Part 3

But Jeckol snorted.... You could hardly blame him, at that. Among the five of us he was the only man who had never crossed Jim Albro at one point or another in the career of that eccentric luminary. And, besides, it was Jeckol's business to snort. You must have read his clever bits in the "Bulletin"--those little running paragraphs that snap and fume like a pack of Chinese crackers? He had been loafing about Bananaland on vacation just before we started, and of course he got wind and wished himself along. Trust a pressman to know the necessary people and a chance for copy.

"I've heard a deal of talk of this Albro since we weighed anchor," he said. "What's all about him? He wasn't commanding the _Timothy S._?"

"No," drawled Peters. "No--he didn't command. Mullhall was skipper."

"Did he launch the scheme then? Was he the discoverer of this wonderful virgin shell bed they were going to strip?"

"No," returned Peters. "No--you couldn't say he had any regular standin' in the expedition.... He shipped as a sort of supercargo--didn't he, Cap'n Bartlet?"

"Cabin boy, more likely," said Bartlet in his slow way. "Or bos'n's mate--or even midshipmite."

Jeckol eyed us all around, but nobody smiled.

"You're getting at me," he said. "Never mind. Only I'm going to write the yarn, you know. You'd much better help me pick the right hero. What's your famous Albro like?"

"The takingest chap that ever stood in shoe leather," cried young Harris with a rush. "Absolutely. I never saw him only twice, but I remember just how he looked and what he said. The first time he was drunk--but--but that was all right. He sang 'Mad Bess of Bedlam' to make your hair curl. And one night in Brisbane when he took on the Castlereagh Slasher for two rounds--"

"Six foot of mad Irishman," said Peters, "and about three inches of dreamy Spaniard atop of that--to put a head on the mixture, you might say. Blue-black wavy beard and an eye like a blue glass marble--"

"With the sunlight shining through!" Harris shot in.

"James O'Shaughnessy Albro." Peters lingered upon the name. "As to his luck, Cap'n Bartlet may be right, but I wouldn't call it so. He was born too late. He should ha' been a conquistador--d'y' call 'em?--and gone swaggerin' up and down in the old time holdin' pepper rajahs to ransom and carvin' out kingdoms. Whereas he was only Jim and anything you like between a navvy and a millionaire.

"Nobody knows what he'd done back home--prob'ly he got to bulgin' over too many boundaries and needed room. He blew into the Endeavor River one season with a tradin' schooner of his own--curly maple saloon, satin divans, silver-mounted gun racks--by Joe, you'd ha' thought he was goin' to trade with cherryubims for golden harps in the isles of paradise. And so he very nearly did, too, what with the dare-devil chances he took, till he lost craft and all on a race back from Thursday Island."

"Wrecked?" asked Jeckol.

"Just gambled. Old man Tyler could lay his _Hawfinch_ half a point nearer the wind than a chap has a right to expect from an archbishop. Jimmie paid over at the dock head and went weavin' his way up Charlotte Street a beggar, turned into a political barney they were havin' there, and made them a roarin' speech on somethin'--temperance prob'ly. And, by Joe, if they didn't elect him a divisional councilor the next day!"

"I've heard of that," proffered Harris with a grin. "Wasn't it the same winter he did a quick dash to the tin mines for his health? It seems there was a beauteous and wealthy widow. He couldn't have loved her half so well had he not loved her pretty under-housemaid more. So he started for Mount Romeo!... My word, he'd turn the worst scrape into a romance, that fellow! They say he made a big winning at Romeo--just to console himself."

"He made a dozen winnings. And I've helped him to a job as warehouse clerk at Samarai when he wore no shirt under his coat, and gunny bags for trousies. That's what the cap'n here means by his luck, I fancy, because you couldn't keep him down. Capitalist, miner, politician, stevedore--it was all one to Jimmie. Look how he brought up the _Creswick_ that nobody else would touch when she went ashore on Turn-again Island, cleared two thou' off her by the nerviest kind of work and dropped it all on the next Melbourne Cup. Little he cared. He was havin' his own way with life--as you say, Cap'n Bartlet."

But Jeckol frowned and pursed his thin lips.

"He never saw the game that was too big for him," said Harris, "nor held back his smile nor his fist."

"Darlinghurst jail is full of the same sort," observed Jeckol dryly.

"You ask what he was like?" Cap'n Bartlet swung around beside the wheel. "I'll tell you. I'm married to a girl that was pretty chief with Jim Albro once. There's no living man dare stand and say a word agen my wife--the finest in Queensland, sir--but I knew all the talk when I married her. And yet you see me here."

"Ah? With an entirely friendly purpose?" queried Jeckol, peering at him. "Or to make sure he won't come back?"

I saw the color flood to Bartlet's rugged cheek and ebb again.

"In friendship," he answered simply.

Jeckol made a gesture like a salute, with a hint of mockery perhaps, but he said no more. And we others said rather less. Bartlet brought the schooner smartly about on her heel and laid her square through the gap and we turned again to that sinister bay, opening before us like the painted depth of a stage set, whereon we were now to discover and reconstruct our obscure tragedy.

We drew a quick curtain on it. Scarcely had we come abreast the near headland when one of the brown, breech-clouted sailors leaped up forward with a yell, and each startled eye swept past his darting finger to the wreck of the _Timothy S._ There could be no manner of doubt--a green hull with a black water line, bedded low and on her side, hatches awash, just behind a shallow jag of the shore well away to leeward. We needed no glasses to pick her name or to see that nothing remained of life or value about the battered shell. She lay in her last berth, in the final stage of naval decay, stripped to the shreds of rigging, her masts broken short and bare as bleached bones; and from her whitened rail rose up a flight of boobies that cried like shrill, mournful ghosts and vanished....

"Aye--that's the end of their pearlin' cruise," said Peters grimly. "That's Mullhall's craft, sure enough. The southwest gales would drive her there. She must ha' been anchored just about where we're passin' now, and I shouldn't wonder."

"On the shell bank?" sniffed Jeckol, leaning to squint down into the sparkling blue.

"Fair under our keel, I'd say."

At a signal the leadsman had flown his pigeon again, though we were well past all reefs.

"Eleven fathom!" Harris echoed the cry. "That's diving! I heard it was a deep-water bed. D'you suppose they were at it when the niggers jumped 'em?"

"I figger they were," said Peters. "See that scrubby bit of island?--the point's not a hundred yards away. A dozen canoes could mass up there and never be noticed. By Joe, it's plain as paint. The ship snugged down for business--the diver below, like as not--pumps and tackle goin'--all hands busy on board and the watch calculatin' profits to three decimals behind the windlass. Aye, there's your treasure hunter, every time! Then perhaps a slant of wind settin' around that point to give the raid a runnin' start--and--"

"Him finish," concluded Harris briefly. "All over in ten minutes. They'd hardly know what hit 'em. A black cloud--that's all. A black cloud."

And Peters was right--it was all too plain. None of us but had heard tales enough, and stark history enough, of these blood-stained barriers that hedge the true unknown continent. To our waiting minds his few phrases threw a sharp picture of the careless ship, the stalking death, and the swift horror that must have followed. There lay the wreck and there the empty bay. The rest we could fill in for ourselves, or just about.

"Then what are we doing here?" asked Jeckol at last.

Peters was already dealing out rifles and ammunition by the deck house, and Bartlet, looking drawn and old, did not seem to hear, but Harris jerked an answer over his shoulder with the flippancy of emotion. "Oh, you can't tell--we might find some smoked heads to bring away."...

* * * * *

A few minutes later the cap'n was giving his last instructions, while we of the shore party dropped to our places in the big whaleboat.

"You're not to follow us in whatever happens--mind that. If you sight more'n three canoes at a time, knock out the shackles and run for open sea. I'm leaving you Obadiah--he's a goodish shot--and four of the best boys."

The young mate nodded. He hated not coming with us, but Bartlet knew. This was Papua, where wise men take no chance and fools seldom live long enough to take a second.

We took none ourselves as we rowed slowly shoreward and sheered off out of spear throw, watching the wall of jungle. There is no beach inside Barange, only the mangrove roots that writhe down to the water's edge like tangled pythons through the oozy bank of salt marsh. It was very still and very clear in the afternoon sunlight, though the heat pouring out over us seemed the exhalation of a great steam bath, choked with stewing vegetation. Now and then our crew of clean-limbed Tonga boys rested on their oars, with timid, limpid gaze turned askance. We heard their quick breathing and the drip from the oar blades--nothing else. At such times we floated in a mirage where each leaf and frond and webbed liana with its mirrored image had an unnatural brilliance and precision, like a labored canvas or a view seen through a stereoscope.

* * * * *

And there stole upon us again the oppressive solicitation of the land, subtle and perilous. Behind the beauty and wonder of it, beyond those bright shores and the first low foot-hills of the range--what? Nobody knows, that is the charm and the lure. Peoples, religions, empires untouched since the birth of time--fabulous wealth, mountains of gold, cliffs of ruby, "cataracts of adamant," any marvel that fantasy still dares to dream in a prosaic century. They may be; no man has ever drawn the map to deny them. They must be: why else should the sphinx smile?...

"I suppose a hundred woolly-heads are spying on us now," whispered Jeckol suddenly. "Why don't they do something?" He fiddled nervously with his rifle and sniffed. "What a place! This air is deadly--rotten with fever. Faugh! It's animal. It's like--it's like a tiger's throat!"

I blinked at the little chap and with the same glance was aware of Peters standing up in the bow. The trader was just lighting a short-fused stick of dynamite from his cigar. Before I could cry murder he had lobbed it in and shot the bush.

It struck with the smash of all calamity in that utter quiet. The trees sprang toward us and the roar rolled back from angry rocks. Like a multi-colored dust of the explosion burst a myriad of screaming birds, lories, parakeets, kingfishers, flashing motes of green and blue and scarlet in the sunshine. But they dwindled and passed. The echoes died. The smoke drifted away and the green wall closed up without a scar; the silence engulfed us once more, floating there, futile invaders who assaulted its immense riddle with a squib....

"They don't seem to care much," giggled Jeckol.

But Bartlet raised a finger.

Far away in the wood something stirred. It drew nearer, with long pauses, pressing on and at last charging recklessly through the undergrowth. We had the spot covered from half a dozen rifles as there broke out at the verge a creature that leaped and clung among the creepers.

"Mahrster!" it cried, imploring. "Mahrster!"

A man--though more like a naked, starving ape with his knobby joints and the bones in a rack under his black skin--and shaken now by the ecstasy of terror! Not at us. He faced the guns without wincing. His beady eyes kept coasting behind him the way he had come as if he looked to see a dreadful hand reach from the thicket and pluck him back. The jungle, the land, was what he feared--

"Mahrster," he gasped, "you take'm me that fella boat along you! One fella ship-boy me--good fella too much!"

"What name?" challenged Peters. "What fella ship?"

From the chattered reply we caught a startling word.

"By Joe--he's one of their boys! Give way, cap'n."...

We edged in until Peters could yank the quaking bundle aboard and pulled again to safety from the mangrove shadow while the fugitive stammered his story in broken _bêche de mer_.

It was true: we had found a survivor from the lost _Timothy S._ Kakwe, he called himself, and he had come to Barange "long time before altogether." Two months, at least, we judged. In the attack on the schooner he had escaped by swimming. Himself a Papuan, of a different tribe and region, he had taken to the tree tops after the fashion of his own people, the painted monkey folk of Princess Marianne Straits--a facility to which he owed his life, it appeared, for he had since lived on fruits and nuts among the cockatoos, undiscovered.

This much we gathered from his gabble before Peters caught him up.

"But the others--them white fella?"

"All finish," said Kakwe bluntly.

"How?" cried Peters.

"No savee, me. Too much fright--walk along salt water--get to hell along beach, along tree. Me fright like hell!"

* * * * *

His account tallied with our own theory of the massacre, but he had seen no bodies brought ashore, could not identify the murderers, could not say where the native village lay or how to reach it, would not guide any one into that bush on any consideration. For the rest--this was a "good fella place" to get away from quickly.

"Ah," said Jeckol, sympathizing. "And that's a true word."

So indeed it seemed, and it is odd to think how close we were to giving up then. Aye, we were that close. We drifted out toward the anchorage and looked helplessly around us. The place was so huge, so baffling. Hopeless to search further among empty swamps and forests, to grope at large in this hushed wilderness, to coerce a jungle. The cruisers that have bombarded these same coasts on many a punitive expedition have learned how hopeless--against Papua, who keeps her secrets.

We must have been halfway back to the _Aurora Bird_ when Bartlet, sitting thoughtful in the stern, made the sign that brought us up all sharp.

"He's lying," he said quietly.

Jeckol's nerves jumped in protest.

"Eh--what? The black? He's only scared half to death. You wouldn't blame him for wanting to get out of this trap, would you? I do myself."

"He couldn't have lived overhead the whole nest o' them all this time without learning something," declared Bartlet.

"Why should he lie?"

But Peters had risen to snatch around that weazened face, blank as a mummy's--his own was alight. "By Joe, and a timely reminder. When you've got to ask why a Papuan nigger should lie you've gone pretty wide! As for scare--what d'y' suppose he must ha' seen to scare him so?"

Here he bent our monkey man over a thwart and introduced him affectionately to the Webley....

"You fella Kakwe," he said, "my survivin' jewel--I forgot your breed. I should ha' begun by bang'm black head b'long you. Now don't stop to gammon. Whatever you're holdin' back you _show_--savee? S'pose you no show'm straight, me finish 'long you close up altogether!"

And Kakwe showed. Dominated by superior wickedness, with all the black man's docility under the instant threat, he collapsed quite simply at the touch of steel, and he showed--the nook where a tiny, hidden creek flowed down among the mangroves, the winding course that led by the swamp's edge through dank and darksome channels to a trodden mud bank and Barange village itself, tucked away there like a huddle of giant hives in a back lot. This time we paused for no maneuvering. Even Jeckol grabbed a boat hook and we pushed through, eager to strike on a definite lead at last--

Though we might have saved our energy, for the wild had its surprise in waiting. The village was silent, deserted, tenantless.

We landed at the square, to call it so, a rude clearing on which the few houses faced, those sprawling, spacious communal dwellings--palaces among huts--that sometimes amaze the explorer along the West Coast. None opposed us. Nothing moved, not so much as a curl of smoke. An insect hummed in the sun like a bullet, and I take no shame to say I ducked. But that was all. And when the groveling Kakwe led us to a wide platform that ran breast high across the front of the largest house we stood with rifles propped and quickened pulses, staring stupidly at the thing we had come this far to find....

Only a box, lying on the middle of the platform, under the shadow of the lofty thatch--a small, brass-bound chest such as sailormen love and ships carry everywhere! "Loot!" snorted Jeckol. "Well--?"

But Cap'n Bartlet had laid hold of another trove, a coil of ringed rubber tubing, neatly disposed about the chest. "What's there?"

"A diver's air pipe," stated the cap'n.

"What about it?"

"It's been cut--top and bottom."

* * * * *

We crowded for a look, and I saw his tanned fist tremble ever so slightly.

"A diver's pipe," he repeated. "A diver, d'you see? They had a diver, and--according to your notions, Peters--" He drew a slow breath. "What--what if that there diver _did_ happen to be overboard at the minute the rush came?"

And then came the voice of Peters, cool and drawling: "Some one's left a message on the box."

As we span around he turned it over atilt, so that all might see the bold letters, scarred in lead, of that laconic legend--all but Bartlet, who fumbled for his spectacles. "Writ with a Snider bullet, I take it," continued the trader. "One of them soft-nosed kind as supplied to heathen parts for a blessin' of civilization."

"Read it, can't you?" begged the cap'n.

And this was the notice Jeckol read:

The Crew of the Schooner _Timothy S._ of Cooktown that tried a cast with fortune and turned a deuce. Barange Bay, Jan. 22, 19--

J. MULLHALL, _master_ BAMBA, KOHO B. SMYTHE, _mate_ KAKWE, JACK-JACK HENRY NEW MENOMI, FRANK

_Hic finis fandi_

Cap'n Bartlet removed his hat and wiped away a steam of sweat with deliberate care and a red-barred kerchief. "Sounds natural," he observed, clearing his throat. "Though I never did make much of that 'hic' language."

"It means 'here ended the talk,' or something of the kind," explained Jeckol. "But still," he added, quite seriously, "the list isn't complete, you know. Where's your friend Albro?"

Peters rolled the white of an eye on him. "Is it your fancy," he inquired, "that the niggers run much to writin' epitaphs? Or books--?"

He held up to our gaze the object he had found on lifting the lid of the box--a packet of thin bark strips covered with coarse markings and bound with a twist of fiber which next he unknotted, to run the leaves over in his hand. "I knew he was alive," said Cap'n Bartlett simply....

And that was the way we won to the story of James O'Shaughnessy Albro. Even now I can recall each tone and gesture of its telling, each detail of the group we made there in empty Barange village; the trader's drawl and check as he read a line or turned to Kakwe with a question or flung in some vivid comment of his own; the strained attention on Bartlet's earnest face; incredulous sniff and squint of little Jeckol, still unsubdued, fidgeting about; the statued bronze figures of our Tonga boys as they stood leaning patiently on their rifles, awaiting the master's next whim; the massed ring of the jungle; the odd, high-peaked houses with their cavernous fronts like gaping and grinning listeners; the lances of sunlight that began to splinter and fall out among lengthening shadows across the open; and through all and over all the heat and the smell and the brooding, ominous, inscrutable mystery of Papua!

_Seeking wealth I found glory. I went below as an amateur diver and I came up a professional god. But I wish I could find which son of a nighthawk it was that cut my pipe. I'd excommunicate him on the altar._

This is a page from the Book of Jim Albro, and it shows him as he lived. Later entries are not so clear, not by any means so sprightly, and some are pitiful enough in all truth. It must have been set down in the early hours of his reign, while he was still in the flush of his stupendous adventure, before he had begun to understand what lay ahead. But here was the man "with an eye like a blue glass marble," that "never held his fist or his smile." No other could have written it after the events he had survived.

Just as Peters inferred to have been the case, the attack on the _Timothy S._ caught the whole crew of pearl hunters unready. They had seen no natives at Barange, they kept no lookout, and when Albro stepped off the ladder that morning of January 22 he left his shipmates contentedly employed on deck. He never saw any of them again, or--what might have been a different matter--any part of them. He went down to the shell bed, and while he was there the black raiders made their sweep of the schooner.

It is likely the savages took the diving lines for an extra mooring--it is certain they knew nothing whatever about the apparatus--and Albro's first warning was the cutting of that air pipe, when he found his pressure gone and water trickling through the inlet valve. Fortunately, he was just preparing to ascend and had tightened his outlet to inflate the suit. Fortunately, too, his helmet was furnished with an adjustable inlet and he was able hastily to close both valves.

He tugged at his life line, but it drew loose in his hand. He turned over on his side to look upward, but he could see nothing--only the vague blue twilight through which the slack coils of his severed air pipe came sagging. Then he knew that he had been cut off, and the hideous fear that lies in wait for every diver, amid the perils and loneliness of the sea bottom seized upon him. He might have popped to the surface by throwing off his forty-pound weights, but he was aware that no chance accident could have served him so, and his impulse was to get away, from schooner and all, to shore. Under water he had some few minutes to live, perhaps four or five, as long as the inclosed air should last him. Frantically he began to struggle toward the beach, yielding to a moment's panic that was to cost him dear.... While trying blindly to slash free the useless pipe he lost his diver's knife.

* * * * *

The rotten coral burst and sank under footing. Clogging weeds enwreathed and held him back with evil embrace. A tridacna spread its jaws before his steps so that he nearly plunged into the deadly springtrap of the deep. But he kept on up the slope; his keen spirit rallied and bore him through, and he came surging from the waves at last on a point of rocks outside the bay where he could cling and open the emergency cock in the helmet. The suit deflated and he breathed new life. But here he suffered his second immediate mishap, for as he scrambled to his feet a dizziness took him and he slipped and pitched forward heavily, and with a great clang of armor the god fell fainting at the very threshold of his world.

_Broke left arm getting ashore. Walking the beach when I met the niggers. They dropped on their faces, and I saw I was elected._