The news went swiftly through the bush. The puffs of wind died down. The whaleboat fell off from her course and rocked and rolled soggily in the long smooth swells. Gleason began to feel little prickles at the base of his skull. He was being hunted.
His paddlers were at work again, trying to use their unaccustomed oars silently, when there came through the night a second dull and distant booming. Far ahead this was, and it meant that another village was awake and preparing to scour the surface of the sea in its greater war canoes. Treasure was afloat. A white man’s head, and the white man proven not invulnerable nor over-dangerous. And it seemed to Gleason, sweating suddenly from terror, that he heard yet other drums, more distant still.
All the dark coast began to boom with drums, both before and behind the whaleboat. The drums, of course, were summoning the local devils to be sent to raise hell with Gleason until the war-boats found him. This sound tactical use of devils is universal in the Solomons. And every village launched its boats, and every boat hunted for Gleason with a panting enthusiasm, and Gleason went into the bluest of blue funks.
He drove his boatmen, whimpering with terror, straight for the shore and apparently for the very stronghold of his enemies. The sensible thing would have been to stand out for the open sea. But one of Henderson’s boat-boys kept Gleason’s panic from being altogether suicide.
All night long the devil-devil drums beat on, and all night long the smoky fires flared in devil-devil houses, and all night long the war-boats hunted tirelessly. The news spread farther and yet farther as the night wore on, until all the coast was awake and aware of what was going on, and all the coast was joining in the hunt. But Gleason was not caught.
When the gray dawn spread across the open sea, there was no dancing speck afloat that could not be identified as an authentic Malaita craft upon its unlawful occasion. Gleason had vanished.
But that same gray dawn filtered down through mangrove leaves upon him. One of the houseboys had panted directions for a little streamlet he knew of. It oozed its way sluggishly out between unbroken banks of mangroves, and there was no village beside it. More, when the whaleboat pulled into it the mangroves were found to stretch their branches thirty or forty feet beyond the edge of the mud and to dip their farther ends unpleasantly into the stagnant, stinking stream. The whaleboat had been drawn far in beneath those branches, and its sides bedecked with green. It was thoroughly hidden.
But Gleason still shook with fear, though the filtering pale light seemed to take away some of the menace of the drums. Birds, too, awaking in the branches overhead, seemed to drown out a little of their rumbling threat. And as the mistiness of dawn faded into the colorful light of early morning, one by one the devil-devil drums ceased their booming.
But the mangrove mud stank noisomely, and little, many-times-deflected ripples from the outer surf sucked and gurgled among the tangled roots. The smell of mangrove mud filled his nostrils, and he waited to be discovered.