The Red One

hated himself, ‘I’m a fool.’ What he had done was to pick up a cane-knife - you know the kind, as big as a machete and as heavy. And I was grateful to him in advance for putting me out of my misery. There wasn’t any sense in slowly feeding in till my head was crushed, and already my arm was pulped half way from elbow to shoulder, and the pulping was going right on. So I was grateful, as I bent my head to the blow.

“‘Get your head out of the way, you idiot!’ he barked at me.

“And then I understood and obeyed. I was a big man, and he took two hacks to do it; but he hacked my arm off just outside the shoulder and dragged me back and laid me down on the cane.

“Yes, the sugar paid - enormously; and I built for the Princess the church of her saintly dream, and… she married me.”

He partly assuaged his thirst, and uttered his final word.

“Alackaday! Shuttlecock and battle-dore. And this at, the end of it all, lined with boilerplate that even alcohol will not corrode and that only alcohol will tickle. Yet have I lived, and I kiss my hand to the dear dust of my Princess long asleep in the great mausoleum of King John that looks across the Vale of Manona to the alien flag that floats over the bungalow of the British Government House… ”

Fatty pledged him sympathetically, and sympathetically drank out of his own small can. Bruce Cadogan Cavendish glared into the fire with implacable bitterness. He was a man who preferred to drink by himself. Across the thin lips that composed the cruel slash of his mouth played twitches of mockery that caught Fatty’s eye. And Fatty, making sure first that his rock-chunk was within reach, challenged.

“Well, how about yourself, Bruce Cadogan Cavendish? It’s your turn.”

The other lifted bleak eyes that bored into Fatty’s until he physically betrayed uncomfortableness.

“I’ve lived a hard life,” Slim grated harshly. “What do I know about love passages?”

“No man of your build and make-up could have escaped them,” Fatty wheedled.

“And what of it?” Slim snarled. “It’s no reason for a gentleman to boast of amorous triumphs.”

“Oh, go on, be a good fellow,” Fatty urged. “The night’s still young. We’ve still some drink left. Delarouse and I have contributed our share. It isn’t often that three real ones like us get together for a telling. Surely you’ve got at least one adventure in love you aren’t ashamed to tell about - ”

Bruce Cadogan Cavendish pulled forth his iron quoit and seemed to debate whether or not he should brain the other. He sighed, and put back the quoit.

“Very well, if you will have it,” he surrendered with manifest reluctance. “Like you two, I have had a remarkable constitution. And right now, speaking of armour-plate lining, I could drink the both of you down when you were at your prime. Like you two, my beginnings were far distant and different. That I am marked with the hall-mark of gentlehood there is no discussion… unless either of you care to discuss the matter now… ”

His one hand slipped into his pocket and clutched the quoit. Neither of his auditors spoke nor betrayed any awareness of his menace.

“It occurred a thousand miles to the westward of Manatomana, on the island of Tagalag,” he continued abruptly, with an air of saturnine disappointment in that there had been no discussion. “But first I must tell you of how I got to Tagalag. For reasons I shall not mention, by paths of descent I shall not describe, in the crown of my manhood and the prime of my devilishness in which Oxford renegades and racing younger sons had nothing on me, I found myself master and owner of a schooner so well known that she shall remain historically nameless. I was running blackbird labour from the west South Pacific and the Coral Sea to the plantations of Hawaii and the nitrate mines of Chili - ”

“It was you who cleaned out the entire population of - ” Fatty exploded, ere he could check his speech.

The one hand of Bruce Cadogan Cavendish flashed pocketward and flashed back with the quoit balanced ripe for business.

“Proceed,” Fatty sighed. “I… I have quite forgotten what I was going to say.”

“Beastly funny country over that way,” the narrator drawled with perfect casualness. “You’ve read this Sea Wolf stuff - ”

“You weren’t the Sea Wolf,” Whiskers broke in with involuntary positiveness.

“No, sir,” was the snarling answer. “The Sea Wolf’s dead, isn’t he? And I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

“Of course, of course,” Whiskers conceded. “He suffocated head-first in the mud off a wharf in Victoria a couple of years back.”

“As I was saying - and I don’t like interruptions,” Bruce Cadogan Cavendish proceeded, “it’s a beastly funny country over that way. I was at Taki-Tiki, a low island that politically belongs to the Solomons, but that geologically doesn’t at all, for the Solomons are high islands. Ethnographically it belongs to Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia, because all the breeds of the South Pacific have gravitated to it by canoe-drift and intricately, degeneratively, and amazingly interbred. The scum of the scrapings of the bottom of the human pit, biologically speaking, resides in Taka-Tiki. And I know the bottom and whereof I speak.

“It was a beastly funny time of it I had, diving out shell, fishing beche-de-mer, trading hoop-iron and hatchets for copra and ivory-nuts, running niggers and all the rest of it. Why, even in Fiji the Lotu was having a hard time of it and the chiefs still eating long-pig. To the westward it was fierce - funny little black kinky-heads, man-eaters the last Jack of them, and the jackpot fat and spilling over with wealth - ”

“Jack-pots?” Fatty queried. At sight of an irritable movement, he added: “You see, I never got over to the West like Delarouse and you.”

“They’re all head-hunters. Heads are valuable, especially a white man’s head. They decorate the canoe- houses and devil-devil houses with them. Each village runs a jack-pot, and everybody antes. Whoever brings in a white man’s head takes the pot. If there aren’t openers for a long time, the pot grows to tremendous proportions. Beastly funny, isn’t it?

“I know. Didn’t a Holland mate die on me of blackwater? And didn’t I win a pot myself? It was this way. We were lying at Lango-lui at the time. I never let on, and arranged the affair with Johnny, my boat-steerer. He was a kinky-head himself from Port Moresby. He cut the dead mate’s head off and sneaked ashore in the might, while I whanged away with my rifle as if I were trying to get him. He opened the pot with the mate’s head, and got it, too. Of course, next day I sent in a landing boat, with two covering boats, and fetched him off with the loot.”

“How big was the pot?” Whiskers asked. “I heard of a pot at Orla worth eighty quid.”

“To commence with,” Slim answered, “there were forty fat pigs, each worth a fathom of prime shell-money, and shell-money worth a quid a fathom. That was two hundred dollars right there. There were ninety-eight fathoms of shell-money, which is pretty close to five hundred in itself. And there were twenty-two gold sovereigns. I split it four ways: one-fourth to Johnny, one-fourth to the ship, one-fourth to me as owner, and one-fourth to me as skipper. Johnny never complained. He’d never had so much wealth all at one time in his life. Besides, I gave him a couple of the mate’s old shirts. And I fancy the mate’s head is still there decorating the canoe-house.”

“Not exactly Christian burial of a Christian,” Whiskers observed.

“But a lucrative burial,” Slim retorted. “I had to feed the rest of the mate over-side to the sharks for nothing. Think of feeding an eight-hundred-dollar head along with it. It would have been criminal waste and stark lunacy.

“Well, anyway, it was all beastly funny, over there to the westward. And, without telling you the scrape I got into at Taki-Tiki, except that I sailed away with two hundred kinky-heads for Queensland labour, and for my manner of collecting them had two British ships of war combing the Pacific for me, I changed my course and ran to the westward thinking to dispose of the lot to the Spanish plantations on Bangar.

“Typhoon season. We caught it. The Merry Mist was my schooner’s name, and I had thought she was stoutly built until she hit that typhoon. I never saw such seas. They pounded that stout craft to pieces, literally so. The sticks were jerked out of her, deckhouses splintered to match-wood, rails ripped off, and, after the worst had passed, the covering boards began to go. We just managed to repair what was left of one boat and keep the schooner afloat only till the sea went down barely enough to get away. And we outfitted that boat in a hurry. The carpenter and I were the last, and we had to jump for it as he went down. There were only four of us - ”

“Lost all the niggers?” Whiskers inquired.

“Some of them swam for some time,” Slim replied. “But I don’t fancy they made the land. We were ten days’ in doing it. And we had a spanking breeze most of the way. And what do you think we had in the boat with us? Cases of square-face gin and cases of dynamite. Funny, wasn’t it? Well, it got funnier later on. Oh, there was a small beaker of water, a little salt horse, and some salt-water-soaked sea biscuit - enough to keep us alive to