And on this small deck, in addition to the crew, were the “return” niggers from three far-flung plantations. By “return” was meant that their three years of contract labour was up, and that, according to contract, they were being returned to their home villages on the wild island of Malaita. Twenty of them – familiar, all, to Jerry – were from Meringe; thirty of them came from the Bay of a Thousand Ships, in the Russell Isles; and the remaining twelve were from Pennduffryn on the east coast of Guadalcanar. In addition to these – and they were all on deck, chattering and piping in queer, almost elfish, falsetto voices – were the two white men, Captain Van Horn and his Danish mate, Borckman, making a total of seventy-nine souls.
“Thought your heart’d failed you at the last moment[23],” was Captain Van Horn’s greeting, a quick pleasure light glowing into his eyes as they noted Jerry.
“It was sure near to doin’ it,” Tom Haggin answered. “It’s only for you I’d a done it, annyways. Jerry’s the best of the litter, barrin’[24] Michael, of course, the two of them bein’ all that’s left and no better than them that was lost. Now that Kathleen was a sweet dog, the spit of Biddy if she’d lived. – Here, take ’m.”
With a jerk of abruptness, he deposited Jerry in Van Horn’s arms and turned away along the deck.
“An’ if bad luck comes to him I’ll never forgive you, Skipper,” he flung roughly over his shoulder.
“They’ll have to take my head first,” the skipper chuckled.
“An’ not unlikely, my brave laddy buck,” Haggin growled. “Meringe owes Somo four heads, three from the dysentery, an’ another wan from a tree fallin’ on him the last fortnight. He was the son of a chief at that.”
“Yes, and there’s two heads more that the Arangi owes Somo,” Van Horn nodded. “You recollect, down to the south’ard last year, a chap named Hawkins was lost in his whaleboat running the Arli Passage?” Haggin, returning along the deck, nodded. “Two of his boat’s crew were Somo boys. I’d recruited them for Ugi Plantation. With your boys, that makes six heads the Arangi owes. But what of it? There’s one salt-water village, acrost on the weather coast, where the Arangi owes eighteen. I recruited them for Aolo, and being salt-water men[25] they put them on the Sandfly that was lost on the way to the Santa Cruz. They’ve got a jack-pot over there on the weather coast – my word, the boy that could get my head would be a second Carnegie[26]! A hundred and fifty pigs and shell money no end the village’s collected for the chap that gets me and delivers.”
“And they ain’t – yet,” Haggin snorted.
“No fear[27],” was the cheerful retort.
“You talk like Arbuckle used to talk,” Haggin censured. “Manny’s the time I’ve heard him string it off. Poor old Arbuckle. The most sure and most precautious chap that ever handled niggers. He never went to sleep without spreadin’ a box of tacks on the floor, and when it wasn’t them it was crumpled newspapers. I remember me well, bein’ under the same roof at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat chased a cockroach into the papers. And it was blim, blam, blim, six times an’ twice over, with his two big horse-pistols, an’ the house perforated like a cullender. Likewise there was a dead tomcat. He could shoot in the dark with never an aim, pullin’ trigger with the second finger and pointing with the first finger laid straight along the barrel.
“No, sir, my laddy buck. He was the bully boy with the glass eye. The nigger didn’t live that’d lift his head. But they got ’m. They got ’m. He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy. Hatcheted ’m before breakfast. An’ it’s well I remember our second trip into the bush after what was left of ’m.”
“I saw his head after you’d turned it over to the Commissioner at Tulagi,” Van Horn supplemented.
“An’ the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost the same old smile I’d seen a thousand times. It dried on ’m that way over the smokin’ fire.
But they got ’m, if it did take fourteen years. There’s manny’s the head that goes to Malaita, manny’s the time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it’s tooken in the end.”
“But I’ve got their goat[28],” the captain insisted.
“When trouble’s hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can’t get the hang of it[29]. Think I’ve got some powerful devil-devil medicine.”
Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt goodbye, resolutely keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other’s arms.
“Keep your eye on my return boys,” he cautioned, as he went over the side, “till you land the last mother’s son of ’m. They’ve got no cause to love Jerry or his breed, an’ I’d hate ill to happen ’m at a nigger’s hands.
An’ in the dark of the night ’tis like as not he can do a fare-you-well overside. Don’t take your eye off ’m till you’re quit of the last of ’m.”
At sight of big Mister Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering whine.
Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of his free hand.
“Don’t forget the agreement,” Tom Haggin called back across the widening water. “If aught happens you[30], Jerry’s to come back to me.”
“I’ll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship’s articles,” was Van Horn’s reply.
Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the talk of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was aware, vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and unguessably terrible thing that was happening to him. He wriggled more determinedly, and Van Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang to the rail with more quickness than was to be expected of an awkward puppy of six months, and not the quick attempt of Van Horn to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry recoiled from the open water lapping the Arangi’s side. The taboo was upon him. It was the image of the log awash that was not a log but that was alive, luminous in his brain, that checked him. It was not reason on his part, but inhibition which had become habit.
He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.
“It’s all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog,” Van Horn soothed him.
But Jerry was not to be reconciled. While this indubitably was a white-skinned god, it was not his god. Mister Haggin was his god, and a superior god at that. Even he, without thinking about it at all, recognized that. His Mister Haggin wore pants and shoes. This god on the deck beside him was more like a black. Not only did he not wear pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his middle, just like any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin-cloth, that, like a kilt, fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.
Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although Jerry did not know it. If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a Rembrandt[31] frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact that he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam[32]. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and mostly over one ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his torso; and from a belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a sheath-knife, filled clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic pistol