HEY called him “the coward” on board Dan McSpadden’s schooner because he flinched every time a gun was fired; and when the cutter had been rowed off the beach at Santa Cruz and McSpadden and Old Billy had shot at the hundred howling savages flinging arrows toward the boat, he had dropped his oar and stopped his ears.
So it happened that the same night, when McSpadden, big and burly and afraid of nothing under heaven, had caught him in the moonlight by the main hatch whispering to Nina McSpadden—well, any other man would have been drowned, but the coward was like a fish in water. And Nina had screamed when her father flung the boy overboard; and the old man, who was not cruel, but very hasty and violent, had heaved to and lowered away.
Furlong might be a coward, but he was a great sailor. It could be said that the ship was his cradle and the ocean was his mother. He had been born the son of a trader—and he had been born at that moment when Chinese pirates, ranging south a hundred miles off Canton, had taken it into their heads to board the little bark. There was fighting on deck and the roar of guns, and the infant’s screams mingled with those of his frightened mother’s. She died that night and so did his father—the father cleft from shoulder to collar-bone with a kris. And the mate of the bark had edged his way south and around the Australian coast to Sydney and, being an honest man, had told a true story and adopted the infant and left it with his wife in port.
Then the bark went down and the wife was widowed and had no love for the baby, which was bandied from hand to hand and sent to sea almost as soon as it could toddle, to be out of the way. At eighteen Dick Furlong shipped with Dan McSpadden, trader. He shipped because he had caught sight of Dan McSpadden’s daughter and learned that she went with her father wherever the White Wing threw her canvas to the winds.
It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Furlong had learned to swim before he could walk. No native was more at home in the water than he, and even native children dive deep for shells and frighten off or fight a shark as our children throw rocks at a dog.
“Dick,” said the girl when she had found him at the wheel one night and knew that her father was asleep, “you are a coward. You know it.”
Now, she said it tenderly, as one regretfully stating a fact that had to be faced. She did not want to love the boy; or rather she did not want to love a coward. But women’s hearts are unruly.
“I know it,” he said frankly. “Are you ’fraid of snakes?”
“No,” she answered scornfully.
“Spiders?”
“No!”
“Are you afraid of anything, Nina?”
“These great big black cannibals—if I drink coffee at night, I’m sure to stay awake till eight bells and then put in the rest of the night fighting them!”
“I’m not afraid of them. Honest, Nina. But a gun—it isn’t the bullet, you know. It’s the noise. I can’t stand it. On the Lucy B.—the last ship ’fore White Wing—they had a one-pounder. It was all I could do to keep from jumpin’ overboard ever’ time they fired her. I’ll go aloft with the best, Nina. I’ve gone over the side with a knife and ripped open a shark that was after a black boy. But a gun—I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—fire a gun! I just simply can’t help it!”
“And father liked you, too!” she said regretfully; for the old man had thought Furlong a great boy until that Santa Cruz affair.
Perhaps if Nina and her father and young Furlong had studied that modern science of psychoanalysis, and if they had known that Mrs. Furlong herself had always had a dread of firearms and had died more of fright than of anything else at the hour of Dick’s birth, they would all have understood that the boy could no more have helped his fear of the guns’ roar than he could have helped having deep, soft brown eyes.
“Billy,” said McSpadden as the schooner came close to a bay on Guadalcanar, “I’m afraid we’ll find trouble here. Never run from a nigger yet when I was on my own ship. Be if I will now.”
The schooner was no sooner headed into the bay than the wind began to die down. It was around noon. There was no surf, and the water was deep and clear as in a glass bowl. As the saying goes, one could count the scales on the belly of a shark.
The schooner was met by a swarm of natives. Ordinarily Captain McSpadden would not have dropped anchor in a strange bay where the savages were not to be trusted, but now he let go the anchor; for there was no wind to go about with, and if the schooner were left to drift she might go on the rocks and have to hang through low-tide even after the evening breeze came up.
