Changed (Young)

by Gordon Young

Changed

by

Gordon Young

Author of “Savages,” “Heathens,” etc.

THEY called him “the coward” on board Dan McSpadden’s schooner because he flinched every time a gun was fired; and when the cutter had been rowed off the beach at Santa Cruz and McSpadden and Old Billy had shot at the hundred howling savages flinging arrows toward the boat, he had dropped his oar and stopped his ears.

So it happened that the same night, when McSpadden, big and burly and afraid of nothing under heaven, had caught him in the moonlight by the main hatch whispering to Nina McSpadden—well, any other man would have been drowned, but the coward was like a fish in water. And Nina had screamed when her father flung the boy overboard; and the old man, who was not cruel, but very hasty and violent, had heaved to and lowered away.

Furlong might be a coward, but he was a great sailor. It could be said that the ship was his cradle and the ocean was his mother. He had been born the son of a trader—and he had been born at that moment when Chinese pirates, ranging south a hundred miles off Canton, had taken it into their heads to board the little bark. There was fighting on deck and the roar of guns, and the infant’s screams mingled with those of his frightened mother’s. She died that night and so did his father—the father cleft from shoulder to collar-bone with a kris. And the mate of the bark had edged his way south and around the Australian coast to Sydney and, being an honest man, had told a true story and adopted the infant and left it with his wife in port.

Then the bark went down and the wife was widowed and had no love for the baby, which was bandied from hand to hand and sent to sea almost as soon as it could toddle, to be out of the way. At eighteen Dick Furlong shipped with Dan McSpadden, trader. He shipped because he had caught sight of Dan McSpadden’s daughter and learned that she went with her father wherever the White Wing threw her canvas to the winds.

It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Furlong had learned to swim before he could walk. No native was more at home in the water than he, and even native children dive deep for shells and frighten off or fight a shark as our children throw rocks at a dog.

“Dick,” said the girl when she had found him at the wheel one night and knew that her father was asleep, “you are a coward. You know it.”

Now, she said it tenderly, as one regretfully stating a fact that had to be faced. She did not want to love the boy; or rather she did not want to love a coward. But women’s hearts are unruly.

“I know it,” he said frankly. “Are you ’fraid of snakes?”

“No,” she answered scornfully.

“Spiders?”

“No!”

“Are you afraid of anything, Nina?”

“These great big black cannibals—if I drink coffee at night, I’m sure to stay awake till eight bells and then put in the rest of the night fighting them!”

“I’m not afraid of them. Honest, Nina. But a gun—it isn’t the bullet, you know. It’s the noise. I can’t stand it. On the Lucy B.—the last ship ’fore White Wing—they had a one-pounder. It was all I could do to keep from jumpin’ overboard ever’ time they fired her. I’ll go aloft with the best, Nina. I’ve gone over the side with a knife and ripped open a shark that was after a black boy. But a gun—I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—fire a gun! I just simply can’t help it!”

“And father liked you, too!” she said regretfully; for the old man had thought Furlong a great boy until that Santa Cruz affair.

Perhaps if Nina and her father and young Furlong had studied that modern science of psychoanalysis, and if they had known that Mrs. Furlong herself had always had a dread of firearms and had died more of fright than of anything else at the hour of Dick’s birth, they would all have understood that the boy could no more have helped his fear of the guns’ roar than he could have helped having deep, soft brown eyes.

“Billy,” said McSpadden as the schooner came close to a bay on Guadalcanar, “I’m afraid we’ll find trouble here. Never run from a nigger yet when I was on my own ship. Be —— if I will now.”

The schooner was no sooner headed into the bay than the wind began to die down. It was around noon. There was no surf, and the water was deep and clear as in a glass bowl. As the saying goes, one could count the scales on the belly of a shark.

The schooner was met by a swarm of natives. Ordinarily Captain McSpadden would not have dropped anchor in a strange bay where the savages were not to be trusted, but now he let go the anchor; for there was no wind to go about with, and if the schooner were left to drift she might go on the rocks and have to hang through low-tide even after the evening breeze came up.

The savages, in many little canoes and one big one, would not at first paddle closer than fifty yards. They kept a wary lookout, as if expecting to be fired on. And they said nothing, which was strange for savages. They would not even answer the hail of the captain. He had no way of knowing that less than a week before a recruiter had been along and kidnaped a dozen stalwart black boys, and that the tribe was sworn to be revenged on the next ship that came near.

Nina stood with her father on the poop and kept her eyes on the great war-canoe that could easily hold sixty men, though it was not quite full. At stern and stern a slender figure stood up over ten feet. This and the sides of the canoe were decorated with cowry shells and mother-of-pearl.

The fifty men in the canoe were evidently the finest warriors of the village. They were big fellows, flat-featured, with bushy hair. Their dark bodies glistened with coconut oil. They were naked except for necklaces of boar’s tusks, bracelets and armlets of cowry shell and a bark clout. No weapons were in sight but Nina knew very well that they might be in the bottom of the boat.

There were about two hundred of the natives on the water and probably twenty of the small canoes—dugouts with out riggers.

The great war-canoe, driven by the regular sweep of the twenty and more paddles that dipped the water on each side, was circling around and around the little schooner and gradually moving in closer.

Whether the natives were merely being cautious or intended to make an attack, Captain McSpadden could not tell.

“You go down to the cabin and lock yourself in,” said the captain to Nina. “There may be trouble.

NINA looked at her father in exasperation. Or rather she looked at his back, for he had given her the orders and had turned away expecting them to be followed without further comment. She didn’t want to go to the cabin. Of all places that was the one where she did not want to be. Down there alone, wondering how the fight was going and imagining the worst, would be more distressing than on deck watching. Besides, she was seventeen and had followed her father over the seas for ten years; she could shoot straight and she—well, she had no intention of doing what he told her, but she knew better than to argue with him.

So she went far enough down the companionway to be out of sight yet able to peep out and listen.

There were only sixteen men on the White Wing and twelve of those were natives, black boys—Samoans, Tongans and Fijians.

Old Billy came up the poop ladder, followed by four of the natives. All were armed and he was carrying three extra rifles, which he carefully stood up against the skylight. No one noticed when Nina’s slender arm reached cautiously out and took one of the rifles.

Old Billy had been a man-o’-warsman in the British navy thirty years before. He was short and square-built, with legs bowed as if they had grown around the bottom of a boat. He wore a short bushy beard but out of deference to Queen Victoria’s wishes regarding the barbering of her sailormen had kept his upper lip shaven.

He was over sixty and, though he might get out of breath a little sooner than in his younger days, he was still a man that could put up a fierce fight and keep it up. And he had no gods before Nina; and though he would not admit it to anybody, and after the Santa Cruz incident was rather ashamed of it himself, he had a pretty strong affection for Dick Furlong—coward.

“What’d you do with the coward?” said McSpadden.

“Stuck ’im on the deck-’ouse forrard, sir, with four black boys. I’m sendin’ four more to the yards, an’ they can ’elp pick cannibals off ’m there. I’ll be forrard myself, sir.”

“You think there is danger?” the captain asked.

Nina, venturing her pretty blond head around the edge of her hiding-place, fastened her bright blue eyes on Old Billy’s weather-worn face and anxiously awaited the verdict.

“I know it!” said Old Billy positively.

“And are you sure they are going to attack?” asked Mr. Summers, who was a kind of supercargo and navigator combined, a man of education who had taken to the ocean for his health.

“I’m afraid so,” said McSpadden, slowly turning and viewing the little canoes that edged closer and closer. “They will try to come over the fo’c’sle.”

“I’ll go forrard an’ see as they don’t,” said Old Billy, moving away.

It happens that Nina knew her father as well as most daughters of seventeen do. She knew that if he caught sight of her aft he would make her go below; but she knew too that if there should be a fight and all came out well he would be in a good humor and readily forgive her for having disobeyed him. And if the fight didn’t come out well—then it would make precious little difference where she was, except that it would be better to be dead with the rest of the ship’s company than to have to shoot one’s self as the cannibals broke through the cabin door.

Not that she reasoned all that out in so many words—but she understood the situation. And there was another and not uninfluential idea in her mind; she believed that by her side, under her eyes, Furlong would not flinch from the roar of a rifle, and she did not want him to flinch. She wanted him to be conspicuously brave. Her father would forgive a brave man anything—even having stolen the heart of his daughter. Moreover, the forward deck-house would be safe for her with Old Billy on guard there, and although her father might see her he could not order her below—not after the cannibals had boarded.

The big war-canoe continued to circle the schooner. The savages seemed to be considering whether or not to come closer. The chief of the chiefs, or king—in the villages there are often many chiefs and the greatest of these is king—sat in the stern. He might be distinguished by a large moon-shaped piece of white shell about the size of a dinner plate that was suspended on his breast. He was a small, wiry man with a withered face; a cunning man, who was circling and circling the White Wing and counting the number of the crew.

At a word from him the paddles dipped slower, so that the canoe seemed scarcely to move through the water. It passed within twenty-five yards of the White Wing’s stern and fifty black, flat faces, many with long bits of bone stuck through the end of the nose, stared up at Captain McSpadden.

He called to them in a friendly tone, holding up one of the trade axes which are greatly prized by all natives, to show that he had come as a peaceful man of commerce, but there was no answer. The canoe passed on slowly, slowly, and as silently as though rowed by black shadows.

Suddenly, as it rounded the schooner’s bow, the king leaped to his feet with a yell. With one stroke of the paddles the war-canoe was brought around short and the second sweep of the paddles sent it, head on, straight for the bow of the White Wing.

And at once, all about the ship, those black forms that had moved about like voiceless specters became as howling demons. Their yells filled the air. The little canoes that were farthest away splashed frantically to come in close. Those nearer dropped their paddles and snatched tomahawks from where they had been lying at their feet.

The war-canoe came straight for the bow, grazed alongside, and the natives—some of them seizing the jib-stay and coming over the bowsprit, some of them leaping to the shoulders of their fellows and springing from there above the freeboard—began climbing on to the schooner.

From the deck-house, from the yards and from the poop the rifles were cracking; and though a native, even when not ex cited, is rarely a good shot, the rifles made a wicked noise and the cannibals were too thick for many of the bullets to go astray. Besides, those rifles in the hands of Old Billy, Captain McSpadden and Mr. Summers were steady and true; while Dick Furlong, stubbornly grinding his teeth and shutting both eyes each time he pulled the trigger, aimed blindly down at the swarming savages.

Nina, who had been slipping forward so that she could not be called back, was caught by the rush just forward of the main hatch.

She could not have been in a more dangerous place. That she was not instantly cut down was due to the fact that she had backed herself against the deck-house and coolly shot down the first savage that came at her. Another thing that saved her and perhaps the others was that savages, when they succeed in boarding a ship, are much more intent on plundering in it than in getting rid of the crew. Those who broke into the trade-room and deck houses were safely out of the fire zone and searched busily for loot.

Dick had been standing at the edge of the deck-house when Nina’s rifle went off just below him. He gave a cry—a wild cry of alarm and consternation—and leaped; and as he went he turned his gun into a club so that as he came down it was laid across the head of a cannibal that was running forward at the girl.

Cannibal and sailor went to the deck, but Dick was up, elbow and knee, at once. From his left side he drew the long knife that always swung to his wrist from a lanyard when he went into shark-infested water. One hand held the knife, the other the war-club snatched from the fingers of the dead savage, and, flinging himself before the girl, he struck right and left.

IT WAS hot and fast work, but the boy’s muscles were tough as ratlines; his lungs, stretched and tempered with ocean breeze from the very first breath, were as near to leather as lungs can be; and than he a tiger-fish was scarcely more quick or fierce.

Old Billy had sworn in contemptuous rage when he saw the boy jump, for he thought panic had set him crazy. But at a glance below Old Billy’s great voice roared out hearty oaths of encouragement.

“Out cutlasses and board!” yelled the old fellow, in his excitement echoing a command of those naval days when ships came alongside of each other and men struggled from deck to deck.

And as he yelled his cutlass came out and he dropped feet first and with a mighty slash stained the steel and cleared space for the free swinging of his powerful arm.

Old Billy stood before Nina and to her right. Dick stood before her and to the left. Between them the girl, her face pale and tense, stood wanting to pray but not daring to take the time, for as fast as she could load and shoot she did.

From the poop Captain McSpadden and the others saw the hand-to-hand fighting of Old Billy and Dick, but between poop and deck-house the deck was alive with cannibals. The native sailors, from deck house, yards and poop, were comparatively safe and shot fast, so that the scuppers ran blood.

Wounded savages fling themselves overboard and those unwounded fight fiercely only when it is easy to win. If victory be in doubt, they run. There were many who went overboard. The savages still in the canoes, seeing such numbers dropping away wounded and in terror, paddled off to a safe distance and waited.

McSpadden was not the man to hesitate when his daughter was in peril; with rifle and trade ax in either hand he lunged down the ladder to hack his way through. Summers came after him, firing as he went. And the Tongans on the poop gave a mighty war-cry and plunged after the white men. Fire spat from the yards and Old Billy, with revolver and cutlass, pressed forward.

As if at a signal, the cannibals became panic-stricken and started for the side. Pell-mell and headlong scores of them dived into the water. But some of the warriors held their ground.

A sudden rush to the side and a blow from behind—Old Billy went down. Dick yelled a warning too late and with a gesture and a cry to Nina lifted her up so that the reaching native sailors a-top the deck house grabbed her arms and pulled her to safety. And as she left his arms Dick wheeled with up-raised knife to meet the cunning cannibal that had laid Old Billy for a time motionless on the deck.

He was not a big savage, but he had a hideous face and a big moon disk was on his chest. Dick ducked low to avoid the downward blow of the tomahawk—struck out—missed—and the next instant he had grabbed the arm that held the tomahawk and his own knife-arm was seized; he was at death-grips with the cannibal king.

The cannibal was crafty and alert, but Dick clung to him like a clamped vise. Nina snatched a rifle from one of the sailors but did not dare to shoot; the bullet would have been sent too near the boy she loved. She cried for the native sailors to jump down to his aid, but they were not Tongans.

The cannibal could not strike. Dick could not use his knife. They twisted and turned. Then the old savage, looking fore and aft, saw the danger he was in; his men were fleeing over the side and McSpadden and Summers were coming on with blow on blow.

Nearer and nearer the side the old king drew the boy. Then suddenly he lurched overboard.

Nina shrieked louder than if it were her own death she had been pulled to.

The water is very nearly as much the South Sea Islander’s home as his hut, and the cunning old king thought the boy’s grip would be easily broken and his head split under the water. But as he fell Dick sucked his lungs full of air. He was as much at home in the water as any islander. No sooner was he plunged into it than he wrapped his legs around the cannibal’s waist and began squeezing as hard as he could; and down, down, down they sank together.

And Dick hung on, though his lungs began to ache and it seemed that he could not restrain his breath another moment. He set his teeth, but he did not shut his eyes. Then it seemed that his lungs must explode in the next instant; his ears roared and a black fog came into his eyes; but stubbornly he winked his lids and kept his eyes open. He knew the cannibal, too, was in great pain—and it would be the first to yield that would die.

The old cannibal had not gained his kingship and held it with craft all those years for nothing. He was wily and quick as a fish. Suddenly he dropped his tomahawk, released his grip on Dick’s wrist and, prying with both hands—at the same time expelling the air from his own lungs—began to sink even deeper. The unexpectedness of the move let him break away. At once with overhand strokes he began shooting toward the surface of the water.

Dick, fiercely stroking with his legs and one arm and as used to using his eyes under water as in twilight, streaked upward as a shark rises, and like a shark he turned on his back so that the cannibal was above and breast-down to him.

Out of the water they came together, almost breast to breast. Dick’s upraised hand swept down, ripping the savage from short rib to thigh. And Nina saw, and McSpadden saw, and even Old Billy, having limped to the side, had looked down to where Nina pointed.

The last of the cannibals who were able to run had leaped from the waist of the ship almost as soon as their king toppled overboard.

The fight was over. The native sailors continued to fire at the savages in the water; but the white men stood looking down at the vague shapes barely visible under it, fascinated by the strangeness of the duel.

Dick puffed once or twice; then with long strokes he reached the side and scrambled up a line that Captain McSpadden himself held. And when he reached the deck the captain’s arm went around his shoulder and his great hoarse voice cried huskily:

“Great God, boy! Who—who—in the —— ever called you a coward!”

AND that night, as the White Wing plowed along in the moonlight to look for a more friendly village to trade with, Dick and Nina nestled together in the shadow of the long-boat and overheard Captain McSpadden say to Mr. Summers:

“I’m gettin’ along in years, you know, and in three or four I’ll be ready to drop anchor. I can give him half-interest in White Wing, and it’ll be pretty nice to have a son-in-law like him workin’ for me. Nobody’ll dare monkey with his ship!”

Then Captain McSpadden pulled down his right eye in an elaborate and prolonged wink and jerked his head in the direction of the long-boat, where two forms were merged into one shapeless shadow.