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_ 'Brown's object was to gain time by fooling with Kassim's diplomacy.
For doing a real stroke of business he could not help thinking
the white man was the person to work with. He could not imagine
such a chap (who must be confoundedly clever after all to get hold
of the natives like that) refusing a help that would do away with the
necessity for slow, cautious, risky cheating, that imposed itself as
the only possible line of conduct for a single-handed man. He,
Brown, would offer him the power. No man could hesitate. Everything
was in coming to a clear understanding. Of course they would
share. The idea of there being a fort--all ready to his hand--a real
fort, with artillery (he knew this from Cornelius), excited him. Let
him only once get in and . . . He would impose modest conditions.
Not too low, though. The man was no fool, it seemed. They would
work like brothers till . . . till the time came for a quarrel and a
shot that would settle all accounts. With grim impatience of plunder
he wished himself to be talking with the man now. The land already
seemed to be his to tear to pieces, squeeze, and throw away. Meantime
Kassim had to be fooled for the sake of food first--and for a
second string. But the principal thing was to get something to eat
from day to day. Besides, he was not averse to begin fighting on
that Rajah's account, and teach a lesson to those people who had
received him with shots. The lust of battle was upon him.
'I am sorry that I can't give you this part of the story, which of
course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown's own words. There
was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before
me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an
undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude
towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his
will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could
induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself
proudly the Scourge of God. No doubt the natural senseless ferocity
which is the basis of such a character was exasperated by failure,
ill-luck, and the recent privations, as well as by the desperate
position in which he found himself; but what was most remarkable of
all was this, that while he planned treacherous alliances, had already
settled in his own mind the fate of the white man, and intrigued in
an overbearing, offhand manner with Kassim, one could perceive
that what he had really desired, almost in spite of himself, was to
play havoc with that jungle town which had defied him, to see it
strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames. Listening to his
pitiless, panting voice, I could imagine how he must have looked at
it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine.
The part nearest to the creek wore an abandoned aspect, though as
a matter of fact every house concealed a few armed men on the alert.
Suddenly beyond the stretch of waste ground, interspersed with
small patches of low dense bush, excavations, heaps of rubbish,
with trodden paths between, a man, solitary and looking very small,
strolled out into the deserted opening of the street between the
shut-up, dark, lifeless buildings at the end. Perhaps one of the
inhabitants, who had fled to the other bank of the river, coming
back for some object of domestic use. Evidently he supposed himself
quite safe at that distance from the hill on the other side of the
creek. A light stockade, set up hastily, was just round the turn of
the street, full of his friends. He moved leisurely. Brown saw him,
and instantly called to his side the Yankee deserter, who acted as a
sort of second in command. This lanky, loose-jointed fellow came
forward, wooden-faced, trailing his rifle lazily. When he understood
what was wanted from him a homicidal and conceited smile uncovered
his teeth, making two deep folds down his sallow, leathery cheeks.
He prided himself on being a dead shot. He dropped on one knee, and
taking aim from a steady rest through the unlopped branches of a
felled tree, fired, and at once stood up to look. The man, far away,
turned his head to the report, made another step forward, seemed to
hesitate, and abruptly got down on his hands and knees. In the silence
that fell upon the sharp crack of the rifle, the dead shot, keeping
his eyes fixed upon the quarry, guessed that "this there coon's
health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more."
The man's limbs were seen to move rapidly under his body in an endeavour
to run on all-fours. In that empty space arose a multitudinous shout
of dismay and surprise. The man sank flat, face down, and moved no
more. "That showed them what we could do," said Brown to me. "Struck
the fear of sudden death into them. That was what we wanted. They
were two hundred to one, and this gave them something to think over
for the night. Not one of them had an idea of such a long shot before.
That beggar belonging to the Rajah scooted down-hill with his eyes
hanging out of his head."
'As he was telling me this he tried with a shaking hand to wipe
the thin foam on his blue lips. "Two hundred to one. Two hundred
to one . . . strike terror, . . . terror, terror, I tell you. . . ."
His own eyes were starting out of their sockets. He fell back, clawing
the air with skinny fingers, sat up again, bowed and hairy, glared
at me sideways like some man-beast of folk-lore, with open mouth
in his miserable and awful agony before he got his speech back after
that fit. There are sights one never forgets.
'Furthermore, to draw the enemy's fire and locate such parties
as might have been hiding in the bushes along the creek, Brown
ordered the Solomon Islander to go down to the boat and bring an
oar, as you send a spaniel after a stick into the water. This failed,
and the fellow came back without a single shot having been fired at
him from anywhere. "There's nobody," opined some of the men.
It is "onnatural," remarked the Yankee. Kassim had gone, by that
time, very much impressed, pleased too, and also uneasy. Pursuing
his tortuous policy, he had dispatched a message to Dain Waris
warning him to look out for the white men's ship, which, he had
had information, was about to come up the river. He minimised its
strength and exhorted him to oppose its passage. This double-dealing
answered his purpose, which was to keep the Bugis forces divided
and to weaken them by fighting. On the other hand, he had in the
course of that day sent word to the assembled Bugis chiefs in
town, assuring them that he was trying to induce the invaders to
retire; his messages to the fort asked earnestly for powder for the
Rajah's men. It was a long time since Tunku Allang had had ammunition
for the score or so of old muskets rusting in their arm-racks
in the audience-hall. The open intercourse between the hill and the
palace unsettled all the minds. It was already time for men to take
sides, it began to be said. There would soon be much bloodshed,
and thereafter great trouble for many people. The social fabric of
orderly, peaceful life, when every man was sure of to-morrow, the
edifice raised by Jim's hands, seemed on that evening ready to
collapse into a ruin reeking with blood. The poorer folk were
already taking to the bush or flying up the river. A good many of
the upper class judged it necessary to go and pay their court to the
Rajah. The Rajah's youths jostled them rudely. Old Tunku Allang,
almost out of his mind with fear and indecision, either kept a sullen
silence or abused them violently for daring to come with empty
hands: they departed very much frightened; only old Doramin kept
his countrymen together and pursued his tactics inflexibly.
Enthroned in a big chair behind the improvised stockade, he issued
his orders in a deep veiled rumble, unmoved, like a deaf man, in
the flying rumours.
'Dusk fell, hiding first the body of the dead man, which had been
left lying with arms outstretched as if nailed to the ground, and
then the revolving sphere of the night rolled smoothly over Patusan
and came to a rest, showering the glitter of countless worlds upon
the earth. Again, in the exposed part of the town big fires blazed
along the only street, revealing from distance to distance upon their
glares the falling straight lines of roofs, the fragments of wattled
walls jumbled in confusion, here and there a whole hut elevated in
the glow upon the vertical black stripes of a group of high piles
and all this line of dwellings, revealed in patches by the swaying
flames, seemed to flicker tortuously away up-river into the gloom
at the heart of the land. A great silence, in which the looms of
successive fires played without noise, extended into the darkness at
the foot of the hill; but the other bank of the river, all dark save for
a solitary bonfire at the river-front before the fort, sent out into the
air an increasing tremor that might have been the stamping of a
multitude of feet, the hum of many voices, or the fall of an
immensely distant waterfall. It was then, Brown confessed to me,
while, turning his back on his men, he sat looking at it all, that
notwithstanding his disdain, his ruthless faith in himself, a feeling
came over him that at last he had run his head against a stone wall.
Had his boat been afloat at the time, he believed he would have
tried to steal away, taking his chances of a long chase down the river
and of starvation at sea. It is very doubtful whether he would have
succeeded in getting away. However, he didn't try this. For another
moment he had a passing thought of trying to rush the town, but
he perceived very well that in the end he would find himself in the
lighted street, where they would be shot down like dogs from the
houses. They were two hundred to one--he thought, while his men,
huddling round two heaps of smouldering embers, munched the
last of the bananas and roasted the few yams they owed to Kassim's
diplomacy. Cornelius sat amongst them dozing sulkily.
'Then one of the whites remembered that some tobacco had been
left in the boat, and, encouraged by the impunity of the Solomon
Islander, said he would go to fetch it. At this all the others shook
off their despondency. Brown applied to, said, "Go, and be d--d
to you," scornfully. He didn't think there was any danger in going
to the creek in the dark. The man threw a leg over the tree-trunk
and disappeared. A moment later he was heard clambering into the
boat and then clambering out. "I've got it," he cried. A flash and
a report at the very foot of the hill followed. "I am hit," yelled the
man. "Look out, look out--I am hit," and instantly all the rifles
went off. The hill squirted fire and noise into the night like a little
volcano, and when Brown and the Yankee with curses and cuffs
stopped the panic-stricken firing, a profound, weary groan floated
up from the creek, succeeded by a plaint whose heartrending sadness
was like some poison turning the blood cold in the veins. Then
a strong voice pronounced several distinct incomprehensible words
somewhere beyond the creek. "Let no one fire," shouted Brown.
"What does it mean?" . . . "Do you hear on the hill? Do you hear?
Do you hear?" repeated the voice three times. Cornelius translated,
and then prompted the answer. "Speak," cried Brown, "we hear."
Then the voice, declaiming in the sonorous inflated tone of a herald,
and shifting continually on the edge of the vague waste-land,
proclaimed that between the men of the Bugis nation living in Patusan
and the white men on the hill and those with them, there would be
no faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace. A bush rustled;
a haphazard volley rang out. "Dam' foolishness," muttered the
Yankee, vexedly grounding the butt. Cornelius translated. The
wounded man below the hill, after crying out twice, "Take me up!
take me up!" went on complaining in moans. While he had kept on
the blackened earth of the slope, and afterwards crouching in the
boat, he had been safe enough. It seems that in his joy at finding
the tobacco he forgot himself and jumped out on her off-side, as it
were. The white boat, lying high and dry, showed him up; the
creek was no more than seven yards wide in that place, and there
happened to be a man crouching in the bush on the other bank.
'He was a Bugis of Tondano only lately come to Patusan, and a
relation of the man shot in the afternoon. That famous long shot
had indeed appalled the beholders. The man in utter security had
been struck down, in full view of his friends, dropping with a joke
on his lips, and they seemed to see in the act an atrocity which had
stirred a bitter rage. That relation of his, Si-Lapa by name, was
then with Doramin in the stockade only a few feet away. You who
know these chaps must admit that the fellow showed an unusual
pluck by volunteering to carry the message, alone, in the dark.
Creeping across the open ground, he had deviated to the left and
found himself opposite the boat. He was startled when Brown's
man shouted. He came to a sitting position with his gun to his
shoulder, and when the other jumped out, exposing himself, he
pulled the trigger and lodged three jagged slugs point-blank into
the poor wretch's stomach. Then, lying flat on his face, he gave
himself up for dead, while a thin hail of lead chopped and swished
the bushes close on his right hand; afterwards he delivered his
speech shouting, bent double, dodging all the time in cover. With
the last word he leaped sideways, lay close for a while, and
afterwards got back to the houses unharmed, having achieved on that
night such a renown as his children will not willingly allow to die.
'And on the hill the forlorn band let the two little heaps of embers
go out under their bowed heads. They sat dejected on the ground
with compressed lips and downcast eyes, listening to their comrade
below. He was a strong man and died hard, with moans now loud,
now sinking to a strange confidential note of pain. Sometimes he
shrieked, and again, after a period of silence, he could be heard
muttering deliriously a long and unintelligible complaint. Never
for a moment did he cease.
' "What's the good?" Brown had said unmoved once, seeing the
Yankee, who had been swearing under his breath, prepare to go
down. "That's so," assented the deserter, reluctantly desisting.
"There's no encouragement for wounded men here. Only his noise
is calculated to make all the others think too much of the hereafter,
cap'n." "Water!" cried the wounded man in an extraordinarily
clear vigorous voice, and then went off moaning feebly. "Ay, water.
Water will do it," muttered the other to himself, resignedly.
"Plenty by-and-by. The tide is flowing."
'At last the tide flowed, silencing the plaint and the cries of pain,
and the dawn was near when Brown, sitting with his chin in the
palm of his hand before Patusan, as one might stare at the unscalable
side of a mountain, heard the brief ringing bark of a brass 6-pounder
far away in town somewhere. "What's this?" he asked of Cornelius,
who hung about him. Cornelius listened. A muffled roaring shout
rolled down-river over the town; a big drum began to throb, and
others responded, pulsating and droning. Tiny scattered lights
began to twinkle in the dark half of the town, while the part lighted
by the loom of fires hummed with a deep and prolonged murmur.
"He has come," said Cornelius. "What? Already? Are you sure?"
Brown asked. "Yes! yes! Sure. Listen to the noise." "What are
they making that row about?" pursued Brown. "For joy," snorted
Cornelius; "he is a very great man, but all the same, he knows no
more than a child, and so they make a great noise to please him,
because they know no better." "Look here," said Brown, "how is
one to get at him?" "He shall come to talk to you," Cornelius
declared. "What do you mean? Come down here strolling as it
were?" Cornelius nodded vigorously in the dark. "Yes. He will
come straight here and talk to you. He is just like a fool. You shall
see what a fool he is." Brown was incredulous. "You shall see; you
shall see," repeated Cornelius. "He is not afraid--not afraid of
anything. He will come and order you to leave his people alone.
Everybody must leave his people alone. He is like a little child. He
will come to you straight." Alas! he knew Jim well--that "mean
little skunk," as Brown called him to me. "Yes, certainly," he
pursued with ardour, "and then, captain, you tell that tall man
with a gun to shoot him. Just you kill him, and you will frighten
everybody so much that you can do anything you like with them
afterwards--get what you like--go away when you like. Ha! ha!
ha! Fine . . ." He almost danced with impatience and eagerness;
and Brown, looking over his shoulder at him, could see, shown up
by the pitiless dawn, his men drenched with dew, sitting amongst
the cold ashes and the litter of the camp, haggard, cowed, and in
rags.' _
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