Once, before dawn, Gleason had to fight. He got away by a miracle, but with only four paddlers left, and he had a fresh wound in his side and was literally mad with fear. A land breeze was blowing now and the whaleboat crept along under sail because four men could not handle it. It was so close to the shore that the splashing of waves among the mangrove roots was plainly audible. Also audible were certain hunting-cries upon the water. And—and this was the thing that crazed Gleason—in the whaleboat’s wake and growing nearer with desperate slowness there was the sound of paddles being dipped by exhausted, driven men.
When in fine irony the whaleboat grounded on the sandspit beyond Cape Kini and the sail cracked thunderously, Gleason sobbed. His remaining paddlers waited in apathetic despair. He saw the shore looming up darker and more forbidding than even the sea, and the whaleboat lifted giddily and crashed again on the sandbank, and a voice sounded behind him, nearer than the cries of the hunting war-boats....
Gleason splashed over the side, shaking in terror. He ran blindly, fighting the swells that tried to trip him, gasping hoarsely in sheer panic, fighting his way to the beach. There was little or no surf. The swells oozed up on the steeply slanting beach and retreated almost soundlessly. Gleason fought his way clear of them and plunged into the dark trees, sobbing as he ran. He tripped and fell and picked himself up, and ran and tripped and fell again.
The sound of the distant devil-devil drum filled him with horror. He ran on hysterically. He was still running at dawn, when the drum slowed up and stopped. And when the sun rolled up overhead Gleason was three miles inland, shaking, with his revolvers naked in his hands, staring wildly all about him.
He was up among the foothills of the inner mountains, by the bank of a swiftly flowing little stream. He was many days’ journey from the nearest white man, in the territory of the one native chief who would pay most lavishly for his head. Jungle surrounded him on every side. In that jungle, as soon as the deserted whaleboat was found, there would be eager hunting-parties searching....
Gleason wept hysterically. He raved. He very probably prayed. And very suddenly he slept, for the first time in two nights and two days.
He slept, it may be, for two hours. No more. There was a crackling of underbrush and a rustling of leaves. Gleason woke in a cold panic and stared with glassy eyes. He saw long, gnarly legs, astoundingly naked-looking, moving beneath a trailing cloud of foliage. Gleason’s revolver came up, held stiffly in a hand of ice.
He saw a frizzy, rounded head. A not particularly high forehead. The invincibly sad, dark-brown eyes of the Malaita bushboy. A wide, flat, and very black nose with a strip of dangling cartilage where Maehoe had discarded a nose-plug on his adoption of civilization.