Chapter 2

CHAPTER II--SOMETHING IS DONE

In the morning David Sheldon decided that he was worse. That he
was appreciably weaker there was no doubt, and there were other
symptoms that were unfavourable. He began his rounds looking for
trouble. He wanted trouble. In full health, the strained
situation would have been serious enough; but as it was, himself
growing helpless, something had to be done. The blacks were
getting more sullen and defiant, and the appearance of the men the
previous night on his veranda--one of the gravest of offences on
Berande--was ominous. Sooner or later they would get him, if he
did not get them first, if he did not once again sear on their dark
souls the flaming mastery of the white man.

He returned to the house disappointed. No opportunity had
presented itself of making an example of insolence or
insubordination--such as had occurred on every other day since the
sickness smote Berande. The fact that none had offended was in
itself suspicious. They were growing crafty. He regretted that he
had not waited the night before until the prowlers had entered.
Then he might have shot one or two and given the rest a new lesson,
writ in red, for them to con. It was one man against two hundred,
and he was horribly afraid of his sickness overpowering him and
leaving him at their mercy. He saw visions of the blacks taking
charge of the plantation, looting the store, burning the buildings,
and escaping to Malaita. Also, one gruesome vision he caught of
his own head, sun-dried and smoke-cured, ornamenting the canoe
house of a cannibal village. Either the Jessie would have to
arrive, or he would have to do something.

The bell had hardly rung, sending the labourers into the fields,
when Sheldon had a visitor. He had had the couch taken out on the
veranda, and he was lying on it when the canoes paddled in and
hauled out on the beach. Forty men, armed with spears, bows and
arrows, and war-clubs, gathered outside the gate of the compound,
but only one entered. They knew the law of Berande, as every
native knew the law of every white man's compound in all the
thousand miles of the far-flung Solomons. The one man who came up
the path, Sheldon recognized as Seelee, the chief of Balesuna
village. The savage did not mount the steps, but stood beneath and
talked to the white lord above.

Seelee was more intelligent than the average of his kind, but his
intelligence only emphasized the lowness of that kind. His eyes,
close together and small, advertised cruelty and craftiness. A
gee-string and a cartridge-belt were all the clothes he wore. The
carved pearl-shell ornament that hung from nose to chin and impeded
speech was purely ornamental, as were the holes in his ears mere