Chapter 8

CHAPTER VIII--LOCAL COLOUR

At sunset a small ketch fanned in to anchorage, and a little later
the skipper came ashore. He was a soft-spoken, gentle-voiced young
fellow of twenty, but he won Joan's admiration in advance when
Sheldon told her that he ran the ketch all alone with a black crew
from Malaita. And Romance lured and beckoned before Joan's eyes
when she learned he was Christian Young, a Norfolk Islander, but a
direct descendant of John Young, one of the original Bounty
mutineers. The blended Tahitian and English blood showed in his
soft eyes and tawny skin; but the English hardness seemed to have
disappeared. Yet the hardness was there, and it was what enabled
him to run his ketch single-handed and to wring a livelihood out of
the fighting Solomons.

Joan's unexpected presence embarrassed him, until she herself put
him at his ease by a frank, comradely manner that offended
Sheldon's sense of the fitness of things feminine. News from the
world Young had not, but he was filled with news of the Solomons.
Fifteen boys had stolen rifles and run away into the bush from
Lunga plantation, which was farther east on the Guadalcanar coast.
And from the bush they had sent word that they were coming back to
wipe out the three white men in charge, while two of the three
white men, in turn, were hunting them through the bush. There was
a strong possibility, Young volunteered, that if they were not
caught they might circle around and tap the coast at Berande in
order to steal or capture a whale-boat.

"I forgot to tell you that your trader at Ugi has been murdered,"
he said to Sheldon. "Five big canoes came down from Port Adams.
They landed in the night-time, and caught Oscar asleep. What they
didn't steal they burned. The Flibberty-Gibbet got the news at
Mboli Pass, and ran down to Ugi. I was at Mboli when the news
came."

"I think I'll have to abandon Ugi," Sheldon remarked.

"It's the second trader you've lost there in a year," Young
concurred. "To make it safe there ought to be two white men at
least. Those Malaita canoes are always raiding down that way, and
you know what that Port Adams lot is. I've got a dog for you.
Tommy Jones sent it up from Neal Island. He said he'd promised it
to you. It's a first-class nigger-chaser. Hadn't been on board
two minutes when he had my whole boat's-crew in the rigging. Tommy
calls him Satan."

"I've wondered several times why you had no dogs here," Joan said.

"The trouble is to keep them. They're always eaten by the
crocodiles."

"Jack Hanley was killed at Marovo Lagoon two months ago," Young
announced in his mild voice. "The news just came down on the
Apostle."

"Where is Marovo Lagoon?" Joan asked.