I went to his office in the middle of the afternoon, when I knew his employees would be all present. In the outer office I attracted their attention to my presence and to the exact time by arguing heatedly that the clock there was a minute fast. Then I went into Bunce’s private office. He was alone. Out of m\ pockets I took the hammer and nails I had bought the day before from a hardware dealer who knew me, and, paving no attention to the astonished Bunce, nailed every window and door securely shut.
That done, I spit out the lozenge with which I had prepared my voice, and yelled loudly at him: “I hate you! You should be killed! I shall injure you!”
The surprise on his face became even more complete.
“Sit still,” I ordered in a low voice, taking a revolver from my pocket — a silver-mounted revolver with my initials engraved in it in four places.
Walking around behind him, carefully keeping the weapon too far away to leave the powder-marks that might make the wound seem self-inflicted, I shot him in the back of the head. While the door was being broken in I busied myself with the ink-pad on his desk, putting the prints of my fingers neatly and clearly on the butt of the revolver, the handle of the hammer, Bunce’s white collar, and some convenient sheets of paper; and hurriedly stuffed the dead man’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief into my pockets just as the door burst open.
After a while a detective came. I refused to answer his questions. Searching me, he found Bunce’s fountain pen, watch and handkerchief. He examined the room — doors and windows nailed on the inside with my hammer, my monogrammed revolver beside the dead man, my finger-prints everywhere. He questioned Bunce’s employees. They told of my entrance, my passing into the office where Bunce was alone, the sound of hammering, my voice shouting threats, and the shot.
And then — then the detective arrested me!
It came out later that this would-be sleuth whose salary the property holders were paying had never read a detective story in his life, and so had not even suspected that the evidence had been too solidly against me for me to be anything but innocent.
Ber-Bulu
Sunset Magazine, March 1925; (aka: The Hairy One, 1947)
Say it happened on one of the Tawi Tawis. That would make Jeffol a Moro. It doesn’t really matter what he was. If lie had been a Maya or a Ghurka he would have laid Levison’s arm open with a machete or a kukri instead of a kris, but that would have made no difference in the end. Dinihari’s race matters as little. She was woman, complaisant woman, of the sort whose no always becomes yes between throat and teeth. You can find her in Nome, in Cape Town, and in Durham, and in skin of any shade; but, since the Tawi Tawis are the lower end of the Sulu Archipelago, she was brown this time.
She was a sleek brown woman with the knack of twisting a sarong around her hips so that it became a part of her — a trick a woman has with a potato sack or hasn’t with Japanese brocade. She was small and trimly fleshed, with proper pride in her flesh. She wasn’t exactly beautiful, but if you were alone with her you kept looking at her, and you wished she didn’t belong to a man you were afraid of. That was when she was Levison’s.
She was Jeffol’s first. I don’t know where he got her. Her dialect wasn’t that of the village, but you couldn’t tell from that. There are any number of dialects down there — jumbles of Malay, Tagalog, Portuguese, and what not. Her sarong was a gold-threaded kain sungkit, so no doubt he brought her over from Borneo. He was likely to return from a fishing trip with anything — except fish.
Jeffol was a good Moro — a good companion in a fight or across a table. Tall for a Moro, nearly as tall as I am, he had a deceptive slimness that left you unprepared for the power in his snake-smooth muscles. His face was cheerful, intelligent and almost handsome, and he carried himself with a swagger. His hands went easily to the knives at his waist, and against his hide — sleeping or waking — he wore a sleeveless fighting-jacket with verses from the Koran on it. The jacket was his most prized possession, next to his anting-anting.
His elder brother was datto, as their father had been, but this brother had inherited little of either his father’s authority or his father’s taste for deviltry. The first had been diluted by the military government, and Jeffol had got most of the second. He ran as wild and loose as his pirate ancestors, until Langworthy got hold of him.
Langworthy was on the island when I came there. He hadn’t had much luck. Mohammedanism suited the Moros, especially in the loose form they practised. There was nothing of the solemn gangling horse-faced missionary about Langworthy. He was round-chested and meaty; he worked with dumb-bells and punching-bag before breakfast in the morning; and he strode round the island with a red face that broke into a grin on the least excuse. He had a way of sticking his chin in the air and grinning over it at you. I didn’t like him.
He and I didn’t hit if off very well from the first. I had reasons for not telling him where I had come from, and when he found I intended staying a while he got a notion that I wasn’t going to do his people — he called them that in spite of the little attention they paid him — any good. Later, he used to send messages to Bangao, complaining that I was corrupting the natives and lowering the prestige of the white man.
That was after I taught them to play blackjack. They gambled whenever they had anything to gamble for, and it was just as well that they should play a game that didn’t leave too much to luck. If I hadn’t won their money the Chinese would have, and anyway, there wasn’t enough of it to raise a howl over. As for the white man’s prestige — maybe I didn’t insist on being tuaned with every third word, but neither did I hesitate to knock the brown brothers round whenever they needed it; and that’s all there is to this keeping up the white man’s prestige at best.
A couple OF years earlier — in the late ’90s — Langworthy would have had no difficulty in getting rid of me, but since then the government had eased up a bit. I don’t know what sort of answers he got to his complaints, but the absence of official action made him all the more determined to chase me off.
“Peters,” he would tell me, “You’ve got to get off the island. You’re a bad influence and you’ve got to go.”
“Sure, sure,” I would agree, yawning. “But there’s no hurry.”
We didn’t get along together at all, but it was through my blackjack game that he finally made a go of his mission, though he wouldn’t be likely to admit it.
Jeffol went broke in the game one night — lost his fortune of forty dollars Mex — and discovered what to his simple mind was the certain cause of his bad luck. His anting-anting was gone, his precious luck-bringing collection of the-Lord-knows-what in a stinking little bag was gone from its string round his neck. I tried to buck him up, but he wouldn’t listen to reason. His security against all the evils of this world — and whatever other worlds there might be — was gone. Anything could happen to him now — anything bad. He went round the village with his head sagging down until it was in danger of being hit by a knee. In this condition he was ripe fruit for Langworthy, and Lang-worthy plucked him.
I saw Jeffol converted, although I was too far away to hear the talk that went with it. I was sitting under a cottonwood fixing a pipe. Jeffol had been walking up and down the beach for half an hour or more, his chin on his chest, his feet dragging. The water beyond him was smooth and green under a sky that was getting ready to let down more water. From where I sat, his round turban moved against the green sea like a rolling billiard-ball.
Then Langworthy came up the beach, striding stiff-kneed, as a man strides to a fight lie counts on winning. He caught up with Jeffol and said something to which the Moro paid no attention. Jeffol didn’t raise his head, just went on walking, though he was polite enough ordinarily. Langworthy fell in step beside him and they made a turn up and down the beach, the white man talking away at a great rate. Jeffol, so far as I could see, made no reply at all.