No Man's Island/Chapter 9

EXT morning the rift had closed to all appearances. Tiburi was on hand with his men at dawn, bringing the two big canoes for the hull of the pontoon and saplings for the under deck. Every one worked with a will and the atmosphere seemed cleared. Holabird and the other three of the relief guard went away in the whale-boat cheerfully, Edwards with them, carrying to the terrace some of the fresh fruits and fish Tiburi’s followers supplied.

There was a surplusage of labor, willing, but in the mass unintelligent. The natives in their canoes got in the way. Tiburi was prodigal enough with his orders and, if Hooper had not put a stop to it, they would have brought enough island provender to stock a battle-cruiser. He was forced to establish the tabu lines early in the morning, as soon as there was enough lumber in sight for Manning to complete his pontoon.

Although he made no protests, plainly in awe of the Hims, it was evident that Tiburi did not relish the tabu. Hitherto that had been his supreme privilege on the island and his obedience to the restrictions of another made him feel as if he had lost face to some extent. The schooner was a powerful magnet for the savage chieftain. It was the treasure-box that held many gifts, that furnished the gin he craved. He had strong liquors enough of his own but this brew the white man supplied was different. More pungent and with a speedy stimulus to his stomach that the native ferments no longer held.

Hooper was quick to see this mood and to meet it.

“The schooner is tabu between the time the sun goes down and comes up again, Tiburi,” he said. “It is tabu everywhere within the red cloths while the Hims are helping us. There will be many gods below the waters and they do not wish to be spied upon. If they become angry I can not stop them from visiting their wrath upon those who have displeased them. So long as the red cloths fly you and your men must keep outside the marks. But the water-gods do not work all day and, when it is safe, I will take down the cloths and you are free to visit the ship. But only your canoe must come alongside and only five of your men must board with you.”

Tiburi looked his surprize at the five fingers and promptly held up ten. But Hooper frowned and shook his head.

“Five, I tell you.”

“No sense in taking any chances at this end of the game,” he told Manning when he returned from setting up the tabu stakes in the reef and putting out the floating markers. “No sense, either, in getting Tiburi peeved so long as he serves us. But his kind is always treacherous and they have memories only a little better than apes. As long as the object-lesson is in front of them, they respect it, but they hold only one idea at a time, whether it is a matter of gifts, of supplying their stomachs or making war. I learned that in the New Hebrides.

“They’ll take a notion to ‘make their village strong,’ as they call it, which is just showing-off, or a chief’s son will die, or a crop will fail. Then they will swoop down upon some friendly trader with whom they have been chumming for months and murder him, seizing the excuse to raid his store.

“His goods have been tickling the back of their minds right along. Tiburi has no one to show off to but his own following, and this Him Who Walks business has to some extent set him down in their opinion. But they’ll keep the tabu so long as we don’t maintain it all the time.”

Manning glanced at the fluttering strips of red cloth. Hooper had drawn a wide circle about the pontoon and the yacht. With the canvas screen, opening seaward, and the natural confusion of several figures on the raft, together with the bulk of the pump and other equipment, it would be hard for the savages, keeping the distance, to distinguish much of what was going on. The canvas screen would act as dressing-room for the divers. Manning nodded his approval.

“We’ll change on the pontoon,” he said, “and carry the suits back to the schooner every night. They’ll need overhauling. Working in sand is liable to wear the rubber. Pontoon’s ready to anchor. A bit to shore of the wreck with enough cable to allow for rise and fall of the tide. The currents will set us up and down a bit.”

Hooper nodded in turn. Such matters of adjustment he knew to be necessary as well as Manning, but this was the diver’s job and he was content to let him carry it through without suggestion. Manning knew his work. So did his assistants. They were all competent and they labored to the point, Fong with them, like men who were used to each other and respected each other’s capabilities. The under deck had been laid in place, lashed and spiked. On this spare planks and gratings made a smooth surface, well supported by the two buoyant hulls of built-up planks, sewn with sinnet, calked with native gums. The outriggers had been left on the canoes and the contrivance was a complete success.

“I’ll make two descents a day, with Fong,” said Manning. “An hour under water each time. Perhaps more, but it’s exhausting work. It’s the sand that bothers me. Could you warp in the schooner closer to the reef without much risk, Hooper?”

“So long as the weather holds, yes. Why?”

“That schooner yacht of ours has some fancy quipment [sic] that will be useful, like the ice-machine. I mean the fire-hose. The best way to handle sand is by hydraulic force, the same as they wash gravel banks for gold. If we couple up both those hoses they will reach across the reef and down to bottom, I think. If not, we can sew up some canvas, I suppose, for an extension.”

“I see,” said Hooper. “Attach to the engine and the pump and give you a strong stream at the nozzle. That’s a new idea to me. Fighting water with water.”

“It works,” said Manning. “Tricks to all trades. The hose is a mean thing to handle down there but there will be two of us. Will you tackle that end of it while I anchor the pontoon? We ought to get everything ready today for a descent to morrow morning, if we’ve any luck.”

Tiburi got no chance to board the schooner that day. The tabu flags did not come down. All hands labored hard to complete the preliminaries and the sun was close to the horizon before Manning announced it satisfactory. The canoe flotilla, between twenty and thirty craft, drawn up as if about to witness a regatta, remained well beyond the bounds all day, some of them fishing as the afternoon wore on, but all eager to watch what the white men were about, half-fearful of some demonstration from the Hims.

TubiriTiburi [sic] left with his big canoe in mid-afternoon. Hooper guessed him sulky and, as soon as it could be spared, sent Edwards in a whale-boat over to the little beach where the chief had settled himself. He both a propitiation in the shape of a few trinkets and two bottles of gin.

“He was a bit peevish,” the steward reported on his return, “but the gin mellowed him, sir. I showed him a few little tricks and got him amused.”

The sailors who had rowed Edwards snickered at this as they held on to the anchored pontoon and Hooper looked at them sharply.

“What kind of tricks, Edwards?” he demanded.

“Nothing much, sir. Just parlor conjuring. I used to do it sometimes for the passengers aboard the Moana at a concert. Like this, sir.”

He held up a dollar and palmed it, showed it vanished, produced it from the nose of one of the sailors. Then he took out a bandanna handkerchief from his coat pocket, spread it on the pontoon deck, folded in the corners, spread another one over it and, when he raised this again, the first cloth was piled with strings of beads, small mirrors and brass curtain-rings.

“I buried one of the bottles in the sand, sir,” said the steward with a deprecating manner. “Then I showed him the mango trick, only I used some scrub pandanus of different heights. A Jap showed me how to do that and it made a big hit with Tiburi, especially when I told him to dig under the roots and he found the bottle. I’ve done quite a bit in that way down in the Fijis, sir, where I learned my dialects, and it always impressed the natives. Tiburi and his men have never seen anything of that sort, sir. I promised him to show him how to make water boil without fire—the Seidlitz-powder trick, sir.”

“Humph!” Hooper exchanged a glance with Manning and narrowed his eyes. “That’s all right for this once, Edwards, but, after this, Mr. Manning or myself will do the wonder-working. Too many wizards spoil the show.”

“Yes, sir. Very well, sir. Sorry if I overstepped, sir.”

Edwards, with Fong transferred to the pontoon, had volunteered to cook, and he went off to the schooner to get supper ready.

“That chap’s too clever and too fond of showing it,” Hooper said to Manning in a low tone. “Yet he never does anything without a plausible excuse tacked on to it. But I’ll have to offset his tricks or Tiburi will be thinking him the whole show, next to the Hims.”

“I agree with you,” answered Manning. “Fong said it long ago. Too slick.”

HE next afternoon, after the second descent, with the tabu temporarily removed, Hooper received Tiburi and ushered him into the cabin, where he fearfully took a seat upon the red-plush transom where Him Who Walks had been throned, glancing about him as if he expected punishment for his temerity.

Hooper, like all trading captains, had a stock of simple tricks on hand for the diversion and amazement of unsophisticated natives. Most tribes were familiar with them. Their own wizards used them, mixed in with devices of their own. But Tiburi appeared to brook no conjuror in his tribe and he himself was ripe for wonderment. Steiner had shown him certain things and Edwards had gone further. Hooper prepared to cap the climax.

He served the gin himself, taking the bottle from Edwards and dismissing the steward in a manner that showed plainly who was the supreme authority aboard. He winked at Manning as he set down by the chief a second tumbler which he stated contained water, knowing Tiburi would ignore it. He himself had a third glass. This he sipped as Tiburi gulped down his gin. Manning had also helped himself to water, which he drank.

As Tiburi poured himself another quantum, Hooper reached out for his extra glass and set it close to his own. He had placed on one of his fingers one of those paste diamonds made famous in minstrel shows and the chief’s eyes had never left the sparkling bauble. Hooper set the fingers of the ring-bearing hand about one glass and lifted it.

“Can you make fire come out of water, Tiburi?” he asked. “Can you make water boil without fire?”

“Only the gods can do that,” answered the chief a little uneasily. He was alone in the cabin with the two white men who held authority on the schooner and he did not like it. “Talu did that when he brought up the smoking islands from the bottom of the sea,” he said.

“It is easy,” went on Hooper, and poured one dissolved Seidlitz powder into another.

Tiburi’s eyes goggled as the mixture sizzled and apparently boiled over. He gasped when Hooper quaffed half the hissing draught and handed the rest to Manning to finish. He hastily lifted the half-empty squareface to his lips and let the stuff run down his throat to restore his equanimity. But Hooper was not through. Another gin-bottle stood in a rack, uncorked, He took this and a tin cup beside it and poured out a little liquid into the latter.

“Now stand away,” he ordered.

Tiburi watched him fascinatedly as he struck a match and tossed it into the ounce of gasoline. It flared up with a vicious roar toward the open skylight and Tiburi incontinently bolted for the deck. The sight of his men checked him and he turned his back on them, his face gray with fright that he strove to fight down. If this white man could do this with water what might not the Hims accomplish?

Hooper and Manning had followed him and Hooper drew from his finger the mock diamond.

“Because you are my friend,” he said to Tiburi, placing the fake in the chief’s hollowed, slightly trembling palm.

Tiburi straightened. Delight banished fear for the time.

“Eyah!” he exclaimed, and exhibited the glittering thing to his five men. “Here is a gift from a friend to a friend!”

And, while his followers jabbered, Tiburi strung the diamond on a sennit plait that had held a disk of pearly shell roughly carved into the semblance of a frigate-bird. He swelled his chest so that the jewel broke out into little rainbows in the sunshine, and offered the pearl ornament to Hooper.

The skipper took it and handed it on to Manning, who examined and returned it.

“Beware of a cannibal offering gifts,” he said with a smile.

“True enough,” said Hooper. “But we’ve got his goat for the time being.”

“And put Edwards’ nose out of joint,” muttered Manning.

Hooper pointed to the west.

“The sun sinks,” he said to the chief. “The ship will soon be tabu.” Tiburi seemed glad enough to take the hint and his canoe was soon racing for the crater.

“How did you get along today, Manning?” asked Hooper. “First chance I’ve had to ask you.”

“Good progress. The hose works well. Some sand will drift back with the tide but we’ve got the bulk of it shifted. It’s mainly shifted in between decks and packed pretty solidly. But the floor of your traderoom seems still solid. The hull will be filled up underneath, clear into the frame of that hatchway, but I wouldn’t be surprized but what we got to the pearls the first trip down the day after tomorrow. I shan’t need Fong for that. He can go back in the galley again.”

“Don’t you like Edwards’ chow?” asked Hooper quizzically.

“I’m not stuck on anything he does,” said Manning.