“Thought you’d want to see this, Colonel Primrose,” he said. “I’ve got orders to keep you informed. This isn’t the man you’re after, though. It looks like a dirty Jap to me. White men don’t use a knife this way.”
The man he spoke to, standing in front of the huge sergeant, looked down, his black eyes softening for an instant, at the dead boy’s body. He looked back to where the single track of footprints, too solidly indented to be a ghost’s, came up the lonely beach out of the Pacific Ocean. He looked up at the black volcanic rock. No one had ever charted the hidden caves formed in the gigantic turmoil that thousands of years ago threw up the floor of the ocean in masses of molten lava to make the islands and atolls of the Pacific. Somewhere up there, in a cave, or beyond, invisible in the growth of bush and vine and tree that stretched into a wilderness of jungle, was the man who had crept silently up out of the midnight sea. Unless, Colonel John Primrose thought, he had already found his friends. . . .
Colonel Primrose’s black eyes hardened as he looked down again at the dead boy.
“Perhaps,” he said quietly. “We’ll find out.”
2
THE THIRD TIME TOMMY DAWSON SAID, “JEEPERS, it’s time for us to go home,” I realized it was double talk, and not meant for himself alone of the three boys there. The only move he’d made when he said it was forward in his chair a little until some gal with bare brown arms and legs and a red or yellow hibiscus in her black hair had passed along the street out of sight of his roving eyes.
The four of us—Tommy Dawson, Dave Boyer, Swede Ellicott and I—were sitting in the broad open lounge of the Moana Hotel in Waikiki. The three of them were lieutenants in the Army Air Force, back from the Marianas for ten days’ rest. And I thought, at the time, that I was Grace Latham, just arrived in Honolulu from Washington, D. C., on what they call “invitational orders.” They seemed important and even impressive the day they were issued, but they were a snare and a delusion, as perhaps I should have realized before I heard any one else say so. It’s clear to me now that what I actually was was nothing other than a plain booby-trap, the brain child of my old friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers U. S. Army (Retired) and acting special agent in Military Intelligence. And no doubt it’s the chief reason why Colonel Primrose’s guard, philosopher and friend, and self-styled “functotum,” Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, doesn’t really have to worry—dreadfully though he does—about his colonel’s ever marrying me. He’d have to find another lady fall guy if he did.
Tommy Dawson craned his red head forward again. “Baby!”
Dave Boyer growled irritably.
“Oh, shut up. For cripe’s sake lay off, can’t you?”
His sensitive sun-blackened face went a shade darker and his mouth tightened. Of the three he was the only one who looked as if he really needed the rest he’d been sent back to get. The casual way he sat there was deceptive, but his finger nails were chewed down to the quick. Twice Tommy Dawson had stuck a foot out, given him a quiet nudge and said, “Hi, boy,” and I’d seen the hunted shadow in his brown eyes disappear as he’d raised his thumb and forefinger in a circle with a quick “Okay, thanks.” But he was sore now.
“Just lay off,” he said. “For about ten seconds.”
Tommy Dawson lay back in his chair, grinning.
“Why, David,” he said. “My dear old friend and brother officer, don’t get me wrong. All I’m saying is, I can’t take it. I just can’t take lolling here in this whispering paradise of sunlight and palm trees. It’s sapping my fiery determination to win the Pacific war single-handed. Listen to the sapphire wavelets caressing the silver strand. Listen to the haunting melody of romance floating through the tender moonlit stillness——”
“Just shut up, is all I said.”
The only haunting melody of romance audible at the moment was coming from the juke box across the streaming Sunday afternoon madhouse of Kalakaua Avenue, and it was all but drowned out by the jeeps and taxis and buses and the shrill congress of mynah birds in the palm tree outside. The wide street, glaring white in the intense clarity of the afternoon sunlight, was a swarm of sailors and seabees, soldiers and marines. A few of them were with girls—Waves, Wacs and the little lady Marines in their bright green and scarlet and white. A few were with the civilian girls with bare brown arms and legs and red or yellow hibiscus in their coal-black hair. Most of them hunted singly or in packs. They jammed the curio shops with the grass skirts in the windows. They stood endlessly in line for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere to stand in other lines for food or a movie or a bus to take them somewhere else, wishing to a man they were back at the corner drug store on Main Street.
To our left across the lounge, the line to the dining room already stretched half the length of the lanai. GI’s and sailors, officers and men and an occasional civilian, stood drearily inching forward, paying no attention to the sapphire wavelets on the famous beach at Waikiki. It was just at the end of the crowded courtyard, within what Sergeant Buck would have called spitting distance and could easily have proved it. The silver strand was hardly visible for sun-tanned bodies, but beyond it were thousands of blue miles of ocean, as calm as an inland lake except where the long low rollers broke for an instant in great white feathers on the coral reef. Surfboards and a few outrigger canoes gave it a slight touch of the tourist ads, a semi-tropical Coney Island, but chiefly the whole scene was like a cross between the Grand Central Station and Market Street when the Fleet’s in.
Tommy Dawson’s hair was red, his face freckled, and he had in him what Lilac, who’s my cook and friend in my house on P Street in Georgetown, District of Columbia, calls a devil as big as a house.
“Jeepers!” he said again.
Dave Boyer’s lean body moved.
“—Relax, David. Just relax.”
Swede Ellicott reached a long leisurely arm out of the deep wicker chair beside Tommy and knocked the dottle out of his pipe into the ash stand between them. He was big and blond and unhurried. The Central Pacific had bleached his eyebrows so they looked like thick patches of straw above his light blue eyes. His face was burned and weather-beaten, not handsome and in fact far from it, and curiously ingenuous, I thought, for anything so rugged and hard-bitten. He had the casual matter-of-fact air that seems to be as much a part of a flyer’s uniform as the dog-eared nonchalance of his cap.
“Don’t pay him no mind, David,” he said placidly. “I’m deaf. I ain’t heard nothin’ he been sayin’.—Hullo, they must be looking for somebody.”
He pointed out the window. I saw two small planes that looked like white birds flying very low against the back drop of the mountain range above the city. They were moving so slowly that they looked stationary until they banked and wheeled back, mounting a little higher each time until they were against the blue sky.
We had all bent down and looked at them, and we were all silent for a moment, watching them. I can believe, now, that we were each aware of some subtle kind of premonitory warning, coming maybe out of the deep substratum of primitive mysticism that’s lingered on in the Hawaiian atmosphere in spite of the missionaries and in spite of modern science. I don’t insist on it, but we were silent, for a moment, watching those searching planes, and no one else seemed to be interested, and it was the four of us, of all the people there in the Moana lobby or on the street, who were to be caught up and vitally affected . . . Swede Ellicott, who’d noticed them first and commented on them, the most vitally and fundamentally of us all.
Maybe, of course, it was only because Swede and the other two were just back from an area where it’s important to be acutely conscious of any plane that’s acting in an unusual fashion. But there were other flyers just back too, not even aware of the two white ships, searching, against the hills and the sky. And we dismissed them at once, rejecting the warning if it was a warning. We’d not heard then that a sentry had been killed on the other side of the Island, or that a man