Adventure | Page 6

A rifle lay on the couch beside him. His revolver was within
reach of his hand. An hour passed, during which he did not move. He
lay in a state of half-slumber, half-coma. He became suddenly alert. A
creak on the back veranda was the cause. The room was L-shaped; the
corner in which stood his couch was dim, but the hanging lamp in the
main part of the room, over the billiard table and just around the corner,
so that it did not shine on him, was burning brightly. Likewise the
verandas were well lighted. He waited without movement. The creaks
were repeated, and he knew several men lurked outside.
"What name?" he cried sharply.
The house, raised a dozen feet above the ground, shook on its pile
foundations to the rush of retreating footsteps.
"They're getting bold," he muttered. "Something will have to be done."
The full moon rose over Malaita and shone down on Berande. Nothing
stirred in the windless air. From the hospital still proceeded the
moaning of the sick. In the grass-thatched barracks nearly two hundred
woolly-headed man-eaters slept off the weariness of the day's toil,
though several lifted their heads to listen to the curses of one who
cursed the white man who never slept. On the four verandas of the
house the lanterns burned. Inside, between rifle and revolver, the man
himself moaned and tossed in intervals of troubled sleep.

CHAPTER II
--SOMETHING IS DONE

In the morning David Sheldon decided that he was worse. That he was
appreciably weaker there was no doubt, and there were other symptoms
that were unfavourable. He began his rounds looking for trouble. He
wanted trouble. In full health, the strained situation would have been
serious enough; but as it was, himself growing helpless, something had
to be done. The blacks were getting more sullen and defiant, and the
appearance of the men the previous night on his veranda--one of the
gravest of offences on Berande--was ominous. Sooner or later they
would get him, if he did not get them first, if he did not once again sear
on their dark souls the flaming mastery of the white man.
He returned to the house disappointed. No opportunity had presented
itself of making an example of insolence or insubordination--such as
had occurred on every other day since the sickness smote Berande. The
fact that none had offended was in itself suspicious. They were growing
crafty. He regretted that he had not waited the night before until the
prowlers had entered. Then he might have shot one or two and given
the rest a new lesson, writ in red, for them to con. It was one man
against two hundred, and he was horribly afraid of his sickness
overpowering him and leaving him at their mercy. He saw visions of
the blacks taking charge of the plantation, looting the store, burning the
buildings, and escaping to Malaita. Also, one gruesome vision he
caught of his own head, sun-dried and smoke-cured, ornamenting the
canoe house of a cannibal village. Either the Jessie would have to arrive,
or he would have to do something.
The bell had hardly rung, sending the labourers into the fields, when
Sheldon had a visitor. He had had the couch taken out on the veranda,
and he was lying on it when the canoes paddled in and hauled out on
the beach. Forty men, armed with spears, bows and arrows, and
war-clubs, gathered outside the gate of the compound, but only one
entered. They knew the law of Berande, as every native knew the law

of every white man's compound in all the thousand miles of the
far-flung Solomons. The one man who came up the path, Sheldon
recognized as Seelee, the chief of Balesuna village. The savage did not
mount the steps, but stood beneath and talked to the white lord above.
Seelee was more intelligent than the average of his kind, but his
intelligence only emphasized the lowness of that kind. His eyes, close
together and small, advertised cruelty and craftiness. A gee-string and a
cartridge-belt were all the clothes he wore. The carved pearl-shell
ornament that hung from nose to chin and impeded speech was purely
ornamental, as were the holes in his ears mere utilities for carrying pipe
and tobacco. His broken-fanged teeth were stained black by betel-nut,
the juice of which he spat upon the ground.
As he talked or listened, he made grimaces like a monkey. He said yes
by dropping his eyelids and thrusting his chin forward. He spoke with
childish arrogance strangely at variance with the subservient position
he occupied beneath the veranda. He, with his many followers, was
lord and master of Balesuna village. But the white man, without
followers, was lord and master of Berande--ay, and on