Fantasy Football Challenge - Football Fanatics Library

Fantasy Football Challenge - Library of Books for Football Fanatics

Fantasy Football Challenge presents
My Tropic Isle

62 of 70

had peeled a luscious banana. He sacrificed it, and Jimmy appeared the next instant with a moustache and dripping beard of squashed fruit as an adornment to his astonished face. Then he opened his mouth to pour forth his soul in an agonising bleat. Tom got in a second shot with the banana skin. With a report like unto that which one makes by bursting an air-distended paper bag, the missile plastered Jimmy's cavernous mouth, smothered his squeal, and sat him down so suddenly that Tom thought his "wind" had stopped for ever. Kneeling beside the boy, he set about kneading his stomach, while Jimmy gasped and glared, making horrible grimaces, as he struggled for breath. Nelly, nervous Nelly, concluding that Tom was determined to thump the life out of Jimmy, assailed him with her bananas and vocal efforts of exquisite shrillness. Just as matters were becoming seriously complicated, Jimmy rolled away, scrambled to his feet, and fled, yelling, to the camp, firm in the belief that his doting father had made an attempt on his young life. THE LOGIC OF THE CAMP Poor half-caste Jimmy Yaeki Muggie, a pleasant-voiced lad, who always wore in his face the slur of conscious shame of birth, died apparently from heart failure, an after-effect of rheumatic fever. Tom and Nelly mourned deeply and wrathfully. Smarting under the rod of fate, they sought with indignant mien counsel upon the cause of death. Jimmy was a young fellow. Why should a young man, who had been lusty until a couple of months ago, die? Somebody must have killed him by covert means. In the first outburst of grief they blamed me. Tom declared, with passion in his eyes, that I had killed Jimmy by making him drunk. The charge was not absolutely groundless, for when the yellow-faced fellow was chilly with a collapse, I had administered reviving sips of whisky-and-water. Yes, Tom declared in an angry mood, and with the air of one who washed his hands of the whole sad business, the doses of whisky had killed Jimmy. As Tom indulged to the fulness of his heart in the luxury of his woe, he began to reflect further, and to change his opinion. He mentioned incidentally that whisky was "good." "Before you gib em that boy whisky, he close up dead-finish. B'mby he more better." Then he began vehemently to protest against the malign influence of some "no good" boy on the mainland, and Nelly, eager to satisfy her own cravings for some definite cause for the ending of the life of a strong boy, supported Tom's vague theories quite enthusiastically. To each distinct natural phenomenon blacks assign a real presence. Even toothache, to which he is subject, Tom ascribes to a malignant fiend, so he asks for a pin which, without a wince, he forces into the decaying bicuspid. His theory is that the little "debil-debil" molesting it will abandon the tooth to attack furiously the obtrusive pin. The affliction upon the camp had certainly been wrought by some boy who had been angry with Jimmy. The how and the why and wherefore of such malignant influence mattered not. There was the dead boy rolled in his blanket, with a petrified smile on his thin lips. Obviously death was due to some illicit control of the laws of Nature. No one but a black boy could so grossly intercept the course of ordinary events as to produce death. Such, at least, was the logic of the camp. Reflecting still deeper, and always with Nelly's unswerving corroboration, Tom began to urge that Jimmy had been poisoned. "Yes," said Nelly, quite cheerfully, "some boy bin poison em. What's the matter that boy want poison Jimmy? Jimmy good fella!" "Who poison that boy?" I asked. "Some fella alonga mainland. .He no good that fella!" "He bin sick long time. Poison kill em one time quick!" Tom dissented. "Some boy make em poison slow. I know that kind." Then he explained. "Some time 'nother fella tchausey belonga Jimmy. He wan make Jimmy shout. Jimmy no wan shout for that boy. They have little bit row." "That boy wouldn't poison Jimmy because he no shout," I reasoned. Everybody liked Jimmy." "Yes," said Tom. "Sometime he might have row." With an air of mystery, Tom continued: "When that boy have row, he get bone belonga dead man, scrape that bone alonga old bottle. When get little heap all asame sugar, put into tea. Jimmy drink tea. B'mby get sick--die long time. Bad poison that." Nelly's grief, which had been shrilly expressed at intervals, became subdued as she listened to Tom's theories. To her mind the whole mystery had been settled. There need be no further anxiety, and only formal expressions of grief. During the rest of the evening the wailing was purely official. Tom's wit had so circumstantially accounted for the event, that it ceased to be solemn. The next day they dug a hole five feet deep in the clean sand at the back of the humpy, and there Jimmy was laid to rest with the whole of his personal property, the most substantial of which consisted of an enamel billy, plate, and mug. The Chinese matting on which he had slept was used to envelop the body, and the sand was compressed in the grave. But Tom and his family had gone. He said--and the deep furrows of grief were in his face: "Carn help it. Must go away one month. I bin think about that boy too much." TOM'S PHILOSOPHY Tom had been so long intimately associated with cynical white people that several of the more fantastic customs of his race are by him contemned. Accordingly I was somewhat surprised to discover, after a few weeks of rainless weather, during which the shady pool at the mouth of the creek whence the supplies for his camp are drawn had decreased in depth, that he had been slyly practising the arts of the rain-maker. As a matter of fact Tom was not in need of water, but, calculating fellow that he is, he foresaw the probability of having to carry it in buckets from the creek for the house, and to obviate such drudgery he shrewdly exercised his wit. A thoughtful, designing person is Tom--ever ready to accept the inevitable, with unruffled aboriginal calm, and just as willing--and as competent, too--to assist weary Nature by any of the little arts which he, by close observation of her moods, has acquired, or the knowledge which has been handed down from generation to generation. As it was the season of thunderstorms, he craftily so timed his designs that

62 of 70 pages. Go to page:

Go to this Book's Directory Page