A very different trail from the one we had never forgotten was that we now descended—wider, and so depressed in the middle that the earth was raised at the outer edge. Man nor beast could fall off the palisade except he went out of his way to do so. But the action of water had on the steepest declivities exposed large bowlders that were exceeding disconcerting to horse and rider. Still hanging with hind-hoofs, while feeling below with fore-, a grunt from the cheerfully alert buckskin pony would advertise that its unprotected belly had come in contact or impact with an equally rounded if less yielding object. Several times our saddles slipped so far over-neck that the beasts almost overbalanced to a somersault.
“It would be far simpler to walk and lead them,” Jack giggled. “But I rode up the trail without getting off, and I’m going down the damned thing the same way! What do you say?” And we did not dismount, save when necessary to set back our saddles.
Once at the doubly luxuriant kukui cluster at the feet of the pali, we saw a rider urging his flying steed in our direction—Jack McVeigh, could it be? It was; and the handclasp and voice were the same, if more than ever cordial. One of the first remarks was: “I wish you were going to be here for the Fourth. We’re going to whoop it up in grander style than ever. The Fourth you saw won’t be a patch on what’s going to happen this time.”
Dr. Will Goodhue, a little heavier, and if anything more benign if that could be, with his beautiful Madonna, in her arms their newest babe, waited at the arbored gate to welcome us of the wayward feet. Dr. Hollmann was now with the indefatigable Dr. George W. McCoy, at the Kalihi Receiving Station in Honolulu, where subsequently we renewed acquaintance.
The huge Belgian dairyman of old memory, good Van Lil, now a patient, had married another, and the pair lived happily in a vine-hidden cottage near Kalawao, making the most of their remaining time on earth. Beyond a fleeting embarrassment in his vague blue eye, he met us on the Damien Road with the undimmed buoyancy of other years, and our eyes could see no blemish on his face. Probably we were the more affected, for in the main the victim of leprosy is as optimistic as he of the White Plague.
Emil Van Lil was not the only one whom we saw who had perforce changed his status toward society in the intervening eight years. The little mail-carrier who had led us up out of the Settlement, we found in the Bay View Home, cheerful as of yore, though far gone with the malefic blight. And, auwe!—some of the men and women we had known here before as extreme cases still lingered, sightless perhaps, but trying to smile with what was left of their contorted visages, in recognition of our voices. Others, whose closing throats had smothered them, breathed through silver tubes in their windpipes. Strange is this will to persist—tenacity of life!
To light the almost desperate gloom of pity that could not but overwhelm me, Jack, with the shadow on his bright face too often there since the Great War commenced, said:
“Dear child—awful it is; but awful as it is, think of how thousands of healthy, beautiful human beings are making one another look in the shambles of civilized Europe right now while we stand here looking at these.”
Annie Kekoa, we were cheered to hear, had been discharged years before, all tests having failed to locate further evidence in her of the bacillus lepræ. Its depredations had ceased with her slightly twisted hand.
With pardonable pride the Superintendent showed us through the new “McVeigh Home,” for white lepers; and next forenoon, while Jack finished writing a chapter of “Jerry,” I visited the Nursery, also new. There behind glass, mothers may see their babes once a week until the tiny things are removed to the Detention Home in Honolulu. Born as they are “clean” of the disease, they are taken from their mothers immediately after birth, since further contact is a peril most strictly to be avoided.