The Argus Pheasant

CHAPTER I

The Omniscient Sachsen

It was very apparent that his Excellency Jonkheer Adriaan Adriaanszoon Van Schouten, governor-general of the Netherlands East Indies, was in a temper. His eyes sparked like an emery-wheel biting cold steel. His thin, sharp-ridged nose rose high and the nostrils quivered. His pale, almost bloodless lips were set in rigid lines over his finely chiseled, birdlike beak with its aggressive Vandyke beard. His hair bristled straight and stiff, like the neck-feathers of a ruffled cock, over the edge of his linen collar. It was this latter evidence of the governor's unpleasant humor that his military associate, General Gysbert Karel Vanden Bosch, observed with growing anxiety.

The governor took a pinch of snuff with great deliberation and glared across the big table of his cabinet-room at the general. Vanden Bosch shrank visibly.

"Then, my dear generaal," he demanded, "you say we must let these sons of Jazebel burn down my residences, behead my residents, and feed my controlleurs to the crocodiles without interference from the military?"

"Ach, no, your excellency!" General Vanden Bosch expostulated hastily. "Not that!"

"I fear I have not understood you, my dear general. What do you advise?"

The icy sweetness of the choleric Van Schouten sent a cold shiver along the commander's spine. He wriggled nervously in the capacious armchair that he filled so snugly. Quite unconsciously he mumbled to himself the clause which the pious Javanese had added to their prayers since Van Schouten's coming to Batavia: "And from the madness of the orang blanda devil at the paleis, Allah deliver us."

"Ha! generaal, what do you say?" the governor exclaimed.

Vanden Bosch coughed noisily and rallied his wits.

"Ahem, your excellency; ah-hum! It is a problem, as your excellency knows. I could send Colonel Heyns and his regiment to Bulungan, if your excellency so desires. But – ahem – as your excellency knows, all he will find is empty huts. Not a proa on the sea; not a Dyak in his field."

"You might as well send that many wooden men!" Van Schouten snapped.

The general winced. His portentously solemn features that for forty years had impressed the authorities at The Hague with his sagacity in military affairs became severely grave. Oracularly he suggested:

"Would it not be wise, your excellency, to give Mynheer Muller, the controlleur, more time? His last report was very satisfactory. Very satisfactory, indeed!" He smacked his lips at the satisfactoriness thereof.

"Donder en bliksem!" the governor swore, crashing his lean fist on the table. "More time for what? The taxes have not been paid for two years. Not a kilo of rice has been grown on our plantations. Not a liter of dammargum has been shipped here. The cane is left to rot uncut. Fire has ravaged the cinchona-groves my predecessors set with such care. Every ship brings fresh reports of piracies, of tribal wars, and head-hunting. How much longer must we possess our souls in patience while these things go on?"

The general shook his head with a brave show of regret.

"Ach! your excellency," he replied sadly; "he promised so well."

"Promises," the governor retorted, "do not pay taxes."

Vanden Bosch rubbed his purple nose in perplexity.

"I suppose it is the witch-woman again," he remarked, discouragedly.

"Who else?" Van Schouten growled. "Always the witch-woman. That spawn of Satan, Koyala, is at the bottom of every uprising we have in Borneo."

"That is what we get for letting half-breeds mingle with whites in our mission schools," Vanden Bosch observed bitterly.

The governor scowled. "That folly will cost the state five hundred gulden," he remarked. "That is the price I have put on her head."

The general pricked up his ears. "H-m, that should interest Mynheer Muller," he remarked. "There is nothing he likes so well as the feel of a guilder between his fingers."

The governor snorted. "Neen, generaal," he negatived. "For once he has found a sweeter love than silver. The fool fairly grovels at Koyala's feet, Sachsen tells me."

"So?" Vanden Bosch exclaimed with quickened interest. "They say she is very fair."

"If I could get my hands on her once, the Argus Pheasant's pretty feathers would molt quickly," Van Schouten snarled. His fingers closed like an eagle's talons.

"Argus Pheasant, Bintang Burung, the Star Bird – 'tis a sweet-sounding name the Malays have for her," the general remarked musingly. There was a sparkle in his eye – the old warrior had not lost his fondness for a pretty face. "If I was younger," he sighed, "I might go to Bulungan myself."

The governor grunted.

"You are an old cock that has lost his tail-feathers, generaal," he growled. "This is a task for a young man."

The general's chest swelled and his chin perked up jauntily.

"I am not so old as you think, your excellency," he retorted with a trace of asperity.

"Neen, neen, generaal," the governor negatived, "I cannot let you go – not for your own good name's sake. The gossips of Amsterdam and The Hague would have a rare scandal to prate about if it became whispered around that Gysbert Vanden Bosch was scouring the jungles of Bulungan for a witch-woman with a face and form like Helen of Troy's."

The general flushed. His peccadillos had followed him to Java, and he did not like to be reminded of them.

"The argus pheasant is too shy a bird to come within gunshot, your excellency," he replied somberly. "It must be trapped."

"Ay, and so must she," the governor assented. "That is how she got her name. But you are too seasoned for bait, my dear generaal." He chuckled.

Vanden Bosch was too much impressed with his own importance to enjoy being chaffed. Ignoring the thrust, he observed dryly:

"Your excellency might try King Saul's plan."

"Ha!" the governor exclaimed with interest. "What is that?"

Van Schouten prided himself on his knowledge of the Scriptures, and the general could not repress a little smirk of triumph at catching him napping.

"King Saul tied David's hands by giving him his daughter to wife," he explained. "In the same way, your excellency might clip the Argus Pheasant's wings by marrying her to one of our loyal servants. It might be managed most satisfactorily. A proper marriage would cause her to forget the brown blood that she hates so bitterly."

"It is not her brown blood that she hates, it is her white blood," Van Schouten contradicted. "But who would be the man?"

"Why not Mynheer Muller, the controlleur!" Vanden Bosch asked. "From what your excellency says, he would not be unwilling. Then our troubles in Bulungan would be over."

Van Schouten scowled thoughtfully.

"It would be a good match," the general urged. "He is only common blood – a Marken herring-fisher's son by a Celebes woman. And she" – he shrugged his shoulders – "for all her pretty face and plump body she is Leveque, the French trader's daughter, by a Dyak woman."

He licked his lips in relish of the plan.

Van Schouten shook his head.

"No, I cannot do it," he said. "I could send her to the coffee-plantations – that would be just punishment for her transgressions. But God keep me from sentencing any woman to marry."

"But, your excellency," Vanden Bosch entreated.

"It is ridiculous, generaal," the governor cut in autocratically. "The argus pheasant does not mate with the vulture."

Vanden Bosch's face fell. "Then your excellency must appoint another resident," he said, in evident disappointment. "It will take a strong man to bring those Dyaks to time."

Van Schouten looked at him fixedly for several moments. A miserable sensation of having said too much crept over the general.

"Ha!" Van Schouten exclaimed. "You say we must have a new resident. That has been my idea, too. What bush-fighter have you that can lead two hundred cut-throats like himself and harry these tigers out of their lairs till they crawl on their bellies to beg for peace?"

Inwardly cursing himself for his folly in ceasing to advocate Muller, the general twiddled his thumbs and said nothing.

"Well, generaal?" Van Schouten rasped irascibly.

"Ahem – you know what troops I have, your excellency. Mostly raw recruits, here scarce three months. There is not a man among them I would trust alone in the bush. After all, it might be wisest to give Mynheer Muller another chance." His cheeks puffed till they were purple.

Van Schouten's face flamed.

"Enough! Enough!" he roared. "If the military cannot keep our house in order, Sachsen and I will find a man. That is all, generaal. Goedendag!"

Vanden Bosch made a hasty and none too dignified exit, damning under his breath the administration that had transferred him from a highly ornamental post in Amsterdam to live with this pepper-pot. He was hardly out of the door before the governor shouted:

"Sachsen! Hola, Sachsen!"

The sound of the governor's voice had scarcely died in the marbled corridors when Sachsen, the omniscient, the indispensable secretary, bustled into the sanctum. His stooped shoulders were crooked in a perpetual obeisance, and his damp, gray hair was plastered thinly over his ruddy scalp; but the shrewd twinkle in his eyes and the hawklike cast of his nose and chin belied the air of humility he affected.

"Sachsen," the governor demanded, the eagle gleaming in his lean, Cæsarian face, "where can I find a man that will bring peace to Bulungan?"

The wrinkled features of the all-knowing Sachsen crinkled with a smile of inspiration.

"Your excellency," he murmured, bowing low, "there is Peter Gross, freeholder of Batavia."

"Peter Gross, Pieter Gross," Van Schouten mused, his brow puckered with a thoughtful frown. "The name seems to have slipped my memory. What has Peter Gross, freeholder of Batavia, done to merit such an appointment at our hands, Sachsen?"

The secretary bowed again, punctiliously.

"Your excellency perhaps remembers," he reminded, "that it was Peter Gross who rescued Lieutenant Hendrik de Koren and twelve men from the pirates of Lombock."

"Ha!" the governor exclaimed, his stern features relaxing a trifle. "Now, Sachsen, answer me truthfully, has this Peter Gross an eye for women?"

The secretary bent low.

"Your excellency, the fairest flowers of Batavia are his to pick and choose. The good God has given him a brave heart, a comely face, and plenty of flesh to cover his bones. But his only mistress is the sea."

"If I should send him to Bulungan, would that she-devil, Koyala, make the same fool of him that she has of Muller?" the governor demanded sharply.

"Your excellency, the angels above would fail sooner than he."

The governor's fist crashed on the table with a resounding thwack.

"Then he is the man we need!" he exclaimed. "Where shall I find this Peter Gross, Sachsen?"

"Your excellency, he is now serving as first mate of the Yankee barkentine, Coryander, anchored in this port. He was here at the paleis only a moment ago, inquiring for news of three of his crew who had exceeded their shore leave. I think he has gone to Ah Sing's rumah makan, in the Chinese campong."

Van Schouten sprang from his great chair of state like a cockerel fluttering from a roost. He licked his thin lips and curved them into a smile.

"Sachsen," he said, "except myself, you are the only man in Java that knows anything. My hat and coat, Sachsen, and my cane!"

CHAPTER II

Ah Sing Counts his Nails

Captain Threthaway, of the barkentine, Coryander, of Boston, should have heeded the warning he received from his first mate, Peter Gross, to keep away from the roadstead of Batavia. He had no particular business in that port. But an equatorial sun, hot enough to melt the marrow in a man's bones, made the Coryander's deck a blistering griddle; there was no ice on board, and the water in the casks tasted foul as bilge. So the captain let his longing for iced tea and the cool depths of a palm-grove get the better of his judgment.

Passing Timor, Floris, and the other links in the Malayan chain, Captain Threthaway looked longingly at the deeply shaded depths of the mangrove jungles. The lofty tops of the cane swayed gently to a breeze scarcely perceptible on the Coryander's sizzling deck. When the barkentine rounded Cape Karawang, he saw a bediamonded rivulet leap sheer off a lofty cliff and lose itself in the liana below. It was the last straw; the captain felt he had to land and taste ice on his tongue again or die. Calling his first mate, he asked abruptly:

"Can we victual at Batavia as cheaply as at Singapore, Mr. Gross?"

Peter Gross looked at the shore-line thoughtfully.

"One place is as cheap as the other, Mr. Threthaway; but if it's my opinion you want, I advise against stopping at Batavia."

The captain frowned.

"Why, Mr. Gross?" he asked sharply.

"Because we'd lose our crew, and Batavia's a bad place to pick up another one. That gang for'ard isn't to be trusted where there's liquor to be got. 'Twouldn't be so bad to lose a few of them at Singapore – there's always English-speaking sailors there waiting for a ship to get home on; but Batavia's Dutch. We might have to lay around a week."

"I don't think there's the slightest danger of desertions," Captain Threthaway replied testily. "What possible reason could any of our crew have to leave?"

"The pay is all right, and the grub is all right; there's no kicking on those lines," Peter Gross said, speaking guardedly. "But most of this crew are drinking men. They're used to their rations of grog regular. They've been without liquor since we left Frisco, except what they got at Melbourne, and that was precious little. Since the water fouled on us, they're ready for anything up to murder and mutiny. There'll be no holding them once we make port."

Captain Threthaway flushed angrily. His thin, ascetic jaw set with Puritan stubbornness as he retorted:

"When I can't sail a ship without supplying liquor to the crew, I'll retire, Mr. Gross."

"Don't misunderstand me, captain," Peter Gross replied, with quiet patience.

"I'm not disagreeing with your teetotaler principles. They improve a crew if you've got the right stock to work with. But when you take grog away from such dock-sweepings as Smith and Jacobson and that little Frenchman, Le Beouf, you take away the one thing on earth they're willing to work for. We had all we could do to hold them in hand at Melbourne, and after the contrary trades we've bucked the past week, and the heat, their tongues are hanging out for a drop of liquor."

"Let them dare come back drunk," the captain snapped angrily. "I know what will cure them."

"They won't come back," Peter Gross asserted calmly.

"Then we'll go out and get them," Captain Threthaway said grimly.

"They'll be where they can't be found," Peter Gross replied.

Captain Threthaway snorted impatiently.

"Look here, captain!" Peter Gross exclaimed, facing his skipper squarely. "Batavia is my home when I'm not at sea. I know its ins and outs. Knowing the town, and knowing the crew we've got, I'm sure a stop there will be a mighty unpleasant experience all around. There's a Chinaman there, Ah Sing, a public-house proprietor and a crimp, that has runners to meet every boat. Once a man goes into his rumah makan, he's as good as lost until the next skipper comes along short-handed and puts up the price."

Captain Threthaway smiled confidently.

"Poor as the crew is, Mr. Gross, there's no member of it will prefer lodging in a Chinese crimp's public house ten thousand miles from home to his berth here."

"They'll forget his color when they taste his hot rum," Peter Gross returned bruskly. "And once they drink it, they'll forget everything else. Ah Sing is the smoothest article that ever plaited a queue, and they don't make them any slicker than they do in China."

Captain Threthaway's lips pinched together in irritation.

"There are always the authorities," he remarked pettishly, to end the controversy.

Peter Gross restrained a look of disgust with difficulty.

"Yes, there are always the authorities," he conceded. "But in the Chinese campong they're about as much use as a landlubber aloft in a blow. The campong is a little republic in itself, and Ah Sing is the man that runs it. If the truth was known, I guess he's the boss Chinaman of the East Indies – pirate, trader, politician – anything he can make a guilder at. From his rum-shop warrens run into every section of Chinatown, and they're so well hid that the governor, though he's sharp as a weasel and by all odds the best man the Dutch ever had here, can't find them. It's the real port of missing men."

Captain Threthaway looked shoreward, where dusky, breech-clouted natives were resting in the cool shade of the heavy-leafed mangroves. A bit of breeze stirred just then, bringing with it the rich spice-grove and jungle scents of the thickly wooded island. A fierce longing for the shore seized the captain. He squared his shoulders with decision.

"I'll take the chance, Mr. Gross," he said. "This heat is killing me. You may figure on twenty-four hours in port."

Twelve hours after the Coryander cast anchor in Batavia harbor, Smith, Jacobson, and Le Beouf were reported missing. When Captain Threthaway, for all his Boston upbringing, had exhausted a prolific vocabulary, he called his first mate.

"Mr. Gross," he said, "the damned renegades are gone. Do you think you can find them?"

Long experience in the vicissitudes of life, acquired in that best school of all, the forecastle, had taught Peter Gross the folly of saying, "I told you so." Therefore he merely replied:

"I'll try, sir."

So it befell that he sought news of the missing ones at the great white stadhuis, where the Heer Sachsen, always his friend, met him and conceived the inspiration for his prompt recommendation to the governor-general.

Peter Gross ambled on toward Ah Sing's rumah makan without the slightest suspicion he was being followed. On his part, Governor-General Van Schouten was content to let his quarry walk on unconscious of observation while he measured the man.

"God in Israel, what a man!" his excellency exclaimed admiringly, noting Peter Gross's broad shoulders and stalwart thighs. "If he packs as much brains inside his skull as he does meat on his bones, there are some busy days ahead for my Dyaks." He smacked his lips in happy anticipation.

Ah Sing's grog-shop, with its colonnades and porticoes and fussy gables and fantastic cornices terminating in pigtail curlicues, was a squalid place for all the ornamentation cluttered on it. Peter Gross observed its rubbishy surroundings with ill-concealed disgust.

"'Twould be a better Batavia if some one set fire to the place," he muttered to himself. "Yet the law would call it arson."

Looking up, he saw Ah Sing seated in one of the porticoes, and quickly masked his face to a smile of cordial greeting, but not before the Chinaman had detected his ill humor.

There was a touch of three continents in Ah Sing's appearance. He sat beside a table, in the American fashion; he smoked a long-stemmed hookah, after the Turkish fashion, and he wore his clothes after the Chinese fashion. The bland innocence of his pudgy face and the seraphic mildness of his unblinking almond eyes that peeped through slits no wider than the streak of a charcoal-pencil were as the guilelessness of Mother Eve in the garden. Motionless as a Buddha idol he sat, except for occasional pulls at the hookah.

"Good-morning, Ah Sing," Peter Gross remarked happily, as he mounted the colonnade.

The tiny slits through which Ah Sing beheld the pageantry of a sun-baked world opened a trifle wider.

"May Allah bless thee, Mr. Gross," he greeted impassively.

Peter Gross pulled a chair away from one of the other tables and placed it across the board from Ah Sing. Then he succumbed to it with a sigh of gentle ease.

"A hot day," he panted, and fanned himself as though he found the humidity unbearable.

"Belly hot," Ah Sing gravely agreed in a guttural voice that sounded from unfathomable abysses.

"A hot day for a man that's tasted no liquor for nigh three months," Peter Gross amended.

"You makee long trip?" Ah Sing inquired politely.

Peter Gross's features molded themselves into an expression eloquently appreciative of his past miseries.

"That's altogether how you take it, Ah Sing," he replied. "From Frisco to Melbourne to Batavia isn't such a thunderin' long ways, not to a man that's done the full circle three times. But when you make the voyage with a Methodist captain who doesn't believe in grog, it's the longest since Captain Cook's. Ah Sing, my throat's dryer than a sou'east monsoon. Hot toddy for two."

Ah Sing clapped his hands and uttered a magic word or two in Chinese. A Cantonese waiter paddled swiftly outside, bearing a lacquered tray and two steaming glasses. One he placed before Ah Sing and the other before Peter Gross, who tossed a coin on the table.

"Pledge your health, sir," Peter Gross remarked and reached across the board to clink glasses with his Chinese friend. Ah Sing lifted his glass to meet the sailor's and suddenly found it snaked out of his hands by a deft motion of Peter Gross's middle finger. Gross slid his own glass across the table toward Ah Sing.

"If you don't mind," he remarked pleasantly. "Your waiter might have mistaken me for a plain A. B., and I've got to get back to my ship to-night."

Ah Sing's bland and placid face remained expressionless as a carved god's. But he left the glass stand, untasted, beside him.

The Coryander's mate sipped his liquor and sank deeper into his chair. He studied with an air of affectionate interest the long lane of quaintly colonnaded buildings that edged the city within a city, the Chinese campong. Pigtailed Orientals, unmindful of the steaming heat, squirmed across the scenery. Ten thousand stenches were compounded into one, in which the flavor of garlic predominated. Peter Gross breathed the heavy air with a smile of reminiscent pleasure and dropped another notch into the chair.

"It feels good to be back ashore again for a spell, Ah Sing," he remarked. "A nice, cool spot like this, with nothing to do and some of your grog under the belt, skins a blistery deck any day. I don't wonder so many salts put up here."

Back of the curtain of fat through which they peered, Ah Sing's oblique eyes quivered a trifle as they watched the sailor keenly.

"By the way," Peter Gross observed, stretching his long legs out to the limit of their reach, "you haven't seen any of my men, have you? Smith, he's pock-marked and has a cut over his right eye; Jacobson, a tall Swede, and Le Beouf, a little Frenchman with a close-clipped black mustache and beard?"

Ah Sing gravely cudgeled his memory.

"None of your men," he assured, "was here."

Peter Gross's face fell.

"That's too bad!" he exclaimed in evident disappointment. "I thought sure I'd find 'em here. You're sure you haven't overlooked them? That Frenchie might call for a hop; we picked him out of a hop-joint at Frisco."

"None your men here," Ah Sing repeated gutturally.

Peter Gross rumpled his tousled hair in perplexity.

"We-el," he drawled unhappily, "if those chaps don't get back on shipboard by nightfall I'll have to buy some men from you, Ah Sing. Have y' got three good hands that know one rope from another?"

"Two men off schooner Marianna," Ah Sing replied in his same thick monotone. "One man, steamer Callee-opie. Good strong man. Work hard."

"You stole 'em, I s'pose?" Peter Gross asked pleasantly.