He walks into the book-room most jauntily. There the deep eyed Mara awaits him with love. She is nestled among her books, just below her mother’s languid picture. She lifts slow eyes that are heavy with love. But she sees that white plume. And Jim has little time left in life to have the Malay nature explained to him, the brief tale of how they may run “amuck” without reason.
Mara cannot wait. Her dagger is out, and she is indeed running “amuck.” They reach the hall together, and she stabs him before the eyes of the green Glass Buddha. She stands stark and lonely above him, and screams for her father to come down from his writing room.
October 29:—The body of Crawling Jim was found in a shadow, near the tree where Boone was hanged, by the group of young Boones who came to take away the body of their kinsman.
No one is in serious peril of being brought to justice for the death of Boone, though that was three months and three days ago. This has always been the case, in Springfield lynchings and murders. It is a thing still taken for granted, as people look drearily in the direction of the courts. The weekly magazines in Coe’s Book Store, from all over the country, roar about the two unavenged and unspeakable Springfield murders:—of the leading editor, and the son of the mayor on the same night. This has been in the papers, on similar occasions, for a century. And curiously enough, the town is blazing with international courage and all tense with efficiency on international issues. We are more in despair of bringing some sixty or one hundred masked murderers to justice than of annihilating the whole nation and religion of Singapore on the other side of the world. And there is, I admit, some justification for our hope. America, paralyzed one minute, is like a million bolts of lightning the next. There is something of the essence of majority rule in this, if one might think it out. But to our story.
Singapore is about to proclaim an all-Asiatic alliance against the World Government, with the ostensible object of an ultimate Pacific Ocean Government, living in alleged reciprocity and amity with the World Government, but not under one jurisdiction. Their newspaper editorials, sent by cable, sound marvelously like the fulminations of South Carolina in the days of Andrew Jackson, and further fulminations in the days just before the Civil War.
Indo China joins the Singaporian league, Burmah, and certain provinces of Southern China. But most of the Asiatic continent and all of Japan remains actively loyal to the Flag of Joseph’s Coat. On the other hand there are strange hesitancies in Europe and South America. There are rumors of World Treason, even among American officials of the World Government. Today the Singaporian declaration hangs.
I find myself again with the Japanese and his secretary on the reviewing stand by the wrought iron gates of Camp Lincoln, as the Amazons once more whirl by. They are valiant and potent as Britomart, and the Japanese Samurai says “it is inconceivable that such creatures could let a mob run away with their town, if such things had not happened hundreds of times in the history of noble cities.”
I find a wan new hope pouring into my dusty veins as they pass us many thousand strong, riding the best bred, the best shod horses in the whole wide world, and flashing the finest swords ever made. And along with the swords, the eyes of the horses flash as though they themselves were shouting the song of the warrior maidens. It is the old song, sung now with terrible irony and sweetness: “Springfield Awake, Springfield Aflame.” And then there are strains of that World Government song, beginning: “Every ship of every land, every wheel and every wing.”
The cheeks of the girls are sun-browned, and rosy as the Amaranth-Apples in the orchards of Hunter Kelly.