House, he followed at the heels of Mauriri. At his own heels, dog- like,
plodded Hare-Lip. From behind came the cries of the hunters, but the pace
Mauriri led them was heartbreaking. The broad path narrowed, swung to
the right, and pitched upward. The last grass house was left, and through
high thickets of cassi and swarms of great golden wasps the way rose
steeply until it became a goat-track. Pointing upward to a bare shoulder of
volcanic rock, Mauriri indicated the trail across its face.
“Past that we are safe, Big Brother,” he said. “The white devils never dare
it, for there are rocks we roll down on their heads, and there is no other
path. Always do they stop here and shoot when we cross the rock. Come!”
A quarter of an hour later they paused where the trail went naked on the
face of the rock.
“Wait, and when you come, come quickly,” Mauriri cautioned.
He sprang into the blaze of sunlight, and from below several rifles pumped
rapidly. Bullets smacked about him, and puffs of stone-dust flew out, but
he won safely across. Grief followed, and so near did one bullet come that
the dust of its impact stung his cheek. Nor was Hare-Lip struck, though he
essayed the passage more slowly.
For the rest of the day, on the greater heights, they lay in a lava glen where
terraced taro and papaia grew. And here Grief made his plans and learned
the fulness of the situation.
“It was ill luck,” Mauriri said. “Of all nights this one night was selected by
the white devils to go fishing. It was dark as we came through the passage.
They were in boats and canoes. Always do they have their rifles with
them. One Raiatea man they shot. Brown was very brave. We tried to get
by to the top of the bay, but they headed us off, and we were driven in
between the Big Rock and the village. We saved the guns and all the
ammunition, but they got the boat. Thus they learned of your coming.
Brown is now on this side of the Big Rock with the guns and the
ammunition.”
“But why didn’t he go over the top of the Big Rock and give me warning
as I came in from the sea?” Grief criticised.
A SON OF THE SUN
48
“They knew not the way. Only the goats and I know the way. And this I
forgot, for I crept through the bush to gain the water and swim to you. But
the devils were in the bush shooting at Brown and the Raiatea men; and
me they hunted till daylight, and through the morning they hunted me
there in the low-lying land. Then you came in your schooner, and they
watched till you went ashore, and I got away through the bush, but you
were already ashore.”
“You fired that shot?”
“Yes; to warn you. But they were wise and would not shoot back, and it
was my last cartridge.”
“Now you, Hare-Lip?” Grief said to the Valetta’s cook.
His tale was long and painfully detailed. For a year he had been sailing out
of Tahiti and through the Paumotus on the Valetta. Old Dupuy was owner
and captain. On his last cruise he had shipped two strangers in Tahiti as
mate and supercargo. Also, another stranger he carried to be his agent on
Fanriki. Raoul Van Asveld and Carl Lepsius were the names of the mate
and supercargo.
“They are brothers, I know, for I have heard them talk in the dark, on
deck, when they thought no one listened,” Hare-Lip explained.
The Valetta cruised through the Low Islands, picking up shell and pearls
at Dupuy’s stations. Frans Amundson, the third stranger, relieved Pierre
Gollard at Fanriki. Pierre Gollard came on board to go back to Tahiti. The
natives of Fanriki said he had a quart of pearls to turn over to Dupuy. The
first night out from Fanriki there was shooting in the cabin. Then the
bodies of Dupuy and Pierre Gollard were thrown overboard. The Tahitian
sailors fled to the forecastle. For two days, with nothing to eat and the
Valetta hove to, they remained below. Then Raoul Van Asveld put poison
in the meal he made Hare-Lip cook and carry for’ard. Half the sailors died.
“He had a rifle pointed at me, master; what could I do?” Hare-Lip
whimpered. “Of the rest, two went up the rigging and were shot. Fanriki
was ten miles away. The others went overboard to swim. They were shot
as they swam. I, only, lived, and the two devils; for me they wanted to
cook for them. That day, with the breeze, they went back to Fanriki and
took on Frans Amundson, for he was one of them.”
Then followed Hare-Lip’s nightmare experiences as the schooner
wandered on the long reaches to the westward. He was the one living
witness and knew they would have killed him had he not been the cook.
At Noumea five convicts had joined them. Hare-Lip was never permitted
A SON OF THE SUN
49
ashore at any of the islands, and Grief was the first outsider to whom he
had spoken.
“And now they will kill me,” Hare-Lip spluttered, “for they will know I
have told you. Yet am I not all a coward, and I will stay with you, master,
and die with you.”
The Goat Man shook his head and stood up.
“Lie here and rest,” he said to Grief. “It will be a long swim to-night. As
for this cookman, I will take him now to the higher places where my
brothers live with the goats.”
IV
“It is well that you swim as a man should, Big Brother,” Mauriri
whispered.
From the lava glen they had descended to the head of the bay and taken to
the water. They swam softly, without splash, Mauriri in the lead. The
black walls of the crater rose about them till it seemed they swam on the
bottom of a great bowl. Above was the sky of faintly luminous star- dust.
Ahead they could see the light which marked the Rattler, and from her
deck, softened by distance, came a gospel hymn played on the phonograph
intended for Pilsach.
The two swimmers bore to the left, away from the captured schooner.
Laughter and song followed on board after the hymn, then the phonograph
started again. Grief grinned to himself at the appositeness of it as “Lead,
Kindly Light,” floated out over the dark water.
“We must take the passage and land on the Big Rock,” Mauriri whispered.
“The devils are holding the low land. Listen!”
Half a dozen rifle shots, at irregular intervals, attested that Brown still held
the Rock and that the pirates had invested the narrow peninsula.
At the end of another hour they swam under the frowning loom of the Big
Rock. Mauriri, feeling his way, led the landing in a crevice, up which for a
hundred feet they climbed to a narrow ledge.
“Stay here,” said Mauriri. “I go to Brown. In the morning I shall return.”
“I will go with you, Brother,” Grief said.
Mauriri laughed in the darkness.
A SON OF THE SUN
50
“Even you, Big Brother, cannot do this thing. I am the Goat Man, and I
only, of all Fuatino, can go over the Big Rock in the night. Furthermore, it
will be the first time that even I have done it. Put out your hand. You feel
it? That is where Pilsach’s dynamite is kept. Lie close beside the wall and
you may sleep without falling. I go now.”
And high above the sounding surf, on a narrow shelf beside a ton of
dynamite, David Grief planned his campaign, then rested his cheek on his
arm and slept.
In the morning, when Mauriri led him over the summit of the Big Rock,
David Grief understood why he could not have done it in the night.
Despite the accustomed nerve of a sailor for height and precarious
clinging, he marvelled that he was able to do it in the broad light of day.
There were places, always under minute direction of Mauriri, that he
leaned forward, falling, across hundred-foot-deep crevices, until his
outstretched hands struck a grip on the opposing wall and his legs could
then be drawn across after. Once, there was a ten-foot leap, above half a
thousand feet of yawning emptiness and down a fathom’s length to a
meagre foothold. And he, despite his cool head, lost it another time on a
shelf, a scant twelve inches wide, where all hand-holds seemed to fail him.
And Mauriri, seeing him sway, swung his own body far out and over the
gulf and passed him, at the same time striking him sharply on the back to
brace his reeling brain. Then it was, and forever after, that he fully knew
why Mauriri had been named the Goat Man.