He lasted fourteen years, too. It was his cook-boy. Hatcheted ’m before breakfast. An’ it’s well I remember our second trip into the bush after what was left of ’m.”
“I saw his head after you’d turned it over to the Commissioner at Tulagi,” Van Horn supplemented.
“An’ the peaceful, quiet, everyday face of him on it, with almost the same old smile I’d seen a thousand times. It dried on ’m that way over the smokin’ fire. But they got ’m, if it did take fourteen years. There’s manny’s the head that goes to Malaita, manny’s the time untooken; but, like the old pitcher, it’s tooken in the end.”
“But I’ve got their goat,” the captain insisted. “When trouble’s hatching, I go straight to them and tell them what. They can’t get the hang of it. Think I’ve got some powerful devil-devil medicine.”
Tom Haggin thrust out his hand in abrupt good-bye, resolutely keeping his eyes from dropping to Jerry in the other’s arms.
“Keep your eye on my return boys,” he cautioned, as he went over the side, “till you land the last mother’s son of ’m. They’ve got no cause to love Jerry or his breed, an’ I’d hate ill to happen ’m at a nigger’s hands. An’ in the dark of the night ’tis like as not he can do a fare-you-well overside. Don’t take your eye off ’m till you’re quit of the last of ’m.”
At sight of big Mister Haggin deserting him and being pulled away in the whaleboat, Jerry wriggled and voiced his anxiety in a low, whimpering whine. Captain Van Horn snuggled him closer in his arm with a caress of his free hand.
“Don’t forget the agreement,” Tom Haggin called back across the widening water. “If aught happens you, Jerry’s to come back to me.”
“I’ll make a paper to that same and put it with the ship’s articles,” was Van Horn’s reply.
Among the many words possessed by Jerry was his own name; and in the talk of the two men he had recognised it repeatedly, and he was aware, vaguely, that the talk was related to the vague and unguessably terrible thing that was happening to him. He wriggled more determinedly, and Van Horn set him down on the deck. He sprang to the rail with more quickness than was to be expected of an awkward puppy of six months, and not the quick attempt of Van Horn to cheek him would have succeeded. But Jerry recoiled from the open water lapping the Arangi’s side. The taboo was upon him. It was the image of the log awash that was not a log but that was alive, luminous in his brain, that checked him. It was not reason on his part, but inhibition which had become habit.
He plumped down on his bob tail, lifted golden muzzle skyward, and emitted a long puppy-wail of dismay and grief.
“It’s all right, Jerry, old man, brace up and be a man-dog,” Van Horn soothed him.
But Jerry was not to be reconciled. While this indubitably was a white-skinned god, it was not his god. Mister Haggin was his god, and a superior god at that. Even he, without thinking about it at all, recognized that. His Mister Haggin wore pants and shoes. This god on the deck beside him was more like a black. Not only did he not wear pants, and was barefooted and barelegged, but about his middle, just like any black, he wore a brilliant-coloured loin-cloth, that, like a kilt, fell nearly to his sunburnt knees.
Captain Van Horn was a handsome man and a striking man, although Jerry did not know it. If ever a Holland Dutchman stepped out of a Rembrandt frame, Captain Van Horn was that one, despite the fact that he was New York born, as had been his knickerbocker ancestors before him clear back to the time when New York was not New York but New Amsterdam. To complete his costume, a floppy felt hat, distinctly Rembrandtish in effect, perched half on his head and mostly over one ear; a sixpenny, white cotton undershirt covered his torso; and from a belt about his middle dangled a tobacco pouch, a sheath-knife, filled clips of cartridges, and a huge automatic pistol in a leather holster.
On the beach, Biddy, who had hushed her grief, lifted it again when she heard Jerry’s wail. And Jerry, desisting a moment to listen, heard Michael beside her, barking his challenge, and saw, without being conscious of it, Michael’s withered ear with its persistent upward cock. Again, while Captain Van Horn and the mate, Borckman, gave orders, and while the Arangi’s mainsail and spanker began to rise up the masts, Jerry loosed all his heart of woe in what Bob told Derby on the beach was the “grandest vocal effort” he had ever heard from any dog, and that, except for being a bit thin, Caruso didn’t have anything on Jerry. But the song was too much for Haggin, who, as soon as he had landed, whistled Biddy to him and strode rapidly away from the beach.
At sight of her disappearing, Jerry was guilty of even more Caruso-like effects, which gave great joy to a Pennduffryn return boy who stood beside him. He laughed and jeered at Jerry with falsetto chucklings that were more like the jungle-noises of tree-dwelling creatures, half-bird and half-man, than of a man, all man, and therefore a god. This served as an excellent counter-irritant. Indignation that a mere black should laugh at him mastered Jerry, and the next moment his puppy teeth, sharp-pointed as needles, had scored the astonished black’s naked calf in long parallel scratches from each of which leaped the instant blood. The black sprang away in trepidation, but the blood of Terrence the Magnificent was true in Jerry, and, like his father before him, he followed up, slashing the black’s other calf into a ruddy pattern.
At this moment, anchor broken out and headsails running up, Captain Van Horn, whose quick eye had missed no detail of the incident, with an order to the black helmsman turned to applaud Jerry.
“Go to it, Jerry!” he encouraged. “Get him! Shake him down! Sick him! Get him! Get him!”
The black, in defence, aimed a kick at Jerry, who, leaping in instead of away-another inheritance from Terrence-avoided the bare foot and printed a further red series of parallel lines on the dark leg. This was too much, and the black, afraid more of Van Horn than of Jerry, turned and fled for’ard, leaping to safety on top of the eight Lee-Enfield rifles that lay on top of the cabin skylight and that were guarded by one member of the boat’s crew. About the skylight Jerry stormed, leaping up and falling back, until Captain Van Horn called him off.
“Some nigger-chaser, that pup, some nigger-chaser!” Van Horn confided to Borckman, as he bent to pat Jerry and give him due reward of praise.
And Jerry, under this caressing hand of a god, albeit it did not wear pants, forgot for a moment longer the fate that was upon him.
“He’s a lion-dog-more like an Airedale than an Irish terrier,” Van Horn went on to his mate, still petting. “Look at the size of him already. Look at the bone of him. Some chest that. He’s got the endurance. And he’ll be some dog when he grows up to those feet of his.”
Jerry had just remembered his grief and was starting a rush across the deck to the rail to gaze at Meringe growing smaller every second in the distance, when a gust of the South-east Trade smote the sails and pressed the Arangi down. And down the deck, slanted for the moment to forty-five degrees, Jerry slipped and slid, vainly clawing at the smooth surface for a hold. He fetched up against the foot of the mizzenmast, while Captain Van Horn, with the sailor’s eye for the coral patch under his bow, gave the order “Hard a-lee!”
Borckman and the black steersman echoed his words, and, as the wheel spun down, the Arangi, with the swiftness of a witch, rounded into the wind and attained a momentary even keel to the flapping of her headsails and a shifting of headsheets.
Jerry, still intent on Meringe, took advantage of the level footing to recover himself and scramble toward the rail. But he was deflected by the crash of the mainsheet blocks on the stout deck-traveller, as the mainsail, emptied of the wind and feeling the
