Wild Blood/Chapter 1

by Gordon Young

WILD BLOOD

 

THREE THIEVES AND LADY BETTY

TWO men were in the shanty bar, sitting at a rough board table; and I was the third. We were on benches under a corrugated-iron roof and a bottle of gin was before us. We leaned heavily, elbows to table.

The sun was hot and the roof was like a baker's door. Flies buzzed about with fretful persistence.

A dozen men slouched at the bar or dozed along the benches. Some were heavily booted, wearing coarse blue or red shirts, and were hairy of throat. Many of them were bearded. When they paid for drinks they would pull little chamois-skin bags from under armpits or from wide-pocketed belts.

These men were from the diggings. They lay in port waiting for the boat, under the delusion that they could get drunker in Melbourne than at Turkee. It takes experience and some philosophy to convince a man that after a few glasses it makes no difference whether he is under polished tables or rough benches.

A discouraged squatter was dolefully pouring out a tale of drought and myalls to a miner who stood and dozed uneasily against the board counter. Two or three sailors, deserters no doubt, snored on the narrow benches.

A pair of troopers, elbow to elbow, paused in passing and filled the doorway. They said nothing, but stared with a certain detached authoritative insolence, as men perhaps have the right to do when they know themselves well hated, feared; yet dare to ride alone, and often do not come back.

They would not have been far in the wrong had they grabbed any man there, and haled him out, though they might have guessed wrong in naming the charge, for crime was very protean in Australia. But judges frowned at troopers who leaned on guesswork; so many a man went impudently free through being tight-lipped.

My lips were never closed, except about the neck of a bottle. I mentioned to my companions how fortunate, then, that my record was without stain.

Each of them looked at me: the somber Englishman with the slow, steady gaze of a man who wonders a little, but doesn't understand nor greatly care; the other man, not big but deep-chested and muscled like a python, had a flicker of amusement in his narrow gray eyes. He was sparing of words, tight-lipped and sober; always sober.

The troopers, thumbs in belts, turned smartly on their heels and walked away. Perhaps they were looking for some one; or maybe they paused to allow us to look at them. Understand me: I would not sneer at an Australian trooper; not even behind his back; not even with three thousand miles between us; not though he were dead and damned, like most of the men of those days.

I pulled the bottle closer to my elbow and peered at the low-water mark. The sweet-bitter kiss of glass lips tingled my blood. Let those two men go on with their talk. One way or the other, or whatever they did, was nothing for me to worry about.

Though whatever they did would affect me quite as much as themselves. I was not much more than a young fellow. And even then I had made the choice of many crossroads; and I always felt that one was as good as another.

If we stole a ship and went north with this strange Englishman, who evidently had a quest that he was not telling to us—for I thought he lied like a man who knows what he wants—why, then there would be queer things happen, and novelty is pleasure. If we stayed where we were, something would happen. It always did. I never stayed where I was for a length of time. I never liked many things to happen in the same place.

The tall, gaunt Englishman with the slender feet and the long nose and the black beard—the very black beard—did not know to whom he was talking. But he was in earnest.

In those days you took a man as you found him. It was impertinent to ask for credentials. He was a reserved, self-possessed, grim sort of a person, this Englishman—with heavy black brows and deep black eyes. Davenant his name, he said.

Had he known to whom he was talking he might have gone excitedly after the troopers; and shared various rewards with them. Perhaps not.

He could have shouted any one of my two or three names at all the troopers from Carpentaria to Melbourne. I was no mainland loafer. In the islands northward, in some of them, I was a little better known. Not much though, for mine was an exceedingly modest renown. Missionaries in particular knew me, by repute when not so favored personally; and were most unchristian in their attitude. It wasn't my fault if their bishop hadn't known whisky was in his ginger ale.

Ah, but he made a grand speech; and right there and then gave the native girls permission to dance—right there and then. A row of white, pious, horrified faces were turned to him, but his eyes were perhaps a little blurred. Though it seemed to me that he did enjoy the siva. I did. So it was for one thing and another, I was remembered in one place and another. One doesn't loaf around in the South Seas for a dozen years without getting acquainted.

But the man at my side—I could have had a thousand pounds, a good round sum for a shifting idler, by merely whispering his name into a trooper's ear. Perhaps a rounder, fuller sum than that.

Legends were around that name. It was known over the Seven Seas and in most of their ports. Dead or alive, said the British government; and when the British government says that, this earth becomes a very small spot to dodge about on. Another European government wanted him dead. And he was supposed to be.

A fat, bearded scientist who spoke English thickly, on his way to the Solomons to study anthropogeny and head-drying, had confided with me, a year before, that he was to make demands upon the natives, and barter generously, for white men's heads, in the hope that this fellow's would be among them. Would I go along and identify the head?

My friend was known to have been wrecked and thought to have been killed on the eastern tip of Guadalcanar. The naval officers of three countries had orders to take him, wherever found, as they would any pirate. One may write an order with a goose-quill and the merest drop of ink. But he knew reefs and atolls that were not on the map; he knew of anchorage and harbor that were not mentioned in the sailing directions, and the natives said that with his own breath he could make canvas pull.

But a German gunboat had shelled his little schooner, driven him ashore, and came on to find it burning. As usual, he had powder and dynamite on board. Even wrecked, he was too much for them. He disappeared into the bush.

German sailors had gone in after him and found cannibals. And on the rafters of some gamal house near that place a half dozen German heads are yet grinning under the softening veils of dust—unless the German scientist bid high enough to have them brought to him. In that vicinity white men's heads are treasures to be desired above pearls and rubies. Yet this outlaw of the sea and land came through.

Those were stern, fierce, vivid days. Looking backward one can see so much better than when merely looking around. But what was then the present was so much more tame than what had gone before that even we looked grudgingly behind us to “the good old days,” which were even more inhuman and cruel than the early seventies.

Adventurers came from the ends of the earth. They had been coming for a century, for centuries. Spaniards and French and Portuguese, English and Yankee, Arab and Chinaman, all came. Out of England the Scarborough, the Neptune, the Success had brought them willy-nilly, in chains. Many a good citizen of the land had a father with “M” burned in his palm.

The good citizens later rose and burned, properly, the convict records; or such as they could get their torches to. It is hard to tell convict blood without a birth certificate; especially in Australia, whither murderers and those who stole loaves off a London cart-tail, or snared a rabbit under the nose of milord's gamekeeper, or wrote a pamphlet telling some truths about the king's rule were despatched in equally heavy chains. Also branded, burned and lashed; turned over as slaves to freemen; bullied, cheated and tormented; but mostly beaten.

Frequently they escaped, and ranged the bush, more ferocious than the cannibal blacks, the myalls, whom they often joined. Missionaries had begun coming with Bibles and bundles of trousers and petticoats, all for the natives, at about the same time as these convict ships from Christian lands.

For a half-century bold, hard seamen from New Bedford and Salem had been dragging whales out of the South Seas—and all the other seas on the globe—and putting them into casks, that civilized people might have oil for lamps. Mutineers and deserters had left foot-prints on every beach. The Bounty was not the only ship that set her officers adrift; seamen hoping these officers would die, but without the courage to kill them.

Respect for officers was beaten in with the cat and the rope's end, and strangely few were murdered for it. But the lure of the purple-plumaged islands and brown maids was strong, and deserters were many.

Some time in the early fifties gold was found and the four winds brought a headlong rush of men, and women of a kind; and a few of the other kind. The whole face of Australia was scratched and gouged.

From one digging to another men scampered, drinking, gambling, quarreling, fighting, robbing, working, saving, dreaming, planning—but ready to pause at any time to chase the chinks. Yellow men were harried out of the camps, killed, or driven into a vicarious massacre under the clubs of the myalls.

After the vanguard, always the herder and the plowman. Herders loosened countless droves of cattle, and billows upon billows of sheep moved over the hills. Enormous plantations were laid out; from Tahiti to Queensland ships went out among the more savage islands to “recruit” blacks with beads, gin or manacles.

Seamen hunted natives, themselves headhunters, and dragged them off to a merciless slavery euphemistically termed “contract labor.” Sometimes the savages cut out the blackbirder—and wore the manacles for earrings.

Traders too went to gather whatever could be carried off, from ancient weapons to copra. Factories sprang up and the dried coconut went forth to cleanse the world with soft-scented soap. It was quite common for traders to be butchered and eaten. It is not unheard of now. On the sea, under one guise and another, captains were pirates; and pearlers put out in luggers to scrape oysters from their beds, give orient gems to the ears and necks of distant ladies and buttons to trousers and coats of gentlemen. Lumbermen went into perfumed islands, where perhaps the Phœnicians had been before them—for where else is sandalwood to be found?—and often under streams of arrows, poisoned, cut down forests that the silks and linen of dainty women from Japan to London might be sweetly scented.

Natives rose in brief, futile fights and butchered, with horrible ferocity, whom they could overnight. In three tongues the chancelleries of Europe quarreled over distant rights. And French convicts continued to be sent to New Caledonia.

From the days of Wallis and Cook to this very hour, under the guidance of another Cook, white men came and ate of the lotus and drowsed dreamily, head in the lap of a brown girl, remembering indifferently through a soothing stupor that some place in the world there was something rather of a nuisance called Civilization.

No man gets rich without wanting other men to obey the laws; and Civilization is as irresistible as if it were a plague. So the man who called himself Douglas Moore was an outlaw, on sea and land.

The Englishman, Davenant, thought that he was the interested party. He thought that he had, more or less by accident, stumbled on to a navigator. It was amusing to hear him wrestling with Moore's conscience explaining why it would be really honest to take out the Lady Betty, to let her drift on the early tide, spread sail and scamper off.

The trouble was, though Moore did not say so in the presence of the Englishman, that the Lady Betty was encrusted with barnacles and needed some work on her bottom. There she lay, with three broken-down caretakers playing cribbage on board. They represented three important creditors, and a half dozen little ones as well.

Who owned her? After she had been refitted and provisioned there arose a conflict of ownership. Who was to pay the bills? Davenant asserted that he owned her, and showed papers and made affidavits. He had bought her from a Yankee captain who was to remain the skipper.

But the Yankee had gone mysteriously. In fact he had gone before collecting the entire purchase price. He had gone about the same time that the A. B. A. Shipping Company of Sydney had sent one of its men down to get and hold the Lady Betty. She belonged to the A. B. A.

The Yankee had no right to sell her. It was, the A. B. A. intimated, characteristic of Yankees to sell things they had no right to.

She was not the Lady Betty anyway. She was the O. P. Jones, in honor of one of the founders of the company.

Scratch out the Lady Betty and, they said, the trace of O. P. Jones would be visible. But it wasn't. Then they said Yankees were damn clever, but she was the O. P. Jones anyway.

Davenant wanted to get away. He was going after pearls—he said. He knew of an atoll where there were pearls, a virgin bed. He could not afford to stand around on his toes waiting for the A. B. A. to scratch off all the fresh paint in order to find O. P. Jones. He wanted to get away, and he had run across Douglas Moore.

Douglas Moore had more than one name. And he had almost everything else that went to make a man hard to catch and harder to hold. He knew all about Davenant's troubles over the Lady Betty and the dispute as to her sex.

He had inquired about him and learned nothing except that he had a daughter in Melbourne lonesomely awaiting the outcome of the difficulties her father—that is, he was supposed to be her father—was in. So when Davenant sought out Douglas Moore he was merely taking an artful bait that had been dropped in his way.

Moore kept his own counsel. He had only Burly Ben Hawkins and me to confide in.

However, I had a suspicion that he was thinking about taking out the Lady Betty anyway—with or without Davenant. But just at present he seemed indifferent. For one thing he wanted about twice as much money as the Englishman was willing to offer.

“When the voyage is over I shall make you a present of the ship," Davenant had said. Few things could be more enticing than that to some men.

“And let the A. B. A. libel her the first time she shows up in a port,” said the man who called himself Moore. “And me be hanged for piracy!”

He knew very well that at most the Lady Betty would add only an inch or two to the height of his gallows. But there is likely to be something wrong with a voyage when the owner so easily promises to give over the ship. Precious lot of pearls one would have to scoop up to pay for a ninety-ton brig that had nothing the matter with her but barnacles and a little rib or two that might spring a leak if hard hit.

But what that bearded Englishman didn't realize was that there was likely to be something even more wrong with a skipper who would take out a ship on the sort of proposition that was offered.

Moore asked to see the Englishman's map, and the Englishman pulled out a piece of rough brown paper with a few tracings on it, no names, but a cross at about 164 west and 12 below. Moore asked if it wasn't a copy from an Admiralty map, and Davenant was much impressed.

“You really know where you want to go?” asked Moore. He was thin-lipped and hard-faced, and he did not make much noise when he talked—not even when the wind was up and thunder boomed.

“I do,” said Davenant firmly.

He nodded his head two or three times. Moore watched him. I said nothing. But I watched Moore.

“Then it is not the atoll, but Dakaru you want!”

Davenant sat up with a jerk. The English aren't a people to jump up and wave their arms. No. When a lean Englishman, one of the lanky, long, thin-nosed type, bats an eyelid twice in three seconds, he is excited.

Davenant did not bat an eyelid at all. He simply stared at Moore for about a half-minute. Which meant that he was paralyzed.

I tipped the square-face over my glass. But a few drops lazily trickled out; just a flavor. So I quietly reached over and took Moore's brimming glass, and left mine before him. He would never know.

“How, may I ask,” said Davenant slowly, calmly, “do you surmise that?”

I paid the man a quiet compliment at the back of my brain, and began to think he had a well-tempered bit of steel for a backbone. He was no ordinary man. One would guess that at a glance.

He was one of those fellows that could be thrown on to a beach in a pair of drawers and still give the impression of having come from a reception to my lord mayor. And he used words as if he knew what they meant and was particular.

Said Moore: “That's the only spot within the radius of a thousand miles, or nearly that, where's a real plantation. Grahame's a fierce fellow, and skippers give him a wide berth.”

“But there are—are pearls,” Davenant insisted nervously.

“There is an atoll two points east and sixty miles south, of this reckoning,” Moore said, taking the paper. “There's bound to be good shell. Right temperature. Grahame owns it. But how can you or I sell shell out of the Lady Betty's hold? She'll be seized as soon as she sticks her stern into port. Turn the shell over to a pearler and he'll steal it.”

“What proposition can I make you?” asked Davenant, a little more impressed than he ever thought of being by a stray sailor.

Moore laid it down briefly. He would agree to get Davenant to Dakaru—the native name of the island, since changed to honor some dead man who is supposed to have discovered it—in six months; but he must have full and complete charge and no questions asked in the meantime. Also twelve hundred pounds, cash, on board the Lady Betty.

“You are probably aware that it may be necessary to use—ah—force,” said Davenant watchfully.

Moore's thin lips twisted a little. He nodded.

“Miscalculations would be embarrassing to me,” said Davenant.

Moore said, “No doubt.”

“I dislike the delay, though time is not the great factor with me.”

Moore said nothing. He had done his talking—and never did very much. This was the third or fourth conversation.

“It may take some time for me to obtain that amount—in cash.”

Davenant had just a trifle hesitancy, naturally. He really had no surety that he would get full service for his money. But he was a man in earnest. Who dices with the devil must fling gold to the table.

At the first meeting Davenant had intimated that he wanted references. Moore told him they were the easiest of things to furnish—that there were plenty of people round about who would write them out, so much per word.

Davenant took it silently, unsmilingly. Perhaps he was a judge of men. I wondered.

“Six months,” said Davenant, a fresh suspicion coming to him. “You intend to use the ship for some enterprise of your own?”

“No. I'm after leeway. I keep agreements. There's a crew to get. A proper night to wait for. Proper beach to find and scrape her. Supplies to be had that you haven't. Takes time.

“I'll raise Dakaru in one hundred-eighty days, or before. But no questions asked or answered. That's final.”

He had a way of conveying finality that was much more effective than words sound. Every move he made, every word he said, was decisive. He was tense, always tense; and never restless. His voice was never loud but his words snapped. There was no hesitancy about him.

“I agree,” said Davenant after a pause.

Moore nodded.

“I shall give you the money as soon as I can arrange for it.”

“No. Give it to me as I need it.”

Another surprise for Mr. Davenant. Was the man a subtler rogue than he thought or no rogue at all? The question looked out of his eyes. But one didn't question Douglas Moore; not even when one didn't know who he was. That is, one didn't ask him personal questions; though Davenant after a little nervous silence said something about hoping that Grahame was not a friend.

Moore might have said many things, and each of them have been the truth. He might have rounded out some full curses and launched them on Grahame's head with the true eloquence of my friend, Ben Hawkins, when wrath was on him. He might have briefly told a short story, and how a knife at thirty feet had gone from his hand to search for Grahame's heart.

But perhaps he would not have mentioned that he was glad the knife had not found it. Or maybe he wasn't glad. I don't know. Some people said Douglas Moore was crazy: so tensely quiet, always—until he unleashed himself. Then he went headlong. No reserve. No caution. No—I was about to say no mercy.

Legend had it that he hated white men. That he was a renegade. Anyway he hated Grahame—or had reason to. But all that he did say was, abruptly, directly, that Grahame was not a friend; and Davenant had no way of knowing that Grahame was an enemy.

“Then it is settled,” Davenant remarked a little uneasily.

I felt that he wanted some papers signed, some witnesses to swear, some sort of solemnity to give the agreement a kind of culmination. He had, I reflected, come from civilized countries where an agreement was not likely to be observed to the letter unless it was riveted by lawyers. A strange man's mere word seemed such a stupid thing to depend on; no more binding than a dead man's word.

And this contract was important to Davenant. He showed it even by his repression. He had about him a manner of well-bred awkwardness. He was dealing with things of which he knew nothing. Maybe the ease with which he had been fleeced by the Yankee skipper showed him how helpless he really was; but he was determined.

Perhaps this black-bearded Englishman wasn't helpless at all, but had to gamble at times, and risk a loss. One someway doesn't expect an Englishman to be black-bearded or to appear as Davenant did. But he was English—born so, anyway.

"Yes,” said Moore. "Settled.”

Davenant stood up, hesitated, looked toward the door and again at Moore, and seemed about to speak. He was tall and thin and erect in the shoulders. He stood not knowing exactly what to do; a glance fell on the empty bottle.

For a moment I thought he was going to ask us to pledge a toast of some kind; it would have been a grim sort of a toast if the truth were in it. One could see that. I am sure he felt that something, something definite, perhaps a little dramatic, ought to be done.

But he said, “Good afternoon” almost casually and walked off.

Douglas Moore sat motionless, his forearms spread on the table. His eyes set at nothing; his thin lips tight and straight. The muscles at the back of his jaw bulged; his teeth were set hard.

I drummed softly with the bottoms of two glasses, and in a sort of rhythmic monotone said:

“And now the devil is telling 'em to stir the fire and get out the biggest pot. There'll be soup o' dead men's bones, and blood splashed to the moon. …”

And I kept one eye cocked on Douglas Moore. Sometimes he seemed to listen to my nonsense as if it were a little pleasing, for when I was the better for a tumbler or two of gin I had the world in my pocket and my lips were restless. Sometimes he did not even hear me, did not hear even Hawkins and me together.

“Get me a crew,” he said abruptly.

With that he stood up, paused, picked the gin-bottle from the table and, tossing it to the dirt floor, went to the bar. He spoke to the red-faced barman and went out.

“Get me a crew,” he had said.

That was the worst of him. He did unexpected things—taking it for granted that I could do things he wanted, as he wanted. I did not like to be uneasy about doing anything right.

The barman waddled to the table and clapped down a square-face; gruntingly stooped over and picked up the empty bottle and went back to his domain behind the bar of rough boards with only figured calico draped in front of them.

The discouraged squatter was still weaving his troubles into an epic of the immigrant's travail for the drowsy miner. The sailors snored unrestfully on their splintery couches. I eyed my virgin bottle: inspiration is always at the bottom of a square-face.

But I would be generous. I would drink it in the presence of Burly Ben Hawkins. He was a good friend.