Michael, Brother of Jerry | Page 9

across the danger-point and
counterbalancing the canoe to its proper equilibrium.
Michael remained on the beach, waiting invitation, his mind not quite
made up, but so nearly so that all that was required was that lip-noise.
Dag Daughtry made the lip-noise so low that the old man did not hear,

and Michael, springing clear from sand to canoe, was on board without
wetting his feet. Using Daughtry's shoulder for a stepping-place, he
passed over him and down into the bottom of the canoe. Daughtry
kissed with his lips again, and Michael turned around so as to face him,
sat down, and rested his head on the steward's knees.
"I reckon I can take my affydavy on a stack of Bibles that the dog just
up an' followed me," he grinned in Michael's ear.
"Washee-washee quick fella," he commanded.
The ancient obediently dipped his paddle and started pottering an
erratic course in the general direction of the cluster of lights that
marked the Makambo. But he was too feeble, panting and wheezing
continually from the exertion and pausing to rest off strokes between
strokes. The steward impatiently took the paddle away from him and
bent to the work.
Half-way to the steamer the ancient ceased wheezing and spoke,
nodding his head at Michael.
"That fella dog he belong big white marster along schooner . . . You
give 'm me ten stick tobacco," he added after due pause to let the
information sink in.
"I give 'm you bang alongside head," Daughtry assured him cheerfully.
"White marster along schooner plenty friend along me too much. Just
now he stop 'm along Makambo. Me take 'm dog along him along
Makambo."
There was no further conversation from the ancient, and though he
lived long years after, he never mentioned the midnight passenger in
the canoe who carried Michael away with him. When he saw and heard
the confusion and uproar on the beach later that night when Captain
Kellar turned Tulagi upside-down in his search for Michael, the old
one-legged one remained discreetly silent. Who was he to seek trouble
with the strange ones, the white masters who came and went and roved
and ruled?

In this the ancient was in nowise unlike the rest of his dark- skinned
Melanesian race. The whites were possessed of unguessed and
unthinkable ways and purposes. They constituted another world and
were as a play of superior beings on an exalted stage where was no
reality such as black men might know as reality, where, like the
phantoms of a dream, the white men moved and were as shadows cast
upon the vast and mysterious curtain of the Cosmos.
The gang-plank being on the port side, Dag Daughtry paddled around
to the starboard and brought the canoe to a stop under a certain open
port.
"Kwaque!" he called softly, once, and twice.
At the second call the light of the port was obscured apparently by a
head that piped down in a thin squeak.
"Me stop 'm, marster."
"One fella dog stop 'm along you," the steward whispered up. "Keep 'm
door shut. You wait along me. Stand by! Now!"
With a quick catch and lift, he passed Michael up and into unseen
hands outstretched from the iron wall of the ship, and paddled ahead to
an open cargo port. Dipping into his tobacco pocket, he thrust a loose
handful of sticks into the ancient's hand and shoved the canoe adrift
with no thought of how its helpless occupant would ever reach shore.
The old man did not touch the paddle, and he was unregardless of the
lofty-sided steamer as the canoe slipped down the length of it into the
darkness astern. He was too occupied in counting the wealth of tobacco
showered upon him. No easy task, his counting. Five was the limit of
his numerals. When he had counted five, he began over again and
counted a second five. Three fives he found in all, and two sticks over;
and thus, at the end of it, he possessed as definite a knowledge of the
number of sticks as would be possessed by the average white man by
means of the single number SEVENTEEN.

More it was, far more, than his avarice had demanded. Yet he was
unsurprised. Nothing white men did could surprise. Had it been two
sticks instead of seventeen, he would have been equally unsurprised.
Since all acts of white men were surprises, the only surprise of action
they could achieve for a black man would be the doing of an
unsurprising thing.
Paddling, wheezing, resting, oblivious of the shadow-world of the
white men, knowing only the reality of Tulagi Mountain cutting its
crest-line blackly across the dim radiance of the star-sprinkled sky, the
reality of the sea and of the canoe he so feebly