White Fire

by John Oxenham

Then Blair called Matti, and, sitting on the deck by the new arrivals, he quietly commenced his approaches towards the conquest of the Dark Islands.

Briefly—in the telling, though very much otherwise in the extracting—this was what they learned. The man's name was Ha'o—which he pronounced Hacho, the ch as in loch—and the woman's Nai or Na-ee.

He was, he asserted, chief of that one of the Dark Islands which had been raided by the brig. A number of the islanders had been enticed on board with soft words and presents and then suddenly made prisoners. The ship had then apparently sailed, but that same night the village was burnt and he and the rest carried off.

It was not easy to make him understand what had induced these other white men to follow and bring them back. If they did really land him on his own island again—of which he was by no means sure—he would be their friend and brother. As for those others—looking venomously at the captain of the brig, who was sitting amidships in gloomy contemplation of the scurviness of fortune—he would ask nothing better than to eat them if the chance offered.

"You eat men, then?" asked Blair, through Matti.

"Of course. Why not? Properly cooked they are excellent eating"—or words to that effect.

And Aunt Jannet Harvey and the other ladies shuddered and wondered, for he did not by any means look the monster his words implied.

Blair tried hard to convey to him the idea that they had come from the other side of the world for the sole purpose of helping him and his people; but that was too much for him—he could not comprehend it.

He got tired of being questioned out of his depth, and strolled about the ship, examining everything attentively. The long brown steel gun, the revolving screw, the engines, and the smoke pouring out of the funnel claimed his chief attention. During the next few days he hung over the stern watching the revolving blades and the bubbling wake by the hour, with absorbed and puzzled face, and every now and then would lick his hand and hold it up to feel the air. There was little wind, for Captain Cathie had purposely run up into the calm belt to lessen the strain of the towage, but such as there was it was dead against them, and the brown man could not understand it. As to the gliding pistons and smooth-running wheels in the engine-room, they were white men's magic of the most virulent description, and Matti himself understood the business too little to be able to convey any clear idea of the connection between them and the never-resting screw astern.

For the rest, both the brown man and the girl found ample grounds for wonder in the farm-yard in the bows—the contemplative cow, the sullen-eyed young bull, the stolid goats, and the rooting piglets and their mother, and the cocks and hens in their coops, and the men's pet cat, which occupied their various bunks in turn, and accepted all their attentions with the utmost complacence and gave nothing in return. But of all the things that set sparks in the girl's wondering eyes, the crowning delight was the piano in the saloon and the little harmonium which was lashed alongside it.