Facing each other, they suddenly stopped. Langworthy’s face was redder than ever and his jaw stuck out. Jeffol was scowling. He said something. Langworthy said something. Jeffol took a step back and his hand went to the ivory hilt of a kris in his belted sarong. He didn’t get the kris out. The missionary stepped in and dropped him with a hard left to the belly.
I got up and went away, reminding myself to watch that left hand if Langworthy and I ever tangled. I didn’t have to sit through the rest of the performance to know that he had made a convert. There are two things a Moro understands thoroughly and respects without stint — violence and a joke. Knock him round, or get a laugh on him, and you can do what you will with him — and he’ll like it. The next time I saw Jeffol he was a Christian.
In spite of the protests of the datto, a few of the Moros followed Jeffol’s example, and Langworthy’s chest grew an inch. He was wise enough to know that he could make better progress by cracking their heads together than by arguing the finer theological points with them, and after two or three athletic gospel-meetings he had his flock well in hand — for a while.
He lost most of them when he brought up the question of wives. Women were not expensive to keep down there and, although the Moros on that particular island weren’t rolling in wealth, nearly all of them could afford a couple of wives, and some were prosperous enough to take on a slave girl or two after they had the four wives their law allowed. Langworthy put his foot down on this. He told his converts they would have to get rid of all except the first wives. And of course all of his converts who had more than one wife promptly went back to Allah — except Jeffol.
He was in earnest, the only idea in his head being to repair the damage done by the loss of his anting-anting. He had four wives and two slaves, including Dinihari. He wanted to keep her and let the others go, hut the missionary said no. Jeffol’s number one wife was his only real wife — thus Langworthy. Jeffol almost bolted then, but the necessity of finding a substitute for his anting-anting was strong in him. They compromised. He was to give up his women, go to Bangao for a divorce from his first wife, and then Langworthy would marry him to Dinihari. Meanwhile the girl was turned over to the datto for safe keeping. The datto’s wife was a dish-faced shrew who had thus far prevented his taking another wife, so his household was considered a safe harbor for the girl.
Three mornings after Jeffol’s departure for Bangao we woke to find Levison among us. He had come in during the night, alone, in a power-yawl piled high with wooden cases.
Levison was a monster, in size and appearance. Six and a half feet high he stood and at a little distance you took him for a man of medium height. There were three hundreds pounds of him bulging his clothes if there was an ounce — not counting the hair, which was an item. He was black hair all over. It bushed out from above his low forehead to the nape of his neck, ran over his eyes in a straight thick bar, and sprouted from ears and great beaked nose. Below his half-hidden dark eyes, black hair bearded his face with a ten-inch tangle, furred his body like a bear’s, padded his shoulders and arms and legs, and lay in thick patches on fingers and toes.
He hadn’t many clothes on when I paddled out to the yawl to get acquainted, and what he had were too small for him. His shirt was split in a dozen places and the sleeves were gone. His pants-legs were torn off at the knees. He looked like a hair-mat-tress coming apart — only there was nothing limp or loose about the body inside of the hair. He was as agile as an acrobat. This was the first time I had seen him, although I recognized him on sight from what I had heard in Manila the year before. He bore a sweet reputation.
“Hello, Levison,” I greeted him as I came alongside. “Welcome to our little paradise.”
He scowled down at me, from hat to shoes and back, and then nodded his immense head.
“You are—”
“I’m not,” I denied, climbing over the side. “I never heard of the fellow, and I’m innocent of whatever he did. My name is Peters and I’m not even distantly related to any other Peters.”
He laughed and produced a bottle of gin.
The village was a double handful of thatched huts set upon piles where the water could wash under them when the tide was in, back in a little cove sheltered by a promontory that pointed towards Celebes. Levison built his house — a large one with three rooms — out near the tip of this point, beside the ruins of the old Spanish block-house. I spent a lot of time out there with him. He was a hard man to get along with, a thoroughly disagreeable companion, but he had gin — real gin and plenty of it — and I was tired of nipa and samshu. He thought I wasn’t afraid of him, and that error made it easier for me to handle him.
There was something queer about this Levison. He was as strong as three men and a vicious brute all the way through, but not with the honest brutality of a strong man. He was like a mean kid who, after being tormented by larger boss, suddenly finds himself among smaller ones. It used to puzzle me. For instance, old Muda stumbled against him once on the path into the jungle. You or I would simply have pushed the clumsy old beggar out of the way, or perhaps, if we happened to be carrying a grouch at the time, have knocked him out of the way. Levison picked him up and did something to his legs. Muda had to be carried back to his hut, and he never succeeded in walking after that.
The Moros called Levison the Hairy One (Ber-Bulu), and, because he was big and strong and tough, they were afraid of him and admired him tremendously.
It was less than a week after his arrival when he brought Dinihari home with him. I was in his house when they came in.
“Get out, Peters,” he said. “ This is my dam’ honeymoon.”
I looked at the girl. She was all dimples and crinkled nose — tickled silly.
“Go easy,” I advised the hairy man. “She belongs to Jeffol, and he’s a tough lad.”
“I know,” he sneered through his beard. “I’ve heard all about him. The hell with him!”
“You’re the doctor. Give me a bottle of gin to drink to you with and I’ll run along.”
I got the gin.
I was with Levison and the girl when Jeffol came back from Bangao. I was sprawled on a divan. On the other side of the room the hairy man was tilted back in a chair, talking. Dinihari sat on the floor at his feet, twisted round to look up into his face with adoring eyes. She was a happy brown girl. Why not? Didn’t she have the strongest man on the island — the strongest man in the whole archipelago? And in addition to his strength, wasn’t he as hairy as a wanderoo, in a land where men hadn’t much hair on face and body?
Then the door whipped open and Jeffol came in. His eyes were red over black. He wasn’t at home in Christianity yet, so he cursed Levison with Mohammedan curses. They are good enough up to a certain point, but the climax — usually pig — falls a bit flat on western ears. Jeffol did well. But he would have done better if he had come in with his knives in his hands instead of in his twisted sarong.
The hairy man’s chair came down square on its legs and he got across the room — sooner than you would think. Jeffol managed to loosen a kris and ripped one of Levison’s arms from elbow to wrist. Then the Moro was through. Levison was too big, too strong, for him — swept him up, cuffed weapons out of hand and sarong, took him by arm and thigh and chucked him out of the door.