Читать книгу Lentala of the South Seas: The Romantic Tale of a Lost Colony - W. C. Morrow - Страница 11

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Insolence and Rebellion in Camp. A Riot Averted. I Train for a Dangerous Rôle. Plotting Among Us for the Destruction of the Colony.

WHEN Christopher began my training and pursued it with such amazing thoroughness, my feeling of being ridiculous disappeared. My love of adventure in these preparations was mingled with other emotions,—the fascination of hazard, a ===wish to risk everything for the colony, and a strong desire to see Lentala and solve the mystery of her whole conduct. Beelo was a will-o’-the-wisp.

Complications arose in camp. Although I had taken care to exercise my authority in a bland way, it became necessary at times to be severe. My greatest difficulty was inability to find the source of a disaffection working insidiously among the young men. Captain Mason had not observed it, lacking my opportunity, and I decided to be more positive and to find evidence before laying the matter before him.

I was intimately thrown with the men by directing the work on the farm. The labor was exhausting on account of the heat. For this reason, and because some men could bear the work better than others, and liked it, I called out only volunteers; but selfishness on the part of some who shirked brought grumbling. At first I had supposed that this was the origin of the dissatisfaction, but presently a deeper cause appeared to be in operation. As a test, and to secure fairness, I adopted a system of levying on all the able-bodied men and requiring each to do his share in turn.

In that way I came down on Rawley, who had never volunteered. When I informed him one evening that his turn in the fields would come next day, he stared at me in insolent silence.

That incident alone was not significant, but it made me alert, and I instructed Christopher to keep a strict and secret watch on the camp. A present necessity was to force the issue with Rawley, whose bearing was a threat to the harmony and safety of the colony.

He had not taken the trouble to absent himself from the tables when I called out the tale of men for the fields next morning, but lounged at indolent unconcern. Annabel was not visible. Mr. Vancouver, sitting near Rawley, had a suspiciously waiting air.

The young man did not rise with the others and prepare to go, but merely stared at me. I went near and said in a low voice:

“These men will resent your refusal.”

“Are you threatening me?” he said under his breath.

“Give my remark whatever construction you please,” I answered.

He could not hide his anger and fear, for a glance showed him a disquieting expression in the faces of the forty men waiting. Mr. Vancouver looked surprised and irritated as he studied them. The men in whom rebellion was stirring were such as he had always directed and commanded,—artisans, mechanics, clerks, sturdy and spirited every one, and loving fair play.

“Save yourself further trouble,” Rawley drawled in an effort to be nonchalant. “I’ll go—if I feel like it, and when I’m ready.”

Although the men could not hear him, they understood, and a murmur arose. One of them angrily said: “He’s too good to work.”

Then came the outbreak.

“Put him under arrest! Duck him in the river! The snob!”

Annabel suddenly appeared. The men at once desisted, and she understood the situation at a glance. Her astonishment grew as her look of angry reproach at Rawley passed to her father and found him silent and pale, as though for the first time he had seen the spirit of the common American.

She came to me and said: “Don’t make trouble now. Be patient. You can find a way.”

I turned to the men.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “I must remind you that you have not been empowered by the colony to enforce its discipline. In this instance it is my task alone, and I propose to handle it as I think best, without your assistance, unless I call on you for it. Your attitude and remarks just now were rebellious, and, if allowed by those in authority, would disrupt us and place us at the mercy of savages. Leave this matter to me, and depend on me to see it properly adjusted. Mr. Vancouver needs Mr. Rawley today. Now to our work.” My speech affected the men in two quite different ways. Some, with a submissive glance at Mr. Vancouver who was watching me curiously, were instantly satisfied; others looked a little confused and rebellious, and were not cheerful in their obedience. They appeared a trifle uneasy, as though something might be afoot and they had not been informed. All of this sharpened my alertness.

After the day’s work I had doubts as to whether I should report the incident to Captain Mason, who had not been present. I felt that something of an underground nature was at work, and that Mr. Vancouver was its focus. I could make allowance for a man shattered by adversity, but I supposed that Mr. Vancouver might have gathered himself up during the weeks we had been held as prisoners.

It turned out that he had. When Christopher came to give me my drill in the forest near the camp that day he brought disturbing information. Mr. Vancouver and Rawley, in order to be alone, had gone into the forest after I left for the fields, and talked. All that Christopher could learn was that Mr. Vancouver was carrying on secret negotiations with the king, and that a messenger from the palace was expected at a certain place within the forest in an hour.

My lesson was short that day. I sent Christopher to Captain Mason to report what he had heard, and to say that I would take the place of the native in the interview, if possible, trusting to the completeness of my disguise as a Senatra. Christopher was to be near for an emergency.

Skirting the spot where Mr. Vancouver was to meet the native, I intercepted him. It sickened me to see the sly confidence with which he approached. Meanwhile, I was aware of the great danger of discovery by the genuine messenger, for I knew the trailing skill of the natives, even though I led Mr. Vancouver as far from the meeting-place as necessary. But Christopher, who had acquired the native slyness, would know how to handle any embarrassing situation.

The discovery of Mr. Vancouver’s seeming treachery had so disturbed me that I had some doubt of myself in the interview. The simple solution offered by strangling the man in the forest kept hammering at me with a dangerous persistency. We had taken it for granted that his interest in the colony was strong; no watch had been set on his liberty, which he had used in plotting.

I was measurably collected by the time we had seated ourselves on the ground. Being totally in the dark as to what had gone before, I was forced to extreme caution, and in addition was some danger of my betraying myself or of his discovering that I was not a native.

“Why didn’t the other man come?” he demanded in his old peremptory manner.

In confusion, not knowing what degree of proficiency in English to assume, I gave some answer in a lame speech, the inconsistency of which he might have detected had he been less absorbed.

“What is the king’s plan?” he asked.

“He wants to know yours first,” I answered.

I was prepared for his quick, half-suspicious look. “He knows what I want,” was the sharp return.

“The other native didn’t know. He couldn’t tell the king very well.”

“This is my plan,” went on Mr. Vancouver: “I make some good, strong men think that Captain Mason does nothing, but sits down and waits for us all to be killed. This is secret. A fellow named Hobart is my leader. The young men are ready to go with him out of the valley. The king will tell the guard to seize them and take them to the palace. That will get rid of the best fighters in the colony.”

“What will the young men think they go for?” I inquired.

“What difference does that make,” he testily demanded, “so long as they are out of the way?”

“The king must know.” I was solid and firm.

“I’ll make them think they can pass the guard; then they’ll find a way for the colony to escape, and will come back and tell me.”

“But they are not to come back.”

Mr. Vancouver was silent, and his impatience grew. “You will send them into a trap?” I persisted. Again his suspicious scrutiny. “Does the king want them to come back?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But he wants your plan.”

“If they don’t come back,” Mr. Vancouver explained, “Captain Mason will be blamed for not knowing they were to go. Then his power will be gone. The colony will break up.”

The ghastly perfection of the scheme overcame me for a moment, but I must learn what benefits Mr. Vancouver expected from this wholesale sacrifice.

“What do you want of the king?”

“I and my daughter and a young man named Rawley are to be taken care of, and——”

“You mean not killed?”

He writhed and reddened under the question, and under my sullen insistence.

Instead of answering, he hurried on: “I will show the king how to work the gold, silver, copper, diamond, and other mines, and how to make much money out of them. I will make treaties with other countries, and build forts, and make him a strong army. All this has to be done sooner or later, or the island will be taken.”

“What is to be done with the other white people?” I demanded.

“The king knows.”

“If I can’t tell him he’ll send me back.”

After a struggle with his anger, Mr. Vancouver said, “The king knows what he has done with other castaways.”

“What do you think he has done with them?”

He started at me in a struggle with his patience, and said nothing.

“Do you think they were sent away?” I returned.

His fury broke. “No!” he exclaimed, and then suddenly checked himself.

“Then you think they are here yet?” I drove in.

He rose in a passion. “Tell the king to send me a man who isn’t a fool!” he stormed.

“I will tell him,” I quietly said, rising and starting away; but he halted me.

“Why do you ask those questions?” he said more composedly.

“The king told me to. He wants to know if he can trust you. If you want these people sent away,——”

“I don’t! That would ruin everything. They’d send armies and war-ships, and——”

“Then, kept here—alive?”

“Certainly not! They’d kill me.”

I had known this to be the answer that I would wring from him; still the renewed impulse to strangle him was almost overpowering.

“I will tell the king,” I duly said, and was turning away, when another idea came. “Maybe he will first send for a man from your people. Which one do you want to go before the young men?”

“Tudor, Captain Mason’s assistant,” he answered with a vicious promptness. “Then, as soon as the young men are gone, I and my daughter and Rawley will go, and I will talk and plan with the king while the soldiers do their work here.”

The humor that I found in the turn, personal to me, which the situation had taken, lightened my spirit, and I thought of something else.

“Did the king send you any word about Lentala, his fan-bearer?”

“I talked with the man about her. I knew there was some mystery about her and that she was close to the king. I asked that she be sent to make the plans with me.”

His halt whetted my anxiety. “What did he say?”

“That she must know nothing about it, or she would break the plot.”

My heart choked me with its bounding. I had gained more than I had lost, but my heart was sore for Annabel.

“I must go,” I said. “Next time I come I will go to your hut in the night. Don’t come into these woods again. The soldiers——”

He understood, and looked relieved. After he had disappeared I sat down in a daze, trying to reason out the tangle. Rawley was in the plot, but Annabel was innocent.

A sound made me raise my head, and I saw Christopher and Captain Mason standing before me. Christopher’s face wore its customary vacancy, but Captain Mason’s had a startled look, as though he had beheld what is not good for a man to see. It appeared to have shriveled him.

“Before Christopher summoned me,” he dully said without any preliminary, “he found the native and sent him away. We have heard every word that passed between you and Mr. Vancouver.”