Gordon Young

“ Young Rideout was not over twenty and I reflected that the knights errant must be holding a magnificent tourney under his cranium if he would crack an ax handle over the head of his uncle, endanger the very valuable plantation, and set the beach gleefully a-roar with his talk of "real love," all because a native girl, who, but for a little less fulness of the lips, was not unlike hundreds back in the bush that danced, howling and naked, in the moonlight feast of cannibals. ”

“ Schwartz cursed angrily and stamped out, almost shaking the earth with his bulky tread, while our laughter followed him into the moonlight. All of us thought that Jake had neatly put over an elaborate joke, and Schwartz was not popular.
TAVAU was half-Samoan, and the Samoans are the coquettes of the South Seas. The Tongans themselves—though not quite civilized, or rather Christianized—are a paradox: in wrath they are undoubtedly as fierce as any tribe that touches the Pacific, but their disposition is such as to have won for their group of islands the geographical designation of "friendly." ”

“ But as they sneaked upon the boy and girl, Iako had heard Tavau chanting one of the old, old fetish songs; and coming closer he had seen Rideout leaping about as Iako himself had leaped before many a maiden in the long ago. He was an exile, a lonesome outlander among the Christianized natives of Niko, and the thought had burst within his head that if the "One God" people took converts from natives, maybe the old gods that he still worshiped could be restored to power and prestige by taking converts from the whites. ”

“ That wise law, enforced by the full majesty of British authority, which permits a white man all the liquor on earth if he can get it, but which makes the punishment severe for giving or selling so much as a drop to a native, assures the beach-comber of always having the wherewith to extract favors from black boys.
It seemed that Schwartz, ever with his eyes on Tavau, was quick to suspect that she had tossed her witchery over young Rideout. Schwartz, bulky as an ox and with a beard that was likely to get tangled in the bush at night, had begun soft-footedly to spy on her. ”

“ The searchers soon split into a score of parties, rushing about in twos, threes and half-dozens; and for the most part having a lark of a time, though the missionaries and Buck Rideout were threatening and entreating.
Near where the trail vanished I suddenly came upon Schwartz arguing earnestly with Iako, a withered old bushman, who, though peaceable enough, held aloof from the "One God" people; but he had come along on the search for the same reason that black boys or white follow the crowd. ”

“ He's just like a good healthy fish that suddenly wakes up and finds he's been sleeping on the beach about ten feet above where the little waves are running along over the sand, whispering and looking for him. ”

“ Jake tried to guard Rideout night and day, even picking out the green cocoanuts from which he drank lest Tonogo, aided by the witch-doctor, might poison the boy. If a missionary could die of "dysentery" after being brained by a war club, why not this stranger if he passed out quietly under the witch-doctor's charm? Jake would still have been left to show the "Government" that the Quosoli did not harm white men.
BUT a labor-recruiter put into the bay before the gunboat. The skipper was new to the South Seas, but he was careful, as most men had to be in those days if they grew old ”

“ Jake would have killed Iako on the spot—and came near to doing it—if Tavau had not begun to pour out the story which told how that grinning old savage had, after all, really saved Rideout's life. Iako had explained it all to her.
Schwartz had hired Iako to trail them down for him, and had made no secret of the hope to kill Rideout on sight. Precious little Iako cared whether one white man killed another. ”

“ Around and around they circled and spun, wild with youth and love, and instinctively celebrating their joy in that same bounding play and rhythmic shouting that no doubt startled the newly-created animals in the forests of Eden when the father and mother of us all first awoke and found themselves alive. ”

“ She had done another queer thing too, for though she spoke English almost like a white girl, she had lapsed into the trader's argot, understood by natives from the Solomons to the Carolines, to tell the skipper that she did not like the "One God" any more because she had prayed to Him, and Tonogo had had the witch-man do his praying to the Quosoli gods; and they were the more powerful, for hadn't he got what he asked for, and she failed, so that now she loved Tonogo very much? ”

“ A few days later a Queensland labor-trader put into Niko short-handed from a little skirmish with reluctant laborers over at Santa Cruz—the natives there were cannibals, fierce and wary—and Jake was taken on as mate and I went along.
When we came back the village hummed with gossip and rumors.
Buck Rideout was the richest planter on ten islands. He thought missionaries were only one degree removed from witch-doctors, but he was a stern moral man himself and had contempt for "white niggers," as he called the fathers of half-breeds, whether or not there had been a marriage ceremony. ”

“ Iako and Jake cut the prisoners loose; then with difficulty convinced them that it was dangerous to try to slaughter the sleeping enemies that would be aroused if a single blow wounded instead of killed.
Tavau and Rideout were brought down to the canoe which was shoved off without so much as a yell from the stranded warriors who, anyway, were likely enough picked up in a day or two by other members of the scattered war-fleet.
The Quosoli, a bad lot themselves, made straight for home; and a favorable wind helped them along. ”

“ Why, the sailors had found the Quosoli the friendliest tribe anywhere. True, their experience with natives was not great because their gunboat had only recently been sent into the South Seas for duty, but they guessed they knew when even niggers were friendly.
But a funny thing had happened a day or two before they got there. The pretty young wife of the chief's son had killed herself—driven a knife right into her heart, and everybody in the tribe was afraid to touch her body—funny thing—because never in the memory of the oldest man in the tribe had a woman done that—killed herself, you know ”

“ They rushed him along the neck of land circling the harbor, ordered him into a canoe and made him lie down; then set out frantically for the schooner which was getting under way. He could get no answers for his questions, though he knew very well that somebody was fooling with the orders of the old chief who had not wanted the labor-recruiters to think white men could live overnight among the Quosoli. He wanted the gunboat to think so; but labor-recruiters were discouraged in every way. ”

“ An old-time sailor he was, but beardless, slow of movement and speech, and as full of yarns as ever a man was who has roved. No doubt some of those yarns were true.
"But he's learnin' fast," Jake went on, nodding his head toward the grove. "He's twenty-some hours on the island and hasn't been bit by a cannibal yet. He thought they'd be ugly as the pictures always is that missionaries send back to help raise funds, and then Tavau gets her eyes on him. And he just simply can't hardly believe his own eyes 'cause she acts like some of the girls back home—only does it better. Yes. ”

“ Jake said tenderly to the boy. "I did for a fact. But being forty-odd years down here I ought t' have known better. Once a heathen, always a heathen—and her having such a grandmother and mother. Anyhow it takes too long for religion to soak through black skins and get down where it does a lot o' good. It's been soaking in the hides of us whites for two thousand-odd years and it ain't reached all our hearts yet. But it's live and learn, my boy—an' learnin' costs a lot o' brainaches and unweeped tears—'specially in this climate.
"Now Schwartz was just a drunken Deutscher. ”

“ The Quosoli are dirty, treacherous, amazingly cunning, and as ugly-faced as a race of poisoners are likely to be. They are notoriously inveterate cannibals, filthy and lazy; and on the first night Jake overheard Tavau praying impatiently in English to the "One God" to make her boy well so she could have him, and to send plenty hell-fire and like-Job-boils on the dirty witch-doctor that brought crushed spiders in a skull bowl to smear the sick boy with ”

“ But even with all the reports I heard, Jake gathered something more and swore that he believed it, too. However, Schwartz being a German, I knew that Jake would believe anything to his discredit. The report that Jake believed came straight from a reliable source—or as straight as anything ever could come from the mission to the bar shanty. ”

“ The white men—traders, beach-combers, colonists and inevitable missionaries—crowded even that island; but the daughter, Naima, was instructed in the old Tongian faith. As she grew up into her teens she was wooed in the divers ways of the white men, with, however, less success than the amorous adventurers often have.
But to make Lean Jake's epic brief: after the mother's death Naima married the handsomest of the unconverted natives, who happened to be a Samoan ”

“ Some man who wrote a book that was left around one time where I had nobody to talk to and nothing else to read, said that from infancy to maturity the human being reflects in a minute way the entire evolutionary history of the race. ”

“ At the first shot the sailor—an innocent stranger to our port— went into the air with a yell and came down some fifteen feet away with steam up and sails crowded; and he traveled so fast that, as one of the fellows afterward said, you had to throw your glance about forty feet ahead to see him go by. ”

“ And Tavau—she was just a nigger, and she fooled us all just like women does no matter what their color is."
A labor-trade, or recruiting, schooner travels pretty much to suit itself; and the skipper dropped some two hundred miles off his course to bring Jake and Rideout to Niko. ”