CHAPTER XII.
THE CHILDREN ARE CARRIED OFF The pirate attack had been a complete surprise,
A sure proof that the unscrupulous Hook had conducted it improperly,
For to surprise the natives fairly is beyond the wit of the white man.
By all the unwritten laws of savage warfare,
It is always the savage who attacks.
And with the willingness of his race,
He does it just before the dawn,
At which time he knows the courage of the whites to be at its lowest ebb.
The white men have,
In the meantime,
Made a rude stockade on the summit of yonder ground,
At the foot of which a stream runs,
For it is destruction to be too far from water.
There they wait the onslaught,
The inexperienced ones clutching their revolvers and treading on twigs,
But the old hands sleeping tranquilly until just before the dawn.
Through the long black night the savage scouts wriggle,
Snake-like,
Among the grass without stirring a blade.
The brushwood closes behind them,
As silently as sand into which a mole has dived.
Not a sound is to be heard,
Save when they give vent to a wonderful imitation of the lonely call of the coyote.
The cry is answered by other braves,
And some of them do it even better than the coyotes,
Who are not very good at it.
So the chill hours wear on,
But to the trained hand those ghastly calls,
And still ghastlier silences,
Are but an imitation of how the night is marching.
That this was the usual procedure was so well known to Hook,
That in disregarding it,
He cannot be excused on the plea of ignorance.
The Picaninnies,
On their part,
Trusted implicitly to his honor,
And their whole action of the night stands out in marked contrast to his.
They left nothing undone that was consistent with the reputation of their tribe.
With that alertness of the senses,
Which is at once the marvel and despair of civilized peoples,
They know that the pirates were on the island from the moment one of them trod on a dry stick,
And in an incredibly short space of time the coyote cries began.
Every foot of ground between the spot where Hook had landed his forces,
And the home under the trees,
Was stealthily examined by braves wearing their moccasins with the heels in front.
They found only one hillock with the stream at its base,
So that Hook had no choice.
Here he must establish himself and wait for just before the dawn.
Everything being thus mapped out with almost diabolical cunning,
The main body of the natives folded their blankets around them.
Here,
Dreaming,
Though wide awake,
Of the exquisite tortures to which they were to put him at daybreak,
Those confiding savages were found by the treacherous Hook.
From the accounts afterwards supplied by such of the scouts as escaped the carnage,
He does not seem to even have to pause at the rising ground,
Though it is certain that in the gray light he must have seen it.
No thought of waiting to be attacked appears from first to last,
To have visited his subtle mind.
He would not even hold off till the night was nearly spent.
On he pounded with no policy but to fall to.
What could the bewildered scouts do?
Masters as they were of every warlike artifice save this one,
But trot helplessly after him,
Exposing themselves fatally to view while they gave pathetic utterance to the coyote cry.
Around the brave tiger lily were a dozen of her stoutest warriors,
And they suddenly saw the perfidious pirates bearing down upon them.
Fell from their eyes,
Then the film through which they had looked at victory.
No more would they torture at the stake,
For them the happy hunting ground was now.
They knew it,
But as their father's sons they acquitted themselves.
Even then they had time to gather in the phalanx,
And would have been hard to break had they risen quickly,
But this they were forbidden to do by the traditions of their race.
It is written that the noble savage must never express surprise in the presence of the white.
Thus terrible as the sudden appearance of the pirates must have been to them,
They remained stationary for a moment,
Not a muscle moving,
As if the foe had come by invitation.
Then indeed the tradition gallantly upheld.
They seized their weapons,
And the air was torn with the war cry,
But it was now too late.
It was no part of ours to describe what was a massacre rather than a fight.
Thus perished many of the flower of the Picaninny tribe.
Not all unavenged did they die,
For with lean wolf fell Alf Mason,
To disturb the Spanish no more,
And among others who bit the dust were Geo,
Scowry,
Chass,
Turley,
And the Elation Fogarty.
Turley fell to the tomahawk of a terrible panther,
Who ultimately cut away through the pirates with Tiger Lily and a small remnant of the tribe.
To what extent Hook is to blame for his tactics on this occasion is for the historian to decide.
Had he waited on the rising ground to the proper hour,
He and his men would probably have been butchered,
And in judging him it is only fair to take this into account.
What he should perhaps have done was to acquaint his opponents that he proposed to follow a new method.
On the other hand this,
As destroying the element of surprise,
Would have made his strategy of no avail,
So that the whole question is beset with difficulties.
One cannot at least withhold a reluctant admiration for the wit that had conceived so bold a scheme,
And the fell genius with which it was carried out.
What were his own feelings about himself at that triumphant moment?
Fain would have dogs have known,
As breathing heavily and wiping their cutlasses,
They gathered at a discreet distance from his hook and squinted through their ferret eyes at this extraordinary man.
Elation must have been in his heart,
But his face did not reflect it.
Ever a dark and solitary enigma,
He stood aloof from his followers in spirit,
As in substance.
The night's work was not yet over,
For it was not the natives he had come out to destroy,
They were but the bees to be smoked so that he could get to the honey.
It was Pan he wanted,
Pan and Wendy and their band,
But chiefly Pan.
Peter was such a small boy that one tends to wonder at the man's hatred of him.
True,
He had flung hooks armed as a crocodile,
But even this and the increased insecurity of life to which it led,
Owing to the crocodile's pertinacity,
Hardly account for a vindictiveness so relentless and malignant.
The truth is that there was something about Peter which goaded the pirate captain to frenzy.
It was not his courage,
It was not his engaging appearance,
It was not.
.
.
There was no beating around the bush,
For we know quite well what it was and have got to tell.
It was Peter's cockiness.
This had got on Hook's nerves,
It made his iron claw twitch,
And at night it disturbed him like an insect.
While Peter lived,
The tortured man fell that he was a lion in a cage into which a sparrow had come.
The question now was how to get down the trees or how to get his dogs down.
He ran his greedy eyes over them,
Searching for the thinnest ones.
They wriggled uncomfortably,
For they knew he would not scruple to ram them down with poles.
In the meantime,
What of the boys?
We have seen them at the first claying of the weapons,
Turned as if they were stone figures,
Open mouth,
All appealing with outstretched arms to Peter,
And we return to them as their mouths close and their arms fall to their sides.
The pandemonium above has ceased almost as suddenly as it arose,
Past like a fierce gust of wind,
But they know that in the passing it was determined their fate.
Which side had won?
The pirates,
Listening avidly at the mouths of the trees,
Heard the question put by every boy,
And alas,
They also heard Peter's answers.
If the natives have won,
He said,
They will beat the Tom-Tom.
It is always their sign of victory.
Now Smee had found the Tom-Tom,
And was at that moment sitting on it.
You will never hear the Tom-Tom again,
He muttered,
But inaudibly,
Of course,
For strict silence had been enjoyed.
To his amazement,
Hook signed him to beat the Tom-Tom,
And slowly there came to Smee an understanding of the dreadful wickedness of the order.
Never probably had this simple man admired Hook so much.
Twice Smee beat upon the instrument,
And then stopped to listen gleefully.
The Tom-Tom,
The miscreants heard Peter cry.
A native victory.
The doomed children answered with a cheer that was music to the black hearts above,
And almost immediately they repeated their goodbyes to Peter.
This puzzled the pirates,
But all their other feelings were swallowed by a base delight that the enemy were about to come up the trees.
They smirked at each other,
And rubbed their hands.
Rapidly and silently,
Hook gave his orders.
One man to each tree,
And the others to arrange themselves in a line two yards apart.
