It may well have been the sheer rugged, manly forcefulness of Bell that gave Allen pause, at least in those early weeks before the Australian's infatuation for the girl became an obsession in which his reason had no part. For years he had been taking life and property out of downright contempt for his victims. "I'm the better man, and therefore the more deserving," was sufficient excuse in his own mind for his most high-handed outrages. But in Bell—for almost the first time perhaps—he had met a man who had an "edge" on him—even his soaring ego could not prevent his recognizing that. This must have been plain to him even when he measured the Yankee with the yardstick of his own primitive code. Yes, I really think that Allen, in his innermost mind, rated Bell as a man who, like himself, had a "right" to the best of everything. I am even convinced that, for a while at least, he even tried to respect Bell's right to Rona.
But do not let me leave the impression that there was one iota of physical fear of Bell in this attitude of Allen's. From what I had seen, and was to see, of the cool-eyed Antipodean that was unthinkable, even though he knew that the powerful ex-athlete could come pretty near to staving in his ribs with a single punch, and though he may have suspected that the Yankee was the deadlier man on the draw. I honestly believe that "Slant" Allen had no fear in his heart of anyone or anything under heaven. At that time, I mean; what came to him later is another matter.
"Slant" ran true to Jackson's "dope sheet" in the matter of "tykin' a myte," though, but it was done quite decently and in order—that is, as such things go in the Islands. He put up with "Quill" Partington (an old pal) for a fortnight, and then, when "Quill's" lyric spirit led him to run over to Malaite in search of a queer native banjo that someone had told him the bush niggers of the interior of that island made, strings and all, from the wild boar, "Slant" simply stayed on to "look after the pigs and chickens" (as he told them at Jackson's) and, incidentally, Mary Regan. Mary came from Norfolk Island, and claimed lineal descent from the mutineers of the "Bounty." Certainly she looked the part—of a descendant of mutineers, I mean. She had specialized in unhappy love affairs, and showed it. She had a thin, bony, angular frame, a voice like the wail of a cracked fog-horn, and a temper "calid enough for cooking purposes," as "Quill" described it. "Quill," who had developed a taste for curries and hot seasonings while living in India, claimed that the reason he had put up with Mary for so long was because of the saving she enabled him to effect in paprika.
How "Slant"—straight meat-eating and unpampered of palate as he was—hit it off with the mercurial Mary no one seemed to know. At any rate, I feel sure that he found her "condimental" disposition useful as a counter-irritant against the rising fever of his passion for Rona, something which, though he kept it under astonishingly good outward control, had been burning with increasing heat from the very first time he saw her. He confessed that to me later. Curbed passion, like wounded pride, if it cannot find outward expression, bites inward. With all his despicable record well in mind, I still cannot help thinking with a certain admiration of the game bluff the rascal put up during those six or eight weeks that the enchantment of Rona worked within him, of the gay, devil-may-care smile that so successfully masked the writhings of his racked spirit. First and last, there was something about the fellow—I think it must have been his flaming courage—that attracted me strongly in spite of all that I knew, and all that I came to hold, against him.
Since Kai held no regular intercourse with any of the surrounding islands, the news that the plague—a pernicious form of bubonic—had broken out and was making terrible ravages among both the bush and saltwater niggers of the Solomons was received with no especial interest on the beach, save perhaps by those who were wont now and then to take a flyer in "black ivory." The labour-recruiting trade—itself almost the only medium through which the pest had been spread—was hard hit of course; indeed, had there been anything like adequate control of the pernicious traffic at this time, it would have been suspended entirely until all of the islands from which blacks were being taken, or to which they were being returned, were able to present something approximating clean bills of health.
Since this was not done, however, the only check on the movement of blacks—infected or otherwise—was the possible reluctance of the masters of ships engaged in the trade to take the risk of carrying them. And since the average black-birding skipper lived as a matter of course with a gun in one hand, his life in the other, and the devil's tow-line between his teeth, it was hardly to be expected that a little thing like the spectre of the "Black Death" looming up on the windward horizon was going to make him reef much canvas. The "Black Death" in another form would ambush him sooner or later anyhow. With niggers waiting to settle accounts with him in every bay it was only a matter of time at the best. Why worry about a few cases of a disease that might not kill him even if he did get it? Heave in and get under way! That was about the way the black-birder looked at it, and he went right on scattering infected niggers around the South Seas like a cook stirring raisins into a pudding.
But in the secluded and peaceful haven of Kai lagoon they reckoned that they had little to fear from the epidemic whatever happened elsewhere. Let the plague and the heathen rage for all they cared. They were their own quarantine officers, and, until the "Black Death" ceased to stalk in the neighbouring islands, "No Visitors" was the order of the day. All very simple and efficient—in theory. Covered every possible contingency—just about.
I had spent several colourful days once—getting about from island to island in the New Hebrides—with red-haired old Mike Grogan on the Cora Andrews, and had heard from that hard-fisted giant's own lips something of the grim balances checked against his life in practically every black-birding island of Melanesia. A black's home bay holds a labour-recruiting skipper responsible for the man's safe return at the end of his contract time, and if he does not come back they figure that the only fair way to even up the score is by killing the captain of the ship which took him away. Grogan calculated that he would have to be killed something like one hundred and forty times to make a clean sheet of all the accounts thus reckoned against him. He took a sort of grim pleasure in running over the items of the various tallies, but always ended with: "B'gorra, the devils'll be gittin' me yit!" He was convinced that it would be a "cutting-out" party that would do for him in the end, and I have no doubt that he fought over in his mind that final bloody showdown every night he stood the "graveyard" watch alone. A sudden volley from the bush, his whaleboat caught in a swarming rush of blacks, his crew disabled or deserting, and himself alone battling it out single-handed with the niggers at the last.... It was something like that he expected for a grand finale, and all the "fighting Irish" in him yearned for it as a sunflower turns to the setting sun.
"An' it ain't as if I won't be givin' the spalpeens a run for their money, me bhoy," he had cried one afternoon, clapping me on the shoulder where I swayed with him to the plungings of the Cora in a nasty cross-swell. "An', b'gorra, it's a way to die after a man's own heart—shootin' an' clubbin' into a mob o' niggers out under God's own sky!"
Full as my mind was of other things on that accursed day of which I am about to write, I could not help but think of these words when they told me at Jackson's that old Mike's fighting spirit had passed on a windless midnight, and while Mike himself was jack-knifed over the Cora's wheel, spitting blood and curses, and imploring the devil to quit tying knots in his tortured guts with a red-hot pitchfork.