Well, that was very much what the Marquis was doing. I will say this much for him—he wasn’t any sort of a coward. I have seen him cry like a girl; I have seen him shiver with excitement, but I never saw him frightened, and I never saw him give anything the best of it. That would have kept me in his company, even if the big diamond had not.
But now we were inevitably linked by that double interest. It shows what a good sort the Marquis was, that we hadn’t a word’s dispute as to who found it first, or whose was the right to claim it—if we ever got it. We just assumed that, being in the thing together, it was “halves.” I was to stick to the Marquis, and he to me, till the business was through.
Good Lord! if we had had an idea of how much that meant!...
We were beginning to have an inkling, no more, the morning after the poor little pretty girl had been buried. They carried her away, wrapped in mats, to some burial place in the forest as soon as the daylight broke, and we did not get a chance to examine the corpse, as I had wished to do. That hurried look-over in her own house, when we found her dead, had shown me that there was no obvious trace of injury; but I thought her slightly swollen. I suspected poison—the sorcerers of New Guinea are clever poisoners, and very ready to use their powers. But nothing would ever tell us now.
Under ordinary circumstances I would have cleared out of the town straight away, for I knew well that some kind of trouble was sure to follow such an unlucky introduction. But with a diamond the size of a chandelier-luster knocking about in a sorcerer’s bag, within a few yards of us, we were not likely to move on in a hurry.
The Marquis and I, on the morning following that eventful night, held a council of war in front of our tent where we could see all that went on in the village street, and keep an eye on the whereabouts of Mo. So long as we saw him, we knew that he could not be doing much mischief.
The bat-eared little man was not to be seen that day. (I had ascertained through Koppi Koko that the dead girl was his promised wife, and that she had told him, after watching the Marquis dance, that she never would marry an ugly little thing like him.) He was the sorcerer’s youngest and favorite brother, so the useful Koppi Koko had found out—being very anxious to retrieve his character, and save himself the hammering that he feared his desertion might bring down on him. I did not touch him as it happened, not because I thought he didn’t deserve it, but because I knew he would be more useful if he were kept in suspense.
I thought his information interesting, but by no means reassuring. It was too much to suppose that the matter would be allowed to end there. The little man must have developed a worse grudge against us than against his late unlucky fiancée, and if her fate was an example of what we had got to expect, things were looking lively.
So I told the Marquis. We were sitting on the ground outside our tent and watching the villagers moving about their daily tasks—water-carrying, net-making, wood-cutting, fetching sago from the forest, going out to dig yams, or to hunt pig. They looked peaceable enough, and it was a peaceful, pretty scene, with the sun just rising over the tall green palms and the smoke curling thin and blue from under the deep thatch roofs.
But the old hand in New Guinea knows well—too well—that the Papuan is most dangerous when, apparently, most friendly. The quiet aspect of the place meant nothing—or worse.