'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.'
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 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 (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 bкche-de-mer. In five minutes they were all dead, with the exception of three boys who got away in a canoe. Don't talk to me about understanding the nigger. The white man's mission is to farm the world, and it's a big enough job cut out for him. What time has he got left to understand niggers anyway?'
'Just so,' said Roberts. 'And somehow it doesn't seem necessary, after all, to understand the niggers. In direct proportion to the white man's stupidity is his success in farming the world—'
'And putting the fear of God into the nigger's heart,' Captain Woodward blurted out. 'Perhaps you're right, Roberts. Perhaps it's his stupidity that makes him succeed, and surely one phase of his stupidity is his inability to understand the niggers. But there's one thing sure, the white has to run the niggers whether he understands them or not. It's inevitable. It's fate.'
'And of course the white man is inevitable—it's the niggers' fate,' Roberts broke in. 'Tell the white man there's pearl shell in some lagoon infested by ten-thousand howling cannibals, and he'll head there all by his lonely, with half a dozen kanaka divers and a tin alarm clock for chronometer, all packed like sardines on a commodious,
