CHAPTER II
From the whaleboat, up the low side of the Arangi, and over her six-
inch rail of teak to her teak deck, was but a step, and Tom Haggin
made it easily with Jerry still under his arm. The deck was
cluttered with an exciting crowd. Exciting the crowd would have
been to untravelled humans of civilization, and exciting it was to
Jerry; although to Tom Haggin and Captain Van Horn it was a mere
commonplace of everyday life.
The deck was small because the Arangi was small. Originally a teak-
built, gentleman's yacht, brass-fitted, copper-fastened, angle-
ironed, sheathed in man-of-war copper and with a fin-keel of bronze,
she had been sold into the Solomon Islands' trade for the purpose of
blackbirding or nigger-running. Under the law, however, this
traffic was dignified by being called "recruiting."
The Arangi was a labour-recruit ship that carried the new-caught,
cannibal blacks from remote islands to labour on the new plantations
where white men turned dank and pestilential swamp and jungle into
rich and stately cocoanut groves. The Arangi's two masts were of
Oregon cedar, so scraped and hot-paraffined that they shone like tan
opals in the glare of sun. Her excessive sail plan enabled her to
sail like a witch, and, on occasion, gave Captain Van Horn, his
white mate, and his fifteen black boat's crew as much as they could
handle. She was sixty feet over all, and the cross beams of her
crown deck had not been weakened by deck-houses. The only breaks--
and no beams had been cut for them--were the main cabin skylight and
companionway, the booby hatch for'ard over the tiny forecastle, and
the small hatch aft that let down into the store-room.
And on this small deck, in addition to the crew, were the "return"
niggers from three far-flung plantations. By "return" was meant
that their three years of contract labour was up, and that,
according to contract, they were being returned to their home
villages on the wild island of Malaita. Twenty of them--familiar,
all, to Jerry--were from Meringe; thirty of them came from the Bay
of a Thousand Ships, in the Russell Isles; and the remaining twelve
were from Pennduffryn on the east coast of Guadalcanar. In addition
to these--and they were all on deck, chattering and piping in queer,
almost elfish, falsetto voices--were the two white men, Captain Van
Horn and his Danish mate, Borckman, making a total of seventy-nine
souls.
"Thought your heart 'd failed you at the last moment," was Captain
Van Horn's greeting, a quick pleasure light glowing into his eyes as
they noted Jerry.
"It was sure near to doin' it," Tom Haggin answered. "It's only for
you I'd a done it, annyways. Jerry's the best of the litter,
barrin' Michael, of course, the two of them bein' all that's left
and no better than them that was lost. Now that Kathleen was a
sweet dog, the spit of Biddy if she'd lived.--Here, take 'm."
With a jerk of abruptness, he deposited Jerry in Van Horn's arms and
turned away along the deck.
"An' if bad luck comes to him I'll never forgive you, Skipper," he
flung roughly over his shoulder.
"They'll have to take my head first," the skipper chuckled.
"An' not unlikely, my brave laddy buck," Haggin growled. "Meringe
owes Somo four heads, three from the dysentery, an' another wan from
a tree fallin' on him the last fortnight. He was the son of a chief
at that."
"Yes, and there's two heads more that the Arangi owes Somo," Van
Horn nodded. "You recollect, down to the south'ard last year, a
chap named Hawkins was lost in his whaleboat running the Arli
Passage?" Haggin, returning along the deck, nodded. "Two of his
boat's crew were Somo boys. I'd recruited them for Ugi Plantation.
With your boys, that makes six heads the Arangi owes. But what of
it? There's one salt-water village, acrost on the weather coast,
where the Arangi owes eighteen. I recruited them for Aolo, and
being salt-water men they put them on the Sandfly that was lost on
the way to the Santa Cruz. They've got a jack-pot over there on the
weather coast--my word, the boy that could get my head would be a
second Carnegie! A hundred and fifty pigs and shell money no end
the village's collected for the chap that gets me and delivers."
"And they ain't--yet," Haggin snorted.
"No fear," was the cheerful retort.
"You talk like Arbuckle used to talk," Haggin censured. "Manny's
the time I've heard him string it off. Poor old Arbuckle. The most
sure and most precautious chap that ever handled niggers. He never
went to sleep without spreadin' a box of tacks on the floor, and
when it wasn't them it was crumpled newspapers. I remember me well,
bein' under the same roof at the time on Florida, when a big tomcat
chased a cockroach into the papers. And it was blim, blam, blim,
six times an' twice over, with his two big horse-pistols, an' the
house perforated like a cullender. Likewise there was a dead tom-
cat. He could shoot in the dark with never an aim, pullin' trigger
with the second finger and pointing with the first finger laid
straight along the barrel.
"No, sir, my laddy buck. He was the bully boy with the glass eye.
The nigger didn't live that'd lift his head. But they got 'm. They
got 'm. He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy.
Hatcheted 'm before breakfast. An' it's well I remember our second
trip into the bush after what was left of 'm."
"I saw his head after you'd turned it over to the Commissioner at
Tulagi," Van Horn supplemented.
"An' the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost
the same old smile I'd seen a thousand times. It dried on 'm that
way over the smokin' fire. But they got 'm, if it did take fourteen
years. There's manny's the head that goes to Malaita, manny's the
time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it's tooken in the end."
"But I've got their goat," the captain insisted. "When trouble's
hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can't get
the hang of it. Think I've got some powerful devil-devil medicine."
Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely
keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other's arms.
"Keep your eye on my return boys," he cautioned, as he went over the
side, "till you land the last mother's son of 'm. They've got no
cause to love Jerry or his breed, an' I'd hate ill to happen 'm at a
nigger's hands. An' in the dark of the night 'tis like as not he
can do a fare-you-well overside. Don't take your eye off 'm till
you're quit of the last of 'm."
At sight of big Mister Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in
the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low,
whimpering whine. Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm
with a caress of his free hand.
"Don't forget the agreement," Tom Haggin called back across the
widening water. "If aught happens you, Jerry's to come back to me."
"I'll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship's
articles," was Van Horn's reply.
Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the
talk of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was
aware, vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and
unguessably terrible thing that was happening to him. He wriggled
more determinedly, and Van Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang
to the rail with more quickness than was to be expected of an
awkward puppy of six months, and not the quick attempt of Van Horn
to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry recoiled from the open
water lapping the Arangi's side. The taboo was upon him. It was
the image of the log awash that was not a log but that was alive,
luminous in his brain, that checked him. It was not reason on his
part, but inhibition which had become habit.
He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and
emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.
"It's all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog," Van
Horn soothed him.
But Jerry was not to be reconciled. While this indubitably was a
white-skinned god, it was not his god. Mister Haggin was his god,
and a superior god at that. Even he, without thinking about it at
all, recognized that. His Mister Haggin wore pants and shoes. This
god on the deck beside him was more like a black. Not only did he
not wear pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his
middle, just like any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin-
cloth, that, like a kilt, fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.
Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although
Jerry did not know it. If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a
Rembrandt frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact
that he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors
before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but
New Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat,
distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and
mostly over one ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his
torso; and from a belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a
sheath-knife, filled clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic
pistol in a leather holster.
On the beach, Biddy, who had hushed her grief, lifted it again when
she heard Jerry's wail. And Jerry, desisting a moment to listen,
heard Michael beside her, barking his challenge, and saw, without
being conscious of it, Michael's withered ear with its persistent
upward cock. Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman,
gave orders, and while the Arangi's mainsail and spanker began to
rise up the masts, Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob
told Derby on the beach was the "grandest vocal effort" he had ever
heard from any dog, and that, except for being a bit thin, Caruso
didn't have anything on Jerry. But the song was too much for
Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed, whistled Biddy to him and
strode rapidly away from the beach.
At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso-
like effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who
stood beside him. He laughed and jeered at Jerry with falsetto
chucklings that were more like the jungle-noises of tree-dwelling
creatures, half-bird and half-man, than of a man, all man, and
therefore a god. This served as an excellent counter-irritant.
Indignation that a mere black should laugh at him mastered Jerry,
and the next moment his puppy teeth, sharp-pointed as needles, had
scored the astonished black's naked calf in long parallel scratches
from each of which leaped the instant blood. The black sprang away
in trepidation, but the blood of Terrence the Magnificent was true
in Jerry, and, like his father before him, he followed up, slashing
the black's other calf into a ruddy pattern.
At this moment, anchor broken out and headsails running up, Captain
Van Horn, whose quick eye had missed no detail of the incident, with
an order to the black helmsman turned to applaud Jerry.
"Go to it, Jerry!" he encouraged. "Get him! Shake him down! Sick
him! Get him! Get him!"
The black, in defence, aimed a kick at Jerry, who, leaping in
instead of away--another inheritance from Terrence--avoided the bare
foot and printed a further red series of parallel lines on the dark
leg. This was too much, and the black, afraid more of Van Horn than
of Jerry, turned and fled for'ard, leaping to safety on top of the
eight Lee-Enfield rifles that lay on top of the cabin skylight and
that were guarded by one member of the boat's crew. About the
skylight Jerry stormed, leaping up and falling back, until Captain
Van Horn called him off.
"Some nigger-chaser, that pup, some nigger-chaser!" Van Horn
confided to Borckman, as he bent to pat Jerry and give him due
reward of praise.
And Jerry, under this caressing hand of a god, albeit it did not
wear pants, forgot for a moment longer the fate that was upon him.
"He's a lion-dog--more like an Airedale than an Irish terrier," Van
Horn went on to his mate, still petting. "Look at the size of him
already. Look at the bone of him. Some chest that. He's got the
endurance. And he'll be some dog when he grows up to those feet of
his."
Jerry had just remembered his grief and was starting a rush across
the deck to the rail to gaze at Meringe growing smaller every second
in the distance, when a gust of the South-east Trade smote the sails
and pressed the Arangi down. And down the deck, slanted for the
moment to forty-five degrees, Jerry slipped and slid, vainly clawing
at the smooth surface for a hold. He fetched up against the foot of
the mizzenmast, while Captain Van Horn, with the sailor's eye for
the coral patch under his bow, gave the order "Hard a-lee!"
Borckman and the black steersman echoed his words, and, as the wheel
spun down, the Arangi, with the swiftness of a witch, rounded into
the wind and attained a momentary even keel to the flapping of her
headsails and a shifting of headsheets.
Jerry, still intent on Meringe, took advantage of the level footing
to recover himself and scramble toward the rail. But he was
deflected by the crash of the mainsheet blocks on the stout deck-
traveller, as the mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the wind
on the other side, swung crazily across above him. He cleared the
danger of the mainsheet with a wild leap (although no less wild had
been Van Horn's leap to rescue him), and found himself directly
under the mainboom with the huge sail looming above him as if about
to fall upon him and crush him.
It was Jerry's first experience with sails of any sort. He did not
know the beasts, much less the way of them, but, in his vivid
recollection, when he had been a tiny puppy, burned the memory of
the hawk, in the middle of the compound, that had dropped down upon
him from out of the sky. Under that colossal threatened impact he
crouched down to the deck. Above him, falling upon him like a bolt
from the blue, was a winged hawk unthinkably vaster than the one he
had encountered. But in his crouch was no hint of cower. His
crouch was a gathering together, an assembling of all the parts of
him under the rule of the spirit of him, for the spring upward to
meet in mid career this monstrous, menacing thing.
But, the succeeding fraction of a moment, so that Jerry, leaping,
missed even the shadow of it, the mainsail, with a second crash of
blocks on traveller, had swung across and filled on the other tack.
Van Horn had missed nothing of it. Before, in his time, he had seen
young dogs frightened into genuine fits by their first encounters
with heaven-filling, sky-obscuring, down-impending sails. This was
the first dog he had seen leap with bared teeth, undismayed, to
grapple with the huge unknown.
With spontaneity of admiration, Van Horn swept Jerry from the deck
and gathered him into his arms.
