“All this is very fine for you, Moreton,” I said, when he had concluded. “You have been years in the Service and know things, whilst I am very young for such an appointment, and have no experience.” “Go to Armit if you get into a fix,” said Moreton, “he will pilot you through all right, he is a walking encyclopædia; but don’t you get Jock’s back up or you will never forget it. You can practically exercise any power you please if you do right and succeed, but if you make a mistake or fail, Jock will make you feel small enough to crawl through a keyhole. Now then, here is a list of things that need attending to at once. There is a murder at Awaiama, a man cut his mother-in-law’s throat, catch him; there is to be a new Mission Station at Cape Vogel, survey and buy the land from the natives; Fellows is in trouble at the Trobriands, go and put him right; Bromilow has collected a lot of orphans at Dobu, go and mandate them to the Mission; a man named Ryan has shot a native at Ferguson Island, arrest him and inquire into the case; Carruth has been supplying grog to the natives on Burns, Philp’s diving boats, catch Carruth and deal with him; the Siai’s decks need caulking and she needs new wire rigging; I’ve got the wire, but there is no money with which to pay any one to do the job. Patten has got into some sort of trouble at the south end of Goodenough, find out what it’s all about; Thompson has started a cocoanut plantation on the north-east coast of the island, look him up and see that he is all right; when you get some spare time, go and buy a cargo of yams for the gaol, and don’t pay more than 10s. per ton for them; see that Billy the Cook shuts his pub at twelve o’clock, there are only fights and rows if he is open later. Don’t use the police for arresting white men if you can possibly avoid it; arrest them yourself. Some one stole an anchor and chain from the Siai, I think it was Graham; search his vessel the first time you come across him; he was last heard of in the Trobriands; there are a handful of summonses for debt against him too, serve them. Find German Harry and hold an inquest into the death of one of his crew; look at the licences of all pearl shell and bêche-de-mer vessels you come across, they dodge paying whenever they can; if they pretend they have no cash, make them give you an order on Burns, Philp and Co. There are a lot of letters about missing friends, find out about the people for whom inquiries are made and answer them, also send duplicates of your letters to the Government Secretary. The Chief Judicial Officer is raising Cain about a lot of Mambare murderers in the gaol on warrants of remand, he wants to know if I intend to keep them without trial for the term of their natural lives; just work through them in your spare time: they are the men that killed Green and his detachment. There are a few other things that want attention, but Symons will give you a list. Give Symons hell, if he gets behind at all with the Headquarters’ returns, and keep your eye on the Siai’s paint and stores, for I’ll take my oath Symons doesn’t keep his whaleboat so smart on his paint allowance. If you give the bo’sun of the Merrie England a bottle of whisky, he will steal enough brass-cleaning stuff, sewing twine, and needles from her stores to keep you going for a year. By the way, Jock won’t allow holystone for the decks, he says it is extravagant, and that we must scrub them with sand and cocoanut husk. They have small-pox in German New Guinea; send any vessel coming from there into quarantine at once, ‘Clean Bill of Health’ or not.”
Symons was a married man with a young family: Moreton therefore had allowed him to take possession of the Residency, whilst he occupied a little three-roomed house, built of native material, in the gaol compound and alongside the Government jetty. As Moreton pointed out, it was much more convenient for a bachelor wishing to keep only two servants—a cook and an orderly—than the big Residency; and the labour of shifting one’s things backwards and forwards from the Siai was much reduced. There was a detached two-roomed building used as a cook-house and servants’ room; Moreton only used two rooms, one as a bedroom and the other as a sitting-room; we dined on the verandah. I investigated the third room, the one to be occupied by me until his departure, and found a couple of trestles supporting a platform of boards. “What on earth is this, Moreton?” I asked; “it strikes me as a devilish hard bunk!” “The fact is,” said Moreton, “there have been a few accidents lately, dynamite and diving and that sort of thing, and as there was nowhere else to put the bodies, I kept them here till the inquests were over, and they could be safely planted in the cemetery; I believe one of the ungrateful beggars walks.” “I think I’ll have a hammock slung,” I remarked; “I don’t so much mind sleeping in a morgue, but I draw the line at a corpse’s bed; his spook might take a fancy to occupy his old berth.”
“You might hunt up a suitable place on Logia Island for a new cemetery,” Moreton said. “The one here, next the gaol, is getting overcrowded for one thing, and for another, it is none too wholesome, for all the coffins are made of thin cedar—some of the inhabitants have not got coffins at all—and the damned crabs will bore holes down to them. I had an awful job to get enough sawn timber for a coffin for Tommy Rous, but he’s tight enough, I think; I thought I owed him something for all the pleasant nights we had spent together. By the way, don’t let Symons read the Burial Service over any one if you can help it; he reads it in a voice like a cock with a quinsy.” Moreton complained that the Woodlark and Mambare miners were getting Samarai a bad name. “They come here,” he said, “at the last gasp with dysentery or malaria, wait a week or two for a vessel to take them to Australia, and then, if the schooner is late, peg out, and give me all the work of administering their affairs and replying to the letters of their relations. I had a little luck with one lot, though; about a dozen came in from the Woodlark, looking very bad, and just managed to catch the Clara Ethel bound for Cooktown. The skipper told me afterwards, that he dumped seven corpses overboard before he reached there, and they had to carry the rest up to the hospital.”
A few days after I arrived at Samarai, the Ivanhoe came in from New Britain bound for Cooktown, and Moreton made ready to depart. “Some little time ago,” he told me, “my brother sent me some champagne and some pâté de foie gras, and a cheque which I am going to blow on my leave. I think we will invite Armit and Arbouine to dinner the night before we sail, and polish off the fizz and pâté; but how the devil am I to get the pâté cold? It is in china pots inside a soldered tin.” “Tie it on to the Siai’s anchor and drop it in fifty fathoms,” I suggested; “it is cool enough down there.” The dinner came, the time for the pâté also, and Moreton’s cook proudly produced, and placed in front of him, a steaming, loathly-looking dish of an evil-smelling mess. Moreton prodded at it. “What is this? I sent for the pâté, you scoundrel: what poisonous mess have you got here?” “That’s all right, sir, that’s the pâté; I’ve curried it!” I draw a veil over the language that followed, and also over the fate of that boy.
Earlier in the day a cutter came in, manned by escaped French convicts from New Caledonia; Moreton promptly placed them in gaol, telling me to keep them there until the Chief Judicial Officer came, and I could get his advice as to what was to be done with them. “What sort of warrant am I to hold them on?” I asked; “it is all very fine for you, you are skipping out, but what will happen to me when his Ex. finds out I have half a dozen Frenchmen jugged without a warrant?” “You are a bright R.M.,” said Moreton; “men are not sent to New Caledonia for stealing apples; only the worst of their criminals go there, and I don’t want half a dozen of the worst sort of convicts loose in this division; law or no law, you hang on to them; charge them with having no lawful visible means of support, or with a breach of the quarantine laws, or entering from a foreign port without a ‘Bill of Health,’ or hold them on suspicion of having stolen their cutter; anyhow, it is better that you should get the sack, than that they should be let loose; Winter will find a way of dealing with them.”
After dinner, on Moreton’s last night, we adjourned to Arbouine’s house, where we remained until about eleven; as we returned home, a wild riot at Billy the Cook’s pub attracted our attention, and running there we found O’Regan the Rager being thrown down the steps. O’Regan was fighting drunk, and making the night hideous with yells and blasphemy. “Go home and to bed, O’Regan,” said Moreton. He would not, and Moreton grabbed him; he promptly hit Moreton in the ribs, and just as promptly I hit O’Regan under the ear and also seized him. “Will you come quietly?” said Moreton; but O’Regan wanted blood and gore, whereupon Moreton blew his whistle and a dozen police, running up, collared him and took him off to gaol, Moreton and I continuing our way home. We had hardly reached the house before a warder rushed up, exclaiming, “That lunatic, the police have run in, is killing the Wee-wees.” I bolted down to the gaol, and found all the cells were full of natives except the one containing the Frenchmen, and accordingly the gaoler had put O’Regan in with them; O’Regan had immediately proceeded to dance with his heavy mining boots over their recumbent forms, and to challenge them to fight.
I had the cell door opened, and told O’Regan that he would be put in irons unless he kept quiet; the Frenchmen all clamoured to be taken away from him. “I’m a plain drunk and disorderly, I am,” said O’Regan, “and I’m not going to be shut up with a —— lot of —— foreign criminals.” “That’s all very fine,” I told him, “but all the other cells are full of natives and you are not going to dance over them; gaoler, bring the irons, and we will make a ‘spread eagle’ of this man on the floor.” Here the Frenchmen chipped in, saying they didn’t want to remain in the cell with him even when ironed, and begged to be put in with the natives, to which I accordingly agreed. O’Regan was left with a bucket of water and a pannikin, and told that if he gave as much as one more howl, he would be ironed to the floor. The following morning, Moreton paid a visit to the gaol to say good-bye to the gaoler and warders, and some estimable native friends of his, whom he had been obliged to gaol for various trifles—such as assault, or burying their deceased relatives in the villages. While he was there O’Regan, who by this time was feeling rather piano, begged his pardon for hitting him in the ribs, and apologized for giving him the trouble of using the police for running him in. “Let him off with ten shillings and costs as a plain drunk, Monckton,” said Moreton; “he seems very contrite, and he’s got a lump as big as a hen’s egg where you hit him.”
The Ivanhoe sailed, and with her, Moreton; my first duty was to hear the cases set down at the Court House, amongst them of course being O’Regan’s drunk. When his case came up, I fined him ten shillings; upon which he gazed at me and remarked, “I’ve seen that blank man up to his backside in mud at the Woodlark, hunting for pennyweights of gold, and now he sits there like a blanky lord and fines me ten bob.” “Yes, O’Regan,” I remarked, “very true; and now that blank man is going to add five pounds to your fine for contempt of court!”
The night after Moreton’s departure I was peacefully sleeping, being dog tired after a hard day, when I was awakened by some one shaking my hammock. Jumping up I saw Robert Whitten, and demanded what he meant by coming and disturbing a tired man at that hour. “So-and-so’s wife has died suddenly,” he said, naming a European carpenter, who was married to a native woman, “and we want you to come and look at the corpse, to find out why she died.” Reluctantly I dressed, called a couple of police, and went off corpse gazing. I found the widower looking very distressed and frightened; he told me his wife had complained of a sharp pain in her chest at different times, and that night it had been very bad. “I sent to every store,” he said, “and I bought chlorodyne and pain killer, fever mixture and pink pills, cough mixtures and Mother Seigel’s syrup; I bought every sort of medicine they had got, and I gave her some of each, hoping that one would fix her up. There are the bottles, you can see I’ve done my best; I then sent for Bob Whitten to ask him if he knew of anything else, and while Bob was here, she died. Is there going to be an inquest, and shall I bring the body up to your house?” “No, you won’t,” I said; “you will keep it here until it is buried, and you need not worry about an inquest. I think your wife died of heart disease, before all those drugs you poured down her throat had time to poison her; but no one will ever know now.”
The following morning I crawled out to breakfast at about ten o’clock, feeling a horrible worm, and found an immaculately dressed Symons sitting on the verandah waiting for me. “Come to breakfast, Mr. Symons?” “No, thank you,” said Symons in a pious voice, “I had my breakfast two hours ago; I adhere strictly to office hours.” “You are a lucky dog,” I remarked; “it seems to me that my hours are all day and all night as well. What’s the trouble now?” “The gaol returns,” he replied; “the gaol is half full of people under Warrants of Remand; the R.M. has been too busy, and latterly too ill, to attend to them; we are over-crowded, and unless something is done, there will be a lot of sickness. The Mambare men, too, are giving no end of trouble, and should be transferred elsewhere; I’m getting anxious about what will happen when you leave with the bulk of the police.” I satisfied Symons by promising to inquire at once into the cases of all the men on remand; and, after breakfast, began upon the men charged with the murders of John Green, Assistant Resident Magistrate at Tamata, his police, and five European miners.