alone partook of an inviting omelet. He had quite finished his plate, when
Harriwell helped himself to the omelet. One mouthful he tasted, then spat out
vociferously.
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67
“That’s the second time,” McTavish announced ominously.
Harriwell was still hawking and spitting.
“Second time, what?” Bertie quavered.
“Poison,” was the answer. “That cook will be hanged yet.”
“That’s the way the bookkeeper went out at Cape March,” Brown spoke up. “Died
horribly. They said on the Jessie that they heard him screaming three miles
away.”
“I’ll put the cook in irons,” sputtered Harriwell. “Fortunately we discovered
it in time.”
Bertie sat paralyzed. There was no color in his face. He attempted to speak,
but only an inarticulate gurgle resulted. All eyed him anxiously.
“Don’t say it, don’t say it,” McTavish cried in a tense voice.
“Yes, I ate it, plenty of it, a whole plateful!” Bertie cried explosively,
like a diver suddenly regaining breath.
The awful silence continued half a minute longer, and he read his fate in
their eyes.
“Maybe it wasn’t poison after all,” said Harriwell, dismally.
“Call in the cook,” said Brown.
In came the cook, a grinning black boy, nose-spiked and ear-plugged.
“Here, you, Wi-wi, what name that?” Harriwell bellowed, pointing accusingly at
the omelet.
Wi-wi was very naturally frightened and embarrassed.
“Him good fella kai-kai,” he murmured apologetically.
“Make him eat it,” suggested McTavish. “That’s a proper test.”
Harriwell filled a spoon with the stuff and jumped for the cook, who fled in
panic.
“That settles it,” was Brown’s solemn pronouncement. “He won’t eat it.”
“Mr. Brown, will you please go and put the irons on him?” Harriwell turned
cheerfully to Bertie. “It’s all right, old man, the Commissioner will deal
with him, and if you die, depend upon it, he will be hanged.”
“Don’t think the government’ll do it,” objected McTavish.
“But gentlemen, gentlemen,” Bertie cried. “In the meantime think of me.”
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68
Harriwell shrugged his shoulders pityingly.
“Sorry, old man, but it’s a native poison, and there are no known antidotes
for native poisons. Try and compose yourself and if–”
Two sharp reports of a rifle from without, interrupted the discourse, and
Brown, entering, reloaded his rifle and sat down to table.
“The cook’s dead,” he said. “Fever. A rather sudden attack.”
“I was just telling Mr. Arkwright that there are no antidotes for native
poisons–”
“Except gin,” said Brown.
Harriwell called himself an absent-minded idiot and rushed for the gin bottle.
“Neat, man, neat,” he warned Bertie, who gulped down a tumbler two-thirds full
of the raw spirits, and coughed and choked from the angry bite of it till the
tears ran down his cheeks.
Harriwell took his pulse and temperature, made a show of looking out for him,
and doubted that the omelet had been poisoned. Brown and McTavish also
doubted; but Bertie discerned an insincere ring in their voices. His appetite
had left him, and he took his own pulse stealthily under the table. There was
no question but what it was increasing, but he failed to ascribe it to the gin
he had taken. ‘mcTavish, rifle in hand, went out on the veranda to
reconnoiter.
“They’re massing up at the cook-house,” was his report. “And they’ve no end of
Sniders. ‘my idea is to sneak around on the other side and take them in flank.
Strike the first blow, you know. Will you come along, Brown?”
Harriwell ate on steadily, while Bertie discovered that his pulse had leaped
up five beats. Nevertheless, he could not help jumping when the rifles began
to go off. Above the scattering of Sniders could be heard the pumping of
Brown’s and McTavish’s Winchesters–all against a background of demoniacal
screeching and yelling.
“They’ve got them on the run,” Harriwell remarked, as voices and gunshots
faded away in the distance.
Scarcely were Brown and McTavish back at the table when the latter
reconnoitered.
“They’ve got dynamite,” he said.
“Then let’s charge them with dynamite,” Harriwell proposed.
Thrusting half a dozen sticks each into their pockets and equipping themselves
with lighted cigars, they started for the door. And just then it happened.
They blamed McTavish for it afterward, and he admitted that the charge had
SOUTH SEA TALES
69
been a trifle excessive. But at any rate it went off under the house, which
lifted up cornerwise and settled back on its foundations. Half the china on
the table was shattered, while the eight-day clock stopped. Yelling for
vengeance, the three men rushed out into the night, and the bombardment began.
When they returned, there was no Bertie. He had dragged himself away to the
office, barricaded himself in, and sunk upon the floor in a gin-soaked
nightmare, wherein he died a thousand deaths while the valorous fight went on
around him. In the morning, sick and headachey from the gin, he crawled out to
find the sun still in the sky and God presumable in heaven, for his hosts were
alive and uninjured.
Harriwell pressed him to stay on longer, but Bertie insisted on sailing
immediately on the Arla for Tulagi, where, until the following steamer day, he
stuck close by the Commissioner’s house. There were lady tourists on the
outgoing steamer, and Bertie was again a hero, while Captain Malu, as usual,
passed unnoticed. But Captain Malu sent back from Sydney two cases of the best
Scotch whiskey on the market, for he was not able to make up his mind as to
whether it was Captain Hansen or Mr Harriwell who had given Bertie Arkwright
the more gorgeous insight into life in the Solomons.
THE INEVITABLE WHITE MAN
“The black will never understand the white, nor the white the black, as long
as black is black and white is white.”
So said Captain Woodward. We sat in the parlor of Charley Roberts’ pub in
Apia, drinking long Abu Hameds compounded and shared with us by the aforesaid
Charley Roberts, who claimed the recipe direct from Stevens, famous for having
invented the Abu Hamed at a time when he was spurred on by Nile thirst–the
Stevens who was responsible for “With Kitchener to Kartoun,” and who passed
out at the siege of Ladysmith.
Captain Woodward, short and squat, elderly, burned by forty years of tropic
sun, and with the most beautiful liquid brown eyes I ever saw in a man, spoke
from a vast experience. The crisscross of scars on his bald pate bespoke a
tomahawk intimacy with the black, and of equal intimacy was the advertisement,
front and rear, on the right side of his neck, where an arrow had at one time
entered and been pulled clean through. As he explained, he had been in a hurry
on that occasion–the arrow impeded his running–and he felt that he could not
take the time to break off the head and pull out the shaft the way it had come
in. At the present moment he was commander of the SAVAII, the big steamer that
recruited labor from the westward for the German plantations on Samoa.
“Half the trouble is the stupidity of the whites,” said Roberts, pausing to
take a swig from his glass and to curse the Samoan bar-boy in affectionate
terms. “If the white man would lay himself out a bit to understand the
workings of the black man’s mind, most of the messes would be avoided.”
“I’ve seen a few who claimed they understood niggers,” Captain Woodward
retorted, “and I always took notice that they were the first to be kai-kai’d
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70
(eaten). Look at the missionaries in New Guinea and the New Hebrides–the
martyr isle of Erromanga and all the rest. Look at the Austrian expedition
that was cut to pieces in the Solomons, in the bush of Guadalcanar. And look
at the traders themselves, with a score of years’ experience, making their
brag that no nigger would ever get them, and whose heads to this day are
ornamenting the rafters of the canoe houses. There was old Johnny
Simons–twenty-six years on the raw edges of Melanesia, swore he knew the
niggers like a book and that they’d never do for him, and he passed out at
Marovo Lagoon, New Georgia, had his head sawed off by a black Mary (woman) and
an old nigger with only one leg, having left the other leg in the mouth of a
shark while diving for dynamited fish. There was Billy Watts, horrible
reputation as a nigger killer, a man to scare the devil. I remember lying at
Cape Little, New Ireland you know, when the niggers stole half a case of
trade-tobacco–cost him about three dollars and a half. In retaliation he
turned out, shot six niggers, smashed up their war canoes and burned two
villages. And it was at Cape Little, four years afterward, that he was jumped
along with fifty Buku boys he had with him fishing bˆche-de-mer. In five
minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys who got away in a