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Murderers' Island 17
hung with queer bows and arrows, to a library. Its windows overlooked the great red prison across the little bay. I wondered what sort of man ruled over this colony of turbident convicts. I created a lionlike figure with bold features and hard eyes. The door opened and, instead, there came toward us a stooped, middleaged man, the type one sees, book in hand, wandering under the elms of a college campus. He said in the low voice of the cultured Englishman, "Welcome to the Andamans, gentlemen."
This was Colonel Beadon, with almost despotic powers. With a handful of whites and a company or so of soldiery, he rules over the thousands of criminals, most of whom are allowed to live quite freely in villages of their own. The prison across the bay was used only for the most desperate characters, and seditionists and new prisoners. This bookish Governor seemed to take the convicts as a matter of course, but even he appeared gripped by the mystery of a race of pigmies who inhabited the jungle. One tribe, he said, roamed the forest only a few miles from the colony, but could not be captured or hardly seen. The only sign the colony ever had of them was when sometimes at night they crept out of the jungle, killed a few convicts and escaped back into their impenetrable wilderness. When the Governor spoke of these queer little jungle people, his voice lost a little of its tone of semi-boredom.
But I was much more interested just then in the life of these whites I had seen walking unarmed among the murderer convicts. So I asked for more information.