Joan nodded but remained silent. She was too occupied in glimpsing the vision of the one lone white man as she had first seen him, helpless from fever, a collapsed wraith in a steamer-chair, who, up to the last heart-beat, by some strange alchemy of race, was pledged to mastery.
«It is a pity,» she said. «But the white man has to rule, I suppose.»
«I don't like it,» Sheldon assured her. «To save my life I can't imagine how I ever came here. But here I am, and I can't run away.»
«Blind destiny of race,» she said, faintly smiling. «We whites have been land robbers and sea robbers from remotest time. It is in our blood, I guess, and we can't get away from it.»
«I never thought about it so abstractly,» he confessed. «I've been too busy puzzling over why I came here.»
CHAPTER VIII-LOCAL COLOUR
At sunset a small ketch fanned in to anchorage, and a little later the skipper came ashore. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced young fellow of twenty, but he won Joan's admiration in advance when Sheldon told her that he ran the ketch all alone with a black crew from Malaita. And Romance lured and beckoned before Joan's eyes when she learned he was Christian Young, a Norfolk Islander, but a direct descendant of John Young, one of the original Bounty mutineers. The blended Tahitian and English blood showed in his soft eyes and tawny skin; but the English hardness seemed to have disappeared. Yet the hardness was there, and it was what enabled him to run his ketch single-handed and to wring a livelihood out of the fighting Solomons.
Joan's unexpected presence embarrassed him, until she herself put him at his ease by a frank, comradely manner that offended Sheldon's sense of the fitness of things feminine. News from the world Young had not, but he was filled with news of the Solomons. Fifteen boys had stolen rifles and run away into the bush from Lunga plantation, which was farther east on the Guadalcanar coast. And from the bush they had sent word that they were coming back to wipe out the three white men in charge, while two of the three white men, in turn, were hunting them through the bush. There was a strong possibility, Young volunteered, that if they were not caught they might circle around and tap the coast at Berande in order to steal or capture a whale-boat.
«I forgot to tell you that your trader at Ugi has been murdered,» he said to Sheldon. «Five big canoes came down from Port Adams. They landed in the night-time, and caught Oscar asleep. What they didn't steal they burned. The Flibberty-Gibbet got the news at Mboli Pass, and ran down to Ugi. I was at Mboli when the news came.»
«I think I'll have to abandon Ugi,» Sheldon remarked.
«It's the second trader you've lost there in a year,» Young concurred. «To make it safe there ought to be two white men at least. Those Malaita canoes are always raiding down that way, and you know what that Port Adams lot is. I've got a dog for you. Tommy Jones sent it up from Neal Island. He said he'd promised it to you. It's a first-class nigger-chaser. Hadn't been on board two minutes when he had my whole boat's-crew in the rigging. Tommy calls him Satan.»
«I've wondered several times why you had no dogs here,» Joan said.
«The trouble is to keep them. They're always eaten by the crocodiles.»
«Jack Hanley was killed at Marovo Lagoon two months ago,» Young announced in his mild voice. «The news just came down on the Apostle.»
«Where is Marovo Lagoon?» Joan asked.
«New Georgia, a couple of hundred miles to the westward,» Sheldon answered. «Bougainville lies just beyond.»
«His own house-boys did it,» Young went on; «but they were put up to it by the Marovo natives. His Santa Cruz boat's-crew escaped in the whale-boat to Choiseul, and Mather, in the Lily, sailed over to Marovo. He burned a village, and got Hanley's head back. He found it in one of the houses, where the niggers had it drying. And that's all the news I've got, except that there's a lot of new Lee– Enfields loose on the eastern end of Ysabel. Nobody knows how the natives got them. The government ought to investigate. And-oh yes, a war vessel's in the group, the Cambrian. She burned three villages at Bina-on account of the Minota, you know-and shelled the bush. Then she went to Sio to straighten out things there.»
The conversation became general, and just before Young left to go on board Joan asked, –
«How can you manage all alone, Mr. Young?»
His large, almost girlish eyes rested on her for a moment before he replied, and then it was in the softest and gentlest of voices.
«Oh, I get along pretty well with them. Of course, there is a bit of trouble once in a while, but that must be expected. You must never let them think you are afraid. I've been afraid plenty of times, but they never knew it.»
«You would think he wouldn't strike a mosquito that was biting him,» Sheldon said when Young had gone on board. «All the Norfolk Islanders that have descended from the Bounty crowd are that way. But look at Young. Only three years ago, when he first got the Minerva, he was lying in Suu, on Malaita. There are a lot of returned Queenslanders there-a rough crowd. They planned to get his head. The son of their chief, old One-Eyed Billy, had recruited on Lunga and died of dysentery. That meant that a white man's head was owing to Suu-any white man, it didn't matter who so long as they got the head. And Young was only a lad, and they made sure to get his easily. They decoyed his whale-boat ashore with a promise of recruits, and killed all hands. At the same instant, the Suu gang that was on board the Minerva jumped Young. He was just preparing a dynamite stick for fish, and he lighted it and tossed it in amongst them. One can't get him to talk about it, but the fuse was short, the survivors leaped overboard, while he slipped his anchor and got away. They've got one hundred fathoms of shell money on his head now, which is worth one hundred pounds sterling. Yet he goes into Suu regularly. He was there a short time ago, returning thirty boys from Cape Marsh-that's the Fulcrum Brothers' plantation.»
«At any rate, his news to-night has given me a better insight into the life down here,» Joan said. «And it is colourful life, to say the least. The Solomons ought to be printed red on the charts-and yellow, too, for the diseases.»
«The Solomons are not always like this,» Sheldon answered. «Of course, Berande is the worst plantation, and everything it gets is the worst. I doubt if ever there was a worse run of sickness than we were just getting over when you arrived. Just as luck would have it, the Jessie caught the contagion as well. Berande has been very unfortunate. All the old-timers shake their heads at it. They say it has what you Americans call a hoodoo on it.»
«Berande will succeed,» Joan said stoutly. «I like to laugh at superstition. You'll pull through and come out the big end of the horn. The ill luck can't last for ever. I am afraid, though, the Solomons is not a white man's climate.»
«It will be, though. Give us fifty years, and when all the bush is cleared off back to the mountains, fever will be stamped out; everything will be far healthier. There will be cities and towns here, for there's an immense amount of good land going to waste.»
«But it will never become a white man's climate, in spite of all that,» Joan reiterated. «The white man will always be unable to perform the manual labour.»
«That is true.»
«It will mean slavery,» she dashed on.
«Yes, like all the tropics. The black, the brown, and the yellow will have to do the work, managed by the white men. The black labour is too wasteful, however, and in time Chinese or Indian coolies will be imported. The planters are already considering the matter. I, for one, am heartily sick of black labour.»