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Read Ebook: The Story of the Thirty-second Regiment Massachusetts Infantry Whence it came; where it went; what it saw and what it did by Parker Francis J Francis Jewett
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Ebook has 367 lines and 12727 words, and 8 pages
THE ARGUS PHEASANT
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.
"I fear I have not understood you, my dear general. What do you advise?"
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:
The general shook his head with a brave show of regret.
"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 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."
"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.
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.
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."
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?"
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.
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.
"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.
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:
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, Caesarian 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."
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.
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