the trouble maker, for whose sake they move. I'm telling you every bit he could tell me--just that: Number One."

I drew a long breath. Adventure--romance? The most hardened realist must have admitted that here was a promising lead. From the opened windows on the terrace came a stealthy, sudden rush of rain, confusing and drowning the fret of the sea below. The curtains flapped inward and we had a whiff of the island night, warm and damp, charged with the heady scents of lush vegetation. Back in the ballroom they were starting a waltz of Waldteufel's, I think it was, some jingly strain that ran with the clink of money on the tables. A suitable setting for a wondrous tale; but it was borne upon me that if I wished full value for my venture I should have to play up now, and play up sharp.

This difficult man was not the kind to unbuckle offhand. He was hardly what one might call a subjective peddler of his wares. He would not care two pins for my thrills, my quest of fancy, which to him, in his own heavy obsession must seem the most contemptible trifles.

With studied carelessness I took the doubloon on my thumb, flipped it and stuck it in my pocket.

"No wonder you were so willing to make a trade!" I said dryly. "One would say the liabilities outweigh the assets. As they have now descended to me, it remains to inquire whether they were honestly come by."

I had caught him fairly out of himself. He sat up as if stung, seemed ready to retort, and then yielded with a laugh--deep-throated tribute.

"You want an abstract of title?"

"My dear sir, I'm frank to say that's what I wanted from the first. I remembered you from Monte Carlo, you see."

With his elbows on the table he pressed his hands over his eyes absently, in that singular mannerism he had; and when they were clear he searched me again, gauging my significance in some alien train of thought.

"You seem entitled to it," he acknowledged slowly, "if only by your cheek, you know. Please note you came asking. I shouldn't care to punch your head later for calling me a liar."...

And this was the way I won his story at last.

* * * * *

"Do you happen to carry any good, live, working superstitions about you?" he began, and marked my blink of surprise. "No? It's a pity. Things must be so much simpler to a man who's satisfied to trust in laws outside himself and his own vision. A streak of fatalism, hey? What a comfort! No use kicking about anything--it's all been arranged for you. Or astrology, now: the stars were in the wrong house, which naturally accounts for Jemmy Jones being in the wrong pew. What'o, there's warm cheer for Jemmy!

"Why are you and I chumming here together on this hole-in-a-corner of an island, for instance, with no end of a silly yarn between us? Likely you'd much rather be somewhere and doing something else--I'm blessed, but I should. Yet here we are; and both our lives, from a world apart, have led us up to this very minute. Now why? Coincidence maybe. Well, coincidence must be worked a bit threadbare explaining things for people.

"Take my own case: I was born in the Riverina of New South Wales, the back lots--sheep country. That's where I belong--and look at me! Quite a gap to bridge--what?...