8c] Short Stories - ''Ridan the Devil''

8c]
at Vailele and Mulifanua, and Ridan alone was left. He was glad of this, for thewhite men on board had been kind to him, and he began to hope that he would be taken back to On阛ta. But that night he was brought ashore by the captain to a house where many white men were sitting together, smoking and drinking. They all looked curiously at him and addressed him in many island tongues, and Ridan smiled and shook his head and said, 'Me Ridan; me On阛ta.'
'Leave him with me, K黨ne,' said Burton to the captain of the brig. 'He's the best and biggest man of the lotyou've brought this trip. I'llmarry him to one of my wife's servants, and he'll live in clover down at Mulifanua.'
So early next morning Rfdan was put in a boat with many other new 'boys,' and he smiled with joy, thinking he was going back to the ship--and On阛ta. But when the boat sailed round Mulinu's Point, and the spars of the Iserbrook were suddenly hidden by the intervening line of palm trees, a cry of terror burst from him, and he sprang overboard. He was soon caught, though he dived and swam like a fish. And then two wild-eyed Gilbert Islanders held him by the arms, and laughed as he wept and kept repeating, 'On隺ta, On隺ta.'
* * * * *
From that day began his martyrdom. He worked hard under his overseer, but ran away again and again, only to be brought back and tied up. Sometimes, as he toiled, he would look longingly across the narrow strait of sunlit water at the bright green little island of Manono, six miles away; and twice he stole down to the shore at night, launched a canoe and paddled over towards it. But each time the plantation guard-boat brought him back; and then Burton put him in irons. Once he swam the whole distance, braving the sharks, and, reaching the island, hid in a taro swamp till the next night. He meant to steal food and a canoe--and seek for On隺ta. But the Manono people found him, and, though he fought desperately, they overcame and bound him, and the women cursed him for a T鈌ito{*} devil, a thieving beast, and beat and pelted him as the mencarried him back to the plantation, tied up like a wild boar, to get their ten dollars reward for him from the manager. And Burton gave him thirty lashes as a corrective.
* The Samoans apply the term 'T鈌ito' to all natives of the Gilbert Group and other equatorial islands. The word is an abbreviation of Taputeauea (Drummond's Island), and 'T鈌ito' is synonymous for 'savage'--in some senses.
Then came long, long months of unceasing toil, broken only by attempts to escape, recapture, irons and more lashes. The rest of the native labourers so hated and persecuted him that at last the man's nature changed, and he became desperate and dangerous. No one but Burton dared strike him now, for he would spring at an enemy's throat like amadman, and half stranglehim ere he could be dragged away stunned, bruised and bleeding. When his day's slavery was over he would go to his hut, eat his scanty mealof rice, biscuit and yam in sullen silence, and brood and mutter to himself. But from the day of his first flogging no word ever escaped his set lips. All these things he told afterwards to Von Hammer, the supercargo of the Mindora , when she came to Mulifanua with a cargo of new 'boys.'{*}
* Polynesian labourers are generally termed 'boys.'
Von Hammer had been everywhere in the North Pacific, so Burton took himto Ridan's hut, and called to the 'sulky devil' to comeout. He came, and sullenly followed the two men intothe manager's big sitting-room, and sat down cross-legged on the floor. The bright lamplight shone fullon his nude figure and the tangle of black hair that fell about his now sun-darkened back and shoulders. And, as on that other evening long before,when he sat crouching over his fire, his eyes sought Burton's face with a look of implacable hatred.
'See if you can find out where the d--d brute comes from,' said Burton.
Von Hammer looked at Ridan intently for a minute, and then said one or two words to him in a tongue that the overseer had never before heard.
With trembling limbs and a joyful wonder shining in his dark eyes, Rfdan crept up to the supercargo, and then, in a voice of whispered sobs, he told histwo years' tale of bitter misery.
* * * * *
'Very well,' said Burton, an hour later, to Von Hammer,'you can take him. I don't want the brute here. But he is a dangerous devil, mind. Where do you say he comes from?'
'On阛ta--Saint David's Island--a little bit of a sandy atoll, as big as Manono over there, and much like it, too. I know the place well--lived there once when I was pearling, ten years ago. I don't thinkthe natives there see a white man more than once in five years.
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