Faery Lands of the South Seas

by James Norman Hall; Charles Nordhoff

"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine. In the December following they landed at Pinaki, where they buried the treasure. The island was uninhabited then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to learn the name of it. The natives were shy, but they persuaded one man to approach, and when they had the information they wanted, shot him and rowed out to their boat. If you should go to Nukatavake you will find two old men there who still remember the incident.

"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel not far from Cooktown, and went ashore with a story of shipwreck. They had some of the gold with them—not much in proportion to the amount of the treasure, but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for the rest of their lives. It soon went, and the four were next heard of at the Palmer gold fields. Alvarez and Barrett were both supposed to have been killed there in a fight with some blacks. Brown and Killorain had not mended their ways to any extent, and both were finally jerked up for manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Brown died in prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally died in Sydney hospital in nineteen twelve.

"Most of these facts—if they are facts—I had from Killorain himself the night before he died. I met him in a curious way; or, better, the meeting came as the result of a curious combination of circumstances. You may have noticed the scar on my side?"

I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges where the flesh had healed, tapering to a point in the middle of his back.

"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it gave me a deal of trouble at the time. I got it in New Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I was prospecting for gold in the back country. I was a long way from a settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head to stick me with a spear. I suppose he wanted my gun and ammunition, for I had little else excepting my placer outfit. I let him have one bullet from my Colt just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for all I know he may be lying there to this day. I have that little frizzly headed native to thank for my knowledge of the Pinaki treasure. Sometimes I am sorry that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting was altogether too easy a death for the man really responsible for bringing me here. I was in a bad way from the wound. Infection set in, and I had to nurse myself somehow and get down to a place where I could have medical attention. I managed it, but the ten days' journey was a nightmare. I was nothing but skin and bone when I left the hospital, and New Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the doctor recommended me to go to Australia.

"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and a half of heart-breaking work in the mountains. Most of it went for the hospital bill, and when I reached Sydney I had very little left. I was compelled to put up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although the woman who kept it was quite a decent sort. Her house was in a poor quarter of the town and her patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters. It was a wretched life for her, but she had two children to support and was making the best of a bad job. I admired her pluck and did what I could in a small way to help her out.

"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen when some one rapped. Before I could go to the door, it opened, and an old man came stumbling in, asking for something to eat. I thought he was drunk and was about to hustle him back the way he came when I noticed that he was wet through—it was a cold, rainy night—and really suffering from exposure and lack of food. I made him remove his coat—he had nothing on under it—but not without a great deal of trouble, and he insisted on drying it across his knees. He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman, about five feet three or four in height, with deep-set blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, a heavy, discolored mustache, and a thick shock of white hair—altogether the most frightful-looking little dwarf that ever escaped out of a picture book. He was tatooed all over the arms and chest—Hands Across the Sea, the Union Jack, a naked woman—several other designs common in waterfront tatooing parlors.

"His body was as shriveled as a withered apple, but his little bloodshot eyes blazed like bits of live coal. Except for the fire in them, he might have been a hundred years old and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't a great way from it. Eighty-seven, he told me, and that is about all he did tell me. He gorged some food and was all for getting away at once. But it had set in to rain very hard and I persuaded him to wait until the worst of it was over. He was very suspicious at first. I believe he expected me to call a policeman. Later he thawed a little, and became even talkative in a surly way when I told him, with the landlady's consent, that he might stay the night if he had no place else to go. Wouldn't hear of it, though. He said he had a job as night watchman at Rush-cutters' Bay. That might or might not have been true. At any rate, I went with him to the car line—the boarding house was a good mile from Rush-cutters' Bay—and gave him a couple of shillings, as a loan, I said. He could return it sometime. Just before I left him he asked for my name and address, mumbling something about doing me a bit of good one of these days. He was insistent, so I gave it to him, but not at all willingly. He had frightened Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady, just by the way he looked at her, and I didn't want him coming back.

"He didn't come back. That was in May, nineteen twelve, and I heard nothing more of him until September. I was still at the boarding house, getting slowly better, but not yet good for anything. I kept out of doors as much as possible, took long walks in the country and along the waterfront looking at ships. When I came in one evening Mrs. Sharpe told me that an attendant from the Sydney hospital had called twice during the day. An old man named Killorain, a patient at the hospital, wanted to see me. The name meant nothing to me and I couldn't imagine who the man could be. The attendant called again later in the evening. Killorain was about to die, he said, and wouldn't give them any peace until I was brought to see him.

"It was getting on toward midnight when we reached the hospital. The old man was in one of the public wards. I recognized him at once, although he had shriveled away to nothing at all. It was impossible to forget his eyes, once you had seen them. He was dying—no doubt of it, but I could see that he wasn't going to die until he was ready.