Argosy All-Story Weekly, February 4, 1922 — page 117: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

FORTUNE UNAWARES. eventually I landed on Borneo at Sandakan as medico for a certain trading company which had large concessions and big planta- tions of tobacco and sago. I kept sober for a while. There was a girl—I got drunk, and I saw what she thought of me. “She really cared—for what she first thought I was, a rolling stone of a mad Irishman who could sing and dance and ride and make poetry and love and who only wanted to meet the right girl. And then she hated herself. I don’t think she hated me. Rather she had than the way she did look at me. Pardon this personal stuff. You see, I thought I loved her more than anything in the world, but I didn’t—I loved liquor better. I got the chuck at the plantation and I went on the beach, muck- ing along. Never mind the details—I don’t remember them. I got to be such a hound that I hung around a fishing village over here on Banguey for the sake of the liquor they forced me to manufacture. I’m a fa- mous brewer on Banguey. I can make booze out of rice, millet, palm-juice, ba- nanas, pineapples—that’s the worst and. strongest, next to sweet potatoes—and I’ve been steadily drunk for a year or so. “ Tell me the date presently and I can figure it. Call it two years. And I got my testamur at Dublin University! Oh, Lord! Only thing I didn’t do was to tie up with a native woman. Between women and myself, black, brown, or white, there is a deep gulf fixed. Very deep. I dug it and I ought to know. “ That yacht, the Zuleika, was wrecked here some weeks ago. I don’t know when. I was drunk at the time. Very drunk, after a pineapple spree. I’ve heard some talk about it since. There were lights changed over on Marudu Bay and one put out on Mallawalle and another faked on Banguey. A deliberate wrecking job. Some talk of a ruby that they didn’t find. And when they didn’t find it, killing and torture. I don’t know much about the details. As I’ve said, I was drunk when it happened. But when I found out there were white men aboard and that these devils had murdered them in cold blood, after I’d been aboard the wreck, I told them exactly what I thought of them, with just enough liquor in me to 427, aid my imagination and a good working knowledge of their own dialect. | “They didn’t like it and they did me up pretty thoroughly. I managed to crawl away and I’ve been living under the head- man’s house lately, that being the last place they’d look for me. Not pleasant, you know, with the ticks and the fire and pepper ants, but safe. I hugged some idea of get- ting even with them and there was another reason—lI’d found something. ‘““'They gave me this wallop on the head a long time ago when I tried to cut loose from the tribe. It has left a clot there on the brain. May clear up some time, may not, but it has short-circuited some of the memory cells and there are some things I can’t remember. One of these things is the discovery I’ve made. I know it’s valuable, but I can’t remember. If it ever comes back—but, as I say, I hoped I’d have a chance of getting even, especially with Balak, the headman, and I hung on. Sneaked out nights and got food, but I couldn’t get any booze to speak of. But I overheard this talk about some ship being. expected. Know anything about a man name Shang Wa?” Li Yuen nodded. “The tribe—Balak’s tribe—are only su- pernumeraries in this thing. They got in on the wreck because it was piled up on their territory. But I gathered the job was done by Sulumen. This time the Sulumen are going to be in it, too, but the most of them came up from Barawak way. And you’ve got machine guns and two quick-firers! It ‘ll be a regular Donnybrook picnic in the mornin’ for, mind ye, there’ll be a hun- dred prahus at least and they’ll swarm at us like a hive of angry bees, everywhere at once. Could I have another drink of that rice brandy?” | So, after all, O’Rourke did not impart much information nor did Li Yuen vouch- safe him any in return, but it was a great thing for me he swam off to the Little Dra- gon and that I happened to stop the bullet that would have made him shark-meat. You are to visualize our position that morning. The Little Dragon lay head to the current, which was flooding, in a nar- row channel off the southeast coast of Ban« COmMiClbMooks.CGonmn