LEVUKA.
He would stay there, he thought, until a vessel bound for Levuka put in; but month followed month and no such ship came. He rose rapidly from the post of chief armourer to be the king’s first minister, and took to himself a woman of the place to be his wife. Ships put in for provisions or to recruit labourers for the South American guano islands; and as the king’s adviser, his services to the captains were paid for, and the money hoarded. So three years slipped over his head, and a ship put in at last wanting provisions, and bound to Levuka to fill up with oil. Allen helped the captain to get his provisions, and sold him his stock of pearl-shell, taking in part payment a passage for himself, his native wife, and her niece. The ship got under weigh, and stood on and off the island till nightfall, and Allen, guided by the riding light, paddled off under cover of the darkness, and cast his canoe adrift; for his royal patron had found him useful, and was prone to secure his own comfort without due regard to the inclination of his dependents. At Levuka he found that his countrymen were busy developing the country with muskets and gunpowder. If a tribe would live it must have as many firearms as its neighbours, and to obtain them it would sell as much land as the foreigner wanted. And so, for ten muskets and a keg of powder, Allen became the possessor of Boot Island, and the vendor, pitying his simplicity, was ready to sell him two other rocky islands on the same terms.
He stood at last, as he had often dreamed, upon the beach where his treasure was buried, and watched the little dinghy labouring out towards the cutter, which presently swooped down upon it and bore it away, running free towards the west. Then he turned to the two women, who sat patiently by the pile of cases on the beach, and pointed to the spot where they had made their camp-fires more than three years ago. They left him to gather sticks, and he passed quickly round the point that hid the dilo-tree under which he had buried the box. It was just as he remembered it, save that the ground bore no sign of ever having been disturbed. The creeping vine that lives between soil and sand covered the place with a thick carpet of shiny leaves, and no mound could now be traced. He tried to picture the spot as he had last seen it—the flickering torchlight, the scared faces of the shipwrecked sailors, and the blood-stained sand—but the bright sun threw a checker-work of shade through the branches, and a fresh trade-wind bore the smell of the sea to his nostrils, so that the picture would not fit the frame, and the memory seemed less real to him than a nightmare. Surely he had dreamed that Benion’s shattered body was buried here! If it was true, where was the grave? and how could the whole place look so bright and peaceful? But the box—that could have been no dream! It was for that that he had come, and he must find it. He went resolutely and stood against the gnarled trunk. Standing thus, as he had stood on the night of the wreck, the box must be buried at his feet, but there was nothing to show that the treasure and its silent guardian lay there together. He stooped and tore away the matted vine, and the coral sand, dulled with vegetable mould, lay bare. Yes, there was a slight swelling of the sand here, but so slight that he could scarcely believe that anything lay beneath it. Some one must have found and stolen it! With a terrible sinking of the heart, that drove out all power of reasoning, he fell on his knees and tore away the yielding sand with his fingers. At the fourth plunge his heart stopped, for his hand struck against something hard. He plunged it lower, hoping to feel the square corner, but the thing was round and unfamiliar to the touch. A little lower, and his fingers were beneath it, and with a fierce curiosity he tore it upwards from its sandy bed. It threw the coarse sand from its slippery sides, and lay inert—a shattered skull, with a patch of hair still adhering to it! Allen sat staring with wide eyes at the grinning face as it perched knowingly on a hillock of sand, and then, as it slid over and rolled down towards him, he shrieked yell after yell of mad laughter, and the women, running in the direction of the sound, found him so.
THE HERMIT OF BOOT ISLAND.
It was past three o’clock when we cast off the buoy at Mango, and let the schooner go free before the “trade.” It was blowing fresh, but she was travelling faster than the seas themselves, and was as steady as a rock. At dusk we were abreast of a precipitous island, steep, too, on all sides but one, which ran off to a sloping point like the toe of a boot. The skipper was gazing earnestly at the dark line of shore.
“That’s Boot Island,” he said, in answer to my question; “and the other you can just make out to the nor’ward they call Shoe Island. If there was a light on that point I’d have to go in. The old devil that lives there’s as crank as a March hatter, and I promised I’d go in if he made a fire on the beach as I was passing. You see he might be sick or something, and no one’d ever know. Nothing but a bird could land on this side in weather like this. You’ve got to lie on and off on the lee side and send a boat ashore. There’s no anchorage. He’s getting very crank. Bickaway, the storekeeper, sent a boat last week for his copra, but he wouldn’t let him land because it was Saturday. Said he was getting ready for Sunday. The old beggar knew well enough that the boat was chokeful of trade, and he and his women hadn’t enough clothes to cover themselves decently. Bickaway yelled to him that his copra would be rotten before another boat came, but he stood on the beach and waved him off. Said that he couldn’t land before Tuesday, because on Monday he’d be meditating. No, he can’t starve. The women take good care of that. Bickaway saw a fine patch of pumpkins and kumalas, besides cocoa-nuts. He won’t catch fish, because he says it’s wicked to take life. There’s only the two women on the place besides him—his woman and her niece; and he must be pretty rough on them at times, or the girl wouldn’t have swum all the way to Shoe Island, and got picked up by the niggers. They brought her back, too, in their boat, and the old chap let them land, and gave them half his kumala crop—he, that don’t like niggers, least of all the Yathata niggers! They say he’s a Yankee, but no one knows for certain. I suppose I’m the only white man as ever got into his house, and that was five years ago. Oh! it’s a long yarn, and not worth telling. I was ‘beech-de-mar-ing’ at the back of Taveuni. Hadn’t had any luck, and one of the niggers belonging to Yathata—that’s Shoe Island yonder—says, ‘Why don’t you try Yathata, and the white man’s island?’ So I went over there in a boat I had, and worked her over the reef at spring-tide in very calm weather. I’d heard a lot about old Simpson, that he wouldn’t let any one fish his reefs, because the island was his; but I meant to fish whether or no, as the nigger told me that the reef swarmed with teat-fish, and the Chinamen in Levuka were giving fifty-five pounds a ton. As soon as we let go the anchor, the old devil came out of a lean-to he’d knocked together of packing-cases and rusty iron. He was the damnedest old scarecrow you ever see, with a white beard down to his belt, a filthy old shirt, and blue dungaree pants. I made the boys haul the anchor short and keep lifting it, so as she dragged in, and I stood up in the stern pretending to read a book I had.”
The crest of a big sea surging past us lopped on deck, drenching us to the knees.