For Jacinta

by Harold Bindloss

"And now there's something I'd rather leave alone to be done," he said. "The launch is ready, and we'll go up and remonstrate with those niggers. It's a little rough upon a man who is fond of a quiet life."

"One would scarcely have fancied that quietness had any great attraction for you," said Austin. "Still, you probably know what pleases you better than I do."

Jefferson laughed. "There are folks who seem to like being kicked, but it's a sensation that doesn't appeal to everybody."

"You have a case of dynamite, too. Now, I had once an air-gun sent me, a good many years ago, and I remember how I burned to go out and destroy the neighbours' cats with it."

The American's face grew a trifle grim, and he looked at him with half-closed eyes. "Well," he said, "I suppose that feeling's there, but in a sense you're wrong. It isn't the only one. We put up a big bluff in coming here at all, and it's nerve, and nothing else, that will have to keep us where we are. There are no police or patrolmen in this country to fall back upon, and you have to face the cold truth, which is this: If one of those niggers clinched with you or me, he would mop the deck with us in about two minutes. It's not a nice thing to admit, but there it is."

Austin looked thoughtful, as, indeed, he was, for Jefferson, who, it seemed, could look an unpleasant fact in the face, had gone straight to the bottom of the question, as he usually did. The white man's domination, it had to be admitted, largely depended upon his command of machine guns and magazine rifles, but they had none of these on board the Cumbria. They were no match for the negro as a muscular animal, and there was only left them what Jefferson called bluff, which apparently consisted of equal parts of hardihood and arrogance. Still, there are respects in which it is difficult to distinguish between it and genuine courage, and it was certainly apt to prove futile in that land without the latter. Austin realised that since there was nothing else available, they must do what they could with it, though this was far from pleasing him. He had a dislike for anything which savoured of assertive impudence.

They went up the creek in the little, clanking launch, eight limp and perspiring white men, with knives and iron bars, under a scorching sun that burned through their oil-stained garments. They slid through strips of shadow where the belts of mire they skirted bubbled with the emanations the heat sucked up from them, and slid across lake-like reaches where the yellow water was dazzling to look upon. All the time, endless ranks of mangroves crawled past them, and there was no sound but the presumptuous clanking of the engine to break the deep silence of the watery forest. The whole land seemed comatose with heat, and all that had its being in it probably was so, for it is at night that nature awakens in the swamps of the fever belt. Man alone was stirring, and the puny noise of his activity jarred for a few moments on the great stillness and then sank into it again.

Austin sat huddled in the launch's stern-sheets with his senses dulled by the heat and glare, though the desolation of mire and mangroves reacted on him. He knew, as he sometimes admitted, a little about a good many things which were of no use to him, and he remembered then that the vast quadrilateral of Northern Africa west of Egypt had absorbed several civilisations long before the Portuguese saw its southern shores. They had vanished, and left no mark on it, and it was plain that in the great swamp belt, at least, the black man still lived very much as he had done when the first mangroves crept out into the sea. It is a primitive country, where man knows only the law of the jungle, and Jefferson, who grasped that fact, was apparently ready to act upon it in the usual primitive fashion.

There was, at first, no sign of life when the launch came into sight of a little village hemmed in by the swamps. It had its attractiveness in that country, for the clustering huts stood, half buried in foliage, beneath towering cottonwoods, with a glaring strip of sand in front of them. There were bananas, and, as Jefferson recognised, lime trees in between. Still, by the time they approached the beach men came floundering hastily out of the huts, and Austin was not greatly consoled by the sight of them. They were big men, and wore very little to conceal their splendid muscles. Some of them also carried long canoe paddles, and one or two had wicked, corkscrew-headed spears. Austin wondered, a little uneasily, whether they only speared fish with them, and looked round to see what effect their appearance had upon his companions.

It was apparently not a great one. Jefferson was quietly grim; Tom, the donkey-man, scornfully cheerful; while there was a little portentous glint in the Canarios' eyes. Austin fancied he was the only one who had the slightest doubt that anything their leader did would not be altogether warranted. This, however, was comprehensible, for he was aware that while the American's attitude towards the coloured people is, perhaps, not altogether what it should be, the Western pioneer never quite equalled the Iberian in his plan of subjugation. The Spaniard, at least, did not send out Indian agents, or dole out rations of very inferior beef.