Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories by George Lewis Becke (best fiction novels to read TXT) 📖

her uncle and the girl Sepe a look of bold defiance.

Palmer rose to his feet, and placed his hand on the head of the girl, who rose with him. "It cannot be, Jinaban. This girl Letane, who is of thine own kin, shall be my wife. But let not ill-blood come of it between thee and me or between thee and her; for I desire to live in friendship with thee."

Without a word Jinaban sprang to his feet, and, with a glance of bitter hatred at the trader and the girl who stood beside him, he walked out of the house, accompanied by his old men and the rejected Sepe, who, as she turned away, looked scornfully at her rival and spat on the ground.

In a few weeks the marriage took place, and Palmer made the customary presents to his wife's relatives. To Jinaban--who refused to attend the feasting and dancing that accompanied the ceremony--he sent a new fishing-net one hundred fathoms in length, a very valuable and much-esteemed gift, for the cost of such an article was considerable. To Jelik, his wife's guardian, he gave a magazine rifle and five hundred cartridges, and to Rao, the other brother, presents of cloth, tobacco, and hatchets.

That night, whilst Palmer slept with his bride, Jinaban came to the house of his brother Jelik. His black eyes gleamed red with anger.

"What right hast thou, my younger brother, to take from the white man that which I coveted most? Am not I the greater chief, and thy master? Give me that gun."

Jelik sprang to his feet. "Nay, why shouldst thou covet my one gift from the white man? Is not the net he gave thee worth twenty such guns as the one he hath given me?"

Jinaban leapt at his brother's throat, and for a minute or two they struggled fiercely; then Jelik fell with a groan, for Jinaban stabbed him in the throat twice. Then seizing the rifle and two bags of cartridges he sallied out into the village. Behind him, panting with rage, ran his murdered brother's wife, a young woman of twenty years of age. She carried an infant in her arms, and was running swiftly, clutching in her right hand a short dagger.

"Stand, thou coward, Jinaban!" she called, setting the child down in the path--"stand, thou coward, for though thou hast slain my husband thou shalt not rob me of that which was his--give me back the gun."

Jinaban laughed fiercely, and his white teeth flashed from his black-bearded lips; he slipped some cartridges into the rifle. He waited till the woman was within ten yards of him, then raised the weapon and shot her dead. And now, his tiger nature aroused to the full, he sprang into the middle of the village square of Ailap, and began firing at every person he saw, sparing neither age nor sex. His second brother, Rao, a courageous young man, seizing the only weapon available--a seaman's cutlass--rushed forth from his house and, calling upon Jinaban to lay down his weapon, advanced towards him. Pretending to consent--for a cartridge had jammed and the rifle would not work--Jinaban held out the butt to Rao in token of surrender; then the moment Rao grasped it, he sprang at his throat and bore him to the ground, and, tearing the cutlass from his hand, he plunged it through and through the prostrate man's body. Then, with a savage threat against the whole of the murdered men's families, he turned and fled towards the beach. Dragging a light canoe down into the water, he sprang into it, and pushed off just as Palmer appeared on the scene, and, raising his revolver, fired six shots at the escaping murderer. None of the shots, however, took effect, and Jinaban, with an oath of vengeance against the white man, paddled swiftly away and reached the low, densely wooded and uninhabited island on the western side of the lagoon.

This for two years had now been his lair. Paddling over at dead of night from time to time, he would stalk, rifle in hand, through the village, and, entering any house he pleased, demand food and tobacco. And such was the terror of his name and his chiefly prestige that no one dared refuse. Sometimes, moved by the lust for slaughter, he would command that the food he demanded should be carried before him and placed in his canoe. Then he would shoot the unfortunate bearer dead on the beach. Against his half-brother's families he manifested the most deadly hatred; and on one occasion, meeting a girl, a slave of Rao's widow, on a little islet some miles away from Ailap, he shot the poor child through her legs, breaking them both, and left her to perish of starvation. Palmer well knew that he was willingly supplied with food by the people of his own village, although they asserted their innocence of aiding him in any way, and expressed the utmost fear and horror of the outlaw. That his death would be a relief to them as well as to the people of Ailap was certainly true, but Palmer and his wife Letane were well aware that none of Jinaban's own people would ever raise hand against him; and, indeed, the Ailap people, though they now had the strongest feelings of friendship for the white man, were so smitten with terror at the constantly recurring bloody deeds perpetrated by Jinaban, that they were too terrified to accompany the trader over to the outlaw's island and track him to his lair. Twice had Palmer crossed over in the darkness of night, and, Winchester in hand, carefully sought for traces of Jinaban's hiding-place, but without success. The interior of the island was a dense thicket of scrub which seemed to defy penetration. On the last occasion Palmer had hidden among a mass of broken and vine-covered coral boulders which covered the eastern shore. Here for a whole night and the following day he remained, keeping a keen watch upon the line of beach in the hope that he would see Jinaban carrying his canoe down to the water to make one of his murderous descents upon the Ailap village. His own canoe he had carefully concealed among the scrub, and as he had landed on a very dark night upon a ledge of rocks that stretched from the water's edge to the thicket, and carried the canoe up, he was sure that no trace of his landing would be visible to Jinaban. At dark on the following evening he gave up his quest and paddled slowly over to the village, sick at heart with fear for his wife Letane, for the outlaw had made a threat that she should soon fall a victim to his implacable hatred.

Halfway across the lagoon he heard the sound of two shots, and by its sharp crack knew that one came from Jinaban's rifle--the rifle he had given to the slaughtered Jelik. Urging his canoe along the surface of the quiet water, Palmer soon reached the beach of Ailap village, and was horrified to learn that the man he had sought had just left after shooting a lad of fifteen--a cousin of Letane--whom he had surprised while fishing in the lagoon. Cutting off the boy's head, Jinaban had boldly stalked through the village till he reached Palmer's house, through the open window of which he had thrown his gory trophy, and then made his escape.

The trader's wife, who at the time was sleeping in the big room of the house, surrounded by half a dozen natives armed with muskets, at once sprang up, and, seizing a rifle, started in pursuit, for she feared that Jinaban had learnt of Palmer's absence, and would wait for and shoot him as he crossed the lagoon. She managed to reach the beach in time to see the escaping murderer paddling along in his canoe close in shore. Kneeling down, she took careful aim and fired. A mocking laugh answered the shot.

*****


That was the story that Palmer told the half-caste Maori, who listened to him attentively throughout.

For some minutes, however, after the trader had finished, he did not speak, and then at last said in his slow, methodical way--

"I will promise you that I'll get you Jinaban, dead or alive, before a week is out. And I don't want money. But I want you, please, to get some one of your natives here to come and tell me all they can about Jinaban's friends in the other village."

Palmer called to his wife. She came in, heavy-eyed and pale-faced, for the youth whose head she and her women had just buried was much attached to her, and her husband as well. At that moment the lad's relatives were searching the lagoon in the hope of finding the body, into which it had doubtless been thrown by the ruthless hand of Jinaban; and Letane had just returned alone to the house.

In a very short time the half-caste learnt from Letane that Sepe, who lived in Jinaban's village, was strongly suspected of receiving visits from the outlaw, and even of visiting the man himself; for on several occasions she had been absent from her mother's house for two or three days at a time. And as most of Jinaban's people were in secret sympathy with their outlawed chief, the girl's movements were never commented on by the inhabitants of her own village, for fear that the relatives of the murdered chiefs, Rao and Jelik, and other people of Ailap, would kill her. But in some way Sepe had betrayed herself, and Letane was now having a strict watch kept upon the girl by two or three of her women attendants whom she had sent to reside in Ijeet, as Jinaban's village was called. Ostensibly they had gone to visit some relatives there. Sepe, however, was always on her guard, and so far the spies had learnt nothing fresh.

At Porter's request the trader's wife gave him a description of Sepe's appearance, and also described the exact position of the house in which she lived with her mother. Then the half-caste unfolded his plan to Palmer and his wife.

"And now," he said, "I must go. If I stay longer it may spoil our plans by making Jinaban's friend suspicious. Give me the bottle of gin, and I'll carry it so that every one can see it as I walk through the village. And you must get all your men out of the way by the time I come back. They might shoot me, but the women will be too frightened."

Palmer went to his trade room and returned with a large bottle of Hollands, which he gave to Porter, together with a box of revolver cartridges; these the half-caste carefully concealed in the bosom of his singlet. Then, shaking hands with the trader and his wife, he walked out of the house, down the steps, and along the path to the village.

"Parma," said Letane to her husband, as they watched the seaman disappear among the coco-palms, "dost think this man will be true to us in this thing?"

"Aye," replied the trader, "sure am I of his good faith; for he it was who four years ago, single-handed, fought two hundred of the wild man-eaters of the Solomon Islands, when they captured the ship in which he sailed, and slew every man on board but himself. Twenty-and-three of those devils of _kai tagata_ (cannibals) did he kill with his Winchester rifle from the fore-top of the ship, although he was slashed in the thigh with a deep knife wound, and was faint from loss of blood. And then when the rest had fled in their canoes he