“You can leave me out. I think you ought to take the offer. If you slip up, the king'll hang you for treason. If he's the government here, he's got a right to say what the law is. I'm going back to the ship. You needn't ask me for backing, for you won't get it.”
We stopped beside the fat man, and I asked him if he hadn't been one of the rival candidates, thinking it might be the old one with the chicken bones that spoke English; and he set to work swearing, so I knew it was; and I judged from the style he swore in he'd been intimate one time with seamen, and I judged; too, he felt dissatisfied. He said he was rightly chief of the island, and that man, all of whose grandfathers were low and disgusting, meaning Julius R., was living in his house, and, moreover, had given him only three pink shirts. Jessamine sat down by him, and said nothing, but listened, and I went and found some of the beach natives, and came back with them to the Good Sister.
That night passed, and it came the morning of the next day, and I heard nothing from them. I went ashore, but found no one about the huts there but children and a few old women. The old women jabbered at us excitedly.
I took six of the men and started inland through the hot woods, where the green and red parrots screamed overhead. When we came out to look up the valley to the open country, we saw no signs of fighting, nor any one moving about. Through the valley, as we went up it, there was no smoke from the huts, no women bruising nuts and ground roots into meal, no fat man before the hut with two doors sitting on his mats, not a soul in the village.
But coming near the palace we could see all the red flower shrubs were trampled and smashed. Then we came on a dead body by the path; then more bodies, bloody and spitted with spears; and one man, who was wounded, lifted himself, and glared, and dropped again among the red flowers. Through the palm stems we saw the roofs of the palace, and the piazza with the bamboo pillars. The line of the bodyguard was squatted on the piazza, with their spears upright before them. Everything was still.
Then we heard a cry behind us, and looked, and saw Jessamine and Breen, but no others with them, running through the village towards us. They came up to us, and said they had been in the woods hunting for the villagers who had run away, but found none. We sat down not far from the wounded man. Jessamine had his arm in a sling, and he told what had happened, so far as he made it out.
“It was the way I fancied,” he says; “J. R. wasn't so solid with his army as he thought, except the bodyguard, but I'd no idea they'd go off like a bunch of fireworks. The old fat one sent messengers around in the afternoon, and at night we went with him over back of that hill, and met a crowd who had a few torches, but it was pretty dark, and I couldn't see how many there were along the hillside. I made them a speech: how J. R. had run away from his land, and was ruling them here when he had no right, and they oughtn't to stand it; but I don't know that the fat one interpreted it. I guess he made a speech of his own. All I know is they went off like gunpowder. Whether all of them yelled for battle and rebellion I don't know; some of them might have been yelling against it. They all yelled, and pretty soon they started hot-foot across the country for the palace, fighting some with each other, so I gathered they disagreed. There are corpses all along between here and the hill, and it was there I caught a cut in the arm. Breen and I agreed to slide out of it. We went and sat on the hillside and watched. Maybe J. R. had word of what was coming. He seemed to be ready for them. I judged the bodyguard met them just above here, and there was a grand mix-up, but we couldn't see well at the distance. It was an awful noise. And suddenly it died out. Not a sound for a while. By-and-by a gang of forty or more ran by us a hundred yards away, and into the woods before we'd decided what to do; and later, after a long time, there was a sort of chanting like a ceremony over here at J. R.'s palace, and this came at intervals all night. This morning we came and found the village empty, and came up a little beyond here, till some one threw a spear past Breen's head, and we went away to look for the villagers. I don't know what J. R. is up to. He appears to be laying low with his wild-cats around him.”
While we were speaking there came someone past the bodyguards, and down to meet us, and it was Kamelillo. Kamelillo didn't have much to say, except that the king wanted to see us, but he answered some questions. He thought that in the attack on the palace the other two candidates and the fat one fell to quarrelling, and their followers joined, and it might be the first two had been inclined to stand by the king, only they thought it was time to have some fighting. But they weren't going to put up with the fat one. Instead of having it out then, they had all gone off to different corners of the island, the same as they used to do, and that suddenly. Kamelillo didn't know how it came about, and doubted if the candidates knew either. He said they were a “fool lot,” and the king could settle them, give him time to hang the fat one. But it was no use now—“Too damn quick,” he said. The women and children had all run to the woods in the beginning. Being asked about King Julius, Kamelillo only grunted, and not having any expression of face, you couldn't gather much from that. But when we came to the piazza, where the bodyguard squatted, what was left of it, with reddened spears, ghastly to make you sick, Kamelillo grunted again and said, “He gone die,” and passed in. The guard broke out wailing and chanting, and rocked to and fro, but only a moment, after which they held their spears up stiff, as the king had taught them, and sat still.
Now we followed Kamelillo to a great room, where it seemed the king held audiences and gave out laws and justice. The red plush chair was on a raised platform at the far end, and over and on three sides were heavy red curtains, and glass chandeliers hung from the rafters of the roof, and a row of mattresses covered with carpet was laid in front, maybe so that subjects could prostrate themselves comfortable. But the room was dusky, and still. It seemed to be empty. But we passed up it and stopped, for on the carpeted mattresses before the throne lay Craney, all alone.
His coat and vest were put back, his shirt torn open, and his breastbone split by a spear or hatchet, and it was clear he hadn't long to live.