A thousand deaths by Jack London

and giving no orders. This was Mauki’s chance, but still he waited.

When the worst was past, and Bunster lay convalescent and conscious, but weak

as a baby, Mauki packed his few trinkets, including the china cup handle, into

his trade box. Then he went over to the village and interviewed the king and

his two prime ministers.

“This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too much?” he asked.

They explained in one voice that they liked the trader not at all. The

ministers poured forth a recital of all the indignities and wrongs that had

been heaped upon them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki interrupted rudely.

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35

“You savve me–me big fella marster my country. You no like m this fella white

marster. Me no like m. Plenty good you put hundred cocoanut, two hundred

cocoanut, three hundred cocoanut along cutter. Him finish, you go sleep m good

fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good fella. Bime by big fella noise along

house, you no savve hear m that fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella

too much.”

In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys. Then he ordered Bunster’s wife

to return to her family house. Had she refused, he would have been in a

quandary, for his tambo would not have permitted him to lay hands on her.

The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room, where the trader lay in a

doze. Mauki first removed the revolvers, then placed the ray fish mitten on

his hand. Bunster’s first warning was a stroke of the mitten that removed the

skin the full length of his nose.

“Good fella, eh?” Mauki grinned, between two strokes, one of which swept the

forehead bare and the other of which cleaned off one side of his face. “Laugh,

damn you, laugh.”

Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas, hiding in their houses, heard

the “big fella noise” that Bunster made and continued to make for an hour or

more.

When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass and all the rifles and

ammunition down to the cutter, which he proceeded to ballast with cases of

tobacco. It was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing came out

of the house and ran screaming down the beach till it fell in the sand and

mowed and gibbered under the scorching sun. Mauki looked toward it and

hesitated. Then he went over and removed the head, which he wrapped in a mat

and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.

So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long hot day that they did not

see the cutter run out through the passage and head south, close-hauled on the

southeast trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack to the

shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat from there to Malaita. He

landed at Port Adams with a wealth of rifles and tobacco such as no one man

had ever possessed before. But he did not stop there. He had taken a white

man’s head, and only the bush could shelter him. So back he went to the bush

villages, where he shot old Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made

himself the chief over all the villages. When his father died, Mauki’s brother

ruled in Port Adams, and joined together, salt-water men and bushmen, the

resulting combination was the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes of

Malaita.

More than his fear of the British government was Mauki’s fear of the

all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company; and one day a message came up to him in

the bush, reminding him that he owed the Company eight and one-half years of

labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then appeared the inevitable white

man, the captain of the schooner, the only white man during Mauki’s reign, who

ventured the bush and came out alive. This man not only came out, but he

brought with him seven hundred and fifty dollars in gold sovereigns–the money

price of eight years and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles

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36

and cases of tobacco.

Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds. His stomach is three times

its former girth, and he has four wives. He has many other things–rifles and

revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent collection of bushmen’s

heads. But more precious than the entire collection is another head, perfectly

dried and cured, with sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is kept wrapped

in the finest of fibre lava-lavas. When Mauki goes to war with villages beyond

his realm, he invariably gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,

contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush of death falls on

the village, and not even a pickaninny dares make a noise. The head is

esteemed the most powerful devil-devil on Malaita, and to the possession of it

is ascribed all of Mauki’s greatness.

“YAH! YAH! YAH!”

He was a whiskey-guzzling Scotchman, and he downed his whiskey neat, beginning

with his first tot punctually at six in the morning, and thereafter repeating

it at regular intervals throughout the day till bedtime, which was usually

midnight. He slept but five hours out of the twenty-four, and for the

remaining nineteen hours he was quietly and decently drunk. During the eight

weeks I spent with him on Oolong Atoll, I never saw him draw a sober breath.

In fact, his sleep was so short that he never had time to sober up. It was the

most beautiful and orderly perennial drunk I have ever observed.

McAllister was his name. He was an old man, and very shaky on his pins. His

hand trembled as with a palsy, especially noticeable when he poured his

whiskey, though I never knew him to spill a drop. He had been twenty-eight

years in Melanesia, ranging from German New Guinea to the German Solomons, and

so thoroughly had he become identified with that portion of the world, that he

habitually spoke in that bastard lingo called “bech-de-mer.” Thus, in

conversation with me, SUN HE COME UP meant sunrise; KAI-KAI HE STOP meant that

dinner was served; and BELLY BELONG ME WALK ABOUT meant that he was sick at

his stomach. He was a small man, and a withered one, burned inside and outside

by ardent spirits and ardent sun. He was a cinder, a bit of a clinker of a

man, a little animated clinker, not yet quite cold, that moved stiffly and by

starts and jerks like an automaton. A gust of wind would have blown him away.

He weighed ninety pounds.

But the immense thing about him was the power with which he ruled. Oolong

Atoll was one hundred and forty miles in circumference. One steered by compass

course in its lagoon. It was populated by five thousand Polynesians, all

strapping men and women, many of them standing six feet in height and weighing

a couple of hundred pounds. Oolong was two hundred and fifty miles from the

nearest land. Twice a year a little schooner called to collect copra. The one

white man on Oolong was McAllister, petty trader and unintermittent guzzler;

and he ruled Oolong and its six thousand savages with an iron hand. He said

come, and they came, go, and they went. They never questioned his will nor

judgment. He was cantankerous as only an aged Scotchman can be, and interfered

continually in their personal affairs. When Nugu, the king’s daughter, wanted

to marry Haunau from the other end of the atoll, her father said yes; but

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37

McAllister said no, and the marriage never came off. When the king wanted to

buy a certain islet in the lagoon from the chief priest, McAllister said no.

The king was in debt to the Company to the tune of 180,000 cocoanuts, and

until that was paid he was not to spend a single cocoanut on anything else.

And yet the king and his people did not love McAllister. In truth, they hated

him horribly, and, to my knowledge, the whole population, with the priests at

the head, tried vainly for three months to pray him to death. The devil-devils

they sent after him were awe-inspiring, but since McAllister did not believe

in devil-devils, they were without power over him. With drunken Scotchmen all

signs fail. They gathered up scraps of food which had touched his lips, an

empty whiskey bottle, a cocoanut from which he had drunk, and even his

spittle, and performed all kinds of deviltries over them. But McAllister lived

on. His health was superb. He never caught fever; nor coughs nor colds;

dysentery passed him by; and the malignant ulcers and vile skin diseases that

attack blacks and whites alike in that climate never fastened upon him. He

must have been so saturated with alcohol as to defy the lodgment of germs. I