Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas

by Lloyd Osbourne

Then Coe leaned over the rail and talked to the prisoners in the waist; told them that he was going to string up one an hour, children and all, till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe; and he ordered Lum to cast loose one of the old women so that she might swim ashore and carry the news. My, if she wasn't over that rail like lightning, and striking out for home with her skinny arms! Coe knew mighty well that Afiola had a string of people up the mountain keeping him informed of everything that happened—the Kanaka telegraph, we used to call it. Then, besides, up there they could see for miles, and Coe had kedged the schooner acrost the fairway so that Afiola might reckonize his relations in the rigging. You might wonder that such an unmitigated black villain would care what Coe did, so long as he had his wicked way with Mrs. Tweedie, and a whole trackless mountain to lose himself in; but there's an awful soft streak in Kanakas for their own blood, and we had his whole family in our hands, not to speak of the two kids. It seemed almost like a waste of lives to look up and see not a speck, or the least sign whatever, that was hid under the tree tops, and it was hard to convince oneself that Coe was doing the right thing, and that from those rocky cliffs there was sharp Kanaka eyes taking us all in, with Alethea Tweedie tied hand and foot, and Afiola in a sweat about his children.

The captain sat on a chair at the forrard end of the house, smoking a cigar, and occasionally searching the woods with his binoculars. There was a stack of loaded rifles beside him, and a keg of dynamite with a loose lid to it. Some of the sticks had touch-and-go fuses to them, ready to throw if they tried boarding; and sometimes he would take out his watch and look at it hard, and every time he looked the people in the waist would set up a kind of a wail. At one o'clock we ran up Filipo, Afiola's brother, and settled down to another spell of waiting. Somewheres along of three bells we saw them getting a boat out by Pita's house, and lo and behold! it was Tweedie, with the native pastor and a divinity student named Henry to pull him. When they were close enough to talk, he fell on his knees in the boat, though it was half full of bilge and slopped all over him; and he besought Captain Coe, by all that was holy, to stop murdering the innocent, and rattled on fast and scolding like he was in the pulpit. We was to leave it to God, he said, and went on like we was worse nor Afiola, the pitiful hound, like it wasn't his own wife we was doing our damnedest to save.

Captain Coe let him have his say, and then he leaned over the ship's side, holding to the starboard shrouds with one hand and taking the cigar out of his mouth with the other, and told him, with a most deliberate spit, as how he was going on with one every hour till Mrs. Tweedie was brought back safe and sound, and when he used up them he had aboard, how he was going to land for more. He didn't speak it particular loud, and you might have thought he was talking what a hot day it was; but there was that in his voice I've never heard before or since, and you knew he'd live right up to every word he said. I guess the pastor and the student understood a little English, for when Coe finished they laid on to their oars like mad, and headed the old sieve for shore again, Tweedie in the bilge and still protesting.

At two o'clock we turned off Sosofina, Afiola's aunt. We now had three aloft, and as we rolled gently broadside on to the swell they'd swing together and swing apart till you didn't care to look at them. That hour from two to three was the very longest I ever spent in my life. It was the hottest time of day and the sun beat down unmerciful, the pitch running in the seams, and the awnings being stripped off to better fight the ship, if need be. The steward passed round sardines and buttered biscuit, and I recollect the Chinaman wolfing his right out of the can and tipping it cornerwise to drink the ile. Bar Coe, he was the coolest customer of the lot, which was the more remarkable, as he was a mild-mannered man ordinarily, given to playing the China fiddle to himself, and very obliging if you wanted fresh yeast or the way he curried pigeon. Rau, the Belgian, with his hairy arms and stubby figure, struck one somehow as being more in his element in so wild a business, and you took his calm for granted, like a soldier serving a gun and doing what he's told. If Coe had ordered him to set off the dynamite and blow up the ship, he would have said "Aye, aye, sir!" and obeyed, respectful and willing, like the first-class seaman and navigator he was. He had served in the Belgian navy, and the habit had stuck to him. But in all of us, after all—me and Lum and John Rau and the Nieue steward—it was Coe's spirit that had raised us to this pitch, and he had blown a little of his own breath into every one of us. We were all Elijah Coe's that day, and it was only afterwards it came over us how different we had acted from our proper selves.

Well, as I said, it was drawing toward six bells, and we were keyed up tremendous, as we might expect to see the result of our work now any minute; and it was a shuddering thing to think of sending up another, and him a child. We all watched Coe out of the corner of our eye as he went on smoking his cigar, and every time he took out his watch and looked at it it seemed like my heart stopped beating.

"Three o'clock, boys!" he says, rising business-like from his chair, while Lum looked up expectant, and my gizzard seemed to shrink inside me. "Three o'clock, boys!"

He hadn't no more nor got the words out of his mouth when Rau ripped out there was a canoe coming off, and we all ran pellmell for the rail. Sure enough, there was an outrigger aiming straight for us, and the fellar in it was bent double and paddling that fast that the water spurted at the bow like it was a race. When he got within a cable's length he stopped, and waved something he had in his hand, and shouted a lot of stuff we couldn't make head or tail of. Coe made motions to him to come nearer, and Rau and me did the same, till the fellar got back something of his nerve, paddling with one hand and holding the little board aloft in the other (like he might a flag of truce), and venturing toward us slower and slower, till at last Coe reached down and took the thing from him standing up.

It was a slab of fresh-cut fuafua, about a foot long by three inches wide, and on it, written, as I heard afterwards, in blood and spit and gunpowder, was a message from Mrs. Tweedie herself—not many words on it, and them printed, for she only had a pointed stick by way of a pen, but saying as how she was unharmed and was being brought back fast, and please, he wasn't to trice up any more of Afiola's family.

The captain read it aloud to us about a dozen times, and then, his face working so he couldn't speak no more, he gripped hands with me, and then with John Rau, and not forgetting the Nieue steward, and then he went down the forward ladder, and I'm blest if he didn't put his arm round the Chink, and burst out sobbing—yes, sir, like a great overwrought girl, sitting on the tool chest, limp as a rag, and wiping his eyes with the cuff of his blue-striped panjammers, the Chinaman, patting him like he might a dog, saying, "Poor captain! Never you mind, captain! She all lite now, captain," while the prisoners broke out in a big gabble of how they were saved, and piped up with a hymn.

He wasn't the man to take anything for granted, however, and after he had sort of pulled himself together and got his second wind, so to speak, he cast loose a couple more with a message that he had to have a letter on paper from Mrs. Tweedie herself, countersigned by the king, that she was at home, safe, and no harm done. He might have saved himself the trouble, for they hadn't been gone ten minutes before she came off herself, queening it in the stern of the king's great alia, seventy feet long, with Tweedie and Maunga, and the princes, and eighty men chorusing to the paddles, with drums aft, and a young boy dancing in the bow and keeping time with a rifle. Except for her paleness, which was like marble, and the bloody marks of the sinnet on her pretty wrists, you wouldn't have taken her for much different than usual; and she skipped up the ladder as sprightly as you please, and made a bee line for Elijah Coe like a schoolgirl running to her pa for the holidays.