While he was ill, though, Gleason saw one other side of Maehoe that eventually led to the triangular drama of Gleason and Maehoe and Fear.
It was the plantation boys, of course. Gleason should have taken them in hand when Henderson went flat on his back, and kept the vice sweated out of them. Idleness is not good for anybody, and especially for recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation. These boys were bushboys, from salt water villages, and two days of idleness gave them time to remember much devilment and speculate hopefully on more.
Two days after Henderson developed black-water fever, Gleason’s four paddlers came shivering to the house and begged to be allowed to stay there. They were To Ba’ita boys, and the labor gangs were south Malaita men.
“’M fella boy talk too damn much Pau talk,” their leader explained fearfully to Gleason. “I think’m kai-kai ’m To Ba’ita boy plenty damn quick.”
Gleason chewed at his nails. The thing to do, of course, was strap on an extra revolver and go over to the barrack sheds and fill each several and separate man with an unholy fear. It could be done especially with the four paddlers to guard his back. Three of them were strong enough to fight, anyhow.
Gleason did not. He assigned sleeping quarters to his men underneath the house, and went and took a peg. During the next hour or so he took several more. And he fretfully stopped Maehoe, who was about to give Henderson quinine. Quinine is almost a specific for ordinary fevers, but it is rank poison in black-water.
Next day—three days after Henderson went down—there was a tumult down at the store-shed. A houseboy fired off a rifle and fled. A knot of scared figures plunged for the bush and vanished. They’d tried to loot the store.
And when recruited laborers on a Solomon Island plantation try to loot the storehouse, it is then time for any white man who wants to keep his head on his shoulders to take some action. The proper and approved action—though it is strictly unlawful—is to flog every man who may conceivably be suspected of the attempt. And it is a very good idea to knock the others about a bit and generally act as if you are fairly itching for them to try to rush you. And of course, thereafter you must work them until they drop in their tracks—bullying them the while—and make their lives a burden to them for some time to come. Loving kindness is not understood or appreciated by salt water boys who contemplate the ownership of a white man’s head with a yearning wistfulness.
But Gleason had a chill, which may or may not have been the sort of chill that comes from a blue funk on top of a fever-racked system. Gleason did nothing whatever except go in half a dozen times to see if Henderson was getting over his delirium with prospects of being able to get up. And he stopped Maehoe from giving him quinine. He was just in time.
The thing was that Sunaku had scared Gleason down to the marrow of his soul. A timid man either gets out of the Solomons or he doesn’t last long. Gleason had become timid. He had lost his nerve because of the exceeding narrowness of his escape from Sunaku.