In consequence, when on the fourth day of Henderson’s illness the inhabitants of the barrack sheds were observed to be talking excitedly, Gleason went and took a peg. When, later, they vanished suddenly, he went and took a couple more. In justice to him, it should also be remarked that during the next hour he stopped Maehoe for the fiftieth time from giving Henderson quinine.
But at two o’clock in the afternoon Gleason’s fear of Maehoe began. The plantation boys had actually tried to rush the house.
A howl from Gleason’s four paddlers underneath the house was warning. Dark figures with improvised clubs were racing across the house-clearing, yelling. A few knives were in evidence, and many tools, and at least one flint-lock pistol smuggled painstakingly through the entire recruiting process and hidden in somebody’s barrack-box.
Gleason started shooting in a panic. He dropped one—two—three of them. His four paddlers swarmed up, gray with fear and frenziedly ready to fight. The wave of frizzy-haired, nose-plugged caricatures of humanity came on, screeching. Gleason shot crazily.
And Maehoe came out on the veranda with a box of dynamite in his hands and one of Henderson’s cheroots between his teeth. He hadn’t told Gleason about fusing the dynamite. Gleason would have stopped him, not trusting natives with civilized weapons.
Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a fuse-end, and flung it.
Maehoe grinned savagely, touched the cheroot to a fuse-end, and flung it. Before the stick went off he had flung another. With a handful of sticks in his hand, he ran around the veranda lighting fuses as he ran and flinging the dynamite down among the attackers.
The sticks made an awful racket when they went off. The house rocked from the detonations. Then the veranda floor lifted and shook. The dynamite box jolted from the floor a full six inches, coming down with a terrific crash. Gleason’s four paddlers howled and dived over the railing. But the dynamite did not go off and Gleason’s courage came back suddenly. He began to shoot with steadier hands, putting bullets in black backs that were running away again. And it may be that the howls that followed the explosions helped to steady his hands.