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By Root 9759 0

pier in front of Bloody Mary, he entertained a persistent question that neither he nor any other American fighting man has ever really answered: "What am I doing here? How did I, Joe Cable, of Philadelphia, wind up out here? This is Bali-ha'i, and a year ago I had never heard of it. What am I doing here?" The question pounded upon his ears in exactly the same way it does upon the ears of a commuter from New Rochelle some morning as he stands in Grand Central Station. He has stood in that station daily for nineteen years, and yet on some one unpredictable morning the meaninglessness of it all bursts in upon him, and he asks, "What am I doing here?" It is certain that Herod of Judea asked himself that question, too. Like Herod, like the man from New Rochelle, like Alexander in Afghanistan, Joe Cable could find no logical reason to explain why he was on Bali-ha'i that morning.

But being there, he was disposed to enjoy his experience to the full. He was not, however, prepared for what Bloody Mary had in store for him.

She took the lead as soon as Cable reached the sandy beach. "We go! We go!" she said at every intersection. She took him past the native huts, and the native girls stayed behind. She took him through the wild coconut trees to the climbing path that led through the loveliest tropical gardens he had ever seen. They were the gardens of the Chinese, filled with fruits and flowers. She took him past the small hospital where he heard Benny laughing with the hard-working sisters. Then she beckoned him around a corner, and suddenly he was on a plateau from which he could see the bay, and the boat, and endless blue of water upon coral sand. Between him and the bay stretched the coconut trees, the gardens, the little huts, and the spotless beach. It was impossible to think that a year ago, before the Japs threatened the islands and Americans threatened the girls, Bali-ha'i was a wilderness.

"We go!" insisted Mary, and Lt. Cable stopped his inspection of the bay, but even as he turned his eyes away, they rested upon the peaks of Vanicoro. They, too, were clean and lovely that morning as if the old volcanoes had burned them white.

Cable now followed Mary along a narrow footpath. Up to this moment he had not wondered where she was taking him. Probably to some Tonkinese hut, he concluded, and he had no time to reconsider before the waddling old woman stopped short, stepped aside, and pointed proudly at a clean, whitewashed house beneath a protecting cluster of four large jungle trees. The earth around the house was packed flat. At the door stood an old Tonkinese man, a younger man, and his wife.

Cable stood where he was and watched Mary greet her friends. They talked furiously, but they did not kiss. They grabbed one another's shoulders, but they did not shake hands. Yet when Mary brought them over and jabbered in Tonkinese, each one sedately shook Cable's hand and promptly walked down the path he had just climbed.

At this moment Mary beckoned him to follow her, and he watched her disappear into the open door at which a moment before her three friends had stood. Cable entered behind her, stooping as he did so. When he had blinked once or twice, he saw that he was standing on an earthen floor, miraculously clean. There were few articles of furniture, but against one wall stood a young Tonkinese girl, perhaps seventeen years old. She was a small girl, slender, with very black hair which was smooth about her head. She wore the Tonkinese white blouse and black trousers. She was barefooted, and her face was a lovely oval, yellow, finely modeled. When she smiled, her teeth were as white as the native girls' had been.

As in a trance, Cable sucked in his breath audibly. The girl smiled, and at that moment Cable heard a hissing noise. He turned around, frightened. But it was only Bloody Mary. She had her peach-basket hat in her left hand. Stains of betel juice were drenching the ravines of her mouth, which was grinning, broadly. Her broken teeth showed through, black, black as night. She winked her right eye heavily and asked,