"Now you have done it!" roared Mr. de Coverley, who was rather a well-bred, but sometimes rather a vulgar young man. "Not divided! Oh, great Scott! Oh, my eye! Oh, I'll die of laughing! Hold me up! Never mind, Vic; I'll see you aren't divided, or cooked either—trust to me!"
* * * * *
Vaiti was still in a speechless state of sulks when she started off the next morning into the interior, to recruit on her own account. It was not a very safe thing to do, but the bushmen would not come down to the coast, and the Sybil could not hang out indefinitely, since the doubtful character of her methods had given the French and English Commissioners of the islands a nasty habit of asking questions about her. Saxon, who had relinquished his lumbago to go off into the hills at a safe distance from the yacht, wanted to make his daughter accompany him; but Vaiti simply laughed at him, and departed with a guide seduced from the mission towards a village lying a mile or two above the volcano. She preferred the glory of working on her own account, and besides, it doubled the chances of recruits.
She knew the Tannese nature well, so she dressed herself for her part in a robe of scarlet sateen, with liberal necklaces of different coloured trade beads, and stuck a couple of tomahawks in her sash, besides an ornamented sheath-knife. Across her splendid young bosom she slung an incongruous-looking bandolier of cartridges, designed apparently for the slaughter of elephants; and a smart magazine rifle, carried over her shoulder, completed the outfit. All these valuables, though designed to assist her plans by suggesting the enormous store of desirable goods possessed by the recruiters, were almost as likely to assist her to a sudden and unprovided end, by reason of the natives' covetousness. She took her chance of this, however; Vaiti was used to taking chances. It is easier than most people suppose to take the risk of being killed every day of your life. In the strange places of the earth, where such things are a common happening, men do not look upon the inevitable end after the pursy, secretive, never-mention-it fashion of Peckham and Brixton. Death is just death in the earth's wild places—yours to-day, mine to-morrow—a thing to walk with shoulder to shoulder, to meet face to face at noonday; in any case, to make no bones of it until it makes bones of you; and after that circumstances will keep you from complaining if you feel like it.
It was a long, hot walk up to the village. A "walk" is mostly a scramble about the uncleared New Hebrides, where roads are mere foot-wide cracks and canyons in the dense forest growth, and level ground apparently does not exist. Besides, a bandolier of cartridges and an assortment of small arms are rather heavy jewellery for such a climate. Vaiti, however, possessed the enviable gift of never looking, or apparently feeling, hot or tired; and she swung along at an unvarying pace that caused the unlawfully enticed mission native, who had waxed fat and lazy, to regret his enticement and wish himself back in the mission school writing copies, instead of slaving up and down precipitous gullies in the rear of a woman-devil who did not know what it was to want a rest.
At long last, however, the reedwork fence of the village came in sight, and they entered the open square, shaded by an immense banyan tree and surrounded by low, ugly huts, all roof and no wall, like all the mountain villages of Tanna. There were sentries perched up in the trees outside the gate, and others squatted on the ground at every entrance, their rifles ready in the crook of the elbow. Within, the dusty tan-coloured square, quivering under the pitiless fire of the white-hot sky, was all alive with moving figures—ugly women in brief grass skirts humped out into swaying bustles; young boys with murderous little faces, and full-sized rifles; wild-looking men, with thick hair twined into myriads of tiny strings ending in a great bush on the shoulders, stripes of scarlet paint on their faces, and no clothing save their native impudence and a cartridge belt—all seething about in a very bee-hive of excitement and alarm. As for the rifle-barrels, they were bobbing about like piano-jumpers all over the square, and every weapon was cocked and loaded.
Vaiti saw at a glance that they were expecting an attack, and picking out a native who could speak English, asked what the trouble was. The man replied that they feared the little man-of-war down below, but that they were entirely innocent. Questioned further, they said naïvely that they had never eaten a white man, and that none of them were low cannibals in any case. Vaiti, who had not heard of this little affair before, saw her chance.
"No good you speak alonga that fellow way," she said, using the bêche-de-mer talk that some of the Tannese understood; for Vaiti, like many half-castes, could handle almost any dialect or corruption of a dialect, though she could not speak decent English or French. "I savvy plenty, you eatum one fellow white man. By'n by, big fellow man-of-war come, shoot you all-a-same one pig, all-a-same one blind box [flying fox], burn altogether house belong you. Very good you come alonga Saxon ship, go Queensland; then you all right."
"No eatum," persisted the man (who was the professional talking-man or orator of the village), with a coy smile.
Vaiti's nose was keen, and she had already guessed something by its aid. She marched straight across the square into a little yam-house, and pointed to a small parcel done up in green banana-leaf and tied with cocoanut sinnet. Five toes and an instep protruded from one end. The game had been well hung, as the Tannaman likes it to be, and there was no mistaking the fact of its presence in any sense.