E. Hoffmann Price's War and Western Action

by E. Hoffmann Price

  But the story was falling flat, and Tarrant began to get a taste of the war he had evaded in advance. His own government had sold him down the river, several years previous, when “good neighbor” legislation, favoring vegetable oils from Brazil, had killed the copra and cocoa nut oil business of the Philippines. And rather than accept the hospitality of natives who had once looked up to him as the owner of a prosperous plantation, Tarrant had sailed away with a Buginese skipper, finally landing in Pulau Besar. There, with homemade arrak to help dramatize his troubles, he had enjoyed the role of draft evader.

  Looking from the veranda of the trading post, Tarrant saw that suspicion would quickly become certainty. Three Papuans, fully armed, were rounding the headland and creeping toward the tarpaulin and the heap of cases which camouflaged the partly completed dugout. To give an alarm would take too long, moreover, every white man in the settlement would dash to the water front and leave the settlement exposed to whatever other armed savages might be lurking on the landward side.

  Casually, loitering along, he headed down the path; and in spite of the revolver in his hip pocket, he did not particularly like his task. Each step away from his fellows made him more uneasy, more and more conscious of the unpleasant aspects of the isolation he had so long sought.

  Once below the level of the town, he broke into a run. The three Papuans, hearing the thud of his feet in the sand, whirled from their objective.

  “Get away!” he shouted, gesturing.

  They stood there, grinning insolently. White prestige had taken a long drop in the past six months. One hefted a stone axe. Another, spear in hand, continued on his way toward the camouflaged hull. Already, they must have seen, from that short distance, that this was not a straggling heap of freshly loaded merchandise.

  “Get away!” he repeated, hesitating to use his revolver against Papuans who had only primitive weapons.

  The man nearest the cache made a quick gesture. Tarrant had heard of Papuan slingers, and he had seen them, but never in action. Almost as quickly as one could draw and fire a pistol, the knotty legged giant had whisked a stone the size of a baseball.

  Tarrant flung himself flat; and with little time to spare. The sound of the heavy missile’s passing told him how narrowly he had missed a fatal wound. Barely flat on the sand, he drew his revolver, firing from rest.

  He drilled his man squarely. The other two fled, howling.

  There was no shooting in the settlement. With pistols, shotguns, and two rifles confronting them, the aborigines had no choice but to withdraw. By the time Tarrant reached the level of the store, the place was clear of Papuans; but he liked neither the looks nor the mutterings of the men he faced.

  “If you’re so anxious to fight, you could have picked a better time and place than this,” they reminded him.

  “If you’d been keeping your eyes open,” he retorted, “you could have headed them off before they got close enough to see that we’re building a boat.”

  Jan Dekker remained neutral. “Two got away, do you say? Then you may depend upon it, they all know by now. So let us stop this everlastingly-damned argument before it starts. There is a boat to be built.”

  He did not add that, in view of the weeks which had passed without the arrival of any supplies, the settlement would have to live off the country; and that the country was now alive with Papuans who, sensing the end of law and order, would collect whatever heads they could, and renew their acquaintance with long pig. All this was too plain for discussion.

  And as he sweated with adze and chisel, Tarrant did not know whether he had or had not used his head, down there on the beach. He was sure of nothing other than that his hands were horribly blistered, that he ached in more muscles than he ever had suspected himself of having, and that the Japs might as we’ll have bombed and shelled Pulau Besar.

  Though he was not really conscious of the fact, Tarrant had quite forgotten to curse the skillet-heads who had ruined the copra business. However, he might have got around to that routine, later in the evening, had Jan Dekker not furnished an antidote: “A guard must be posted at the hull as well as at the blockhouse. Line up and draw lots.”

  Everyone but the two Chinese had suggestions, brilliant ones, on guard duty. But the posthouder, after listening patiently, simplified matters a good deal. “Just stay awake and on your posts. No drinking, sociable or otherwise—Tarrant, I mean you, too! Since this is not an army, I cannot tell you that sleeping sentries will be shot. Still I can assure you that sleeping sentries will be eaten. Good night, gentlemen.”

  * * * *

  There was no attack that night, and none during the shaping of the hull, or the stepping of the mast. She had a square sail, like a Moro vinta.

  No champagne for the launching. She was long and slim, without any keel; outriggers kept her from capsizing. For a chronometer, there was the posthouder’s watch. For charts, his atlas, and a 1904 edition of a British Admiralty pilot book, dug out of a corner of the trading post. One of the Australian prospectors had a prismatic marching compass.

  Tarrant, meanwhile, had been solving problems of his own. Buginese navigation was based on principles contained in manuals written in that obscure language. Where he had expected elementary sea knowledge among at least a few others of the settlement, he found that every man, from the posthouder down, had cheerfully dumped the responsibility on him. What had started as a suggestion for public consideration had ended as a personal responsibility. So, during the completion of the war canoe, Tarrant had been at work.

  He was tempted to confess to Luden, the missionary, but thought better of it. Instead, he said boldly, “There’s probably not a sextant between here and Timor, and probably not even a surveyor’s theodolite.”

  Mynheer Luden nodded. “That is true. But the old mariners steered by the stars, and we have a compass. After all, we do not expect frills, Mynheer Tarrant, the Buginese method you know is good enough for us.”

  Tarrant was thinking, “Yeah, swell, until we wander around in circles, and run out of rations and water, and then who’ll they be lynching?” He said, “Maybe you have some drafting instruments, a protractor?”

  “But of course. Right here.”

  So he set to work with an aluminum dishpan, wire, and a piece of gas pipe. What he finally carried aboard was something he hoped would pass for an astrolabe.

  The women, crowding amidships with the half dozen children who had not been sent back to the Netherlands to go to school, cried out against the impossibility of living in such a cramped space. Jan Dekker said, grimly, “As we run out of rations, there will be more room to stretch your legs, ladies.”

  Dekker was in command, by virtue of age and rank. Tarrant’s job was merely to set the course. “And,” Dekker whispered to him, once they were under way, “to be thrown overboard if something goes wrong. And I will be next.”

  Tarrant glanced back at the settlement, which Dekker had ordered set afire, so that nothing could by any chance serve the enemy. “Better than being eaten,” he retorted.

  She knifed the water. Once well from the lee of the headland, she raced along, spray drenching the closely packed passengers. Tacking was a simple business, for with both ends alike, either could be bow, or stern. Luckily, no heads were cracked when the boom came about. But she had scarcely made three cable lengths beyond the bar when Sims, the carrot-topped Australian yelled, “Look there! A whole bloody navy!”

  Two Papuan war canoes were converging from port and starboard. Apparently they had been waiting to catch the refugees all packed in a vibrating hull, too cramped for defense of concealment. Or perhaps, with their walnut-sized brains, they had reasoned that once the whites left the taboo-protected settlement, their magic would fail.

  Their oiled black bodies gleamed in the beating sun. Leaf shaped paddles flashed, and wooden drums set the cadence. From the deck of a destroyer, the spectacle would
have been beautiful to see.

  For a while, it seemed that sail and the Malay pirate hull would win. With a Buginese crew, and all the canvas she could carry, it would not even have been an interesting bet. But here, amateurs were competing with experts. And the black men, beyond any doubt, felt that they had to cut off the fugitives so that there could not be any future vengeance.

  Bone tipped arrows began to rake the bulwarks as the Papuans narrowed the gap. Black slingers cut loose with rocks polished round in torrent beds.

  “Heads down!” Dekker shouted, rather needlessly. Then, “Who can shoot?”

  “I ain’t bad, Guvnor,” Sims answered, and Pitt, the other Australian, admitted no greater incompetence. “But the way she pitches don’t help.”

  One pointed port, one to starboard; the ripping whack of the two rifles made a long drawn sound. Dekker, spotting with his binoculars, shouted, “Good! Both good!” But a realistic Chinese trader observed, “Still come too damn fast.”

  And the gap in the rank of rowers was filled up. Tarrant said, “They’ve got more men than we have ammunition.”

  No doubt that Sims and Pitt were handy. Neither arrows nor sling stones shook their aim. Not even the scream of a woman nailed by a bone-headed shaft made them flinch. Dekker, however, said, “We are short of cartridges.”

  “Hell, Guvnor! We won’t have any more if we wait till they overhaul us.” Someone shouted to the women, “Quit that screaming!”

  Dekker nudged Tarrant. “Bad case of nerves. Wish we had another dozen Australians.”

  A sling stone bounced off the taut sail. Another, dish-shaped instead of spherical, cut a hole. The canvas began to tear. With the least freshening of the wind, there would be a ripping, and the race would end.

  Dekker’s lips were knife-thin. “If you know any other Buginese customs, my lad, let us hear them within the next couple seconds.”

  Tarrant was breaking out hatchets and knives. Pistols and shotguns were served to their owners. Each tack gave the Papuans a definite advantage. Then Tarrant said, “Dekker, one chance. Make for the nearest boat, to hell with running, close in on one!”

  As he spoke, he dug for the tin of homemade alcohol which was to feed the little stove amidships, and slashed its top.

  Dekker shouted to the man at the sweep, “I’m not crazy, do as I say!”

  Sims and Pitt grinned. The redhead said, “If we get across their bow, maybe we can string four of them with one bullet!”

  The Netherlanders had tightened up, stubborn and silent, no longer shaken by the moan of the woman nailed by an arrow. The two Chinese were blank faced as they crouched with their hatchets. Nobody paid much attention to Tarrant. The helmsman groaned, dropped. Luden took the helm to put her hard a-port. If the missionary was praying, he did not look it.

  The tack was good. One outrigger in the air, one deep in the water, and the sail catching hell; but not ripping. Not yet.

  “Now!”

  Rifles whacked. Shotguns bellowed. Pistols smacked and roared, and for a moment, the flight of arrows and stones had to cease. The war canoe lost way as paddlers dropped. Then, when it seemed that the outrigger would foul the enemy’s prow, Tarrant flicked a cigarette lighter and heaved the slashed can of alcohol.

  The fire ball landed among the enemy, scattering flaming fuel. Dekker followed up with three beer bottles amidship. The archers and the slingers and the paddlers neglected their work; for the blazing alcohol floated on the water the fast running canoe had shipped. And her crew was too tightly jammed for good dodging.

  Sims shouted, “See how you like roast meat!”

  The Malay prahu came about, and now the other Papuan canoe was pulling nearer. “Get the drummer!” Tarrant shouted. “Pick him off!”

  Pitt frowned. “You don’t like their bloody music?”

  “Pick him off, damn it!” Tarrant howled. “Break their beat!”

  The Australian’s second shot did it. And whether the cessation of the war drum, or the fire flinging which had demoralized the near canoe, the fact remained that the Papuans began to lag further and further astern.

  Luden relinquished the helm. “That poor woman with a barbed arrow in her arm,” he muttered, and dug into the supplies.

  The anesthetic was four ounces of brandy. Taken in a few gulps, the patient was practically paralyzed. The missionary forced the shaft home until it appeared on the other side, its barbs tearing all the way. Tarrant leaned over the side, and when he looked back, wiping his chin, Luden had cut the arrow head: and could thus withdraw the shaft.

  “I guess that hurt me more than it did her,” he muttered, and went astern.

  There he found Dekker white faced and coughing blood. He turned to shout to Luden, but the posthouder caught his arm. “No use. This is one he can’t shove through. Call Maartens and Doom.”

  These were the posthouder’s two cronies, and next to him, the oldest residents of Pulau Besar. When they saw him, and the result of the farewell volley from the second canoe, they tried to tell him of cases where men had recovered. But Dekker snorted. “Shut up, you two fools. Listen to me, you are witnesses.” He coughed, a gush of blood choked him. “This Tarrant—no one thinks much of him—maybe they are right—but he’s the only man—who can—navigate—I leave him—in command—of—”

  “But—see here, Jan—” Maartens protested.

  Dekker persisted, “One eyed man—is king—among the blind—damn it—you can’t—navigate—at all. Shut up. Do—as I say.”

  And though he lived for some minutes, Dekker could not say any more. When the missionary learned what had happened, he said, “You should have told me. The other wounded could wait.”

  Tarrant shook his head. “Reverend, the only consolation he wanted was knowing you were taking care of those you could save.”

  On paper, the Banda Sea is small, and crowded with islands; and the Timor Sea looked just as easy, but before many days had passed, Tarrant began to worry. Islands were totally lacking, and both water and food were running low.

  A prahu manned by Buginese sailors apparently made three times as much way as a similar craft handled by landlubbers. Tarrant’s own misgivings had made him ration water almost from the start, and thus he had handicapped himself with thirsty and doubting people.

  “Where’s those bloody islands you said you’d have a hard time dodging?” Sims demanded.

  The Netherlanders, though they kept a stoical silence, had the same question in their bloodshot eyes and drawn faces. The prahu was no longer crowded. Nearly every arrow wound had led to a fatal infection, in spite of the missionary’s first aid kit. “Poison,” he told Tarrant, one night. “But I didn’t have the heart to tell them. Probably they knew, and tried to believe they’d be exceptions.”

  Tarrant’s astrolabe was a wonderful thing to see. The azimuth circle had been scribed on the bottom of an aluminum dishpan. The column was a piece of gas pipe.

  The telescope, a bit of copper tubing, was wired to the straight-edge of a draftsman’s protractor, to which was attached a plumb bob.

  He shot the sun. He shot stars. He consulted the Buginese manual. Unhappily, for all his thumbing of the Admiralty Pilot, 1904 edition, there was no landfall.

  Pitt, taking up Sims’ refrain, demanded, “Where’s those bloody islands you told us about, with lots of tucker and water?”

  Tarrant carefully set the astrolabe down. “I cannot call this mutiny. Any sea lawyer could prove that my being put in command was irregular. But the first island we reach, I’ll beat the living hell out of both of you!”

  “Chum, take off that gun, and have at it.”

  Tarrant shook his head. “A prahu is too crowded. If I thought you could navigate any better—want to try it?”

  They eyed each other and the weird astrolabe. “We can’t read Buginese tables.”

  A squall carried
away mast and half the sail. Bamboo and rattan, stolen from the outrigger struts, furnished what an optimist might have called a jury rig. “It is better than paddling,” Tarrant contended, “particularly since we don’t have paddles.”

  When they did sight an island, it proved to be rich in guano, devoid of vegetation, and without any water. Flying fish and a shark stretched the scanty rations. Tarrant, regarding the gaunt and hollow eyed passengers, could see that they eased their misery by telling each other that this was his idea; that his bluff and brag had induced them to leave a blockhouse which they might have defended, and in whose immediate vicinity they might have foraged. They at least would have had water aplenty.

  He sustained himself by thinking, “They’ve got to blame someone. They’re sorry for themselves.”

  Now that supplies were dismayingly low, he knew that there had to be a guard against pilfering from the stores. The passengers would be short sighted enough to express their resentment by stealing. More and more often, he had to say, “I am sorry, but a child does not get any more thirsty than a grown person. A ration is a ration.”

  Luden said, one day, “You can’t keep it up, with just cat-naps. Let me watch. You need sleep.”

  “No, Reverend. They’ll wheedle you out of water for the kids.”

  Luden had no answer. Tarrant napped at times, but never for long. He would awaken, shocked from a sleep in which passengers crept upon him to steal; and then, awake, he would see that none had moved from their places. Sometimes he thought that Jan Dekker was saying to him, “Don’t be afraid of them, they know the supplies have to be rationed.”

  Dekker’s presence became very real. He knew now that he was in command only because of Jan Dekker’s final words. But he also knew that beyond a certain point, a dead man’s will and courage could not sustain people who suffered far more from fear and doubt than from actual hardship.