CHAPTER XXV
About this time I received a message that Sir Francis Winter had departed, and that Mr. Musgrave had assumed the administratorship, pending the appointment of a successor to that official, or the return of Sir George Le Hunte. Likewise I received orders at once to prepare to accompany the Acting Administrator on a journey of exploration, for the purpose of discovering a practicable road from Oro Bay to the Yodda Gold-field, together with instructions to collect carriers for the said expedition.
I therefore hastily departed for Cape Nelson; and on my arrival at that point, at once hoisted about sixteen feet of turkey-red at the flagstaff—the signal that I wanted carriers for an important expedition, and also that all village constables and chiefs were to come to me immediately. Within a few hours the men began pouring into the Station, generally accompanied by their wives and relations, who were prepared to camp there until they knew what was in the wind, or until their husbands and relatives had departed with me.
A few hours after my arrival the Merrie England came in, and when I went on board I was informed that the Acting Administrator did not intend to make the proposed journey in person, but that he had decided that I should act for him and that I should be accompanied by Mr. Tooth, a Government surveyor, whom he had brought with him for that purpose. The Merrie England was swarming with extra Central Division police, who were landed to camp for the night in my barracks. His Excellency also informed me that, as he suffered from nausea on board, he wished to sleep at the Residency; upon which I sent for my house boys and told them to prepare my bedroom for the Acting Governor and to make up a bed for me in my private office, which they did. Upon my landing from the Merrie England, Oia, my orderly, remarked, “What are we to do with the bones of the white man in your room?” “Oh, shove them under my bed until this trip is over, and I have time to attend to them,” I said. For a short time before Oiogoba had brought me the bones of a man, which he informed me he suspected from the decayed state of the teeth in the jaw to be those of a white man: he, or rather his sorcerer, had roughly articulated them, after the manner in which they had previously seen me prepare the skeletons of the smaller mammals.
Night came, the whole station was plunged in the most profound sleep, with the exception of the sentries and myself. I was sitting in a bath, and was taking advantage of my first spare moments in order to read my private mail brought by the Merrie England, when suddenly a shriek rent the air from the Acting Governor’s room, followed by a scamper of feet across the verandah, a loud yell, and then a shot. Hastily I jumped from my tub, donned my pyjamas and arms, and bolted for the Governor’s room, while the noise of an alarmed Station became louder and yet louder.
When I reached His Excellency’s room I found the mosquito nets surrounding the bed in a blaze, whilst he was capering up and down the room, jibbering something to which I had no time to listen. I hurriedly tore down the burning nets and trampled them underfoot; the need for haste is evident, when I mention that thousands of rounds of cordite cartridges and several hundred-weight of gelignite and dynamite were stored in cells beneath my room. Just as I finished trampling out the flames, a rush of feet came; Sergeant Barigi on the one side and Corporal Bia on the other, with their respective squads, swarmed into the house, mother naked, except for bandoliers, bayonets and rifles, and prepared to kill at sight. Before I had time to question his Excellency as to what was the reason of the alarm, the sentry dumped up upon the verandah the stunned body of the Governor’s boy, with the remark, “I’ve got him, sir!” Then came screams, shrieks, and howls from the women and children in the married quarters, coupled with the yells of the non-commissioned officers of the respective detachments falling-in their men on the parade ground, and the shrill call of a bugle from the gaol compound, a quarter of a mile away, calling for the night guard; mix with that the beating of the drums of the native chiefs in charge of the carriers assembled for the expedition, crown it all with the bellowing of the Merrie England’s foghorn hysterically calling for her boats, and it may be imagined that a fair state of pandemonium reigned!
And all about nothing! His Excellency had gone to bed; then, in the dark had got up and felt for an object under his bed, and had inserted his fingers into the eye-holes of my skeleton’s skull, and being rather puzzled, had called for his Motuan boy to bring a candle. The boy groped under the bed, grabbed the skeleton, and, being a superstitious Motuan, had given a yell and promptly dropped the candle, which fired the mosquito nets; he had then bolted over the verandah, where he had instantly been flattened out by the sentry, who immediately afterwards fired his rifle to alarm the guard.
The prisoners in the gaol, most of whom were runaway carriers from the Mambare, had heard the riot and imagined that the Station was attacked or taken; they accordingly had made frantic efforts to break out and escape, for fear of being murdered—efforts which the ordinary warders were powerless to restrain; hence the wild bugling for assistance. In twenty minutes, however, peace reigned once more; some one yelled to the Merrie England that it was not battle, murder, or sudden death, but merely a compound of funk and imbecility. Sergeant Barigi’s squad went and quietened the agitated prisoners, while Corporal Oia and his men explained to the rest of the Station that the trouble was only due to a fool of a Motuan having been scared of my skeleton!
Tooth, the surveyor the Governor had brought with him, was a most peculiar individual; he had spent most of his life surveying in the arid wastes of Northern Australia, and had there lost every ounce of superfluous flesh, as well as acquiring two delusions; one of which was, that his frame and constitution were like cast-iron and not susceptible to fatigue, and the other, that an extraordinary Calvinistic brand of religion that he had invented was the only true means of grace. He had only made one convert, so far as I could understand, namely, his wife.
I discovered Tooth’s idiosyncracies during the first ten minutes we were alone together, while we were discussing the arrangements for our expedition. I noticed two large S’s embroidered on his collar. “Mr. Tooth,” I asked, “what do those S’s mean? Surveyor?” “No,” he replied, “Salvation.” “Are you a member of the Salvation Army, Mr. Tooth?” “I was,” he said, “but I differ with them,” and then began to explain his own particular brand of dogma. “Oh, Lord!” I thought, “what am I in for?” Then I cut in hurriedly to the discourse, as a dreadful thought struck me. “Mr. Tooth, are you a teetotaller as well?” “No,” said Tooth, “that is one of my differences with the——” I hastily interrupted him by yelling for a boy and telling him to bring drinks; then, before Tooth could get going again, I struck in, “This expedition of ours will in no way resemble a Methodist picnic. We shall first have to penetrate a coastal belt full of swamps and rotten with fever of the most malignant type; there, forced marches will be the order of the day, and sometimes it will be necessary to use other than Kindergarten methods to persuade carriers of the type I shall have with me, that such marches are for their own benefit; next, we shall skirt Mt. Lamington, and that mountain is the haunt of some particularly venomous tribes, who are perpetually fighting, and who regard every stranger as an enemy to be slain at sight; we shan’t have a chance to get into anything like friendly relations with them, for Walker and De Molynes have had one scrap with them, Elliott another, and they chased Walsh clean out of their district. Now, what I want to know is this, have you any conscientious scruples about shedding blood? You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, and you can’t take an expedition past Mt. Lamington without some one being killed on one side or the other. Personally I have a strong aversion to being coarsely speared in the midriff or rudely clubbed on the head, or having similar things done to my constabulary or carriers, and should prefer the casualties to be on the other side.” “If the heathen in his wickedness rageth,” said Tooth, “the heathen in his wickedness must die, also I have a wife to think of; but it is sad to contemplate that his soul will be damned.” “That’s right, Mr. Tooth,” I said, “when the heathen rageth, you think of Mrs. Tooth and be hanged to the heathens’ souls.” He then got up and groped in his bag, producing therefrom an antiquated ivory-handled revolver of Brobdingnagian proportions; a thing throwing a ball about the size of a Snider bullet. “What do you think of that?” remarked the proud owner. “I’ve had it twenty-five years!” “The Lord help the heathen you shoot with that thing; you’ll disembowel him,” I said, as I gazed in awe at the ponderous piece of artillery and shoved a finger into its cavernous muzzle; “also the ammunition will be the devil’s own weight for you to carry. Let me lend you a service revolver; it will be quite as effective and half the weight.” He, however, declined to be parted from his beloved piece of ironmongery, explaining to me that weight did not matter to his iron constitution; he, however, consented to take a service rifle, instead of an enormous American repeating fowling-piece he had as his second armament.