“It is a pity,” she said. “But
the white man has to rule, I suppose.”
“I don’t like it,” Sheldon assured
her. “To save my life I can’t imagine
how I ever came here. But here I am, and I can’t
run away.”
“Blind destiny of race,” she said, faintly
smiling. “We whites have been land robbers
and sea robbers from remotest time. It is in
our blood, I guess, and we can’t get away from
it.”
“I never thought about it so abstractly,”
he confessed. “I’ve been too busy
puzzling over why I came here.”
At sunset a small ketch fanned in to anchorage, and
a little later the skipper came ashore. He was
a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced young fellow of twenty,
but he won Joan’s admiration in advance when
Sheldon told her that he ran the ketch all alone with
a black crew from Malaita. And Romance lured
and beckoned before Joan’s eyes when she learned
he was Christian Young, a Norfolk Islander, but a
direct descendant of John Young, one of the original
Bounty mutineers. The blended Tahitian
and English blood showed in his soft eyes and tawny
skin; but the English hardness seemed to have disappeared.
Yet the hardness was there, and it was what enabled
him to run his ketch single-handed and to wring a
livelihood out of the fighting Solomons.
Joan’s unexpected presence embarrassed him,
until she herself put him at his ease by a frank,
comradely manner that offended Sheldon’s sense
of the fitness of things feminine. News from
the world Young had not, but he was filled with news
of the Solomons. Fifteen boys had stolen rifles
and run away into the bush from Lunga plantation, which
was farther east on the Guadalcanar coast. And
from the bush they had sent word that they were coming
back to wipe out the three white men in charge, while
two of the three white men, in turn, were hunting
them through the bush. There was a strong possibility,
Young volunteered, that if they were not caught they
might circle around and tap the coast at Berande in
order to steal or capture a whale-boat.
“I forgot to tell you that your trader at Ugi
has been murdered,” he said to Sheldon.
“Five big canoes came down from Port Adams.
They landed in the night-time, and caught Oscar asleep.
What they didn’t steal they burned. The
Flibberty-Gibbet got the news at Mboli Pass,
and ran down to Ugi. I was at Mboli when the
news came.”
“I think I’ll have to abandon Ugi,”
Sheldon remarked.
“It’s the second trader you’ve lost
there in a year,” Young concurred. “To
make it safe there ought to be two white men at least.
Those Malaita canoes are always raiding down that
way, and you know what that Port Adams lot is.
I’ve got a dog for you. Tommy Jones sent
it up from Neal Island. He said he’d promised
it to you. It’s a first-class nigger-chaser.
Hadn’t been on board two minutes when he had
my whole boat’s-crew in the rigging. Tommy
calls him Satan.”
