Adventure, February 1917 — page 73: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

meet s Island he was dead; the other, who had been crushed against a rock, they brought into the village; and in a few moments, lying on the ground, he too gasped away his life. At this Edith began drying her eyes with a handkerchief that had suffered much from its journeyings through the bush. “He didn’t think he was going to die when we broke camp this morning,” was all her explanation. ‘‘He’d have liked to live and go home again—and now I’ve led him to death, and I’ve shot a man myself. I feel like a murderess.” Slade saw her bite down on her ripe low- er lip at the word, and knew that the long- forgotten hangman’s rope had jerked again. But he only answered what she had said. “Don’t worry about that. Where is he? Look.” “T—T can’t see him,” said Edith, gazing up and down the rocky slope. ‘And yet I did see him fall and roll down.” “Ves. You winged him, and when he picked himself up he ran away, and the at- tack collapsed... I finished mine all right.” “T’m glad,” said Edith. “TI fired without knowing what I was doing—it seemed to fire itself. .But I didn’t want to kill any one.” “Tt takes a woman,” observed Slade, ‘‘to draw a bead on a man, press the trigger, and then explain that the last thing she wanted was to do him any harm. All the same, I think I understand. I wonder are those beasts coming back?” The carriers were all up in the village now, the deaf and dumb ones—Slade’s own boys staring wildly about them and making odd animal sounds, the others beginning to calm down, and, as a corollary, to chew betel. For the first time there was leisure to look about and to admire the amazing scene. The little cluster of mushroom-brown huts occupied the top of a hill as sharp as a pyramid, which had been artificially leveled at the summit. It seemed to float on a sea of magnificent blue ranges, wave after wave tossing up to the white-hot sky. Beyond the last wave of all, the plain of the Pacific, lit by the afternoon sun, glowed like the sea of brass in the Israelitish temple. Edith, looking down as from some far-off bastioned cloud, felt once again the wonder and the awe that wait upon those who jour- ney in the unknown lands—the feeling that * Zi “ehe had once expressed to Slade as Stas that the country would get up and bite her. She spoke something of this, but Slade ‘was busy. He had spied five Lalang men sneaking back among the rocks, and dart- ed out with his boys to capture them.» When Edith turned round from the far- off scenery, it was at the sound of a violent scuffle, punctuated with howls. Slade and his boys had fallen on the mountaineers and secured four out of the five. “The headman of the village, and his son, and the chief sorcerer, and the principal buck of the place. This is a haul!’’ cried Slade joyously. “TI was afraid they wouldn’t come back, but they thought tkey’d get in a spear or two under cover of the rocks. Just what I wanted. Edith, I’ll trouble you to go into one of the huts and stop there for the present. This won’t be pretty.” ‘Are you going to kill them?” asked the girl, her eyes widening. “Certainly not; nor am I going to leave them to the chance of a Government patrol catching them later on. I’m going to kill all their pigs, and give the men themselves the walloping of their lives.” “Oh, Ben, don’t be cruel!’’ entreated the woman who had drawn a bead on a man half an hour before. “Certainly I sha’n’t be cruel. T’ll only make them wish they hadn’t ever been born; my ankle’s well enough for that.” “Tf you’re going to kill pigs, I can’t stand it,’’ said Edith inconsequently, and fled. ‘Crouched in the ill-smelling dusk of a reed-and-thatch hut, she listened to the cries of delight emitted by the boys who were rounding up the pigs; to the wails of distress from the savages who saw their most valued possessions about to be de- stroyed—one cried so hard for mercy on the pigs that she would have sworn he was pleading for his wife, had she not known that no peril to a mere wife could elicit such wails from a Papuan. She heard the shots and grunts that fol- | lowed—not a pig squealed; Slade’s aim was too sure—and then she put her fingers in her ears, for it was plain now that justice was being executed on something else than | pigs, with the aid of a length or two of law- yer cane. But the howlings of the cannibals pierced through her defenses. Clearly, they thought that the tortures before the final EOPIE KOOKS ( (E@ S|