Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/18



UANE BALLINGER sat on a fallen mahogany log, alternately shaking with chills and wiping the sweat from his face, as he watched his native boys finish the fag end of his planting. One more year, and he knew his plantations would be well started, and he could leave a half-caste overseer in charge and go home for a year. His thoughts always stopped right at this point—going home—and he got up from his log. He had promised himself a few hours of uninterrupted thought, as he had some problems to settle with himself before he went back to the home plantation, but this was not the time for it. There were a hundred things to do before night, and he was short-handed.

The night before, the Tauregs had come down out of the bush and had caught his boys at the worst hour possible, when they were tired out after a killing day under the tropic sun, and were nodding over their cook fires. Their short spears were always at their backs, of course, and they had made a game fight. Ballinger still thrilled when he thought of it. He had fought side by side with them, the shining black bodies glistening in the glow of the fires, the blood streaming from a slash in his leg. At the last a very madness of killing had seemed to possess him, and he had thrust and slashed like the black beasts themselves, he thought, rather shamefacedly.

They had finally driven the Tauregs back, but not without the loss of fourteen of his men.

"They are probably roasting before the Taureg cook fires right now," he said to himself grimly.

In the islands one does not like to think of the fate of prisoners. The Tauregs are head-hunters.

It would have been a much worse disaster if it had happened a few weeks earlier, but now the planting was almost finished, and only about half a hundred remained of the nuts, sprouted for the planting, and by night it would be finished.

He would leave Daku, his native overseer, in charge, while he went to meet Karl, who would be back from New Guinea by now with the new field hands. How lucky it was, he thought, that he had sent Karl for the men. Always they needed new hands, of course, as the blacks never do well at plantation labor, but they would need them worse than ever now.

It was after dark as he gave his last directions to Daku, and heavy tropic rain was falling in lines straight as lances, as he was rowed out to his little tramp steamer which was to take him to the home plantation, as he called his larger place over on Vatou.

At the turn of the tide the little steamer slipped over the reef and headed out to sea, leaving behind it the quick tropic storm and the wails of his black boys who, with the coming of night, had begun their weird songs of lamentation for their slain.

As they cleared the lagoon and began to feel the heave of the long Pacific rollers, although the lightning still played in the west, the moon rose, a magic green lantern, the shimmering silver pathway leading to the little steamer, a dark speck in this remote world of moving water.

Ballinger always liked to sit where he could see the forefoot of his little steamer throwing back a double line of gleaming phosphorus, and tonight as he sat on a coil of rope, feeling the surge of the waves that seemed to come from the far rim of the world, a fragment of verse that he had heard a girl in Noumea sing, drifted through his mind:

He was like his mother in that, he thought, fragments of verse always coming unbidden, to remind him, as she had so often told him, that with all its striving, all its unsatisfied longings, life was beautiful.

What had gone wrong with his life, anyway? A year ago all this—the ocean, the night, the singing of the trade wind through the rigging—would have been a sheer delight, and now he felt only a vague, restless unhappiness. What was it all about? He put his head in his hands and deliberately went over the last year of his life, which by all rights should have been his happiest, as he had had Nadine.

He thought of his first meeting with her. He had been walking up from the wharf at Suva, late one night, just in from his plantation for supplies, and he had heard the sound of a harsh masculine voice, and of a woman sobbing. The sound had seemed to come from a narrow side street, and when he reached the spot a man's figure disappeared through a hedge, but a girlish form in white had been crumpled on the ground. As he raised her a pair of soft black eyes were lifted to his, and from that moment something in his steadfast English heart had gone out to her, never to return.

It had been a mad infatuation on his part from the first, and in a month they were man and wife. Even now, after they had been married a year, he could not think of her without a beating of blood in his temples. She was beautiful and winsome, with the soft sensuous beauty of the South, but there was an air of subtlety, almost of mystery about her, which he had tried in vain to penetrate. He realized suddenly how little, how very little he really knew her. She had no people, and she had been raised in the islands—that was about the sum of it. He had never even been able to get a very clear understanding of what had happened that time when he had found her, late at night, crying. She was given to long periods of stillness, not sullen or sulky, but rather as though she had withdrawn to some inner retreat