Show ANOTHER OUTCAST a P Half French Creole and Half English 1UNALDS THE ODD STOWAWAY y Part Boy Part Man He was a Sore Puzzle to His Benefactor Whom he Finally Tried to Betray For TIKE SUSDAT HERALDCopyrighted r OR THREE thousand trackless 1 1 track-less miles the vast gi 5 expanse of tho f Indian ocean a sweeps from the narrow Sunda straits to where green hilled the lonely island of j Mauritius rises from unfathomed depths No ocean in the world presents to tbe mariner mar-iner such an equal stretch or havenle water In the crowded channels of the stormy Atlantic the companionship of another an-other and often many sails in sight Is of i iaily occurrence to the traveler across the I ocean in the great Pacific too the surface I of the peaceful sea dotted witb countless isles and archipelagoes and crossed by tho great highways of commerce to the Orient and to Australia A glance at a map of the eastern world will show that the Indian sea can claim no such advantages as are possessed by its two big brothers If a straight coarse be drawn from the southern extremity of Java to Maurituis in the Indian ocean between the narallels of about five degrees to twenty degrees south latitude lati-tude a distance of 3000 miles it will be seen that this intersects no land of any character save the rocky uninhabited peak of Rodrique till the Sugar island of Enr land stands solitary sentinel off the coast i of GreatMadagascar Itis a dreary lonely voyage to those to whom the novelty ocean travel has long since lost its freshness fresh-ness But withal a peaceful voyage with steady warm winds of tropic trades with blue and cloudless skies and bluer almost unruffled water It was my fortune once some balfadozen years ago to find myself stranded and almost penniless in that hot and dusty outpost of British East Indian EmpireSingapore I was endeavoring in r r r some way to reach the coast of distant Madagascar nrrnouT MONET AND FRIENDLESS Absolute necessity and the daily inroads that the expenses of the meanest of sailor boarding houses made upon my scanty purse at last drove me to wandering hour after hour about the shipping wharves and to sit in gloomy dejection in the tarsmelling rooms of ship chandler shops At last a little luck came to me in the shape of a small hairy Scottish skipper who commanded com-manded a little Australian brig then lying in tbe outer harbor and loading for Mauritius Mauri-tius We soon struck a bargain he wanted s mate to bis three hundredton ship and toY f to-Y his crew of seven men one lascar and one II C Chinaman cook and I wanted a cheap pas 0 sago somehow across the Indian ocean tot S = to-t J rC va of J 5 G r t o 1 I funds and to friends So one brilliant I tropical day we got up our rusty anchors and steered down and along the high ver dureclad shore of Sumatra through the Banca and the Sunda straits and hauled up to the eastward and across the Indian sea Fiftyeight days after this one dark and stormy night for the southwest monsoon was freshly blowing the little vessel rushed by the rocky peak of the Rodrique and steered away for Mauritius In three days more there rose from out the ocean before our weary eyes the green and lovely hills of that fairest gem on the bosom of any sea Mauritius It is a queer place this Port Louis the capital Nestled in the lap of lofty mountains towering cloud capped on every side it sleeps in hot and lazy peace Yellowgreen blind houses glare in the tropic sun at one another across narrow and crooked streets Dusty statues of long since DEAD TRENCH DIGNITARIES stand mutely protecting here and there at British occupation bronze fountains long since dry with dusty mermaids gazing down at empt basins in the parks Long r CR R 1 r I 5 lr 3 i ISLES OF MAURITIUS rows of tumbledown vehicles of every shape and make in the public squares Now and then a lofty pretentious building with many people coming in and outsugar ware houses Now and then a little bustle on the wharves where some new arrival hauls in and with much shouting and profanity in all manner of languages is finally lashed to her sisters at the docks But above all a relentless sun by day and a sultry starlit sky by night But inthe country up the mountain sides and on the great estates of the sugar planters plant-ers all the surroundings of the musty sleepy town are changed Here are great onestory rambling houses built at the end of broad lanes lined on both sides by the giant trunks of the Mauritius palm Here are great piazzas whose pillars are entwined by thick and sweet smelling vines Hero are glorious lawns blushing in the thousand thou-sand glows of tropical fiowers Here In the day in cool and woody rambles the traveler feels no sense of the heat of the sun overhead nor at night when the mountain moun-tain winds come perfumed rustling through thick foliage A life of ease of comfort of restand indolence Six weeks of it almost taught me to forget and repent of the object I bad in view and that bad drawn me to the beautiful island Day by day THE DIFFICULTIES INCREASED as to reaching Madagascar The French I had long since bombarded Tamatan and taken possession of that seaport Their naval force on the western coast had been largely augmented and their cruisers strictly blockaded all the small Malagasy tradirg ports for several hundred miles Trade with the great island and Mauritius I was practically dead all communication had ceased except very occasionally when some daring dealer in cotton goods risked a schooner load to some more southern post In all the difficulties that encountered me from the firstmomentof my landing at Port Louis thero was none that concerned me more than securing the help of some able bodied companion one to whom I could talk and who could converse with me and the Malagasy as well Some ODD who knew something of Madagascar of the country the people and bow best to avoid all these dangers with which my ears had been filled since first I made known my design I had freely advertised in the little French weekly paper published in Port Louis My host in the country too had let it be widely known about the island The natural consequence con-sequence followed I had for the first few days a host of applicants And such applicants appli-cants Adventurers broken down speculators specu-lators castaways from ships and the riffraff riff-raff of a floating halfcreole halfEnglish population None suited me I did not see a single face that I felt I could trust in so long and dangerous an adventure Finally I gave it up and decided to proceed alone Meanwhile I had arranged by halfcharter with a French gentleman on the island togo to-go over to Madagascar and help land a cargo car-go of cotton goods with which a little vessel ves-sel be owned bad long been loaded The day came at last for her sailing and having all my goods aboard I biJ farewell to my kind friends in Mauritius and set sail for the coast of the Great African Island I was practically alone I KNEW NO ONE in the motley crowd that peopled the deck of the schooner The captain was a French Creole of villainous countenance He spoke a little broken English but surly overbearing over-bearing and cruel The crew consisted of four men all Creoles who spoke only bad French The dozen passengers were all French people of the lowest caste taking their chance again in a country from which they bad been driven by tbe Malagasy In the weeks passage to the coast I would sit for hours on the roof of the little low house on deck buried in my own reflections talking for days to no one and finding no solace the certainty now of the desperate adventure I bad undertaken One morning I heard a shout from forward and saw some of the crew leaning over the schooners rail and pointed eagerly down at the sea I walked forward and looked over A large school of dolphins were sporting in the foam that the bluff bows of the vessel made Two or three of the men got linos and commenced to fish with hooks baited with pieces of rR Presently one of them crawled out on the short bowsprit to get a better chance The Jib bad been hauled down as the schooner was sailing wing in wing before the spar The sailor reached it and sat down He commenced to unwind un-wind his line when suddenly he gave a shriek dropped his tackle in the sea and sprang up the stay He pointed frantically at the jib and screamed for the captain VT FRIEND WITH THE VILLAINOUS FACE first 1st loose a volley of horrible profanity at the frightened sailor then he got over the bows himself and climbed out on the bowsprit The sailor joined him and they both began to loose the jib Presently there was a shout and a curse and from out the folds of tbe sails the two men dragged and held between them the oddest specimen of living humanity I had ever seen They pulled him over the bows and let him drop heavily on the deck All the crew and passengers crowded around myself my-self with the foremost The stowaway for such he evidently was rose slowly and stiffly to hIs feet and looked about him Sis face was the face of a full grown man of forty his bodyand limbs those of a boy of fifteen His hair was thick black and curly his complexion very dark and swarthy and his eyes black as a coal His face was devoid of any hair but with many wrinkle around the mouth and forehead He wore a dirty shirt of blue flannel that hung in wrinkles about bis diminutive fig re He was mot more than five feet in height He glanced at us all and smiled I li i < < < T L 1 blankly Who are you Where do you come from you doge sputtered out the captain shaking him roughly He turned his eves towards him and with tho same bland smile answered in purestFrench From Mauritius captain I am going to Madagascar my parents are there at Ma banoro I will not disturb 1ouifif but alas I am hungry if you will please give me to eat A torrent of questions followed follow-ed and the fierce captain bad snatched up a piece of rope to stnke with shouting to him You viper You stowaway Ill teach you a better trick than that To all of which this odd being only answered an-swered with his black eyes and bland smile and repeating gently ALAS IF BUT TOU WOULD GIVE ME SOMETHING SOME-THING TO EAT I put out my hand and touched him on the shoulder Come aft lad Ill see what I can do for you So I was introduced intro-duced to my future friend guide and interpreter inter-preter I took him down into the little abin and got out some potted meat and crackers with a lump of cheese I told him kindly to pitch in He did so without a word and ate with the voracity of a very hungry animal I waited patiently till ho had finished He stood more steadily on his feet then and gazed long at me wonderingly wonder-ingly with his black eyes I waited for him to speak He did presently in a voice as deep as that of a grown person but to my utter astonishment In most excellent English Eng-lish Thank you sir y ou are very very good and kind I will serve you And he quickly put away the tins of meat and breaa from whence he had seen me tako them After that our acquaintance ripened rapidly In the few days that remained before our schooner dropped anchor off tte little Malagasy village of Mbonoro in southeastern Madagascar I had learned much of the story of his life at least as much as he may have deemed advisable to tell me He was born so he said in Port Louis of a French Creole father and an English mother The former was the overseer over-seer of a large sugar plantation in Mauritius Mauri-tius and the latter the governess of the or I f w 1r RINALDO THE STOWAWAT several children of an English officer stationed sta-tioned on the island He had been the only child when his English mother died of the fever ten years ago He had been sent first to a French school in Port Louis for awhile a-while and afterwards to a Jesuit college at Bourbon the adjacent French island His father had remarried and gone with his Creole wife to Madagascar to start a sugar plantation He soon learned that HE BAD BEEN PURPOSELY DESERTED by his father so he had worked his way IB a little coasting vessel from Bourbon to Mauritius and bad lived God knows how for be only came out at night he said for eight months in the streets of Mauritius Hearing of our schooner be had stowed I S 1 c 1 > l i t1 I himself away the night before we sailed and had eaten nothing till he had been found That was all his story So he went with me through the vast dim forests of eastern Madagascar towards the capital of the Queen In the middle of the year Sb4 I and my party reached Antanarivo the capital city of Interior Madagascar and for the following six weeks I remained the guest of the Hova Queen Ranavolona III In all those many dreary days made often the sadder still by the deaths or desertion of my party by forest fever by long exposure ex-posure and the innumerable disheartening incidents of travel in an unknown and barbarous bar-barous country from the far coast to the upland interior Rinaldo as I called him the castaway was my ever faithful companion Ho followed my every action every look every gesture He paid me the most implicit obedience always and forestalled fore-stalled my every unexpressed wish His oldish wrinkled face lit up always with the same bright smile when I addressed him I His cheery voice in good old English came to my ears amid the jibbering of half a thousand naked men like cool water to the thirsty palate His devotiou to me was the blind devotion of animal to human He would sleep nowhere but in front of my tent at night or trot by my side the long weary way through the forest belt He exercised a peculiar sway with the natives who accompanied us though he spoke not their language He excited a certain awe amongst them as much by his peculiar physical appearance as anything else We were traveling in the country of the Betei masaraka A DEGRADED AND VINDICTIVE RiCE and steeped in all the lowest beliefs of savagery and fetishness 1 often at sly moments studied this peculiar creatures face When in repose it expressed little and I have tried to picture to myself how such a head would look upon another body or such a body with a younger head Then the combination in Rinaldo would suddenly force itself upon me again and I could have shouted with laughter at the oddity of the thing if the earnest honest look of love and reverence for me I could see creep Into his black eyes when he caught my glance at him At the end of our stay at the capital in the fall of 1H I started at the bead of a native expedition of nearly four hundred souls to reach the west coast of Madagascar Madagas-car Rinaldo accompanied me His devotion devo-tion for me became more and more marked each day both while we were Antanarivo and the terrible journey toward the sea In somewhat over a month our party found ourselves in the heart of the western or Sakalara district the country of a totally barbarous cruel and savage race By constant con-stant desertions and deaths our once large army had dwindled to a handful of men and women and food was scarce We were many many miles from the coast Our situation grew daily more hopeless and I was full of a dull foreboding and anxiety Little by little I noticed too that the natives na-tives about me showed in many ways discontentment dis-contentment and insubordination Slowly I began to understand that for some unknown un-known reason they had lost both fear and respect for me The crisis came rapidly One morning I rose much earlier than was my custom I came out from my tent in the very early morning light To my great astonishment I DID NOT FIND RINALDO at my door as had been his invariable custom cus-tom and I saw that the camp fires that generally died out during the night were all burning brightly aid surrounded by groups of natives I knew both the value of caution as well as of action with the rude people who surrounded me I went back into the tent and armed myself then oncoming on-coming out stepped cautiously around and behind the cauras and into the woods behind be-hind the native camp Noiselessly I trod the forest path till I got within a few rods of the nearest blazing fire Twenty naked men were standing about it gesticulating and talking wildly one to another I could not of course understand them but I was sure that several strange laces were among them I looked closer my heart almost L t I stopped beating They were strangers indeed in-deed They were Sakalara and not my party There wore twenty fires burning in the clearing How many Sakalarai Oh I where was Rinaldo If he was only here l What should I do I turned again to the I fire Suddenly there was a stir about it sr r y Li4 fn 1 1 f READT TO ATTACK and a figure joined the group of natives My eyes fairly started from their sockets My blood seemed to cease flowing in their veins I doubted the vision God had given me for there in the light of the early dawn stood Rinaldo not the stowaway Rinal I do that I had rescued and befriended but the dark and naked Rinaldo tho Sakalara J I I He was talking vehemently to the excited natives about him in tao native tongue the one bo bad sworn to me he did not know a syllable IN A WHIRL OF SURPRISE of horror of fear I knew not what to do I got back to my tent and fell heavily on the blankets When I aroused ayself the I sun was us tha bustle of early preparation for the march was in tho camp and Rinaldo was wrapped in his blanket at my tent door I had made up my mind what to do I stepped over him and out into the open air Rapidly I mustered a dozen of the most trusty of those who had come all the way from the east coast with me One or two of these understood a little English and had always been faithful and true I harangued them excitedly of the Sakalara and of the certainties that I had of at attack at-tack this day Soon I had them as excited as myself and by a hundred native ways they tried to convince of their valor and integrity I had to trust them and I gathered gath-ered them in a knot near my tent The rest of my party gathered in groups about wondering won-dering and chattering as only the Malagasy can Of Rinaldo I had said nothing I intended in-tended to see him I threw back the flap of my tent and touched him lightly as I entered enter-ed I sat down on the grassy floor as he came in Sit down Rinaldo I tried to say calmly He did it wonderingly Rin aldo I said we have long been friends I found you a waif an outcast a stowaway I fed you clothed you cared for you You know the story I do This early morning I saw not Rinaldo the outcast but who I the Sakalara Ho said nothing but rose slowly slow-ly to his feet Open that tent sir He did so I raised my hand slowly Go I said The same oldish wrinkled face the same soft pleading look in the coal black eyes the same bland and childish smile upon his lips he turned but as instant tome to-me then dropped the flap walked slowly across the forest open and was lost forever in the gloom of the mighty wood I never saw him again But one of the greatest puzzles of my varied life still remains re-mains unanswered in my brain I Who was this oddest of odd creatures and what was the fate of this last cf outcasts out-casts I MAsoN W SHUFELDT Lieut U S Navy I I r vw |