Dinihari? Her former lord’s body hadn’t thudded on the ground below — a nasty drop with the tide out — before she was bending over Levison’s hairy arm, kissing the bleeding slit.
Jeffol was laid up for a week with a twisted shoulder and bruised back. I dropped in to see him once, but he wasn’t very cordial. He seemed to think I should have done something. His mother — old toothless Ca’bi — chased me out as soon as she saw me, so my visit didn’t last long. She was a proper old witch.
The village buzzed for a day or two, but nothing happened. If Jeffol hadn’t gone Christian there might have been trouble; but most of the Moros held his desertion of the faith against him, and looked on the loss of Dinihari as just punishment. Those who were still Christians were too tame a lot to help Jeffol. His brother the datto washed his hands of the affair, which was just as well, since he couldn’t have done anything anyway. He wasn’t any too fond of Jeffol — had always been a bit envious of him — and he decided that in giving up the girl at the missionary’s request, Jeffol had surrendered ownership, and that she could stay with Levison if she wished. Apparently she did so wish.
Langworthy went to see Levison. I heard of it a few minutes later and paddled like mad out to the house. If the missionary was going to be smeared up I wanted to see it. I didn’t like the man. But I was too late. He came out just as I got there, and he limped a little. I never found out what happened. I asked Levison, but if he had done all the things he told me the missionary wouldn’t have left standing up. The house wasn’t upset, and Levison didn’t have any marks that showed through his hair, so it couldn’t have been much of a row.
Jeffol’s faith in Christianity as a substitute for an anting-anting must have been weakened by this new misfortune, but Langworthy succeeded in holding him, though he had to work night and day to do it. They were together all of the time — Langworthy usually talking, Jeffol sulking.
“Jeffol’s up and about,” I told Levison one day. ‘‘Better watch your step. He’s shifty, and he’s got good pirate blood in him.”
“Pirate blood be damned!” said Levison. “He’s a nigger and I can handle a dozen of him.”
I let it go at that.
Those were good days in the house out on the point. The girl was a brown lump of happiness. She worshipped her big hair-matted beast of a man, made a god of him. She’d look at him for hour after hour with black eyes that had hallelujahs in them. If he was asleep when I went out there, she’d use the word beradu when she told me so — a word supposed to be sacred to the sleep of royalty.
Levison, swept up in this adoration that was larger than he, became almost mellow for days at a time; and even when he relapsed into normal viciousness now and then he was no crueler to her than a Moro would have been. And there were times when lie became almost what she thought of him. I remember one night: We were all three fairly drunk — Levison and I on gin, the girl, drunker than either of us, on love. She had reached up and buried her brown fists in his beard, a trick she was fond of.
“Hold on!” he cried, kicking his chair away and standing up.
He reared up his head, lifting her from the floor, and spun round, whirling her through the air like a kid swinging on a May-pole. Silly, maybe. But in the yellow lamplight, his beaked nose and laughing red mouth above the black beard to which her fists clung, her smooth brown body slanting through the air in a ripple of gay waist and sarong, there was a wild magnificence to them. He was a real giant that moment.
But it’s hard for me to remember him that way: my last picture of him is the one that sticks. I got it the night of Jeffol’s second call.
He came in late, popping through the door with a brand-new service Colt in one hand and a kris in the other. At his heels trotted old Ca’bi, his mother, followed by broken-nosed Jokanain and a mean little runt named Unga. The old woman carried a bundle of something tied up in nipa leaves, Jokanain swung a heavy barong, and Unga held an ancient blunderbuss.
I started up from where I was sitting cross-legged on the floor.
Unga centered the blunderbuss on me.
“Diam dudok!”
I sat still. Blunderbusses are wicked, and Unga had lost twelve dollars Mex to me three nights before.
Levison had jerked to his feet, and then he stopped. The Colt in Jeffol’s hand was too large and too steady for even a monster like Levison to jump at. Dinihari was the only one of us who moved. She flung herself between Jeffol and Levison, hut the Moro swept her out of the way with his left arm, swept her over into a corner without taking eyes or gun from the hairs man.
Old Ca’bi hobbled across the floor and peeped into each of the other rooms.
“Mari,” she croaked from the sleeping-room door.
Step by step Jeffol drove Levison across the room and through that door, Ca’bi going in with them. The door closed and Unga, holding me with the gun, put his back against it.
Dinihari sprang up and dashed toward him. Jokanain caught her from behind and flung her into her corner again. Beyond the door Levison roared out oaths. Ca’bi’s voice cackled excitedly in answering oaths, and in orders to her son. Bind (ikat) and naked (telanjang) were the only words I could pick out of the din. Then Levison’s voice choked off into silence, and no sound at all came from the sleeping-room.
In our room there was no motion. Dinihari sat still in her corner, staring at her feet. Unga and Jokanain were two ugly statues against two doors. The chatter of flying foxes busy among the cottonwoods and the rustling of thatch in a breeze heavy with the stink of drying tripang were the only things you could hear.
I had a dull, end-of-the-road feeling. A Moro is a simple son of nature. When he finds himself so placed that he can kill, he usually kills. Otherwise, it runs in his head, of what use is the power? It’s a sort of instinct for economy. I suspected that Levison, gagged, was being cut, in the Moro fashion, into very small bits; and, while my death might be less elaborate, I didn’t doubt that it too was in the cards. You don’t last long among the Moros once you let them get the bulge on you. If not tonight, some young buck will cut you down tomorrow night, just because he knows he can do it.
Half an hour or more went by slower than you would think it could. My nerves began bothering me: fear taking the form of anger at the suspended activity of the trap I was in; impatience to see the end and get it over with.
I had a gun under my shirt. If I could snake it out and pot Unga, then I had a chance of shooting it out with Jeffol and Jokanain. If I wasn’t fast enough, Unga would turn loose the blunderbuss and blow me and the wall behind me into the Celebes Sea, all mixed up so you couldn’t say which was which. But even that was better than passing out without trying to take anybody with me.
However, there was still gin in the bottle beside me, and it would make the going easier if I could get it in me. I experimented with a slowly reaching hand. Unga said nothing, so I picked up the bottle and took a long drink, leaving one more in it — a stirrup cup, you might say. As I took the bottle down from my mouth, feet pattered in the next room, and old Ca’bi came squeezing out of the door, her mouth spread from ear to ear in a she-devil’s grin.
“Panggil orang-orang,” she ordered Jokanain, and he went out.
I put the last of the gin down my throat. If I were going to move, it would have to be before the rest of the village got here. I set the empty bottle down and scratched my chin, which brought my right hand within striking distance of my gun.
Then Levison bellowed out like a bull gone mad — a bellow that rattled the floor-timbers in their rattan lashings. Jeffol, without his Colt, came tumbling backward through the door, upsetting Unga. The blunderbuss exploded, blowing the roof wide open. In the confusion I got my gun out — and almost dropped it.