"You're smart. I don't say a Kanaka can't be smart when he wants to hide
anything. He can. I ain't figgered you yet. And that's a mighty healthy
thing for you, my boy, d'y' see? Because, if I could once make sure it
was you I saw slipping away by the chapel hedge two nights ago, I'd--" A
purplish haze suffused his cheek. "I'd dig the heart out of your carcass
with my two hands," he ended, very quietly, and hit the table so that
it jumped. "Was it?" he roared.

"No-o, Mahrster," said Motauri.

"You lie--blast you--it was!"

"No, Mahrster."

"Was it you that's been hanging around that white fella girl b'long
missionary--that's dared lift your dog's eyes to her?"

He crouched like a beast, ferine--all the obscure and diabolic passion
of him ready to spring.

"No, Mahrster."

Gregson glared at him steadily.

"What did you want of that boat?"

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

The trader sat back again, plying his billowy silk handkerchief.

"The trouble with me--" he said, reflectively, "I can't believe my own
eyes; that's the trouble with me. And how could I believe 'em?" he
inquired, with almost a plaintive note. "Such things don't happen. They
can't. Why--what kind of a man are you? Black, I believe--leastways
brown. And she--_she_--

"A Kanaka. If not you, then another. A Kanaka! To know her, be near
her--touch her--play all manner of pretty, cuddlin' tricks around
her--to--to kiss her, maybe! To crush her up in his arms--!" The words
came away from him hot and slow, from under half-shut eyes. "And I've
sat here behind them slats and watched her go by and wished I might
crawl where her little feet could walk on me....

"How should one of your sort have the cursed impudence to think of such
things? What have you got to do with heaven? Could _you_ see anything in
that blind-like look sideways--and hair so smooth over the ear? Do you
know what level eyebrows and a fullish underlip mean--hey? Do you? A
lip like a drop of blood--

"What did you want that boat for?" he cried, in a terrible voice.

"Me like'm go fish," said Motauri.

"I tell you one thing, you don't leave here till I'm sure. There's
something rotten going on. I smell it. I'm on the track, and I'll never
give up--never give up. Right now I've got the mission path watched by
my own men. Nobody gets up or down without my knowing it--to-night or
ever. D'y' mind that, before I screw the thumbs off you to make you
talk?"

It was then that he heard the slight, sobbing breath in his gallery, the
rattle of his slatted door that brought him to his feet and bounding
across the room. Reaching into the darkness he dragged out the
eaves-dropper--whose poor knees had simply given like paper, whose
desperate effort to save herself had thrown her against the jamb and
betrayed her--Miss Matilda....

"You--!" said Gregson. "You--!"

He dropped her by the threshold and started away from her with spread
fingers and fallen jaw. For a time only the sound of his labored
breathing filled the silence and the three stayed so, the woman
collapsed against a chair, Motauri swaying and winking stupidly and
Gregson, struck dumb, incredulous, empurpled at first and then slowly
paling. Without a word he spun on his heel, returned to the table and
poured himself a drink and tossed it off.

"Respectability!" he said, in the tone of conversation, caught his
collar and ripped it loose. "By Heaven!" he cried, and wrung his great
hands. "What am I going to do now? What am I going to do?"

His wandering glance lighted on the rope's end on the table-top, and he
coiled it in his hand. He began to walk to and fro before them. His face
was ghastly, his bloodshot blue eyes were set like jewels. Now he
stopped before Motauri and looked him up and down curiously. Laughter
took him like a hiccup: laughter not good to hear: but he left off as
quickly. He came back and stood over the cowering figure on the floor.

"And you're the thing that was too good for me!"

He let his gaze possess her deliberately, noting each stain and smirch,
her disordered dress and loosened hair, and pitiful, staring face.

"Well, you're not too good now," he said, wetting his lips. "No--you're
none too good! You'll marry me to-morrow--and you'll crawl on your knees
to have me. And that father of yours--that sniveling old
hypocrite--he'll crawl to make the lines, if I choose....

"When I think how I've dreamed of you! How I've lived through days and
nights of perdition, wanting you--you sweet, cold, white saint you--and
a devil after all!

"To think how I've schemed and trembled and trembled and waited, afraid
to say a word or make a move lest I'd queer any chance. Me--a common
trader with a native wife that wouldn't die. And you up there on the
hill so prim and fine. A missionary's daughter. Too respectable to
touch! And what are you now--that's been out in the night--?"

He whirled around and the maddened, jealous rage and hate rose up in his
soul like scum on a dark pool.

"With a nigger!" he screamed.

All his strength was behind the tiller-rope. It slashed Motauri over the
face so that the red welt seemed to spurt. As he lifted his arm to
repeat, with a strangled cry Motauri leapt upon him and the rest was
fury. They fought baresark, interlocked and silent, spinning from side
to side of the room. Gregson had the weight and the thews and the
cunning. He kept the other's clutch away from his throat and maneuvred
toward the table. As they reeled against it, he put forth a mighty
effort, tore off Motauri and hurled him away for an instant--long enough
to grab the revolver.

"_Nigger_--I said!"

But in the very gasp he choked. The weapon raised for a chopping,
pointblank shot, dropped over his shoulder. He rocked, pressing at his
heart, frowned heavily once, and fell crashing forward....

"Hokoolele! Hokoolele--! Up and make haste!"

Miss Matilda lifted her face from her hands.

"Let us hurry while there is time," urged Motauri, thickly. "No one has
seen or heard us yet. His boat-shed is open. We are safe!"

"Go away from me!" said Miss Matilda.

"What do you say?" he stammered. "Come. Nobody will stop us. Nobody will
know anything, about us--"

She fended him off with a gesture of instinctive loathing....

"Please go--"

"But you cannot stay here! It would be a very evil thing for you if you
were found in this house. It must never be known you were here at all."

"Don't touch me!" That seemed the only important thing.

"Hokoolele--what of the golden chain of love between us? Come with me
now!"

"I was mad. I was blind. It is judgment!"

He regarded her sorrowfully, but sternly too.

"You mean you do not want me any more?"

"No--!" she moaned, in the stupor of horror and despair. And then the
brown man, the native, whose blood had been roused by every agency that
can stir wild blood to frenzy--by love and shame, by drink, by battle
and triumph--then Motauri, the high chief, struck unerringly to the
heart of the matter and made his swift decision by his own primitive
lights. Recovering her shawl he wrapped it about her tightly, caught her
up once more willy-nilly in his arms and bore her away from that
sinister place by force....

She was lying on a bench in the veranda of her father's house and her
father himself was calling her name, when she came to herself.

"Matilda, I'm speaking to you! Where are you?"

He came through the window of her room.

"Gracious me!--have you been sleeping out there?"

She could only stare at him and down at the twisted shawl about her, for
it seemed it must be so, she had only been sleeping--with what dreams!

But his next words showed her the truth.

"Matilda, my dear," he quavered, "you must prepare yourself. Be brave.
Something dreadful has happened. One of Captain Gregson's boys has just
come up from the village with terrible news. The Captain is dead! He had
some kind of a stroke, it seems--very sudden--all alone at the time. I
shall have to hurry right down. And at this hour too, when the woods are
so damp! What a loss, what a loss, Matilda, when I had so hoped--!"

He left her, and it came to her then that she too had hoped and that she
too had lost. The mountain stream was singing in her ears, and it seemed
threaded with mockery. The moonlight came filtering through the vine,
and it was old and cold. Her wonderful night was over. She was safe. Her
life would begin again where she had dropped it, in formulated routine,
and nobody would ever know--unless Motauri--

Some curious twinge, half fearful, half regretful, drove her to peer
through the leaves and to listen for his crooning song.

  _"Bosom, here is love for you,
    O bosom, cool as night!"_

But it did not come. She was to listen for it many times, and it was
never to come. Having reached such heights and depths that night, having
achieved the impossible and the doubly impossible, going down the stream
and climbing it again, Motauri had gone down once more and at last by
way of the chute and the outfall. For Motauri was a gentleman of sorts.
But perhaps, because he was also a pagan, he had been at some pains
before that final descent to enmesh his wrists firmly and helplessly in
a knotted tendril from the passion-vine.

THE PRICE OF THE HEAD

The possessions of Christopher Alexander Pellett were these: his name,
which he was always careful to retain intact; a suit of ducks, no longer
intact, in which he lived and slept; a continuous thirst for liquor, and
a set of red whiskers. Also he had a friend. Now, no man can gain
friendship, even among the gentle islands of Polynesia, except by virtue
of some quality attaching to him. Strength, humor, villainy: he must
show some trait by which the friend can catch and hold. How, then,
explain the loving devotion lavished upon Christopher Alexander Pellett
by Karaki, the company boat boy? This was the mystery at Fufuti.

There was no harm in Pellett. He never quarreled. He never raised his
fist. Apparently he had never learned that a white man's foot, though it
wabble ever so much, is given him wherewith to kick natives out of the
road. He never even cursed any one except himself and the Chinese
half-caste who sold him brandy: which was certainly allowable because
the brandy was very bad.

On the other hand, there was no perceptible good in him. He had long
lost the will to toil, and latterly even the skill to beg. He did not
smile, nor dance, nor exhibit any of the amiable eccentricities that
sometimes recommend the drunken to a certain toleration. In any other
part of the world he must have passed without a struggle. But some
chance had drifted him to the beaches where life is as easy as a song
and his particular fate had given him a friend. And so he persisted.
That was all. He persisted, a sodden lump of flesh preserved in
alcohol....

Karaki, his friend, was a heathen from Bougainville, where some people
are smoked and others eaten. Being a black, a Melanesian, he was as much
an alien in brown Fufuti as any white. He was a serious, efficient
little man with deeply sunken eyes, a great mop of kinky hair, and a
complete absence of expression. His tastes were simple. He wore a red
cotton kerchief belted around his waist and a brass curtain ring
suspended from his nose.

Some powerful chief in his home island had sold Karaki into the service
of the trading company for three years, annexing his salary of tobacco
and beads in advance. When the time should be accomplished, Karaki would
be shipped back to Bougainville, a matter of some eight hundred miles,
where he would land no richer than before except in experience. This was
the custom. Karaki may have had plans of his own.

It is seldom that one of the black races of the Pacific shows any of the
virtues for which subject populations are admired. Fidelity and humility
can be exacted from other colors between tan and chocolate. But the
black remains the inscrutable savage. His secret heart is his own. Hence
the astonishment of Fufuti, which knew the ways of black recruits, when
Karaki took the worthless beachcomber to his bosom.

"Hy, you, Johnny," called Moy Jack, the Chinese half-caste. "Better you
come catch this fella mahster b'long you. He fella plenty too much
drunk, galow."

Karaki left the shade of the copra shed where he had been waiting an
hour or more and came forward to receive the sagging bulk that was
thrust out of doors. He took it scientifically by wrist and armpit and
swung toward the beach. Moy Jack stood on his threshold watching with
cynic interest.

"Hy, you," he said; "what name you make so much bobeley 'long that fella
mahster? S'pose you bling me all them fella pearl; me pay you one dam
fella good trade--my word!"

It annoyed Moy Jack that he had to provide the white man with a daily
drunk in exchange for the little seed pearls with which Pellett was
always flush. He knew where those pearls came from. Karaki did forbidden
diving in the lagoon to get them. Moy Jack made a good thing of the
traffic, but he could have made a much better thing by trading directly
with Karaki for a few sticks of tobacco.

"What name you give that fella mahster all them fella pearl?" demanded
Moy Jack offensively. "He plenty too much no good, galow. Close up he
die altogether."

Karaki did not reply. He looked at Moy Jack once, and the half-caste
trailed off into mutterings. For an instant there showed a strange light
in Karaki's dull eyes, like the flat, green flicker of a turning shark
glimpsed ten fathoms down....

Karaki bore his charge down the beach to the little thatched shelter of
pandanus leaves that was all his home. Tenderly he eased Pellett to a
mat, pillowed his head, bathed him with cool water, brushed the filth
from his hair and whiskers. Pellett's whiskers were true whiskers, the
kind that sprout like the barbels of a catfish, and they were a glorious
coppery, sun-gilt red. Karaki combed them out with a sandalwood comb.
Later he sat by with a fan and kept the flies from the bloated face of
the drunkard.

It was a little past midday when something brought him scurrying into
the open. For weeks he had been studying every weather sign. He knew
that the change was due when the southeast trade begins to harden
through this flawed belt of calms and cross winds. And now, as he
watched, the sharp shadows began to blur along the sands and a film
crept over the face of the sun.

All Fufuti was asleep. The house boys snored in the back veranda. Under
his netting the agent dreamed happily of big copra shipments and
bonuses. Moy Jack dozed among his bottles. Nobody would have been mad
enough to stir abroad in the noon hour of repose: nobody but Karaki, the
untamed black, who cared nothing for custom nor yet for dreams. The
light pad of his steps was lost in the surf drone on the barrier reefs.
He flitted to and fro like a wrath. And while Fufuti slept he applied
himself to a job for which he had never been hired....

Karaki had long ago ascertained two vital facts: where the key to the
trade room was kept and where the rifles and ammunition were hidden. He
opened the trade room and selected three bolts of turkey red cloth, a
few knives, two cases of tobacco, and a fine small ax. There was much
else he might have taken as well. But Karaki was a man of simple tastes,
and efficient.

With the ax he next forced the rifle chest and removed therefrom one
Winchester and a big box of cartridges. With the ax again he broke into
the boat sheds. Finally with the ax he smashed the bottoms out of the
whaleboat and the two cutters so they would be of no use to any one for
many days to come. It was really a very handy little ax, a true
tomahawk, ground to a shaving edge. Karaki took a workman's pleasure in
its keen, deep strokes. It was almost his chief prize.

On the beach lay a big proa, a stout outrigger canoe; of the kind
Karaki's own people used at Bougainville, so high of prow and stern as
to be nearly crescent-shaped. The northwest monsoon of last season had
washed it ashore at Fufuti, and Karaki had repaired it, by the agent's
own order. This proa he now launched in the lagoon, and aboard of it he
stored his loot.

Of supplies he had to make a hasty selection. He took a bag of rice and
another of sweet potatoes. He took as many coconuts as he could carry in
a net in three trips. He took a cask of water and a box of biscuit.

And here happened an odd thing.

In his search for the biscuit he came upon the agent's private store of
liquor, a dozen bottles of rare Irish whisky. He glanced at them and
passed them by. He knew what the stuff was, and he was a savage, a black
man. But he passed it by. When Moy Jack heard of that later he
remembered what he had seen in Karaki's eyes and ventured the surprising
prediction that Karaki would never be taken alive.

When all was ready Karaki went back to his thatch and aroused
Christopher Alexander Pellett.

"Hy, mahster, you come 'long me."

Mr. Pellett sat up and looked at him. That is to say, he looked. Whether
he saw anything or not belongs among the obscurer questions of
psychopathy.

"Too late," said Mr. Pellett profoundly. "This shop is closed. Copy boy!
Give all those damned loafers good night. I'm--I'm goin'--bed!"

Whereupon he fell flat on his back.

"Wake up, mahster," insisted Karaki, shaking him. "You too much strong
fella sleep. Hy-ah, mahster! Rum! You like'm rum? You catch'm rum any
amount--my word! Plenty rum, mahster!"

But even this magic call, which never failed to rouse Pellett from his
couch in the mornings, fell now on deaf ears. Pellett had had his
skinful, and the fitness of things decreed that he should soak the clock
around.

Karaki knelt beside him, pried him up until he could get a shoulder
under his middle, and lifted him like a loose bag of meal. Pellett
weighed one hundred and fifty pounds; Karaki not much more than a
hundred. Yet in some deft coolie fashion of his own the little black man
packed his burden, with the feet dragging behind, clear down to the
beach. Moreover, he managed to get it aboard the proa. Pellett was half
drowned and the proa half swamped. But Karaki managed.

No man saw their departure. Fufuti still dreamed on. Long before the
agent awoke to wrath and ruin their queer crescent craft had slipped
from the lagoon and faded away on the wings of the trade.

That first day Karaki had all he could do to keep the proa running
straight before the wind. Big smoky seas came piling up out of the
southeast and would have piled aboard if he had given them the least
chance. He was only a heathen who did not know a compass from a degree
of latitude. But his forefathers used to people these waters on
cockleshell voyages that make the venture of Columbus look like a ride
in a ferry-boat. Karaki bailed with a tin pan and sailed with a mat and
steered with a paddle: but he proceeded.

Along about sunrise Mr. Pellett stirred in the bilge and raised a
peagreen face. He took one bewildered glance overside at the seething
waste and collapsed with a groan. After a decent interval he tried
again, but this was an illusion that would not pass, and he twisted
around to Karaki sitting crouched and all aglisten with spray in the
stern.

"Rum!" he demanded.

Karaki shook his head, and a haunted look crept into Pellett's eyes.

"Take--take away all that stuff," he begged pathetically, pointing at
the ocean....

Thereafter for two days he was very, very sick, and he learned how a
small boat in any kind of a sea can move forty-seven different ways
within one and the same minute. This is no trifling bit of knowledge, as
those who have acquired it can tell. It was nearly fatal to Pellett.

On the third day he awoke with a mouth and a stomach of fumed leather
and a great weakness, but otherwise in command of his few faculties. The
gale had fallen and Karaki was quietly preparing fresh coconuts. Pellett
quaffed two before he thought to miss the brandy with which his
breakfast draft was always laced. But when he remembered the milk choked
in his throat.

"Me like'm rum."

"No got'm rum."

Pellett looked forward and aft, to windward and to lee. There was a
great deal of horizon in sight, but nothing else. For the first time he
was aware of a strangeness in events.

"What name you come so far?" he asked.

"We catch'm one big fella wind," explained Karaki.

Pellett was in no condition to question his statement nor to observe
from the careful stocking of the proa that they had not been blown to
sea on a casual fishing trip. Pellett had other things to think of. Some
of the things were pink and others purple and others were striped like
the rainbow in most surprising designs, and all were highly novel and
interesting. They came thronging out of the vasty deep to entertain
Christopher Alexander Pellett. Which they did.

You cannot cut off alcohol from a man who has been continuously pickled
for two years without results more or less picturesque. These were days
when the proa went shouting across the empty southern seas to madrigal
and choric song. Tied hand and foot and lashed under a thwart, Pellett
raved in the numbers of his innocent youth. It would have been singular
hearing had there been any to hear, but there was only Karaki, who did
not care for the lesser Cavalier poets and on whom whole pages of
"Atalanta in Calydon" were quite wasted. Now and then he threw a
dipper-ful of sea water over the white man, or spread a mat to keep the
sun from him, or fed him coconut milk by force. Karaki was a poor
audience, but an excellent nurse. Also, he combed Pellett's whiskers
twice every day.

They ran into calms. But the trade picked them up again more gently, so
that Karaki ventured to make westing, and they fled under skies as
bright as polished brass.

  _My heart is within me
    As an ash in the fire;
  Whosoever hath seen me
    Without lute, without lyre,
  Shall sing of me grievous things,
        even things that were ill
        to desire--_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett, whose face began to show a
little more like flesh and a little less like rotten kelp....

Whenever a fair chance offered Karaki landed on the lee of some one of
the tiny islets with which the Santa Cruz region is peppered and would
make shift to cook rice and potatoes in the tin dipper. This was risky,
for one day the islet proved to be inhabited. Two white men in a cutter
came out to stop them. Karaki could not hide his resemblance to a
runaway nigger, and he did not try to. But when the cutter approached
within fifty yards he suddenly announced himself as a runaway nigger
with a gun. He left the cutter sinking and one of the men dead.

"There's a bullet hole alongside me here," said Pellett from under the
thwart. "You'd better plug it."

Karaki plugged it and released his passenger, who sat up and began
stretching himself with a certain naive curiosity of his own body.

"So you're real," observed Pellett, staring hard at Karaki. "By George,
you _are_, and that's comfort."

He was right. Karaki was very real.

"What side you take'm this fella canoe?"

"Balbi," said Karaki, using the native word for Bougainville.

Pellett whistled. An eight-hundred-mile evasion in an open boat was a
considerable undertaking. It enlisted his respect. Moreover, he had just
had emphatic proof of the efficiency of this little black man.

"Balbi all some home b'long you?"

"Yes."

"All right, commodore," said Pellett. "Lead on. I don't know why you
shipped me for supercargo, but I'll see you through."

Strangely--or perhaps not so strangely--the whole Fufuti interval of his
history had been fading from his brain while the poison was ebbing from
his tissues. The Christopher Alexander Pellett that emerged was one from
earlier years: pretty much of a wreck, it was true, and a feckless,
indolent, paltry creature at best, but ordinarily human and rather more
than ordinarily intelligent.

He was very feeble at first, but Karaki's diet of coconuts and sweet
potatoes did wonders for him, and the time came when he could rejoice in
the good salt taste of the spray on his lips and forget for hours
together the crazy craving for stimulant. They made a strange crew, this
pair--simple savage and convalescent drunkard--but there was never any
question as to which was in command. That was well seen in the third
week when their food began to fail and Pellett noticed that Karaki ate
nothing for a whole day.

"See here, this won't do," he cried. "You've given me the last coconut
and kept none for yourself."

"Me no like'm eat," said Karaki shortly.

Christopher Alexander Pellett pondered many matters in long, idle hours
while the rush of foam under the proa and the creak and fling of her
outriggers were the only sounds between sea and sky. Sometimes his brow
was knotted with pain. It is not always pleasant to be wrenched back
into level contact with one's memories. Thoughts are no sweeter company
for having long been drowned. He had met the horrors of delirium. He had
now to face the livelier devils of his past. He had fled them before.

But here was no escape of any kind. So he turned and grappled with them
and laid them one by one.

When they had been at sea twenty-nine days they had nothing left of
their provisions but a little water. Karaki doled it out by moistening a
shred of coconut husk and giving Pellett the shred to suck. In spite of
Pellett's petulant protest, he would take none himself. Again the
heathen nursed the derelict, this time through the last stages of
thirst, scraping the staves of the cask and feeding him the ultimate
drop of moisture on the point of a knife.

On the thirty-sixth day from Fufuti they sighted Choiseul, a great green
wall that built up slowly across the west.

Once fairly under its headlands, Karaki might have indulged a certain
triumph. He had taken as his target the whole length of the Solomons,
some six hundred miles. But to have fetched the broadside of them
anywhere in such a craft as the proa through storm and current, without
instrument or chart, was distinctly a feat of navigation. Karaki,
however, did no celebrating. Instead, he stared long and anxiously over
his shoulder into the east.

The wind had been fitful since morning. By noon it was dead calm on a
restless, oily sea. A barometer would have told evil tales, but Karaki
must have guessed them anyway, for he staggered forward and unstepped
the little mast. Then he bound all his cargo securely under the thwarts
and put all his remaining strength into the paddle, heading for a small
outpost island where a line of white showed beach. They had been very
lucky thus far, but they were still two miles off-shore when the first
rush of the hurricane caught them.

Karaki himself was reduced to a rattle of bones in a dried skin, and
Pellett could scarce lift a hand. But Karaki fought for Pellett among
the waves that leaped up like sheets of fire on the reef. Why or how
they got through neither could have said. Perhaps because it was written
that after drink, illness, madness, and starvation the white man should
be saved by the black man again and a last time from ravening waters.
When they came ashore on the islet they were both nearly flayed, but
they were alive, and Karaki still gripped Pellett's shirt....

For a week they stayed while Pellett fattened on unlimited coconut and
Karaki tinkered the proa. It had landed in a water-logged tangle, but
Karaki's treasures were safe. He got his bearings from a passing native
fisherman, and then he knew that _all_ his treasures were safe. His home
island lay across Bougainville Strait, the stretch of water just
beyond....

"Balbi over there?" asked Pellett.

"Yes," said Karaki.

"And a mighty good thing too," cried Pellett heartily. "This is the
limit of British authority, old boy. Big fella mahster b'long Beretani
stop'm here, no can go that side."

Karaki was quite aware of it. If he feared one thing in the world, he
feared the Fiji High Court and its Resident Commissioner for the
Southern Solomons, who did sure justice upon all who transgressed in its
jurisdiction. Once beyond the Strait he might still be liable for the
stolen goods and the broken contract. But never--this was the
point--never could he be punished for anything he might choose to do
over there in Bougainville.

So Karaki was content.

And so was Christopher Alexander Pellett. His body had been wrung and
swept and scoured, and he had downed his devils. Sweet air and sunshine
were on his lips and in his heart. His bones were sweet in him. As his
vigor returned he swam the lagoon or helped Karaki at the proa. He would
spend hours hugging the warm sand or rejoicing in the delicate tracery
of some tiny sea shell, singing softly to himself while the ground swell
hushed along the beach, savoring life as he never had done.

"Oh, this is good--good!" he said.

Karaki puzzled him. Not that he vexed himself, for a smiling wonder at
everything, almost childlike, filled him these days. But he thought of
this taciturn savage, how he had capped thankless service with rarest
sacrifice.

And now that he could consider soberly, the why of it eluded him. Why?
Affection? Friendship? It must be so, and he warmed toward the silent
little man with the sunken eyes and the expressionless face from which
he could never raise a wink.

"Hy, you, Karaki, what name you no laugh all same me? What? You too much
fright 'long that fella stuff you steal? Forget it, you old black scamp.
If they ever trouble you, I'll square them somehow. By George, I'll say
I stole it myself!"

Karaki only grunted and sat down to clean his Winchester with a bit of
rag and some drops of oil he had crushed from a dried coconut.

"No, that don't reach him either," murmured Pellett, baffled. "I'd like
to know what's going on under that topknot of yours, old chap. You're
like Kipling's cat, that walks by himself. God knows I'm not ungrateful.
I wish I could show you--"

He sprang up.

"Karaki! Me one big fella friend 'long you: savee? You one big fella
friend 'long me: savee? We two dam big fella friend, my word!... What?"

"Yes," said Karaki. No other response. He looked at Pellett and he
looked away toward Bougainville. "Yes," he said, "my word," and went on
cleaning his gun--the black islander, inscrutable, incomprehensible, an
enigma always, and to the end.

The end came two days later at Bougainville.

Under a gorgeous dawn they came into a bay that opened before their prow
as with jeweled arms of welcome. The land lay lapped in bright garments
like a sleeper half awakened, all flushed and smiling, sensuous
intimate, thrilling with life, breathing warm scents--

These were some of the foolish phrases Pellett babbled to himself as he
leaped ashore and ran up on a rocky point to see and to feel and to draw
all the charm of the place to himself.

Meanwhile Karaki, that simple and efficient little man, was proceeding
methodically about his own affairs. He landed his bolts of cloth, his
tobacco, his knives, and the other loot. He landed his box of cartridges
and his rifle and his fine tomahawk. The goods were somewhat damaged by
sea water, but the weapons had been carefully cleaned and polished....

Pellett was declaiming poetry aloud to the alluring solitude when he was
aware of a gentle footfall and turned, surprised to find Karaki standing
just behind him with the rifle at his hip and the ax in his hand.

"Well," said Pellett cheerfully, "what d'you want, old chappie?"

"Me like," said Karaki, while there gleamed in his eyes the strange
light that Moy Jack had glimpsed there, like the flicker of a turning
shark; "me like'm too much one fella head b'long you!"

"What? Head! Whose--my head?"

"Yes," said Karaki simply.

That was the way of it. That was all the mystery. The savage had fallen
enamored of the head of the beachcomber, and Christopher Alexander
Pellett had been betrayed by his fatal red whiskers. In Karaki's country
a white man's head, well smoked, is a thing to be desired above wealth,
above lands and chiefships, fame, and the love of women. In all
Karaki's country was no head like the head of Pellett. Therefore Karaki
had served to win it with the patience and single faith of a Jacob. For
this he had schemed and waited, committed theft and murder, expended
sweat and cunning, starved and denied himself, nursed, watched, tended,
fed, and saved his man that he might bring the head alive and on the
hoof--so to speak--to the spot where he could remove it at leisure and
enjoy the fruits of his labor in safety.

Pellett saw all this at a flash, understood it so far as any white could
understand: the whole elemental and stupendous simplicity of it. And
standing there in his new strength and sanity under the fair promise of
the morning, he gave a laugh that pealed across the waters and started
the sea birds from their cliffs, the deep-throated laugh of a man who
fathoms and accepts the last great jest....

For finally, by corrected list, the possessions of Christopher Alexander
Pellett were these: his name, still intact; the ruins of some rusty
ducks; his precious red whiskers--and a soul which had been neatly
recovered, renewed, refurbished, reanimated, and restored to him by his
good friend Karaki.

  _"Thou shouldst die as he dies,
    For whom none sheddeth tears;
  Filling thine eyes
    And fulfilling thine ears
  With the brilliance ... the bloom
      and the beauty...."_

Thus chanted Christopher Alexander Pellett over the waters of the bay,
and then whirled, throwing wide his arms:

"Shoot, damn you! It's cheap at the price!"

THE SLANTED BEAM

All the world meets beneath the towering spire of Shway Dagohn, which
pins back the clouds and throws a shadow between India and the China
Sea. All paths in the East tend toward that great pagoda with its mighty
shaft of gold. Around the sweep of its pedestal, among its terraced
mazes, is one of the common crossroads where men as various as their
skins and their faiths come to mingle; to worship or to wonder: seeking
each in his own fashion whatever clue to the meaning of things he can
take from that vast finger which carries the eye and the soul up and up
and points forever to the heart of mystery.

So it was natural enough, as it was also inevitable and ordained since
the beginning of time, that Cloots should have met the headman of
Apyodaw at last in one of the tiny shrines clustering under the Temple
of the Slanted Beam on Thehngoottara Hill....

The shrine in no way differed from the many lesser chapels and _zaydees_
that lined the ramp and the inner and outer platforms. Together they
might have seemed a jumble of booths thrown up there to attract the
unhurrying, sweet-voiced, hip-swinging natives who drifted and gossiped
like holiday makers at a fair.

But those booths were built of enduring stone with a serene and flawless
symmetry. And the wares they offered were the philosophies of an old,
old religion. And the folk themselves in their thighbound silks of
softened maroon and olive and citrine and cutch, with the pink fillets
about their brows and their open and twinkling brown faces, were a very
ancient folk indeed, who knew what they knew and did as they did a
small matter of thirty centuries ago.

Cloots stepped into the chapel for no purpose, in mere idle discernment
of color and contrast.

The pagoda and its whole base, dominating the city, swam in a level
flood of late sunset. Every surface had taken an almost intolerable
richness and warmth, from the far, jeweled spike of the _htee_ four
hundred feet above, down through fire-gilt and smoldering saffron to the
pigeon-blood ruby of the monastery roofs below. Even the shadows gave
off a purplish haze. But here, inside this plain, windowless cell of
white-washed wall and gray pavement, the visitor passed with the swift
relief of a diver's plunge to cool and quiet, and the pervading peace of
the Excellent Law.

At the end facing the doorway was the sole furnishing--a deep niche and
altar where sat the Buddha in perpetual contemplation.

Some forgotten devotee, toiling wearily like the rest of us up the
ladder of existence, had once earned the right to skip a step or two by
the gift of this life-size image. Some forgotten artist had acquired
merit by faithfully carving and lacquering it on teak, with the left
hand lying palm upward in the lap and the right hanging over the
knee--with the calm and passionless regard which somehow, no matter what
the medium, no matter what conventions interpose, is always so surely
portrayed. But that had been long and long ago. Decay had eaten through
those painted and gilded robes. The soot of many years had tanned those
sacred lineaments to an obscure and homely human tint.

Along the near edge of the altar lay a shallow trough for the better
disposal of such offerings as the shrine might receive: fresh flowers
and flakes of popped and colored rice, incense sticks of which the
vapor rose in a slow, unwavering veil, and a row of paper flags to
record the prayers of the pious.

Midway there burned a single taper, a point of light that dimly
illumined the holy spot and revealed to Cloots, as he entered, its only
other occupant.

On a bamboo mat knelt a young girl, fairly on her knees, as the Rule
allows for such frail creatures. Her black hair was drawn sleek as a
bird's wing. At her breast she held a new lotus blossom, no softer nor
more delicate than the fingers that offered it. Her little feet were
carefully tucked within the silken _tamehn_. Her head was bowed. And the
gleaming curve of her body, all her lithe vigor, was subdued, was
humbled, to the act of ecstatic supplication before the Excellent One.

Cloots arrived as a confident and more or less truly appreciative
observer of all these details. They were familiar to him. He understood
them, so far as any perceptive, far-wandering white is likely to
understand. They ministered to him.

He approved the flaring sunset and he approved this discreet
retreat--the hushed and perfumed air of worship no less than the stir
and brilliance outside. He could interpret the sigh of imploring lips
and the trouble of a fluttered little breast before the altar as keenly
as the murmur and laughter of the barefoot crowds and the distant music
of numberless pagoda chimes. He enjoyed the more intimate delights of
exotic life as well as its bright outward cheek. Particularly, having
just renewed his contact with an engaging and responsive native people,
he enjoyed this opportunity with a native girl--decidedly engaging and
responsive probably.

No mere brutal, casual sensualist was Cloots. He found it good to be
alive. He found it very good to be back in a country where he was master
of the idiom and the customs. He found it exceeding good to be
contemplating the skillful conquest of such a pilgrim, so earnest, so
adorable, and so appropriately concerned. The lady, he gathered, was
praying for a husband....

He smiled, and when he turned his glance it encountered the eyes of the
headman of Apyodaw, who had entered noiselessly at his side and who now
stood between him and the entrance.

"I knew I should find thee, Shway Cloots."

It said something for Cloots that he did not cease smiling all at once,
that he gave no outward sign, and that he was able to answer quite soon
and quite steadily in the same dialect.

"Hast been looking for me, Moung Poh Sin?"

"I did not have to look, Shway. It was written."

"Hast been waiting for me, then?"

"It was written I would have to wait."

"Was it also written that I had become any safe or easy game to track
into a corner?" demanded Cloots.

"I did not track thee."

"Half an hour ago I left the docks, newly landed from Moulmein. No man
could have given thee word of my return. No man knew if ever I should
return."

"I knew."

"By that I mark thee a liar and a fool, Moung Poh Sin, for I knew it not
myself. I see now thou hast been watching and spying for me. By the
harbor, or by the pagoda here, belike. A long vigil.... But it can
profit nothing. What could it profit thee? I am not the kind to be
followed and hunted down."

"I tell thee, Shway, I did not follow at all. At the appointed time I
came and thou wert here. The talk and all things else come in their
order."

"So and so. And what else is to come, thinkest thou?"

"At sunset to-day," said the other quietly, "at big-bell time, I am to
slay thee in this chapel under the Slanted Beam."...

Cloots loosened his collar. He had had a bit of a start. He had been
surprised into rather nervous speech. But he recovered himself. Merely
he was aware of a slight oppression, due, no doubt, to the scented fumes
in this inclosed space. Also, he took occasion in lowering his hand to
run one finger lightly down the front of his green twill shooting jacket
so that the buttons were slipped and the lapels left open. "Art mad?" he
inquired. "What babble is this, Moung Poh Sin?" he rasped abruptly.
"Stand away from that door, dog! Remove--stand off!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not budge.

Now, there are ways and ways of regarding the native within the areas of
white empery. As a sort of inferior and obedient jinn, supplied by
Providence and invoked by a gesture to fetch and to carry at need. As a
specimen of the genus homo, also inferior and obedient, but quite quaint
and decorative too, and really rather useful, you know, in his place. Or
again, less commonly, as an elder member of the family, with resources
and subtleties of his own which may or may not be inferior, and which
may or may not lead to obedience, but which lie as far outside the chart
of the Western mind as a quadratic complex lies outside a postage stamp.

This last view is not popular, and when brought home to the invader has
proved at times extremely discomposing.

Moung Poh Sin was a squat, middle-aged person about half the size of
Cloots, with a flat and serious face resembling a design punched
laboriously on a well-worn saddle flap. There was a little about him to
be called either quaint or decorative. His bare, rugged chest under the
narrow-edged coat; his sturdy, misshapen legs to which the silk _pasoh_
lent scanty disguise; the slitted eyes that held a glint of the green
jade from his own hills--all his features were rude and resistant. And
he came by them in the way of average after his kind, for he was part
Kachin, which is the warlike strain of the upcountry and the breed of
dacoits and raiders from the dawn of history.

Cloots had taken the measure of him months before and once for all, he
would have said, in his smoky little village. And to appearance the
fellow had not changed a hair from the simple, untaught, somewhat
hard-bitten but altogether undistinguished headman of Apyodaw. He was
just what he had always been. Yet Cloots saw now with transfixing
clarity that he did not know him in the least--could never have known
him. For this native, who was a very ordinary native, had withdrawn
himself, after the immemorial manner of the native on his own occasions,
beyond every index of temper or purpose: fear, respect, rage, hate,
injured pride, or lacerated honor; impatience, vindictiveness, greed--or
doubt.

Cloots could not fathom Moung Poh Sin. He could not follow the thought
process of Moung Poh Sin. Worst of all, he could not divine those
elements from which Moung Poh Sin had borrowed such absolute and amazing
assurance. It made him cautious.

"Softly," he said. "Softly a while. There is some folly here. Name the
business."

"There is no business, Shway. Only a debt."

"All debts of money were long ago settled between us."

"It is not money, Shway. Only my house is empty; my hearth is cold. My
heart is both cold and empty. There is no one under my roof to husk the
paddy, or to cook, or to sing, or to drive away evil spirits with
laughter. There will never be any fat babies rolling about the mats or
swinging in the basket at my home while the mother tells the _Sehn-nee_,
the cradle song. Once I had a treasure in my house, Shway. Where is that
treasure now?"

"Meaning thy daughter, Moung Poh Sin?" asked Cloots directly to show
himself quite cool and firm. "Meaning Mah Soung, thy daughter?"

"Mah Soung is dead," said the headman.

"Mah Soung is dead," repeated Cloots, and an echo ran back and forth
between the walls with his word. He glanced swiftly toward the kneeling
maiden by the altar in the dim taper light, and for all his control he
could not repress the strangest flicker of fancy. She looked very like
Mah Soung. Very like. Some tilt of the head, some odd, soft line of the
shining tress over the ear started a poignant dart of memory, caught his
breath sharp. It was in just such a place as this, he recalled, in
pursuit of just such an idle, colorful adventure, that he first had
found Mah Soung....

But then--he told himself hastily--he had seen Mah Soung die. Who but he
had seen her die? She had died with her adoring eyes and her slender
yellow fingers uplifted to him as this girl's eyes and fingers were
lifted to the sacred image.

A curious qualm took him, one of those turns of sick uncertainty that
now and then seek out and wring the nerve of any white man who ventures
a bit too far off white man's ground.

He was still staring as the worshiper rose from the mat, placed her
water lily reverently on the altar and with obeisance and the murmured
invocation that begins "Awgatha, by this offering I free me from the
Three Calamities," faced about and glided in silence between Cloots and
Moung Poh Sin and so on and out of the chapel and out of their ken
forever.

She did not notice either man. She was quite unconscious of them. They
had spoken in a hill dialect, all incomprehensible to her.... She was
not Mah Soung, of course--though Cloots wiped a brow gone damp and
chill.

"I have learned," continued the headman of Apyodaw--"I have learned how
my child died--"

Cloots regained his speech in a curt laugh.

"What is that to me, old man? Yesterday's rice is neither eaten nor paid
for twice."

"There remains, however, Shway, every man's account with the _nats_ and
such guarding spirits as may be; and their just pay is taken always in
due course."

"Do they ask more than thee for a daughter? Thy payment was the highest
market rate, at least--But again I say, stand aside. I weary of thee,
Moung Poh Sin."

But Moung Poh Sin did not move.

"There is not much longer to wait," he said, neither grim nor humorous,
simply unvarying. "The sun already has dipped. Soon the big bell speaks
when all will be paid."

And in fact it became clear to Cloots that this affair would have to be
solved on the spot. He was not minded to stand any more of it nor to
leave Moung Poh Sin in train to repeat such performances. He had lost
that perfectly ripping new love toy of a girl. A very jolly evening had
been ruined for him, and his confident balance most inexplicably and
painfully shaken. And here this insignificant relic of a discarded past
was undertaking to block his steps. This flute-toned, slab-faced little
heathen was presuming to threaten him, to name the moment when a
superior white, with his strength and his vision, with his civilized
capacity for perceptions and enjoyments, should suddenly cease to be....

He shifted both fists easily to his belt and took a watchful survey of
the figure by the doorway--and he did some rapid calculating.

Outside on the platform between west and east, between flame and dark,
Shway Dagohn showed now like one cutting from a jasper opal. Each flake
and streak of coloring had mellowed. And, with that, all sounds seemed
mellower too, as if they came more resonantly on the burdened air.
Everywhere, all about, the pagoda bells were ringing: bells of bronze
and silver and gold, bells hammered by devout and lusty celebrants,
bells insistently jangled by begging priests, bells that tinkled and
sighed to any stray breeze. And the whole tide of color and of sound was
drawing to an end, a definite climax: presently the tropic night would
fall like a curtain, and presently the huge central bell, Mahah Ganda,
"the great sweet voice" which is the voice of a continent, would bestir
itself ever so slightly for an instant at the touch of its monstrous
battering-ram and wake brazen thunder far and wide.

Cloots reckoned that he had perhaps five minutes before the stated
limit. It was to be a sort of test, as he saw and accepted. He would
have to decide how well, after all, he did understand the ancient half
of the earth to which he and others like him went swaggering as
conquerors and masters. He would have to demonstrate which of the
various ways and ways and just how seriously he was going to take this
ancient people and their self-sufficing and queerly keyed formulas, so
strange and vivid and charming. And whether he was going to be laid
under some kind of psychic blackmail every time he chose to snatch a
delicious interpretation.

If he meant to be quite sure of that essential white superiority of
this, the time had come to make it good.

He smiled again as he swung the right lapel of his twill jacket a little
farther to the right....

"Moung Poh Sin," he began, almost amiably, "with the rest of these
matters which seem so well and so fully known to thee, is it also known
where I have been since I went away?"

"No, Shway."

"Now, as it chanced, I went to the Salween country; even up into Yunnan,
the Cloudy South. And there, in those wild parts, I hunted the painted
leopard and the fishing cat and the tiger cat and other such, as I have
done before.... Thou hast seen me shoot?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Rememberest thou, perhaps, how once at Apyodaw in a merry mood, to show
my skill and for a jest, I shot away one by one the six strings from a
minstrel's harp?"

"Yes, Shway."

"And again, how with the short gun I slew a pigeon on a housetop and
tore the head from its body?"

"Yes, Shway."

"Then, for the third and the last time, I warn thee to get clear of that
door and of me--and to keep clear, Moung Poh Sin. I have been patient
and tolerant, marveling too much at thy insolence to be rightly angered.
But I have had enough. By every law of the land and by common privilege
of my kind, thy life is forfeit to me for daring to breathe these
threats. And it was a pity of thy cunning, and a flaw in thy
information, not to have learned whence I came--and whether I would be
likely to come from a place like Yunnan unarmed, Moung Poh Sin!"

But Moung Poh Sin did not stir.

"That can make no change, Shway. My own life is of no moment, and thine
is surely forfeit, as I told thee--here by the Slanted Beam when the sun
sets. What will be will be. It is written."

Whereupon Cloots very quickly and expertly fired once from the hip. The
shot burst with a racketing smash against the eardrums. To any on the
platform it might have just sounded as a clap of hands, no louder. But
within these solid blank walls it multiplied like a volley, then
dwindled and passed. A weft of smoke went drifting across the taper, and
that too passed. The chapel fell quiet. There had been no visible
result.

At one side stood the white man, half crouching in the act, tense and
expectant; and by the doorway stood the headman of Apyodaw, planted in
the same position he had held throughout, with the rectangle of fading
daylight behind him--a little brown figure in neutral tinted silks....

"They do not strike the big bell until the last ray of the sun,"
explained Moung Poh Sin, without the least quiver of emotion, without
the least break of intonation. "We have yet some moments to wait."

Cloots glared at him, astonished, unable and unwilling to believe,
picturing the collapse, waiting from one tick of time to the next to see
the fellow crumple on the stones. But nothing happened, nothing came of
it, and he brought up his arm and the glittering, compact fistful of
steel, and this time he took deliberate aim.

Again the shot and smashing echo. Again the still pause.

"They will be making ready now," said Moung Poh Sin evenly. "They will
be swinging out the striker of the big bell."

All shadows about the pagoda had run long and black like spurts of jet
and its western edge was no more than lined with copper; only the
topmost peak caught a last radiance and spread and shed a faint ruddy
glow and a patch of that lay on the threshold of the chapel....

Cloots had fallen back to the wall with sagging jaw, with eyes fixed
and starting in their sockets. He was stricken; he was beaten. For he
had come to the end of things known and conceivable. He had reached the
end of the white man's resource and had made the ultimate appeal of the
white man's civilization--and had failed. Beyond lay the incredible and
the impossible. It was rather a galvanic impulse than any reasoned
operation by which he brought up his weapon in both shaking hands,
steadied an elbow against his side and fired a third and last despairing
shot.

From somewhere, from under their feet as it seemed, there issued a vast
booming vibration; the air fluttered to a single gigantic, metallic
stroke. And it was then and not until then that Moung Poh Sin moved at
last and drew from the silken folds at his waist a broad, short-shafted
knife and all with perfect precision and deliberation advanced to do
what he was there to do.

"The time has come," said Moung Poh Sin....

Outside it had gone quite dark.

Those two busy officials of colonial administration whose duty it was to
gather up and to sort out the threads of local crime in that far Eastern
port wasted no time and few words about their work. They had been on
many cases together. Moreover, this particular case offered a bare
simplicity in its few apparent details. Also, since it concerned the
death of a white, it called for urgent action, and they went at it with
precision and dispatch while the police guard held the entrance against
a wondering throng.

"How long has he been dead?" asked the assistant inspector.

"Some ten minutes, I should say," returned the medical examiner. "He's
still warm."

"Instantaneous?"

"As nearly as possible. His heart's been split in half, you might say,
with this _dah_." The doctor indicated a short iron dagger buried to
its iron handle in the victim's left breast. "One jab, and no bungling
about it."

"Done by a native," remarked the inspector, bending over.

"Evidently. But what kind of a Buddhist was he, giving himself to the
frozen Buddhist hell by taking a life?"

"Not much of a Buddhist. That's a hill weapon. They're hardly what you'd
call orthodox in the hills."

"Quite true," agreed the doctor. "Buddhism is a modern novelty to the
hills. What's a matter of three thousand years? They've got a system
rather older."

"And we've got a story here, if we could only read it, that's older than
any system."

"But still--to kill a man in a shrine, eh?"

"Yes. He must have had a pretty good reason."

Something in the other's tone made the doctor look up.

"You knew this chap?"

"Slightly," said the inspector. "Name of Cloots. He's been cruising
about after jade and ruby mines one time and another, living among the
people. Kind of a prospecting tramp and adventurer--you know the type.
Rather an obnoxious beast, if he's the one I've heard about."

The doctor sought no further comments on Cloots--that was quite
sufficient and might serve for an epitaph. He preferred to jot down
certain necessary official entries in his little book, and as the light
was bad he moved away toward the altar. Meanwhile the inspector remained
by the body, outsprawled there in a crimson pool, until an exclamation
brought him spinning around to find his colleague standing under the
glimmer of the lone taper and looking singularly pale, he thought.

But the doctor's question was quietly put.

"Have you any notion what became of the murderer?"

"It's a queer business," admitted the inspector, frowning. "I wish I
could begin to learn something of the capabilities of these people.
There must have been three hundred about the platform and the stairs.
And we can't dig up a clue to save ourselves."

"No theory yet?"

"What theory can there be? You see the material as well as I. A corpse,
a knife, and an empty shrine. It's a clear get-away, without a witness."

"Quite so. But aren't you forgetting this witness?"

The doctor laid a finger on the image of the Buddha. There it sat behind
the taper and the offerings and the veiling vapor of the incense. There
it sat cross-legged in its niche, with the left hand lying palm upward
in the lap and the right hanging over the knee--with the calm and
passionless and inscrutable regard of the tradition--a life-size image,
whose painted garments in gilt and old rose, whose set and peaceful
features had been dimmed to a uniform human tint. A very ordinary
image....

At least so it seemed to the bewildered inspector. Until he saw it sag a
trifle. Until he saw it give flaccidly under the doctor's touch. And
then he saw that the actual image had been displaced and jammed back
into the niche for a support and that this--this was a substitute.

"Dead!" he breathed.

The doctor dropped the wrist he had been thumbing.

"Dead," he affirmed rather shakily. "And not only dead, but cold!...
Inspector, I'm not a fanciful man, would you say? I'm not one to believe
much in deviations from the normal--in aberrations from the positive,
eh?--even under the Temple of the Slanted Beam. But I'd swear in any
court--west of Suez, I mean--I'd take my solemn oath the fellow was dead
when he climbed to that altar!... It's the plain evidence. It's as
certain as anything I know, if I know anything.... Dead?... He was dead
the first of the two! He was obliterated, wiped out, blasted out of
existence, _a full five minutes before he ever killed that white chap
there on the floor_!"

"Capabilities," stammered the inspector. "Would you call that suspended
animation, now--or what?"

"I'd call it suspended extinction, if there were such a thing in medical
science. As it is, I'll call it suspended judgment and let it go at
that."

They stayed staring at Moung Poh Sin for a while.

"'There are more things 'twixt'--" began the doctor.

"Twixt East and West," suggested the inspector.

"Quite so. And if you doubt my word for it--look!"...

He lifted aside the narrow-edged coat to show the naked, rugged breast
beneath; and there, a little to the left, within a space that might have
been covered with a lotus leaf were three smooth, round bullet holes
where the late headman of Apyodaw had been drilled through the
heart--three times.

THE RED MARK

Even now nobody can tell his name, though doubtless it was a grand and a
proud one. Perhaps you could find it in the files of the Bordeaux press
twenty years ago, when they sentenced him to transportation for life for
five proved murders. Since then it has been officially forgotten. But
the man himself has lived on. He lives and he continues to develop his
capabilities--as we are all expected to do here in New Caledonia.

M. de Nou, we call him. He is our only convict official. Ordinarily, you
comprehend, our jailers do not admit convicts to the administration. We
are citizens, if you like, in this criminal commonwealth. We are the
populace of this outlaw colony at the far navel of the earth. We are
artisans, workmen, domestics: we are masons, cooks, farmers: we are even
landholders and concessionaires--enjoying the high privilege of forced
labor, the lofty civic title of cattle in a bull-pen. It is all very
philanthropic: but we have not yet risen to fill posts under the
government. Except one of us. He has been raised because they could find
no other, convict or free, to perform the peculiar duties of the
position. That is M. de Nou. We hate him. There is not a creature of us
from Balade to Nouméa, from the nickel mines of Thio to the forests of
Baie du Sud, that does not hate and fear him as some other people hate
and fear sin. The very Canaques flee at the whisper of his coming and
invoke their own dark gods against this white demon in the flesh. Eight
thousand felons bear the thought of him in daily bitterness. We have
been thieves, assassins, poisoners: we have been set aside in a sort of
infected rubbish-box, the sweepings of the prisons: but the last of us,
perishing from thirst, would turn back a cup that had been polluted by
the touch of M. de Nou. When M. de Nou comes to die the devil will have
to dig a deeper pit. Hell is too good for M. de Nou.

He is the executioner. He operates the guillotine. Not for any pay or
profit nor for the rank it gives him: but from choice. It is his
capability! It is the thing he likes to do.

Me, I am even with him. I am even with him against all time. Should it
be my fate to pass through his hands some day, should he stand to
perform his last dreadful offices for me, still am I even with him. I
would grin from under the slide itself and I would say to him--"M. de
Nou, I am even with you!" But I would not tell him how. I would turn
silent from those haunted yellow eyes, half-understanding and ravening
at me, and I would die content to leave him to his damnation. No, I
would not tell!... Only I am telling you, truly, so that perhaps this
tale may reach some of our friends who have escaped from New Caledonia
into the world again. They will remember, and they will rejoice to hear
how I evened the score on M. de Nou. Listen:

It was soon after my release from the Collective--when I was considered
to be properly chastened by residence in the cells--that I had the
ill-luck to meet this individual.

You can see for yourself I was never built for rude labor. But I have a
certain deftness of my fingers and perhaps also--well, a certain
polish--what?... Monsieur agrees? Too kind! Your servant, Monsieur....
Anyway, it was quite natural I should find employment with Maître
Sergeo, he who keeps the barber shop in the Rue des Fleurs.

Maître Sergeo is a worthy man, a libéré, which means he was formerly a
life convict himself, you understand, though since restored to certain
rights within the colony limits. Requiring an assistant at his lathery
trade he applied to the penitentiary on Ile de Nou.

"Here is a brisk fellow," said the sub-commandant, leading me out like a
horse at a fair. "Number 7897. Docile and clever. Condemned for eight
years. Having served his Collective with a clear record. If you are ever
dull about your place he will sing you the latest operas. He has all the
polite accomplishments."

"A duke in trouble," suggested Maître Sergeo, regarding me with his
sober twinkle. "What romance!... Perhaps he is the Red Mark himself!"

Strange he should have said that. Strange, too, that I should have heard
the term then and there for the first time in my life. Afterwards I
found it common enough, a kind of by-word among people who affect to
share the inner mysteries of police and crime. And later still I had
good reason to remember it.

Meanwhile the sub-commandant was encouraging no unofficial illusions on
my account.

"I said nothing about a duke," he returned. "But this is a superior
type. He has been a student in his day and even has taken prizes."

"I hope he has not the habit of taking them from the till," said Maître
Sergeo, like a prudent patron. "What was his little affair?"

The sub-commandant consulted my ticket.

"An argument with a knife, it appears. A favorable case. Only his enemy
was so ill-conditioned as to die."

"I shall employ him," decided Maître Sergeo. "A man who is handy with a
knife should also qualify with a razor."

That is how I came, as Bibi-Ri always said, to be scraping throats
instead of cutting them. Myself, I considered the jest rather poor
taste and Bibi-Ri a good deal of a chattering monkey. But what would
you? Nobody could be angry with that mad fellow. He was privileged.

Also, as it happened, Bibi-Ri himself was my single client on this
particular afternoon of which I speak. I recall it with an authentic
clearness: one of those days made in paradise for a reproach upon us
poor wretches in purgatory: the air sweet and mellow, spiced with tropic
blossoms: the sky a blue ravishment: the sunlight tawny in the street
outside as if seen through a glass of rich wine.

It was very quiet and peaceful. From the Place des Cocotiers not far
away one heard the band discoursing. Those convict musicians were
playing _Perle d'Italie_, as I bring to mind: a faded but graceful
melody. One could be almost happy at moments like this, forgetting the
shameful canvas uniform and the mockery of one's freedom on a leash. I
even hummed the tune as I listened and kept the measure with stropping
my blade.

I waited for Bibi-Ri. By an amiable conceit he never failed each day to
get his chin new razored--though in truth it resembled nothing so much
as a small onion: as I often told him.

"That is no reason why you should peel it, sacred farceur!" he would
sputter. "Please to notice I have only the one skin to my face!"

But this day he was late. I missed the merry rascal. His hour went by
and still he did not come. And then, of a sudden, I spied him.

He was passing among the market stalls on the opposite pave:
unmistakable, his quick, spare figure in the jacket tight-buttoned to
the chin as he always wore it and the convict's straw hat pulled low on
his brow. Bibi-Ri in fact. But he never even glanced to my side. At the
pace of a rent collector he hurried by and disappeared.... This is
singular, I thought. What game has he started now?

Presently he came hurrying back again, and this trip I discovered he was
following a girl. But yes! A market girl. Only a slip of a thing--I
could not see her well--a dainty piece she seemed, supple as a kitten,
who threaded her way with a basket on her arm. I caught a flash of bare
ankle white as milk, the sheen of her hair, smooth like a raven's wing:
and she was gone, with Bibi-Ri at her skirts.

Three times I saw them so, through the drifting chaffering throng.

"The rogue!" I murmured. "He has found a better amusement than getting
himself flayed by me. Evidently!"

At the very word came a swift clatter of sandals and who should burst
into the shop upon me but that same Bibi-Ri. I had a finger lifted to
accuse him, but I stopped at sight of his face.

"Dumail!" he cried. "Hide me!"

My faith, he took one's breath away.

"Hide me and say nothing!" he implored.

Well, then I thought he was simply up to some of his jokes again. You
understand there is no actual hiding in a penal settlement, where we all
live in the eye of the police. Nevertheless I obeyed, planted him in my
chair, flung a cloth about his neck and slapped on a great mask of
lather.

I had him well settled under the razor when a shadow edged across the
doorway. Glancing over his shoulder, Bibi-Ri made a jump to rise.

"Animal!" I protested. "Will you take care!"

But I saw him staring with a strange fear.

Just outside by the threshold stood a man, an amazingly tall man,
looking in at us. The sunlight descended on him there like the flood of
a proscenium and he himself might have seemed a player in some stage
burlesque. Yes, one might have smiled at first glimpse of him: a
travesty of fashion in his long black redingote and varnished high hat
of ancient form which added the touch of caricature to his height. One
might have smiled, I say ... but the smile would have frozen next
instant as a ripple freezes on a street puddle.

His face was a moist and shining white, the white of a corpse under the
icy spray of the Morgue. He was old, of reverend years, though still
straight and strong as a poplar. And with that mouth of painted passion
and a great nose curved like a saber and the glittering tiger eyes in
the skull of him--I leave you to imagine any one more appalling.

Close behind him came another: a bandy-legged, squat fellow like a
little black spider, in attendance.

Even then, before knowing, I shrank from them both. They resembled the
bizarre and evil figures of the Guignol that used to haunt my dreams in
childhood. Truly. And the tall one was Polichinelle, the image of a
gratuitous and uncomprehended wickedness.

"Well done, hireling," he observed, in the voice of a crow. "Well done
indeed! You are something of a craftsman too. A good beginning. And a
good subject, who is ripe to have the head shaved from his shoulders, I
should think.... Pray continue," he said. "Cut again and cut deeper!"

Thereupon I became aware he was addressing me, and with the most
pointed, the most sinister interest: and next I found myself still
holding the razor over Bibi-Ri's cheek where he had taken an ugly gash.
That big devil smiled and chuckled in intimate fashion at my red blade.
His eyes shone like topaz. Stupidly I followed their gaze. When I looked
up again ... the two outside were gone.

"Name of God!" I cried. "Who are those?"

Bibi-Ri had fallen back in his chair.

"The vultures!"

Well, I understood fast enough that I had made acquaintance of the
terrible M. de Nou. The other would be his aide and familiar, a former
Polish anarchist--I had heard--whom even the society of convicts
rejected and who bore the fit name: Bombiste. These were the dreaded
servants of the guillotine. But now they had passed I was bold as the
best: I could mock myself.

"Imbeciles!" I laughed. "To be scared by an old bogey like that! The
executioner? So be it. We can curse him and let him go.... Though in
truth he has a sickly notion of an afternoon call, the lascar! ... Sit
still while I plaster that sliced onion of yours."

But something had come upon Bibi-Ri. For once he gave me back no jest.

"The monster has marked me down! You heard him? It is a warning!" At
that he started up, all streaky with soap and blood as he was, and must
rush away on some errand. And then remembering it would be impossible to
run the police limits of Nouméa before dark, collapsed again. "I am
lost!"

Figure my amazement.

"But how?" I demanded. "Does your blessed executioner have power to pick
his own victims?... Does he go about cropping heads, for example, like a
man in a flower garden? What can he make to you? ... Unless perhaps he
has come between you and that fair fortune I saw you pursuing so
ardently a moment ago."

The way his jaw dropped! As if I had touched the very spring of his
destiny.

Now you can guess that I knew perhaps a little--no matter how little--of
lawlessness and violence and secret intrigue persisting within this
model criminal laboratory of ours. Do you change vice to virtue by
transporting it half a world away and bottling it up? A disturbing
question. At least if you expect your convicts to work, to aspire, even
to marry and to multiply like free men, you must expect them also to
covet, to scheme, to quarrel and to sin--again like free men. These
facts I had noted without exploring too deeply, you comprehend. But
Bibi-Ri was the last I should have credited with a share in their darker
meaning.

Only picture this client as I had found him. A nimble rogue: a kind of
licensed pest, with a droll face resembling those rubber toys that wink
and grimace between your fingers. True, he had been shipped with the
worst of us. But what of that? One knows these gentlemen the Parisian
police: how they cry a wolf and then go out and nab some stray puppy in
the street. Bibi-Ri! One wondered how he had ever earned his sentence.

And yet--and yet there was certainly something about the fellow. In his
eyes were depths. Something fateful and despairing. Something, in view
of his accustomed mad humor, to make me pitiful and uneasy.

"Look here, my zig," I said. "I have seen too much and not enough. What
have you done? I spy a gay mystery that makes a comedian like you play
such a part."

"Perhaps it is the other part I have to play," he returned, with a gleam
of his proper spirit. "Perhaps I am playing it at the last gasp of
fright--my poor knees clapping like castanets......

"Dumail," he said, "put it this way: Suppose you were within three
counted weeks of your final release from this hell of an island. Your
little red ticket in hand and the actual ship in harbor that presently
should bear you home. Within sight of heaven--you understand. Able to
taste it. Able to count the days still left you like so many bars on a
red-hot gridiron still to be crossed. Three little weeks, Dumail!...
And then your sacred luck offered to trip you up and cheat you again....
Rigolo--what?"

"Very rigolo," I agreed, luring him. "But it seems to me you are
borrowing your effects from the martyrdom of the holy St. Laurent."

"Oh, I have a stranger impersonation than that in my repertoire," he
flashed. "Conceive, if you can, that I am also supposed to fill the rôle
of a seigneur--and a very noble gentlemen, too--in disguise!"

Perched there on the chair with a dirty towel about his neck, his hair
in a wisp, smeared like a clown and preaching his gentility, he made a
figure completely comic--should I say?--or tragic. Anyway I gave a
gesture of derision that stung him past endurance.

"Dumail--" he broke out. "You laugh? Dumail, will you believe this?
There is awaiting me back home at the present moment a heritage of
millions. Of millions, I swear to you! Not the treasure of an opium
dream, Dumail, but a place ready established among the great and the
fortunate. For me: Number Matricule 2232! Life in a gondola, do you see?
Luxury, leisure, rank. Beauty. Women. Happiness! Everything a poor lost
devil could crave!"

Well, you know, it was a bit too much for me.

"Comedian!" I applauded. "Ah-ah--comedian!"

A sort of fury took him. All else forgotten, he jerked loose the collar
of his jacket: made to spread it wide--checked himself and instead drew
out from his breast an object for my inspection.

I had view of a miniature: one of those cherubic heads on ivory that
relate to the model, perhaps, as a promise relates to a fact in this
naughty world. Nevertheless I could trace a sort of semblance to that
roguish front as it might have seemed in childhood--all ringlets and
innocence, cerulean eye and carmine cheek--the whole encircled by a
double row of pearls: Bibi-Ri himself.

"My title deed."

I was impressed. Impossible to deny a richness in this miniature. And
while the likeness was thin the pearls were indubitable. Still--

"Blagueur!" I murmured. "Where did you snaffle it?"

Gloomily he regarded me. "You are like the others. Always while I was
kicking about the gutters or the jail it was that way. No one would
listen. Another of Bibi-Ri's jokes! And I lacked any clew to this
trinket: my single poor inheritance.... But now--look! These queer signs
on the reverse. They have been deciphered. Oh, an unbelievable stroke of
chance! Of course I have much to learn. The name of the family. My own
true name itself. But at least I am in the way of proof and this time I
was going to win!... A famished man--a man famished since his birth,
Dumail--is set before a boundless feast. Does he joke about that?"

"Perhaps not," I admitted. "Go on."

"But I am showing you what Life means to me!"

"And M. de Nou--?" I reminded him.

He shuddered: his head dropped upon his breast.

"M. de Nou--is Death!"

Well, you know, this was all very thrilling for emotion, but as a
statement it left something to be desired.

"Answer me," I commanded. "Have you killed any one?"

"No!"

"Is there another sentence hanging over you? Have you some stain on your
prison record?"

"None."

"Whom have you wronged?"

"Nobody."

"Then sacred pig! It is only a folly of nerves after all! Just because
you expect to cash your millions and swim in champagne at last?... Bear
up under it, my boy. Stiffen your lip! Faith, you might be a missing
dauphin or even the Red Mark himself--as people say--and still you could
meet your luck with a little courage!"

Like a jack on wires Bibi-Ri sprang to his feet.

"True!" he laughed, shrill. "You are right, Dumail. You are the friend
in need!... Where is that blessed mop, to dry my face at least. So! I'm
off!... But to-night--what? I owe you something, Dumail: you and your
curiosity! To-night you shall come behind the scenes. If you dare.
Understood?" He wheeled at the step: his eyes held their old twinkling
deviltry. "I was a thief before I was ever a gentleman," he said, with
his weird grin, "and I can still play that farce to its end--get through
and done with it and pull out once for all!... You shall see for
yourself!"

Thereupon he left me to the haze of bewilderment in which I lived for
the rest of the day.

Now you can imagine without much telling that we have ways--we convicts
assigned here and there on service--to conduct our own underground
affairs in despite authority. Unnecessary to explain these little
evasions. Enough to say my client was as good as his word that evening.
Enough to say that under misty stars, while the military of the watch
were safely watching, Bibi-Ri crept out of town by forbidden paths: and
that I crept along with him.

Inland from Nouméa for a wide district is all one checkerboard of
gardens and small estates where libérés and convict proprietors--the
aristocrats of our settlement--enjoy their snug retreat. Not being a
reformed bandit myself, skilled in agriculture and piety, I was strange
to this countryside. But Bibi-Ri had the key. I could only tag at his
heels through blind plantations and admire his silence and his speed.
Truly, as he said, he was taking me behind the scenes: until at last, in
a grove of flamboyants that wrapped the night with darker webbing, he
set hand to a door.

For all I knew it could have opened on the Pit itself: but a shaft of
light guided me stumbling into a stone-flagged kitchen, low and dim and
smoky in fact as some lesser inferno.

By the hearth a woman turned from tending the kettle to overlook us
steadily. She was alone, but my faith! she had no need to fear. Figure
to yourself this massive sibyl with a face planned on a mason's square,
deep-chiselled and brooding in the flush of firelight. She was like
that. Yes, a sibyl in her cave, to whom Bibi-Ri entered gingerly as a
cat.

"I am here, Mother Carron," he said.

Then for sure and for the first time I saw where we stood. Mother
Carron! In Nouméa--through all the obscure complex of convict life--no
name bore more significance: or less, in the official sense. For she had
no number. Consider what that means to a community of jailbirds. The
finger of the law had never touched her. Consider how singular in a
country of keepers and felons!

She was a free colonist. Her husband, a distinguished housebreaker, had
been transported some years before. Whereupon she had had the
hardihood--sufficient if you like!--to immigrate, to claim a concession
and to have that same husband assigned her as a convict laborer.

Since then she had wielded a curious power. Her size, her tongue, her
knowledge of crime and criminals and her contempt of them all--these
made her formidable. But also it was whispered that queer things went on
at her plantation under the flamboyant trees: a famous rendezvous where
no prying agent ever found a shred of evidence--against her or any one
else. Successful escapes had been decided there, they said. And
disputes of convict factions that troubled no other court, and even
politics of the underworld at home, referred to certain great ones among
us. Our inner conclave of transportés--so dread and secret that to be
identified a member brings solitary confinement in the black cells--had
assembled there to seek her counsel. Had demurred to it and been routed
with her broom whisking about their ears, if rumor spoke true. For she
was a lady of weighty ways.

Me, I was glad to slip aside unchallenged. I had no desire to linger
between that dame and the purpose, whatever it might be, that dwelt in
the fixity of her frown. As a spectator I blotted myself in the shadows,
to attend the next act of this hidden and somber drama.

"Monsieur," she began, with an affectation wholly foreign to her rough
voice, "I have the felicity to inform you that our beloved Zelie is home
from Fonwhary again."

"I knew it," murmured Bibi-Ri.

"She resides at present under this poor roof."

He cast a nervous glance toward the stairway. "I knew that," he said.

"Ah? You know so much? After staying away so long?... We began to doubt
it."

She came to plant herself before him, and the effect of her politeness
was like a bludgeon.

"In that case be kind enough to sit, Monsieur Bibi-Ri. Dear little
Monsieur Bibi-Ri: we have missed you! Be seated. You bring your pockets
full of news, it seems."

But it seemed on the other hand, not so. I saw my companion brace
himself. Evidently this was his stage-play: the ordeal he had now to
meet.

"You must excuse me, Madame. I cannot remain and I have no news....
Except that I drop this business on the spot. Like a live coal,
Madame!"

His whimsy might have disarmed any other.

"I have done my best with Zelie. Sad! Somehow she fails to perceive any
longer my true charm.... You had sent me mysterious word, Madame, of
some danger to which you said she was drifting. Well--seeing her in the
public market to-day I sought to question her: at the least to give her
brotherly advice. Madame--she repulsed me. Like that! Would neither talk
nor listen. Said we were watched. Said it was not safe.

"Sapristi!... You can believe I was ready to quit then and there! But
presently I found a better reason--if I needed one, Madame. For casting
about, perplexed as I was, of a sudden I recognized--can you guess? Why
the man! The individual you expected to send me against, I imagine. From
whom I am supposed to guard her, perhaps! I saw him.

"After that: enough and many thanks!" he laughed, with a catch in his
throat. "No place for Bibi! Finished. Rien ne va plus!... For who am I
to chase any maid so unwilling? And at the same time who am I and what
should I be doing--in my present station, Madame--to cross the little
harmless fancies of such a personage?... It was M. de Nou!" he cried.

Still she made no move.

"And so--Bibi-Ri retires," he concluded, unsteadily, edging for his
exit. "I withdraw! You can find someone better fitted. My time is up. My
ship sails soon. I will not need to come again, I think. In parting--"

"What!" It was like the break of a banking storm. "What did you sing me
there? 'Not come again?' Forty devils! Do you know if you hadn't come
to-night in answer to my message I would have had you haled by the
leg?... Why you two sous' worth! You think to employ your sneaking
pickpocket tricks on me? To decamp with the prize I taught you to use:
and pay nothing for it?"

There was incredulity in her wrath: the measure pf her rude mastery.

"Before God! Where did you get the courage to try that?" she marvelled.
"As if I had not trouble enough already with the other stubborn brat
herself. And now you!... Have you altogether forgotten that I betrothed
you myself to my niece--my own dead sister's child--when she came
visiting from the church school at Fonwhary some weeks ago?"

"You said it was so," admitted Bibi-Ri, squirming.

"Good! Then you can wager it was so, my boy.... And at that time did you
or did you not strike a solemn bargain with me?"

He made no denial.

"You wept--sacred pipe! You called every saint to witness your
gratitude. Anything I wanted! Zelie? Of course. You would always be the
defense of that precious infant against the taint and the curse of
Nouméa!"

He shrugged.

"You swore by your own hope of salvation to save her--to pluck this pure
flower from the dung-hill and marry her the very hour of your release.
Your bridal trip should carry her away to France.... Are these your
words?"

"I offered to," he retorted. "But Zelie refused even then--you know she
did! And so she has since."

"Fichtre! You and your offers! Tell me--from the day you discovered your
heritage have you ever been back to persuade her?"

He avoided that stern eye.

"There it is, you see!" She gave an eloquent gesture. "As for her--leave
her to me. She is only a stiff-necked little idiot who knows nothing.
You should have made up her mind for her. You! I picked you for that:
and you were willing enough before. But straightway: instead: what did
you do?... Why you began to swell up over notions of your coming
greatness! That is what happened to you. Shrimp! Can't I read your soul?

"Suddenly you found yourself to be a somebody! Ambition grew in you like
a mushroom. Not good enough--Zelie, of New Caledonia! She might handicap
you in your fine career. You beheld a glorious future that had no place
for her. But who opened that prospect? Cré tonnerre! Who sold it you?
Who deciphered the miniature? Who but I?

"And now at last, when the girl falls in deadly peril--as much through
pique as through mere blindness, be sure of it!--when I call you to
redeem your pledge and protect her: you quit! You 'withdraw'! You
decide to use your new airs and graces and pull your feet out of
the wet! Because you prefer the excuse of a coward to that of a
traitor--Monsieur--is that it?"

Her fist hit the table like a sledge.

"Faineant!... Unless you brand yourself as shamefully as any Red Mark
that ever lived.... Sit down!"

He had been sidling, bit by bit: he had taken himself almost to the
door-sill: but under that tone of thunder--under that sudden amazing and
cryptic jibe--he started, he faltered, he obeyed. She bulked above him
and it was about this time I began truly to be sorry for my harlequin
friend.

It was plain enough by this time, you understand, that I was witnessing
one of those obscure human tangles which ravel themselves in the depths
of a penal society. Possible nowhere else, I suppose. Yet its threads
were the passions and its center was the heart: and poor Bibi-Ri no
poorer hero than you or I or any of us might prove. At this point he
had fallen back to his defense: sullen, awed, but also intently curious
of her. How she expected to force him to her design I could not guess.
But breathlessly I watched while she wove about him and about.

Back by the hearth she stood meditative for a space in silence: a dim
presence in that room where the kettle hissed and gave off its
vapors--of brewing fates, perhaps.

"Give me a man if he be a bad one. A man who can stand to his game two
days on end--how do they put it: those savants?--'developing his
capabilities.' Ah! Not like these others. Waffles! Half-baked. Mixed
with small impulses good and evil. Let him be saint or devil, so he
develop that capability. Let me see him anyway stand to it!... As I have
seen a few:

"I remember many years ago at the prison of Mazas," she went on, as if
in casual retrospect, "they kept a certain famous captive. Myself, I was
never a resident there--no thanks!--I prefer the comforts of honesty.
But my one sister, now dead, she was beginning her own silly career
about then. She lacked the brains to steer it safe. So for a time she
inhabited that same institution. And one day as we went by the visitors'
room she pinched my arm to look.

"'There goes the wickedest man in France,' she said.

"Down the courtyard came a dozen of gendarmes parading a prisoner. That
was a devil--if you like! That was a type--for example. Tall and fierce
and unbeaten, with the eyes of a tiger. Once to see him was never to
forget him again.... While he was still newly-caught they had always to
guard him that way lest he slay some one with his manacled fists.

"He belonged to the very oldest stock of the South, it appeared: the old
high noblesse. And was he rich? And proud? You can believe it. But also
he was a great criminal such as walks the earth every while or so to
remind us after all how short a journey it is to hell. A true devil. My
sister knew him. She had been a servant in the household. She knew his
whole story--which soon was hushed, I can tell you: a scandal too black
to publish."

Her voice rose a rumbling note under the vault.

"Messieurs, never mind the rest of the tale at present. But inquire only
this: Did they slay him? Did they give him his deserts?... Oh, naturally
not--else where is the use of Nouméa! We must suppose those savants were
glad of the specimen. 'The wickedest man'--do you see? And as for him:
he was strong. And cunning to seize his opportunities. And above all
true to his own devilment. So he won reprieve, Messieurs. They preserved
him. They shipped him out to this tropic forcing house of ours--to let
him keep on developing!... And he has. He does. My faith! With the
approval of the Administration. With all kinds of special privileges and
gratifications!"

She moved from the shadow again.

"Why do you tell me this?" demanded Bibi-Ri, hoarsely.

"For your instruction, Bibi-Ri," she returned, with her tone of
intolerable significance. "To show you how one man stood to it.
Admirable--eh?... A moment ago you spoke of his 'harmless fancies.'
Well: he gluts them. He gets what he wants. A fancy of pride? Behold him
in his black coat and his lofty office! A fancy for blood? From time to
time he stands to spill it publicly on the scaffold! A fancy for young
and innocent flesh--a solace to his old age?... Do you imagine he would
be balked of that? Or rather are you prepared to hear how--with official
permission and even the clerical benediction--how he manages to bedevil
and to win the particular young girl of his choice?"

In hammer blows she planted each phrase.

"How this same man has let no grass grow under his feet in his little
rivalry with yourself, Bibi-Ri!"

She spared him nothing.

"How, having desired your Zelie without 'ifs' or 'buts' he found means
to make his purpose good, Bibi-Ri!"

He could only gape at her.

"How he followed her to Fonwhary: how he followed her back: how he
missed no trick of persuading and persisting: how he finally forced her
consent like any true lover in this very house this morning!"

"It is not possible!" gasped Bibi-Ri.

"Eh? It is true of true!" she trumpeted. "Name of God--where do you
think you are? This is Nouméa!... Let her pass for a fool--half-mad with
bitterness and chagrin though she be--and still you must admit it is not
every poor orphan who gets such a chance hereabouts. What? To occupy a
little manor outside the prison grounds. To enjoy the little benefits of
official standing. To wear the pretty trifles of jewelry, the rings and
keepsakes and lockets, that fall to the master's share every time he
strikes off a lucky head!... Dieu!... Can you picture to yourself the
home-coming at that menage after a day's honest labor? To be sure, she
might require him first to wash his hands for fear of spoiling her new
gown! But these stains of the trade--what do they matter? And so your
Zelie, your sweet pigeon, your simple Caledonienne who was all too
simple for you--whom you cast aside with 'brotherly advice'--she chooses
to embrace that ghoul, that hell-hound, that old satyr of all the
infamies.... To-morrow she weds with M. de Nou!"

In blind distress he stumbled to his feet and shied from her with hands
outspread to fend away the monstrous thing. But skillfully she headed
him around to the foot of the stairs and brought him face to face with
the actual vision descending there.

"Ask her yourself!"...

You have seen those figures in a window of old stained glass which leap
from the haze of color as if illumined of themselves. The girl who
waited just above us on the step bore that same transparent loveliness,
with all the fleshly promise of my glimpse of her in the market. She
wore a single belted garment of some white peasant's stuff, but nothing
could have suited better in the somber light of that place, smoke-blued
against smoky walls. In truth it might have seemed the subtlest coquetry
to clothe such beauty in the coarsest garb. For she herself was delicate
as a bud. Vital and lithe: with a close-set casque of jet hair, mouth
like a crushed mulberry against satin, mutinous eyes and chin: the wild,
slight, heavy-scented flower of these climes.

There she stood quite coolly: even languidly.

"Visitors?" she inquired, aware of us with impersonal gaze. "I wondered
if any would stop to-night. It would be kind of them to come and wish me
happiness."

Except that she spoke unsmiling and ignored Bibi-Ri, except for her
deathly pallor, she seemed without the least consciousness of a terrible
irony. And when my poor friend made some sound in his throat her pure
brow clouded a bit: she pouted.

"Have you been making yourself tiresome again with the visitors, Maman?
Now where is the good of that? I wish you would not start fretting with
everybody.... Yes, I shall be married. Yes, I shall be married
to-morrow. By special civil license and by the priest from La Foa.
There! It is all settled.... I hope you can find something more amusing
for our guests."

Incredible to see how quiet she was, how composed, how youthfully
unstrained. Only when her heavy lids swept over Bibi-Ri and their
glances crossed could you detect like electric charges the
unacknowledged tension behind.

"Oh, for amusement," chuckled Mother Carron, with a savage humor,
"Bibi-Ri is amused: right enough. Sacred stove--yes!... Only he says the
affair is impossible."

For the first time Zelie regarded him fairly.

"I see no reason why any one should think so. Unless he forgets--as I
never do any more--that I am the daughter of convicts."

Ah, there was steel in that girl! What? The way she said it! Very
simply. Without rancor, you understand. Letting it bite of itself.
Without a quaver from that crisis of despair in which she must have
learned to say it. In a flash I knew how the gleaming, soft,
full-blooded slip of a creature had stood up against this tremendous
aunt of hers. And could stand. And would!... And Bibi-Ri: he knew too.
His babbling protest died cold on his lips.

"My convict father married my convict mother in this convict country,"
she went on, evenly. "I was born here. I must live and die here. I could
never look to marry outside--could I?... They would say I was
tainted.... For the rest--well, I have only to please myself, I
believe."

And mother Carron nodded like a grim showman.

"Eh? What do you think of that? A wise infant--eh? Could anything be
more just and reasonable?"

And it was so. She was right. It was perfectly just: perfectly
reasonable. There you had the stark and appalling fact. For this is
Nouméa--as Mother Carron reminded us in good season. This is Nouméa--the
Noah's Ark toy of penology. If you expect your convicts to pair off and
to breed like free folk, you must expect their children likewise to
couple as they can--or will: free folks themselves. And with whom? Where
do you draw the line? What kind of a social formula have you left for
the second generation, reared in an out-door jail? Our wise
philanthropists who devised the experiment: I wonder if they ever
thought so far ahead. They should have been interested in Zelie--the
perfect product.

Meanwhile there remained my companion--Bibi-Ri. Poor Bibi-Ri....
Whatever had passed between him and that unhappy deluded child I could
not know, you comprehend--in truth I never did know. But they must have
been very close at one time: those two: before his great ambition nipped
him. He was suffering. He writhed. Nevertheless I saw it was going to
make no difference with him.... Not now. Not this late along. I sensed
his effort. I heard him draw his breath sharp like a man who plucks the
barb from the wound.

"One moment, Madame!" He avoided Zelie. In abrupt and flurried speech he
addressed himself to Mother Carron. "A moment, Madame--I beg. This is
mere madness. And painful. And unnecessary.... There is still one easy
way out for her, you know--for Zelie, for me, for everybody. Still a
way."

She unbent to him all at once as to a prodigal son.

"Tiens!" she cried. "You have perceived it?"

"I have remembered. I intended not to tell you: to let it come of
itself. And truly--you drove it somewhat out of mind. But now--"

"At last!"

"If we can only get Zelie to listen--"

"Ha! Just look at her there!"

"It fits the need."

"She never had but one, my boy--to hear you speak out once like this: as
if you meant it." "And besides," he stammered, "it should cancel
any--any obligations you might still hold against me, myself."

"Parbleu! I should hope so!"

He labored on, with a kind of desperate snuffle.

"At the end, Madame, we can always turn for aid to the Church--the
patient friend of us all.... This afternoon--uneasy about Zelie, I
confess, and thinking a decisive step would be best for every one--this
very afternoon I took myself to St. Gregory's and there I saw--"

"Bibi-Ri: in a moment I shall kiss you!"

"For God's sake let me speak, Madame!... I saw the Directress of the
Order of St. Joseph of Cluny. She heard me readily. You know--these good
nuns--how they rescue any they can of the children of Nouméa.... Well: I
arranged it.... To-night a travelling sister will visit you here. By
great luck she is returning home very soon. If the dispositions are
favorable she has promised to take Zelie at once, to guard her and to
see her safe--passage free--to France, where refuge and the consolations
of religion, Madame, await her!"

In the silence that dropped you should have seen Mother Carron.

"Refuge!" she began, empurpled. "What is the fellow talking about?
Conso--.... Look here. Do you mean a convent?"

"Of course, Madame."

"A convent! In truth? Is this all you have to offer?"

"Yes, Madame."

She flung up her arms.

"Faith of God! You dare to make me ridicule like that? Animal low of
ceiling!... But no, I tell you, but no! It is too much. My turn now.
Listen to me, both. Listen to my plan!... To-day I also went to St.
Gregory's: do you hear? I also sought the aid of Holy Church, which
never refuses in the cause of morality--Heaven be praised!--to perform a
convict marriage where it can. I also obtained help. That good Father
Anselm: he also promised. He also is coming here to-night!... And word
of honor, I hope to be turned into a pepper-mill if I don't have him
marry the two of you on the spot."

One and the other, she challenged them.

"You think not; you wilful imp?" she roared. "I tell you it shall be
so!... And you, Bibi-Ri--you grin in that sickly fashion? Wait, my gar:
I'm not done with you yet! Thousand thunders!--in another minute you
will be crawling at the crook of my finger.... Attend!"

And looming on us there, gigantic in the firelight like some ancient
fury, she launched her climax.

"You recall that tale I started for your benefit? Well: there is more of
it. I told you my sister knew all the story of 'the wickedest man'?
Well: there was one thing she did not know and would have given much to
hook up--like many another blackmailer, then and since.... Note!... From
the murderous purpose with which that fiend pursued all in his
power--wife, family, associates--it appears he spared a single victim.
The creature, indeed, in whom he centered his whole affection--to call
it so--his hateful pride, at least. A single one he set aside. But only
to be the instrument of a last defiance.

"Brought to exposure, his course run out: what do you suppose he did?
Why he took measures to conceal that remaining heir of his house beyond
recovery.... He put away that son. He lost him! Completely. In space: in
the world: in the crowd and the gutter. Where none should ever find him
again--as none ever did, for all the rewards and all the police.

"Such cleverness--eh? Such logic. For observe.... They dared pass no
death sentence while there appeared any chance of extracting his secret.
A vast estate was waiting on the person of that child--one of the finest
fortunes in France: the heritage of a golden line. He kept it waiting.
At a stroke he saved himself before the judges: he hid away the only
treasure he loved: he prolonged his own evil destiny through this
unknown seed of his planted somewhere in the mud!"

Her regard flamed on Bibi-Ri.

"Unknown--my little dears. Unknown ever since!... Though it is said
Heaven itself had set its seal on that race for a warning and a symbol:
though the child himself was marked from birth: was marked about the
neck--so the legend goes--with a thin red line like the print of a noose
or the trace of strangling fingers!"

Bibi-Ri had propped himself by the table, one hand clutching the close
collar of his jacket.

"How--how could you guess...!"

"Ah-ah! Now will you try to throw us over? Not so easily--eh? Now don't
you think you still have need of us? Until the depositions are made, at
least?... Sac à papier! The very instant you showed me that old
miniature and the initial it bears--I knew you, my boy! I could have
read you your whole fortune then: only I saved the best of it for a
wedding present! And for sure, I never expected you to try a bolt. A
droll of an idea--that! To run away from your chief witness?... Why,
stupid one!" She broke off to drop him a little mocking curtsey.
"Monsieur the Duke!... It was my own sister had had the honor to be Your
Grace's nurse!"

He was trembling. "Tell me the name of that family!"

"But certainly, my lad.... After you are married!" "Don't torture me!
Tell me the name of that man!"

"But certainly, my love.... It is M. de Nou!"

Strange how like a sinister refrain that title--that word--ran and
recurred throughout the affair. But this time it had an impact as never
before. Credit me! This time it came home to Bibi-Ri: and my little
joker absolutely reeled under it.

"Eh?" cried Mother Carron. "Eh? How is your sacred ambition now? Is
there any manhood to you? And what are you going to do about it?"

What indeed! She had reduced him to a rag. For this she had played upon
a febrile nature, you understand: had battered it, dazzled it, wrung it
of emotions: confirming his wildest beliefs: destroying his dearest
illusions: tossing his hopes to the stars and smirching them in the mire
with the same sweep:--that he might have no other will at the end....
And therein appeared the triumph of her masterful certitude. For
presently raising his miserable and hunted eyes he looked at her: he
looked for me in the shadow: he did not look at Zelie again--but he
looked toward the door....

How easy it might have seemed, after all! Actually in his pocket he
carried his release ticket, ready dated. His ship lay in harbor. His
sentence expired some few days off. A step would take him into the
night. He had simply to keep safe within police limits until the hour of
sailing and march himself freely on board. And then ... he had won! You
see? By his theory the world would open before him the most radiant of
welcomes. By his faith he would have his life-long arrears to collect:
his gorgeous dreams to realize. One must have been a felon--one must
have eaten his heart in prison cells--and even in this widest and
farthest of prison cells with its wall of painted horizons none the
less alien and inexorable--to feel what those dreams meant to him.

Now again, as before, he had only to get himself off stage: he needed
only the boldness to break once for all with the thief's part--as he
himself had said: the selfishness to stand to his game--as Mother Carron
put it!

And in truth what was hindering him? No actual compulsion: none he need
fear. Only impalpable things. Shame. Uncertainty, timidity, regret. The
pressures of personality. The qualms of a poor juggler with life:
fearful of missing--fearful of not seizing it featly.... Cobwebs all!

What he would have done about it the good God can tell. I have asked
myself often enough. But he hesitated a bit too long: that little fool
of fortune with his face of a rubber puppet squeezed by fate. Next
moment the cue had been taken from him, for across the pause ran a thin,
keen whistle. Mother Carron spun around. And as if dispatched on that
breath--through the key-hole, perhaps--there blew in suddenly among us
from the back of the house somewhere a tiny, gray-faced, white-haired
wraith of a man.

"Well--idiot?... What's up now?"

From her greeting, as from the blurred effacement of the apparition
himself, one divined without trouble the person of that former
redoubtable housebreaker: Carron. In a voice scarcely above the singing
of the kettle he made his announcement.

"There are two coming by the road."

"Hey?" she bawled. "What two?"

"A priest and another."

Mother Carron smiled the only smile to pass upon her wintry front that
night: she spread her hands before us.

"Enfin! What did I tell you? And in great good time, my word!... You
hear that--you others?... Go and welcome Father Anselm, fool! And fetch
out the wine, if you are able to stir your pins!"

The shadow sighed.

"It is not Father Anselm."

"Not Father Anselm?... Imbecile! Of course it is!"

"It is not Father Anselm."

"Who then--vaurien?"

"It is the fat priest from La Foa."

Impossible to doubt his steadfast whispering.

"La Foa!" she echoed, stricken. "You say? Not truly!... La Foa?"

"I saw him."

"And another? What other?"

"We think he is Bombiste."

I can swear that wretched individual never in his black past had handled
a bomb with half the effect his mere nickname produced among us there.

"Bombiste! The executioner's assistant?... From Ile de Nou?... Here?"

"They are at the gate."

"Thunder of God!... And above all, at this time!" She caught his arm.
"Delay that priest! Any way and anyhow: hold him!... Confess to him, if
nothing else will do--Heaven knows you need it!... And let the other
through at once. Be quick!"

She banished him like a puff of smoke and we waited in drawn
suspense--we four--our eyes on the archway through which this visitant
must now appear.

"What can he want?" demanded Mother Carron. "That blood-stained basket
robber!"

And Zelie answered her very quietly.

"I suppose he brings me my message from M. de Nou."

You will remember in all my term at Nouméa I had seen but once before
this ignoble under-servant of the guillotine. I could have preferred
never to see him again. He did not improve on closer view.

He was one of those creatures somehow resembling insects: like the
ciliate and noxious things that run about when you lift a damp rock. You
know?... Very black. Very hairy, with hair overlaid in fringes curiously
soft and glistening. With eyes very small, round and quick as beads. In
person he was misshapen: bandy-legged: but with all that a powerful
ruffian, whose long, crooked arms might have ended in nippers like a
scorpion's.

There you have the fellow Bombiste, who presently slid in at the doorway
and stood blinking through the light.

We regarded this type: and he us. Did I tell you he called himself a
Pole? I cannot say. But certainly his speech was hardly to be
comprehended. He spat something that could have passed equally for a
greeting or a curse. And so far he had the advantage of us: for any
reply of ours would have been only the half of that.

To do her justice Mother Carron kept a bold front to him. But she was
handling here a very different sort of brute--not to be reached by that
singular influence she exerted on the convict community at large:
himself an outcast among convicts: sharing the isolation of his detested
master on Ile de Nou. When she demanded to know his affair--

"Official!" he snarled back, with his slit grin.

Indeed it must have been a rare errand for him: a rare jest. He affected
in his manner a gratified swagger of contempt: natural enough for a man
with whom the vilest felon would never willingly speak, you understand:
natural enough for one whose only dealing with his fellows was to valet
their shorn bodies on the scaffold and to gather their last poor trifles
of property for the executioner's wage--"robbing the basket," as we
say.

"What are you after?" persisted Mother Carron.

"Not you, old woman!" he retorted. "Not any of you," he added with
brutal assurance as his glance shifted past Bibi-Ri and myself. "But I
come to see ... Mam'zelle here. And Mam'zelle alone!"

Well, we had had warning, to be sure. From this welter of evil portents
some actual horror was due. And my faith, he wasted little time about
it! He passed us over as if we had been less than nothing. He removed
his ragged straw hat to twirl on his finger. He scraped low before the
calm-faced girl who still waited impassive on the stairs. And then and
there he delivered himself of the message he had been taught. All at
once. Even glibly. With a kind of damnable sputtering eloquence.

"Mam'zelle Zelie--at your service--I bring you this word from my master:
best respects and affections. He bids me say the civil ceremony will be
for to-morrow, as planned. But he mistrusts your clever aunt--who might
indeed try tricks to interfere. And so ... you see ... to-night:
straightway: will be the wedding, Mam'zelle!

"The priest is here. In me behold one happy witness! For the other--" He
grinned. "Perhaps Madame Carron will do." He thrust a thumb at Bibi-Ri.
"Or that young buck yonder. The master himself only delays his
impatience a few moments formally to arrive when all is ready. Safely
escorted, you can believe, in this place of so bad a reputation--from
which, moreover, he promises to remove you at once."

To see the rascal strut, and what airs he took!

"Meantime, Mam'zelle--in attending--please will you put on your best
frock and prepare yourself," he concluded. "And as your wedding gift ...
the master has pleasure to send you herewith the precious chains and
jewels in this box and asks you to wear them for his sake!"

Throughout this stupefying recital none of the rest of us stirred, you
will conceive. And when he had done we could still only stare. A
picture, if you like! Zelie, the unfortunate child: and there,
distorting himself in gallant gesture, offering tribute, that foul
ambassador! The glow of fallen embers in the fire smudged him with
infernal fantasy--it lent her the softest flush, making her young beauty
to quicken and to kindle. As if a guilty angel should stoop from the
lower step of heaven to take a bribe of hell. For she assented: make no
mistake.... She was going to assent. He tendered her a small black box
of leather: she had a hand outstretched to it--when a word dropped sheer
and arresting in the silence as a pebble in a well.

It was not Mother Carron who spoke: our crafty hostess was far too
burdened just then under the collapse of all her craftiness. Decidedly
it was not me. Remained only Bibi-Ri. And in truth, he it was: though
the fact appeared as one of those momentary incredibilities of
intercourse.

"Zelie!"

Now I cannot pretend to know, what lay in the mind of that young girl.
Who could plumb such a depth? She had kept herself inscrutable. How she
actually felt toward Bibi-Ri I had no guess. She had seen him pared like
a carrot--humiliated as few could be--his little human folly and
weakness exposed, his grand hopes and aspirations made sordid and slimy.
Even his one effort, his scheme of shuffling her away into a convent
which must have seemed the sorriest cowardice, had surprised no motion
from her. But how she regarded him now was plain. In the slow lift of
her head, the heavy glitter of her eyes--plain to read.

"Zelie," he said. "You can't go on with it."

"No?" she inquired.... "No?"

Some way or other he had taken up position between the door and the
stairs.... Oh, not with any sort of flash heroism--understand me. I am
not giving you a feuilleton of melodrama. But there he put himself and
there he stayed.

Of course that brute Bombiste had bristled at the first interruption.
With a sign Zelie checked him short.... She was ready for Bibi-Ri. She
had been waiting for Bibi-Ri. One knew it. One knew this to be their
real meeting, and finally one knew who was and who had been his real
opponent. Here the issue was joined. Between the dream and the girl--as
you might say--here stood the Red Mark.

"You can't go on with it," he repeated in a voice, after all emotions,
that had become almost matter of fact. "It is unthinkable. You will not
touch those presents."

"I wonder if I won't," she answered.

"They were stolen from dead men--"

"Not so wicked as stealing heart and faith," she said.

"For this crime: worse than murder--"

"Not so bad as killing a soul given into your hand," she said.

"By a man the lowest of assassins!"

"Not so low," she said, "but that you claim his name, his blood and his
fortune for your own!"

Ah, they were striking at each other's naked breasts, those two. With
naked weapons. And neither of them shirked it. Not the girl, who sent
back as good as she got--not Bibi-Ri, who took even that last terrible
thrust.

"Such things do not happen." You would have thought he was putting a
form of statement. "All else aside--" he said, "all else aside, this
does not happen."

"What can you do or say to prevent?" she asked, leading him by so much.

"Anything you want of me."

"I want nothing: it would only be false."

"Anything you want me to say."

"I want to hear nothing: it would only be lies."

"Zelie," he offered, "will you marry me?"

That must have been the test, you know. In the covert, unproclaimed
struggle which had brought them both to this pass, that must have been
the gauge. Whatever thrill of satisfied passionate resentment she could
have wished must have been hers there and then.

"Will you wed with me, Zelie?"

An exultant throb escaped her.

"Too late!" she said.

But he was beyond flinching.

"Let me be sure," he begged. "I was wrong, Zelie. I was blind and mad
and heartless. I say so. But I give it up--I give up all that foolish
gilded fancy of mine, for I see what true treasure it cost me.... Or
look--petite--I give it up to you and we go seek the future together.
Heaven knows if it could ever be any worth to us after--after to-night.
But it's all I have. Zelie ... take it for my wedding gift!"

She looked him up and she looked him down, long and steadily.

"Comedian!" she said....

Well--it was rather hard. What? To twit that poor player at life with
his poor playing. At his last and best not to believe him. At his
supreme attempt to throw in his teeth that supreme mockery. Rather hard.
In effect!

It left him dumb--and again across the pause, from somewhere outside,
cut a shrill, thin whistle. Again came floating in among us, from
nowhere at all, the spectral guardian of the gates: Carron. Again from a
voice like a piping wind at a key-hole, we heard the news.

"Father Anselm has arrived. He is in the basse-cour, with the other
priest. Also two sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny, who came with him."

"Father Anselm!" echoed Mother Carron, dully, in a sort of groan. "So
much for my plan.... And the sisters?... So much for Bibi's! We're all
finely cooked, the lot of us!" But even in disaster she could keep the
uses of habit. "Sacred pig, you take your own time!" she scolded. "Was
that your signal?"

"Not for them," sighed Carron. "We gave no signal for them, seeing who
they were. But a carriole is climbing by the road--"

In fact through the heavy tropic night and the open doorway there
reached our ears as we hearkened a grind of wheels, the muffled jolting
of a cart.

"Two militaires on the driver's seat," continued Carron, unhurried,
unvarying. "And inside--another man: a man in a black coat. The runner
who brought word is not quite sure, but he thinks--"

"Eh?"

"It is M. de Nou!"

So once more, to clinch the tragedy, there befell that phrase so often
repeated: and this time like the summons of fate, this time invoking the
very presence of the monster himself, soon to descend upon us. Bombiste
gave an obscene chuckle. He had been wriggling and scowling these last
few tense moments in a furious temper at the neglect of himself and his
black box. But I think no one else in the room drew breath until Mother
Carron, with a remnant of vigor, summed the whole desperate business and
spread it in a sweep to Bibi-Ri and cried, as she had cried before--

"What are you going to do about it now?"

Bibi-Ri fell back three paces to the archway. He drew the door shut. He
swung into place the bar. Then he walked over toward the foot of the
stairs.

It had been my share, if you have followed me, to see many curious
changes wrought upon my luckless friend during some few hours. It was my
fortune at the end to see him himself. Simply. The proper spirit of a
man rising to a situation no longer tolerable. Figure to yourself this
eager little chap: high-keyed, timid, fervid: something of a buffoon,
always a victim of his perceptions. Do you remember that cry of his when
he spoke of his coming release? "Able to taste it," he had said. What do
you suppose he must have been tasting at this crisis? Such a perceptive,
whimsical poor devil!... But yet capable of an ultimate gesture as far
above bitterness as above rage or despair.

"Why," he said, with his wry smile that I knew so well and from all his
little height, "why--since I can't play any other it seems, I have one
part left in my repertoire.... I can still play the gentleman!"

Deliberately, giving no other warning, he struck from the hand of
Bombiste the black leather box--dashed it far away into the fireplace.
With an inhuman scream the Pole jumped for his throat. They locked. And
the rest was convulsion.

How long it took I cannot tell. Nor yet exactly how it was done. A
darkness seemed to descend about them. They fought as it might have been
through a gap in time and space: I watched them reeling in a dim
immensity. At some point I was aware of a thundering and a hammering
from the outer limits.... At another I had some idiotic impulse to
plunge into the fray myself, to aid my friend. But one glimpse of his
face, caught as a blink through the whirl of things, was quite enough to
throw me back out of that.

Himself, he had no fury. I mean none of the heedlessness of a man merely
berserk. While they revolved in their course together like a many-limbed
polyp, the Pole ravened with ceaseless and bestial ululation. Bibi-Ri
never uttered a sound. Little aid he needed! I swear to you he was still
smiling. He kept on smiling with a set and implacable and dreadful
pleasantry.

And good reason he had to smile, since that was his humor. For just then
by a masterly wrench of wrist over neck he had sent Bombiste's knife
spinning from his grip like a red-winged dragonfly.... Soon afterward I
heard a bone snap.... I had forgotten, you see, that while he might be
the Red Mark he was not called Bibi-Ri for nothing. I had forgotten that
while he might establish his claim to the belated title of a gentleman,
for some twenty-odd years of his life he had been acquiring the
recondite arts of the Parisian apache!

To say the less of it: by those lights he accomplished the job. In the
manner of the voyou and the garroter. In a merciful obscurity. Between
his hands. Between his fingers. With precision and dispatch. He broke
that creature Bombiste the way you would break a bread-straw. Until
their last smashing fall when the Pole was somehow horribly twisted
downward underneath, when his clamor shut off suddenly like a stream at
the tap, when he rolled on the floor an inert bundle.

And we were back in the smoky kitchen....

Voices were crying: figures shifting. The barred door seemed ready to
crack under assault. One fat and snuffy priest had come chattering like
a parrot. One gaunt and iron priest had gone sweeping forward to kneel
by the dead and his duty. Two sad-robed sisters looked on with the
placidity of canvas saints. Mother Carron was roaring. Carron himself
flitted about with a lantern like a will o' the wisp whose tremulous
flare shot the firelight with pallid citrine. It served at least to show
the singular tableau at the foot of the stairs where Bibi-Ri had picked
himself up.

A gladiator in the arena might have turned to Cæsar as he turned to the
girl on her pedestal. He was stripped to the waist, his jacket in
shreds, his compact torso white and gleaming. And there we could
see--any one might have seen who knew and was minded--the curious
scarlet line of the birthmark about his neck which had shaped his
destiny for him to this very moment: the Red Mark.

"Do you believe me now?" asked Bibi-Ri.

Wide-eyed, she stood at gaze.

"Will you believe me now?" asked Bibi-Ri.

As the child in the fairy tale when the ice fell away from about her
heart: so with Zelie. The steeled, unnatural restraint dropped from her.
The generous, quivering pulse sprang in her veins. She groped: she
swayed toward him.

"Bibi--what have you done? Your chance!... Fly while you can!"

"Too late," he said, in his turn.

"But the heritage--your great future! Your riches! Your happiness!
Nothing counts but that!... Name of God, you've lost it!"

"I find this better: to have you think kindly of it once--and of me."

"What else should I think of?" And oh, the impassioned miracle of her
voice! "... It is your right. You should have it--you must have it,
yourself, in freedom, without hindrance! For that I would have given
anything--everything. For that I tried to drive you away!"

"Zelie!" he cried, in wonder. "Is this true? Did you feel so?... It was
for my sake!"

"What else?... Though it tore me: though I died for it! I was not fit
for you, but you should have your desire and I could help--a little,
however little--to set you on the road. I could free you from danger of
Maman--her blackmailing. For always. It was my own hope. But now--!...
Oh Bibi!... Bibi!..."

She must have fallen if he had not caught her. And that was the way of
it at long end. She loved him. They loved. The convict and the daughter
of convicts: lovers of New Caledonia. With what somber consummation!

"But you must escape!" she gasped. The knocking at the door was like to
splinter the panels. "There may yet be time.... The militaires are
coming! Be quick!"

He shook his head.

"It will not do, little one," he answered. "Useless. I should only be
run down by black trackers. No. For me, it is finished.... But I am
quite content."

"If you are taken it means death! ... And mine!"

"No. Not that either. You owe me, perhaps, one promise."

"Anything you want of me!"

"I bind you to it!"

"Anything you want me to say!"

"Then you will not die: and you will save yourself from worse than death
the only way still open.... These good sisters are waiting here for you.
Do you understand?"

"I understand!" she sobbed, through her weeping. "I am yours.... I
promise!... Only kiss me once!"

It was Mother Carron who recovered some sort of sanity first among us. It
was Mother Carron who gathered the fainting girl and passed her over to
the charge of the nuns; Mother Carron who had forethought to snatch
one of Carron's jackets from a hook; Mother Carron, finally, who slipped
that jacket onto Bibi-Ri and buttoned it carefully to the chin before
she would order the door unbarred.

"Well, well--so we land her in the church after all," observed that
remarkable woman briskly, at the last. "Chouette, alors! It is honest,
at least.... And now, stupid, open up and admit the happy bridegroom and
let him see what he can see!"

He saw, right enough. He saw as much as was needful. When the door
thrust inward, when his two rogue friends of military surveillants
rushed through, when that tall devil in long black redingote and high
hat, with his flaming yellow eyes and raging front--when M. de Nou
himself, I say, confronted us--there we were properly ranged as the
actors in a perfectly obvious police case of brawl and murder: prisoner,
witnesses, corpus delicti and the succoring clergy: complete.

"What does this mean?" he demanded.

Bibi-Ri faced him--a strange meeting, in truth!

"Me," he said, with his old trick of whimsy. "Only me. Convict 2232.
I've been developing my capabilities a little.... That's all!"

So they guillotined Bibi-Ri. In due course, by due process, he passed
before the Marine Tribunal, before the Commandant and the Procurator
General and the Director and the rest of our salaried philanthropists.
They dealt with him faithfully and of a gray early morning they led him
from the little door of the condemned cell. They marched him out with
his legs hobbled and his hands tied behind his back; with the chaplain
tottering at his side and the bayonets of the guard shining martially
file and file: with some of the chiefest of these judges to receive him
and some hundreds of us convicts drawn up below to do him honor.

Such was the method of his elevation, you will perceive: such the means
by which he attained his ambitions, his uplifted position in the
world--when he climbed the scaffold in the courtyard of the central
prison on Ile de Nou and took his final look on life.

I was there. For my complicity at Mother Carron's that night and my
refusal to testify at the trial they had shipped me back to the
Collective. I stood in the front row. I was among those felons whose
special privilege is their compulsory attendance at executions. I could
miss nothing. Not a word nor a movement. Not the hurried mumbling of the
death sentence. Not the ruffling of the drums that covered the fatal
preparations.... Not even the icy chill to the marrow when we sank there
in our ranks on the damp flagstones.

"Convicts: on your knees! Hats off!"

Just as well for me I was allowed to kneel, perhaps.... Never mind....
It does not bear talking of. Except one thing. One thing I recall to
comfort me, as I saw it through a mist of tears, wrung with pity and
with awe. And that was Bibi-Ri's last salute to my address before they
lashed him on the bascule, under the knife.... He smiled at me, the
little fellow. Even gayly. Bidding me note as plain as words how he held
fast his good courage, how he had kept his counsel and his great secret
in prison and would keep them to the end. How he apprehended and viewed
clear-eyed the inconceivable grim jest of the family party there on the
scaffold: himself and the executioner!

Then he looked away across the harbor, toward the anchorage, and he did
not shift his gaze again from that goal of Nouméa. Taking his farewell,
Monsieur. Taking his farewell in spirit and quite content, as he had
said, I do believe. For this was the day, this the very morning, when
the steamer left Nouméa bearing his beloved Zelie for home....

And one other thing I can tell you, crisp and clear. Do you remember
when I began I said I had evened the score against M. de Nou? Evened it
for always until that fiend shall be dragged to the nethermost level of
hell and earn his reward? Evened it the only way it could be evened on
this side of the grave?... And so I did. Never was such an evening!
Listen:

Ask me not how it was done, by aid of what obscure pressure, through
what underground channels. But the miniature--the miniature of Bibi-Ri!
You recollect? Somehow. Monsieur--somehow, I say--it found its way into
the panier with the head of Bibi-Ri. Somehow the new assistant,
Bombiste's successor, discovered it when he "robbed the basket"--when he
stooped to gather the little perquisites of office for his master. And
somehow and finally it was laid straightway in the palm of M. de Nou....

He glanced at it. I saw him start. I saw him stare. I saw him stand and
stand and still stare. I saw him lose bit by bit that shell of damnable
pride, that prop of untouched and unrelenting hatred and contempt which
was and which had been through all his years, his evil support.... He
gave a movement, of horror, of growing terror. He stepped over. And he
looked into the basket at his handiwork still lying there. He looked and
he looked. But he could not know. He cannot know. He can never, never
know, Monsieur.... For the red mark about that severed neck was all one
red mark--do you see?--and the Red Mark remains a mystery forever!

EAST OF EASTWARD

Few persons ever attain any precise knowledge of the immemorial East,
its ways or its meanings; its wickedness or its mystery. But Tunstal was
a young man with a cherubic smile and a plethoric letter of credit, and
he had traveled far and wide to Honolulu, to Yokohama, to Macao, and