covering boats and carry the old barbed wire above their rails. There’s the
plantation now. We’ll be in in half an hour.” He handed the binoculars to
his guest. “Those are the boat-sheds to the left of the bungalow. Beyond
are the barracks. And to the right are the copra-sheds. We dry quite a bit
already. Old Koho’s getting civilized enough to make his people bring in
the nuts. There’s the mouth of the stream where you found the three
women softening.”
The Wonder, wing-and-wing, was headed directly in for the anchorage.
She rose and fell lazily over a glassy swell flawed here and there by
catspaws from astern. It was the tail-end of the monsoon season, and the
air was heavy and sticky with tropic moisture, the sky a florid, leaden
muss of formless clouds. The rugged land was swathed with cloud- banks
and squall wreaths, through which headlands and interior peaks thrust
darkly. On one promontory a slant of sunshine blazed torridly, on another,
scarcely a mile away, a squall was bursting in furious downpour of driving
rain.
This was the dank, fat, savage island of New Gibbon, lying fifty miles to
leeward of Choiseul. Geographically, it belonged to the Solomon Group.
Politically, the dividing line of German and British influence cut it in half,
hence the joint control by the two Resident Commissioners. In the case of
New Gibbon, this control existed only on paper in the colonial offices of
the two countries. There was no real control at all, and never had been.
The bêche de met fishermen of the old days had passed it by. The
sandalwood traders, after stern experiences, had given it up. The
blackbirders had never succeeded in recruiting one labourer on the island,
and, after the schooner Dorset had been cut off with all hands, they left the
place severely alone. Later, a German company had attempted a cocoanut
plantation, which was abandoned after several managers and a number of
contract labourers had lost their heads. German cruisers and British
cruisers had failed to get the savage blacks to listen to reason. Four times
the missionary societies had essayed the peaceful conquest of the island,
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63
and four times, between sickness and massacre, they had been driven
away. More cruisers, more pacifications, had followed, and followed
fruitlessly. The cannibals had always retreated into the bush and laughed
at the screaming shells. When the warships left it was an easy matter to
rebuild the burned grass houses and set up the ovens in the old- fashioned
way.
New Gibbon was a large island, fully one hundred and fifty miles long and
half as broad. Its windward coast was iron-bound, without anchorages or
inlets, and it was inhabited by scores of warring tribes—at least it had
been, until Koho had arisen, like a Kamehameha, and, by force of arms
and considerable statecraft, firmly welded the greater portion of the tribes
into a confederation. His policy of permitting no intercourse with white
men had been eminently right, so far as survival of his own people was
concerned; and after the visit of the last cruiser he had had his own way
until David Grief and McTavish the Troublemender landed on the deserted
beach where once had stood the German bungalow and barracks and the
various English mission-houses.
Followed wars, false peaces, and more wars. The wizened little
Scotchman could make trouble as well as mend it, and, not content with
holding the beach, he imported bushmen from Malaita and invaded the
wild-pig runs of the interior jungle. He burned villages until Koho wearied
of rebuilding them, and when he captured Koho’s eldest son he compelled
a conference with the old chief. It was then that McTavish laid down the
rate of head-exchange. For each head of his own people he promised to
take ten of Koho’s. After Koho had learned that the Scotchman was a man
of his word, the first true peace was made. In the meantime McTavish had
built the bungalow and barracks, cleared the jungle-land along the beach,
and laid out the plantation. After that he had gone on his way to mend
trouble on the atoll of Tasman, where a plague of black measles had
broken out and been ascribed to Grief’s plantation by the devil-devil
doctors. Once, a year later, he had been called back again to straighten up
New Gibbon; and Koho, after paying a forced fine of two hundred
thousand cocoanuts, decided it was cheaper to keep the peace and sell the
nuts. Also, the fires of his youth had burned down. He was getting old and
limped of one leg where a Lee-Enfield bullet had perforated the calf.
II
“I knew a chap in Hawaii,” Grief said, “superintendent of a sugar
plantation, who used a hammer and a ten-penny nail.”
They were sitting on the broad bungalow veranda, and watching Worth,
the manager of New Gibbon, doctoring the sick squad. They were New
Georgia boys, a dozen of them, and the one with the aching tooth had been
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64
put back to the last. Worth had just failed in his first attempt. He wiped the
sweat from his forehead with one hand and waved the forceps with the
other.
“And broke more than one jaw,” he asserted grimly.
Grief shook his head. Wallenstein smiled and elevated his brows.
“He said not, at any rate,” Grief qualified. “He assured me, furthermore,
that he always succeeded on the first trial.”
“I saw it done when I was second mate on a lime-juicer,” Captain Ward
spoke up. “The old man used a caulking mallet and a steel marlin-spike.
He took the tooth out with the first stroke, too, clean as a whistle.”
“Me for the forceps,” Worth muttered grimly, inserting his own pair in the
mouth of the black. As he pulled, the man groaned and rose in the air.
“Lend a hand, somebody, and hold him down,” the manager appealed.
Grief and Wallenstein, on either side, gripped the black and held him. And
he, in turn, struggled against them and clenched his teeth on the forceps.
The group swayed back and forth. Such exertion, in the stagnant heat,
brought the sweat out on all of them. The black sweated, too, but his was
the sweat of excruciating pain. The chair on which he sat was overturned.
Captain Ward paused in the act of pouring himself a drink, and called
encouragement. Worth pleaded with his assistants to hang on, and hung on
himself, twisting the tooth till it crackled and then attempting a
straightaway pull.
Nor did any of them notice the little black man who limped up the steps
and stood looking on. Koho was a conservative. His fathers before him
had worn no clothes, and neither did he, not even a g-string. The many
empty perforations in nose and lips and ears told of decorative passions
long since dead. The holes on both ear-lobes had been torn out, but their
size was attested by the strips of withered flesh that hung down and swept
his shoulders. He cared now only for utility, and in one of the half dozen
minor holes in his right ear he carried a short clay pipe. Around his waist
was buckled a cheap trade-belt, and between the imitation leather and the
naked skin was thrust the naked blade of a long knife. Suspended from the
belt was his bamboo betel-nut and lime box. In his hand was a short-
barrelled, large-bore Snider rifle. He was indescribably filthy, and here
and there marred by scars, the worst being the one left by the Lee-Enfield
bullet, which had withered the calf to half the size of its mate. His
shrunken mouth showed that few teeth were left to serve him. Face and
body were shrunken and withered, but his black, bead-like eyes, small and
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65
close together, were very bright, withal they were restless and querulous,
and more like a monkey’s than a man’s.
He looked on, grinning like a shrewd little ape. His joy in the torment of
the patient was natural, for the world he lived in was a world of pain. He
had endured his share of it, and inflicted far more than his share on others.
When the tooth parted from its locked hold in the jaw and the forceps
raked across the other teeth and out of the mouth with a nerve-rasping
sound, old Koho’s eyes fairly sparkled, and he looked with glee at the poor
black, collapsed on the veranda floor and groaning terribly as he held his
head in both his hands.
“I think he’s going to faint,” Grief said, bending over the victim. “Captain
Ward, give him a drink, please. You’d better take one yourself, Worth;
you’re shaking like a leaf.”
“And I think I’ll take one,” said Wallenstein, wiping the sweat from his
face. His eye caught the shadow of Koho on the floor and followed it up to