CHAPTER XVI THE CANNIBAL KING AND THE PINK PEARL

The swift tropic night had fallen, and the black sky was aglow with winking stars—miniature moons that turned key, reef, and water into a phosphorescent glow. Out of the silence came only the weird songs of the black boatmen gathered about the camp fire at the hut under the palms. On the schooner the evening meal was over, and Andy sat almost lost in dreams, while his host drew on his after-dinner cigar.

When Andy and Captain Bassett had landed, after their aerial flight into the cove, it was nearly dusk. The boy suggested that he would at once dismantle his machine and take it aboard the schooner, to be carried to his host’s home on Andros Island, and thence to Nassau and the steamer. After his nerve-wrecking flight in the afternoon, he did not feel equal to another sky voyage of perhaps one hundred and fifty miles.

At this, the Englishman made a peculiar request.

“I wish you wouldn’t take it apart for a little while.”

“Then it isn’t convenient to sail to-night?” said Andy. “But, just as you like.”

It had been agreed that the schooner was to set sail for distant Andros as soon as the moon rose.

“Yes,” answered the man slowly. “But I’ve been thinking of something. I can’t quite make up my mind—I’d like to talk to you about it after a bit. Then we’ll go as we’ve arranged, if you like.”

“Oh, it isn’t that,” exclaimed the boy. “Nothing would please me more than to stay here always. But you can see how it is—they’ll all be worried. I’ve got to get to the telegraph as soon as possible and wire them I’m not lost in the sea.”

“I understand,” answered Captain Bassett. “It was thoughtless of me to ask it. Go ahead. We’ll leave with the moon.”

But instead of going ahead, the boy walked to his new-found friend’s side.

“What was it?” he asked curiously.

“A crazy idea,” answered his host, with a laugh. “Please forget it.”

“I can’t,” said the boy decisively. “If you have the slightest reason to have me stay here awhile, I know it isn’t a crazy idea. Anyway, I won’t consent to taking you away from your business on an hour’s notice and unless it is convenient for you to go.”

The man shrugged his shoulders.

“Coming or going is nothing to me,” he replied. “I am here not because I am needed—my black overseer can be trusted with my business. But there are strange things in these faraway keys. For a time you and your flying machine set me thinking. I’ve dismissed the idea—”

“I haven’t,” interrupted Andy. “Whatever it was, if the Pelican was a part of it, she’s goin’ to stand there until you tell me what you had in mind.”

The white-costumed man looked at the boy with a quizzical smile, appeared to be about to speak, and then only shook his head. He and the boy were yet standing by the ghostly planes of the aeroplane, on which the Englishman’s hand rested as if the machine meant much to him.

“It’s about Timbado Key, isn’t it?” suggested Andy, at last.

“Yes,” retorted Captain Bassett, startled. “But how—Oh, yes, I remember: I told you it had a tragic story. You’re a good guesser,” he concluded, smiling again.

“I’m not guessing now,” went on the boy impulsively, and unable longer to restrain himself. “I know about Timbado and about Cajou.”

The man came toward him, a look of surprise on his face.

“I’ve never met any white person who knew that,” he said at once. “What is it you know?”

The remark had escaped Andy unwittingly. He was embarrassed.

“I—I didn’t mean to speak yet,” he began.

“Why not?” retorted his companion. “What do you know?”

“I’m awfully sorry I said that, Captain Bassett,” went on the boy slowly. “But I’ll tell you after you tell me the real story.”

“Isn’t yours a real story?” laughed the Englishman.

“I’m sure it isn’t,” answered Andy impulsively. “At least, I don’t want to talk of it now.”

“It must be uncomplimentary to someone,” suggested his friend.

The boy, still much confused, blurted out:

“It is.”

“Am I concerned?” asked Captain Bassett.

Andy looked at the man again. There was anything but a bad look in the Englishman’s face. His strong, sunburned countenance was set in feature, but the boy saw nothing more than the face of a man accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed. Yet, being in for it, the lad could not lie. Caught in his indiscretion, he only nodded his head.

“After supper, then, we’ll talk it over,” was the Englishman’s only comment.

“And,” added Andy, eager to show some appreciation of the man’s kindness to him, “we won’t take the machine apart until I know what you were figuring on.”

“As you like,” replied the man in quite another tone.

Nothing more was said until Captain Bassett’s after-dinner cigar was going well.

“Now,” he said, “before I tell you of what I was thinking and of Timbado Key, I’d like to hear what you know about the place—that is, if you like.”

“I don’t like it at all,” answered Andy in renewed confusion. “And I’m sure part of what I’ve been told is not true. But I’ll finish what I started, even if you think the less of me for it. I ain’t much for carryin’ tales.”

“It may be true,” was the Englishman’s comment, as he settled down in his canvas deck chair and luxuriously drew on his Havana cigar.

With no further preface, Andy repeated the disjointed tale Ba, the colored man, had gradually revealed: how the Herculean negro had escaped from the jail in Nassau, how he had been carried away to Nassau practically a prisoner by Captain Bassett, how he and Nickolas and Thomas had been sent to steal the great pink pearl from King Cajou, how Ba had actually seen the jewel and was lashed so cruelly, and the unsolved mystery of what came after in Ba’s escape and the disappearance of the other conspirators.

When he had finished, there was no immediate response from the man who presumably had sent two men to their death at the hands of an African cannibal—no denial. But Captain Bassett’s cigar had gone out. The Englishman at last drew a match on the arm of his chair. As it flared up at the end of his cigar, the observant boy thought he could make out a smile on the strong face of the accused man. Then it was dark and silent again.

“This nigger, Cajou,” came at last through the half dark night from Captain Bassett’s chair—and in a voice devoid of either guilt or innocence—“is more than you have been told. So far as I know, I am the only white man who has visited his island and come away again. He is a king, in a way. He is also the best type of the pure blood African as he exists in our island world. How he came to be on Timbado, no one knows. Nor how he made about himself a settlement of others of his kind. You can find bits of old savagery in similar people on some of the other ‘out islands.’ But on Timbado, in Cajou’s realm (if you can call it that), there no doubt exist practices that you can find nowhere else but on the Congo.”

“Cannibals?” interrupted Andy, drawing his chair forward.

“Among other things,” replied the speaker, “but, of course, only by report. We can imagine the rest. Also, by report, they are wreckers and pirates in a small way. By my own experience, I know they are thieves—Cajou an artful one.”

“Six years ago,” went on Captain Bassett, “in an expedition such as I have made here, I visited the southern reefs of the Smaller Bank, north of Cajou’s island. As I told you, I am a fruit and sisal hemp grower on Andros. But, like everyone in the Bahamas, in the off season, I utilize my men sponging. And, as you will soon learn, sponging means possible pearls. Like the gold prospector in other lands, we Bahamans love to seek the unknown waters where always there is the possibility that we never quite realize—the Koh-i-noor of pearls; the perfect pink pearl that is to make us fortune and fame.”

“I understand,” assented the boy.

“As you can see,” continued the Englishman, “it isn’t an unideal fancy. Even here, in this beautiful cove, there is such a chance—” and the boy could almost see a smile. “But six years ago, idling as now in about the same kind of a sleepy place, I got my first sight of Cajou. In a leaky old ‘sponger,’ crowded with a cargo of half-naked subjects, he did us the honor of calling on us.”

“What’d he look like?” broke in the entranced lad.

“Anything but a king,” went on the Englishman. “He was certainly eighty years old, gray haired and thin, but not bent. He was stripped to the waist, his skin was oiled, and around his bony neck was a necklace of bits of pink conch shell. He also carried a spear that must have come from Africa.”

The boy’s heart beat with excitement—this man and his subjects were only a few miles away.

“He didn’t favor me with a personal call,” continued Captain Bassett, “but I didn’t stand on ceremony. From what I had heard of the old man, he had a wonderful influence on hard working, honest colored men, and I didn’t care to have him hanging around the bay. He arrived about sundown, and when I rowed up to the side of his boat, I decided not to go aboard. The fish-cleaning shed at the market in Nassau was perfume compared to the hold of Cajou’s old hulk.

“By right, I had no control over the vicinity, but I had plenty of help with me, and I stayed only long enough to tell the king that I’d kick a hole into the bottom of his boat if he wasn’t gone by morning. He left all right, sometime in the night, one of my crews of three blacks with him. As that was their own business, I had to stand it.”

The boy sighed. He had expected a dramatic clash.

“That was only the prelude,” went on the Englishman. “Three weeks later, when I had reached home again, my pearl bag not much heavier than when I set out, I learned something more. I had been near fortune and just missed it. Two days before Cajou visited our mooring, one of my crews had made the find I had been awaiting for years. The great pink pearl had been found, and the usual thing happened. My men turned conspirators and thieves and concealed it.”

Andy sprang to his feet.

“And that’s how Cajou got it?”

“Precisely. One of the men confessed. The savage but clever Cajou probably got his charms working—like as not did it in all pearl fleets he could find. Anyway, he got three of my men, and you can be sure he got the pearl.”

“What’d you do?” asked the boy eagerly.

“What could I do? Somehow it became known at once that I knew the facts. All the men who had been with me decamped overnight. It was useless to go to Nassau and the authorities. I had no proof and, besides, Timbado is far away. Later I did tell the facts to the governor. He was good enough to tell me if I would locate the property and establish proof of ownership, he would attempt to recover it. He even looked up the location of Timbado on the official chart and asked me to tea. I was grateful and thanked him.”

“Then you never even saw the pearl,” said Andy.

“But I tried to,” said the captain, shaking his head in the negative. “I judged it was worth while. So I took the trouble to sail all the way to Timbado and call on the king. I took six men with me—all colored, but not thieves—and we landed at daybreak. The place is worth going to see,” explained the speaker. “It isn’t much of an island. Including a coral reef that surrounds the key, it is about a mile across and almost circular. There is a circular beach of sand, but the main part of the island is a coral elevation with bluff-like sides—it resembles the hill on which Nassau is built.

“My men had no longing to go ashore, so I didn’t insist. There was no delegation to welcome us, but I beached the boat and walked over to a group of thatched huts at the base of the bluff. Several men, clad mainly in rough palmetto hats, watched my approach. One of them, fully clothed and weighing at least two hundred pounds, came forward. He spoke English, and was probably the secretary-of-war, as he carried a revolver in a belt.”

Andy edged forward again.

“I told him I wanted to see the king, and he replied by asking if I had tobacco or rum. When I told him I wasn’t a trader and repeated that I wanted to talk to Cajou, he pointed at once to my boat and touched his revolver. He was so unsociable that I took the trouble to look over my own, and then I passed on.

“The collection of huts was a combination cook camp and slaughter pen. Decaying conchs was the predominating odor. But it was varied with the smell of rotten shark meat, a half-consumed shark hanging from a post in the center of a filthy court. One glance told me that Cajou’s house was not here, for behind the odorous pens and the reeking cook pots, I had seen steps cut in the coral limestone bluff.

“These steps,” went on Captain Bassett, after he had supplemented his expired cigar with a pipe, “were partly concealed under vines and dwarfed palms. After most of those about the beach huts had disappeared toward the top of the elevation, I followed. When I saw this, it occurred to me at once that the summit would make a good cricket ground. Mainly, the place was solid, smooth limestone with some sand and sparse vegetation, and all sloping to the center, where there was a considerable pool or pond.”

“Weren’t you afraid?” broke in his auditor. But to this there was no reply.

“On the edge of the pool was a stockade, and in this a quadrangle of latania-roofed huts. On each side of an opening facing the water were two dead cocoa palms. From the top of each hung a mess of odds and ends: bones, shark heads, colored cloth, shells on long strings, that I knew meant royalty. I saw at once that the palace was at the lowest part of the basin—you couldn’t even see the tops of the dead palms from the sea.

“When I started down the slope, black men seemed to spring up from every few yards of the little palms that grew on the edge of the elevation. I counted thirty of them and stopped. The fat secretary-of-war was following me. As I got nearer, I saw something in the things hanging from the totem-like trunks that set me to thinking—”

“What was it?” asked the boy, breathlessly.

“Well,” answered the Englishman, “you’ve heard the worst about Timbado. I guess it’s true.”

The boy drew back in horror.

“And you kept on?” he asked, breathing hard.

“There were a good many more than I thought there’d be,” went on Captain Bassett, “but I’d served in the English army, part of the time in Afghanistan, and I thought I might as well. When I got to the open gate, I saw that the stockade surrounded the real town. It seemed the dormitory for women and children. I thought for a minute I’d seen enough and that my men might be getting anxious,” went on the old soldier, sucking at his pipe, “but I didn’t have much choice. The thirty or more full-grown men I had counted came crowding up behind, so I went in.

“All this time there wasn’t a word said. Before I could make any explanation, the king appeared—old Cajou walked out of one of the huts, as thin and straight and gray as I first saw him. He had on a blue coat with brass buttons, a navigating officer’s cap marked ‘First Mate’ in gold letters, and he carried a gold-headed cane. His pink shell necklace was there, too, hanging on his breast.

“The old man held out his hand, but my eyesight was poor.

“‘Good morning,’ I began. ‘I’ve come for my pink pearl.’

“I had a notion that he understood, but he shook his head.

“‘You don’t speak English,’ I went on.

“Again he shook his head. Then I began to have a little reason. My curiosity was satisfied. Manifestly, I had gone the limit. Numbers, at least, were against me, whether they were armed or not. Before anything could be attempted I whirled about, swung my arm to open a path, and, as the crowd behind me fell back, I walked out of the enclosure. A hubbub of voices rose behind me, but not a hand was raised against me. Indifference seemed the best weapon, and I strolled up to the edge of the plateau, passed down the steps and to the boat.”

“Then what?” urged the boy.

“I had got about as much as I expected. But I did not give up wholly. I sailed back home, and at last decided on one more attempt. It was a slim chance, but I took it. I have often regretted it. Your Ba was working for me then—his name then was Zaco. I coached Zaco and two other men named Nickolas and Thomas to go to Timbado and pose as castaways—not as thieves. They were simply to discover, if possible, whether the pearl was still there or had been disposed of.

“Not one of them ever returned. Your story is the first account I ever had of their fate. Nickolas and Thomas are either there to-day as Cajou’s subjects, or they are dead. Zaco, of course, escaped—somehow. The marks he carries with him prove that he saw the pearl and that it was there at that time. I’ve felt that it has been there all these years. Now that we know it—” and he paused.

“What?” exclaimed his listener, every nerve atingle.

“Let’s go and get it—you and I and the aeroplane,” continued Captain Bassett calmly.