Chapter XIV

HOW THE WITCH-DOCTOR GOT HIS MONEY BACK

When the trader’s wife came in next morning with Vaiti’s cup of tea, she was touched to see how deeply her pretty lodger was sleeping.

“Poor young dear,” said the good woman, “lying there so sweet and innocent, sleeping like a baby! It’s only the good heart that rests like that. I don’t believe a word of the silly lies they tell about her. Here, dear, wake up,” she called gently. “Your good papa is ever so much better this morning, and looking for you to come in. And it is Sunday morning, and a nice cool day.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Smith,” said Vaiti politely, broad awake at once. “May I asking you one little hot water? I like get up and go to turch.”

Church, attended for reasons religious or otherwise, was not one of the amusements patronised by the nameless white man of the bush. Indeed, his amusements, such as they were, were so far confined to the native villages of the interior that very few of the other whites had seen him. He was not good for trade, having no money and possessing no credit—that was all they knew, or for the most part wanted to know, about him.

There was all the more astonishment, therefore, in the shanty owned by the Mua trader, away up in the bush, when the unknown man walked into the store that Sunday night, and demanded some tobacco, at the same time showing a sovereign he held in his hand. He was dressed in a pitiful mass of rags, none too clean, but he looked well pleased with himself, and was more than half drunk. Fortune had apparently found him out at last.

The Mua trader was an honest man, but he did not see why he should not have a share in anything good that happened to be available about that lonely and unprofitable district. So he welcomed the stranger in with much cordiality, and asked him to stop for supper.

The newcomer had no objection in the world to come in and share the trader’s good tinned meats and new yeast bread, and he made himself very much at home without pressing. The trader, who had a private store of consolation in his own back kitchen, plied the spirits freely. He was curious, and he believed in the old saw of “Wine in, truth out.” A couple of friends who had ridden over from Alofi, the capital, and were equally curious about the derelict’s sudden access to fortune, did their disinterested best to help, and the bottle went merrily round. The Niué traders are a sober, decent set of people enough, but Donahue had mixed with them so little that he did not know this, and consequently was not put on his guard by the unusual conviviality. Indeed, he was by no means the same active, crafty villain who had set that successful snare of the diamond necklace in Apia many months ago. A white man cannot “live native” without going downhill very fast, and Donahue was nearly at the bottom.

So he drank, and laughed, and told evil tales, and grew quarrelsome, and pathetic, and finally affectionate and confidential, in well-defined stages, while all the time the other men kept sober, or nearly so. The Mua trader in particular hardly touched his glass. But Donahue, once so wary, never saw, and chattered on.

Before midnight the trader had sold him some gay calico for the native’ girls, and a little tinned meat and flour, and half-a-dozen various trifles that brought the score up to about a pound. Here the guest came to a pause and fingered his coin.

“Oh, well, if that’s all you have, you won’t get any more goods to-night. Thanks,” said the trader, putting out his hand.

The visitor, however, declined to hand over the money. He would pay to-morrow, he said. He was not going to leave himself without money again—not if he knew it—and he would have lots to-morrow: and if the trader wouldn’t send up the goods without the cash to-night, why, he might keep his condemned rubbish, and his customer would go elsewhere.

Rather than lose the order, the other gave in, and sent a boy away with the stuff. It would always be easy to bully him out of it afterwards, he thought, and there was no arguing with a drunken man’s whim.

Then he set himself, in company with all the rest, to find out where the money had come from.

Donahue, who by now was far gone, responded readily. It was the silly old chap who lived down on Avarangi beach, he said; an old fool who was an uncle of a girl who was a friend of his. The old chap had a notion that there were some Spanish doubloons hidden somewhere on the island, but in a place he was afraid to touch, so he had forked out a good British sovereign, and offered it to Donahue to go in his place, and share the money with him. Donahue was to keep the earnest money for his trouble, if nothing came of it, and if anything did turn up he was to take half. So he was going, that very night—the sooner the better. Natives were—well, natives; but as for him, he was afraid of nothing.

“Thasser-sort-er-man I am,” he finished thickly, looking round for applause.

He did not get it. The traders one and all burst out laughing. The story of the doubloons, they told him, was a very old one in the island, and only the newest of new chums thought of believing it. It was quite true that the natives, who were perfect magpies for hoarding, did possess among them a certain number of doubloons, which came from God-knows-where—for the coinage used in the island was British—and true also that the trader would get a doubloon from one of them every now and then in the course of business, always with some mystery attached to it, and some reluctance to part with the coin. But the Resident Commissioner, who knew the island pretty well, and the missionary too, had long been certain that the store was merely the remains of some ship-wrecking raid of past days, about which the Niuéans were now ashamed to speak. They were great misers, and it would like enough be another generation before all the hoarded coins had come to light and passed through the traders’ hands. But hidden treasure in Niué! Pf! If old Sona had been giving away money, he must be either going mad with age or (more likely) up to something. He was the cutest old fox on Niué, and that was saying something. Why, when he had come into that very store to buy a darning-needle a few hours ago (what a man who lived in a waist-cloth and nothing else wanted with a darning-needle he hadn’t explained), it had been all the trader could do to prevent his picking up half-a-dozen odds and ends. That was what he was like if one ever took an eye off him; and he wouldn’t even pay for the needle, either, till the trader had threatened to hammer him unless he forked out. Take his word for it, if Sona had been giving away money, he meant to have it back—somehow. And the treasure was poppy-cock.

Donahue had now passed into the quarrelsome stage, and he rose with tipsy dignity from his seat.

“I considdle you no gennlemen,” he said scornfully. “For half a Chile dorrer I’d” ... He mentioned what he would do, in gross and in detail, to the assembled company for the small sum mentioned.

“Kick the dirty brute out,” said the Alofi trader disgustedly. “It’s easy to see what sort of company that carrion has kept.”

Donahue was gone, however—gone with surprising agility, and lurching rapidly up the forest pathway towards his house. His legs were always the last thing to fail him.

He knew very well that he had had too much, and when he reached his hut he proceeded to sober himself by dipping his head repeatedly in a bucket of water. Then he brewed himself a powerful jorum of black tea, drank it, and set off considerably sobered.

It was a long way to the clump of palms, and he stumbled badly now and then as he went over the graves that lay thick about the edges of the path. Burial along the high-road is very popular in Niué, where they like to keep an eye on their dead and see that they are lying quiet in their graves—a thing that no one considers at all a matter of course. Some of the graves that Donahue passed had felt hats laid upon them; others had plates, bowls, bottles of hair-oil, fans—all to amuse the ghost and keep it quiet; and one or two looked ghostly enough to scare a nervous person as it was, with the wraith-like mosquito curtains thoughtfully suspended over the tomb by mourning and anxious relatives. Every grave was completed by a solid mass of concrete, weighing anything from several hundredweight to a ton. It was not the fault of any Niuéan if his dead relatives “walked.”

Donahue as he went chuckled to himself at the thought of his keenness in over-reaching the old witch-doctor. He had used him for his own purposes through the girl Mata before, and though that had not worked out too well, it was the witch-doctor who bore the discredit, not he. He would use him again now, and in another way. It was in the daytime that Sona had arranged to meet him at the palm-tree clump. At night, he said, it would be certain death; and even in daylight no one would linger there who could help it. He at least would never dare to disturb the big tomb in which the money was hidden and call down the anger of the devils on himself, unless he had a white man with him who feared nothing. So next morning, very early, the white man who was so brave would meet him, and they would open the big, cracked tomb together—the tomb that no Niuéan had ever dared to lay a finger on before, though there were one or two besides himself who suspected that it was just there the mysterious foreign coins had come from years ago, and that there were a good many left.

Thus the witch-doctor. And Donahue had assented eagerly, and gone off with his earnest money. And, on arriving at his hut, he had looked out an old axe that he possessed, and cleaned up his lamp, and begged a drop of oil from the nearest native house. For he meant to go that very night, and take everything there was for himself. Who was to prove it?

Which was just the course of action that Sona had calculated very confidently on his taking.

It poured furiously in an hour or two, for it was in the hot season, and the great rains were out. Donahue could not light his lamp when he came to the clump of palms, which he knew well enough to recognise almost in the pitch dark. It thundered soon after, and the sky was split from pole to pole by corpse-blue flashes of lightning. In one of these, Donahue, feeling about the cracks of the tomb, thought he saw something moving against the gloom of the bush near at hand. It made his throat turn dry, for all the wet, and he felt his hair prickle curiously. But he went on groping. Another flash ripped up the sky; it was a smaller one, but for one horrible moment he thought he had been struck, for something stinging streaked across his face and gave him an ugly thrill. But it passed immediately, and he began groping again—groping with both hands, in a frantic hurry, trying to make out the best place to apply the axe—tearing and grasping and scuffling like some deadly graveyard mole, breathless, with beads of warm sweat coursing down his face through the streams of chilly rain.... He was fighting—fighting he knew not what and knew not why—but he was fighting, for all that, fighting hard, with the stone falling away from his nerveless hands, and the breath in his body sinking down under some nightmare oppression, and the sound of the thunder now almost continuous, blending itself with another and far louder sound that was battering madly in his ears. He was fighting with—— Christ!—it was Death!

The thunder passed, as tropic storms do pass, suddenly and completely. The dawn shot up in the east, wet and red, and cast long, black, ghostly shadows, set shaking by an icy wind, low down upon the palm-trunks and the grave. But Donahue did not want the light. The axe lay untouched beside him; and he lay over the tomb, dead. And his face was black and his body was all contorted.

It was barely daylight yet when something small and slow crept out of the bush, and began hunting carefully near the corpse. It could not find what it wanted, seemingly, and this distressed it, for it whimpered pitifully in a thin old voice, and looked long before it desisted. Then it put its claws into the dead man’s pockets, and hunted through them, before it finally disappeared down the road.

* * * * *

The Mua trader was at his door when a howling procession of natives came into the village, carrying the white man’s corpse to his home. The Alofi trader, who had found the body, stepped aside to speak. After the tale of the finding had been told, the Mua trader asked slowly:

“Did you think of searching his pockets? A dead man’s a dead man—and I’d not be sorry to have the money he owed me, for the natives will have taken the goods by this time.”

“They were empty when I found him. Queer, for I was the first to see him,” said the other. “I found this thing on the road close by, though. Do you recognise it?”

It was the trader’s darning-needle, stuck neatly into the end of a tiny, arrow-like reed, and stained at the point with some dark sticky stuff.

The Mua trader took it in his hand, smelt it and looked at it closely. Then he walked to his kitchen, and, watched by the Alofi trader, threw the thing into the fire.

“That’s what I think of it,” he said. “My boy, I traded in the worst of the Solomons for three years. I’m the only man on the island that knows that thing, bar one—and he was a plantation hand in the Solomons, in the black-birding days. There’s no wanderers like the Nuié men.”

“Do you think——” began the other.

“I think,” said the Mua trader, “that old Sona has got his money back.”

* * * * *

The schooner Sybil had no reason for staying longer in Niué, for the business of the ship was done, and the captain was quite well again. A picture of perfect beauty the Sybil made, as she stood out of Alofi roads in the golden afternoon, every sail set and every inch of cloth straining to the merry breeze. Niué was sorry to part with Vaiti, for she had interested the island considerably, and her beauty had, as usual, won her more admiration than her temper deserved. Every one, on parting, expressed a courteous wish to see the Sybil and her owners again.

For all that, and all that, the schooner came back no more. Vaiti had won the game at last, but she never willingly mentioned Niué again.