Chapter XI: Part 11

"The next day, in midafternoon, Poia again felt the darkness close in before her eyes, the pangs of death as her spirit struggled and at last escaped from the body. But this time she found herself gloriously clothed and beautiful at once. All went as before until they came to the third chamber of the _marae_; there were leaves spread on the floor of that place as if for a feast, but the only food was purple flowers. The others sat down and began to eat, and Poia attempted to do likewise, but the taste of the flowers was bitter in her mouth. Again the two women said, 'You belong to us; you must not be called Poia, but Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea.' And they coaxed her to stay with them, but she wept and said that she could not bear to be separated from her husband, whom she loved. As before, they were kind to her and took her to her house, where she awoke as if from sleep, and said nothing.

"It was the same the next day, but this time, when they had come to the third chamber of the _marae_, Vehinetua and Vivitautua said: 'Now you must no longer think of returning. You are ours and we wish you to stay here with us.' Poia wept at their words, for she began to think of the man she loved. 'I must go,' she said; 'if I had no husband I would gladly remain with you here.' At last, when her tears had fallen for a long time, the three dwellers in the _marae_ took her home; they bade her farewell reluctantly, saying that next day she must come to them for good.

"This time Poia awoke in great fear, and she told the story to her mother when they went to bathe together. Her mother went straight to the grandfather, to tell him what she had seen and ask him if her true name was Poia, as he had said years before. Then the old man said that he had done wrong, for the name was not only Poia, but Tetuanui Poia Terai Mateatea, a name which belonged to Vahinetua and Tanetua and Vivitautua. And these three came no more to get Poia; they were content, for they loved her and wanted her to have their name."

As she finished her story, Tehinatu lay down once more, resting her head on her grandmother's knee. My thoughts were wandering far away--across a great ocean and a continent--to the quiet streets of New Bedford, set with old houses in which the descendants of the whalers live out their ordered lives. In all probability the girl beside me, Polynesian to the core and glorying in a long line of ancestors whose outlandish names fell musically from her lips--had cousins who lived on those quiet streets; for she was the granddaughter of a New Bedford whaling captain, the husband of Airima--a Puritan who ate once too often of the _fei_, and lingered in the islands to turn trader and rear a family of half-caste children, and finally to die. The story is an old one, repeated over and over again in every group: the white cross; the half-white children at the parting of the ways; their turning aside from the stony path of the father's race to the pleasant ways of the mother. And so in the end the strain of white, further diluted with each succeeding generation, shows itself in nothing more than a name ... seldom used and oftentimes forgotten. It is Nature at work, and she is not always cruel.

"Is it the same with names in your land?" Airima was asking. "Are certain names kept in a family throughout the years?"

"It is somewhat the same," I told her, "though we do not prize names so highly. My father and grandfather and his father were all named Charles, which you call Tehari."

"Among my people," she said, "the possession of a name means much. As far back as our stories go, there has been a man named Maruae in each generation of my father's family. Some of these Maruaes were strange men. There was Maruae Taura Varua Ino, who fished with a bait of coconut for the spirits of men drowned in the sea; and another was Maruae Mata Tofa, who stole a famous shark--the adopted child of a man of Fariipiti. That was a good shark; it lived in the lagoon, harming no one, and every day the man and his wife called it to them with certain secret words. But Maruae coveted the shark, and he prepared an underwater cave in the coral before his house. Then, when the cave was ready, he hid in the bushes on the shore of the lagoon while the man was calling his shark, and in this way Maruae learned the secret words of summons. When the man and his wife had gone, Maruae called out the words; the shark appeared close inshore and followed him to the cave, where it stayed, well content. And that night he taught it new words. Next day the man and his wife called to their shark; and when it did not come they suspected that Maruae had enticed it away. After that they went to the house of Maruae and accused him of the theft; but he said: 'Give the call, if you think I have stolen your shark. I have a shark, but it is not yours.' They called, but the shark did not come, for he had taught it new words. Then Maruae called and the shark came at once, so he said, 'See, it must be my shark, for it obeys me and not you.' As he turned away to return to Fariipiti, the other man said, 'I think it is my shark, but if it will obey you and no other, you may have it.'

"Some days later, a party of fishermen came to Maruae's cave, where the shark lived. They baited a great hook and threw it into the water, and as it sank into the cave they chanted a magic chant. Then the shark seized the bait, and as they hauled him out they laughed with joy and chanted, '_E matau maitai puru maumau e anave maitai maea i te rai_.' This chant is something about a good hook and a good line, but the other words are dead--what they mean no man knows to-day. That night there was feasting in the houses of the fishermen, but next morning, when Maruae went down to the sea and called his shark, nothing came, though he stayed by the lagoon, calling, from morning till the sun had set. After that he learned that his shark had been killed and eaten, and from that day none of Maruae's undertakings prospered; finally he pined away and died."

Tehinatu stirred and sat up, eyes shining in the moonlight. The subject of sharks has for these people a fascination we do not understand, a significance tinged with the supernatural.

"They did evil to kill that shark," she said, "for all sharks are not bad. I remember the tale my mother told me of Viritoa, the long-haired Paumotuan woman--wife of Maruae Ouma Ati. Her god was a shark. It was many years ago, when the vessels of the white men were few in these islands; Maruae shipped on a schooner going to New Zealand, taking his wife with him, as was permitted in those days. That woman was not like us; she understood ships and had no fear of the sea; as for swimming, there were few like her. When she came here the women marveled at her hair; it reached to her ankles, and she wore it coiled about her head in two great braids, thick as a man's arm.

"The captain of that schooner was always drinking; most of the time he lay stupefied in his bed. As they sailed to the south the sea grew worse and worse, but the captain was too drunk to take notice. The men of the crew were in great fear; they had no confidence in the mate, and the seas were like mountain ridges all about them. The morning came when Viritoa said to Maruae: 'Before nightfall this schooner will be at the bottom of the sea; let us make ready. Rub yourself well with coconut oil, and I will braid my hair and fasten it tightly about my head.' Toward midday they were standing together by the shrouds when Viritoa said, 'Quick, leap into the rigging!' That woman knew the ways of the sea; next moment a great wave broke over the schooner. The decks gave way, and most of the people--who were below--died the death of rats at once, but Viritoa and her husband leaped into the sea before the vessel went down.

"A day and a night they were swimming; there were times when Maruae would have lost courage if Viritoa had not cheered him. 'Put your hands on my shoulders,' she said, 'and rest; remember that I am a woman of the Low Islands--we are as much at home in the sea as on land.' All the while she was praying to the shark who was her god. The storm had abated soon after the schooner went down; next day the sea was blue and very calm. Presently, when the sun was high, Viritoa said to her husband, 'I think my god will soon come to us; put your head beneath the water and tell me what you see.' With a hand on her shoulder, he did as she had told him, gazing long into the depths below. Finally he raised his head, dripping, and when he had taken breath he spoke. 'I see nothing,' he said; 'naught but the _miti hauriuri_--the blue salt water.' She prayed a little to her god and told him to look again, and the third time he raised his head, with fear and wonder on his face. 'Something is rising in the sea beneath us,' he said as his breath came fast--'a great shark large as a ship and bright red like the mountain plantain. My stomach is sick with fear.' 'Now I am content,' said the Paumotuan woman, 'for that great red shark is my god. Have no fear--either he will eat us and so end our misery, or he will carry us safely to shore.' Next moment the shark rose beside them, like the hull of a ship floating bottom up; the fin on his back stood tall as a man. Then Viritoa and her husband swam to where he awaited them, and with the last of their strength they clambered up his rough side and seated themselves one on each side of the fin, to which they clung.

"For three days and three nights they sat on the back of the shark while he swam steadily to the north-east. They might have died of thirst, but when there were squalls of rain Viritoa unbound her hair and sucked the water from one long braid, while Maruae drank from the other. At last, in the first gray of dawn, they saw land--Mangaia, I think you call it. The shark took them close to the reef; they sprang into the sea and the little waves carried them ashore without a scratch. As they lay resting on the reef the shark swam to and fro, close in, as though awaiting some word from them. When she saw this, Viritoa stood up and cried out in a loud voice: 'We are content--we owe our lives to thee. Now go, and we shall stay here!' At those words the shark-god turned away and sank into the sea; to the day of her death Viritoa never saw him again. After that she and her husband walked to the village, where the people of Manitia made them welcome; and after a few years they got passage on a schooner back to Maruae's own land."

The soft voice of the girl died away--I heard only the murmur of the reef. Masses of cloud were gathering about the peaks; above our heads, the moon was sailing a clear sky, radiant and serene. The world was all silver and gray and black--the quiet lagoon, the shadowy land, the palms like inky lace against the moonlight. Tehinatu stifled a little yawn and stretched out on the mat with the abrupt and careless manner of a child. Her grandmother tossed away a burnt-down cigarette.

"It is late," said the woman of Maupiti, "and we we must rise at daybreak. Now let us sleep."

*Becalmed at Pinaki*

*CHAPTER XVI*

*Anchored off the Reef*

On the third day of the homeward voyage the wind died away, and in the middle of the afternoon it fell dead calm when we were less than a mile distant from the atoll of Pinaki. With the exception of a small group of Papeete traders, I don't suppose there are a dozen white men who have ever heard of the place; and those who have seen it or set foot upon it must be fewer still. It lies toward the eastern extremity of the Low Archipelago, and is one of four small atolls, all within a radius of thirty miles of one another. On charts of that segment of the eastern Pacific these four islands are barely discernible, and Pinaki, the least of them, appears but little larger than the dot of the "i" in Whitsunday, its English name.

The current carried us slowly along the north-westerly side of the island. It was intensely hot. Teriaa, nephew of Miti, the skipper, was sluicing the blistered deck, but the water steamed out of the scuppers, and in a moment the planking was as dry and as hot to the touch as before. He soon left off and took refuge in the whaleboat, which he covered with a piece of canvas. I crawled in with him, but the suffocating shade was less endurable than the full glare of the sun. Tane, the other sailor, a man of fifty, was below. He had remained there most of the time since our departure from Rutiaro, sleeping on a greasy mat, indifferent to the cockroaches--the place was alive with them by night--or the copra bugs, which were a nuisance at all hours. The stench from the little cabin, filled almost to the ceiling with unsacked copra, was terrible; and it was not much better on deck. I took shelter beside Miti, who was sitting in the meager shade of the mainsail. Presently, pointing casually toward the shore, he said: "You see him? What he do there?"

I saw the man plainly enough, now that he was pointed out to me, standing with his arms folded, leaning lightly against a tree. I was limited to a hasty glance through my binoculars, for he was looking toward us; but I saw that he was unmistakably white, although his skin seemed as dark as that of a native. He was barefoot, naked to the waist, and for a nether garment wore a pair of trousers chopped off at the knee.

I, too, wondered what a white man could be doing on an uninhabited island. Miti knew no more of the atoll than that it was or had formerly been uninhabited. It belonged, he said, to the natives of Nukatavake, which lay nine miles to the northwest. We could see this other atoll as we rode to the light swell, a splotch of blue haze a nail's breadth wide, vanishing and reappearing against the clear line of the horizon. In two hours' time the current had carried us to the lee side of the island. It ran swiftly there, but in a more northerly direction, so that we were forced out of the main stream of it, and drifted gradually into quiet water near the shore. An anchor was carried to the reef and we brought up to within thirty yards of it. With another anchor out forward, the schooner was safely berthed for the night.

I went ashore with the two sailors for a fresh supply of drinking coconuts, but I gave no help in collecting them. A fire was going on the lagoon beach, and there I found the solitary resident frying some fish before a small hut built in the native fashion. He might have been of any age between thirty-five and forty-five; was powerfully built, with a body as finely proportioned as a Polynesian's. His voice was pleasant and his manner cordial as he gave me welcome, but a pair of the coldest blue eyes I have ever seen made me doubt the sincerity of it. I felt the need of making apologies for the intrusion, adding, lamely, "I haven't seen a white man in three months, and our skipper speaks very little English."

"I was about to look you up," he said. "I can't say that I'm lonely here. I manage to get along without much companionship. But to be frank, I'm hungry for tobacco. There's none left at Nukatavake, and I've been sucking an empty pipe since last November. You haven't a fill in your pouch by any chance?"

I would have given something for his relish of the first pipeful, or the fifth, for that matter. Finally he said: "I imagine you are in for several days of Pinaki. You have noticed the sky? Not a sign of wind. I can't offer you much in the way of food; but the fishing is good, and if you care to you are welcome to stop ashore."

I accepted the invitation gladly; but as I walked back to the schooner for a few belongings and some more tobacco I questioned the propriety of my decision. My prospective host was an Englishman by his accent, although, like my friend Crichton at Tanso, he was evidently long away from home. He struck me as being a good deal of the Crichton type, although he differed greatly from him outwardly. I remembered that Crichton, too, had been pleasant and friendly, once the ice was broken between us; but the prospect of an early parting and the certitude of our never meeting again had been the basis for the friendship in so far as he was concerned. This other Englishman was not living on an uninhabited atoll because of a liking for companionship. I was debating the matter of a return to shore when Tane crawled out of the cabin to make preparations for supper, and as he was a sufferer from elephantiasis, the sight of his immense swollen limbs and his greasy, sweating body decided me. Papeete was far distant, and I would have enough of Tane before we reached the end of the journey.

Supper was ready by the time I reached the hut. It consisted of fish deliciously broiled, coconuts, and hard biscuit. Over it I gave my host an account of my stay at Rutiaro and of the unsuccessful experiment in solitude.

"Yes," he said, "they are rather too sociable, these natives. The people of Nukatavake used to bother me a good deal when I first came here. I thought nine miles of open sea would keep them away; but they often came over in sailing canoes--a dozen or two at a time when the wind favored; and they would stay until it shifted back into the southeast. I didn't encourage them. In fact, I made it quite plain that I preferred to be alone. The island is theirs, of course, and I can't prevent them from coming during the copra-making season; but they no longer come at other times. Nine months out of the year I have the place to myself. But they are damnably inquisitive. I don't like Kanakas in the aggregate, although I have one or two good friends among them."

The dying fire lit us to bed about midnight. I lay awake for a long time after my host was sleeping. We had talked for three hours, chiefly about the islands. In fact, all that he told me of himself was that he was fond of fishing.

There was not a hint of a breeze the next day, nor the next, nor the day after that. The sea was almost as calm as the lagoon, and the _Potii Ravarava_ lay motionless at anchor as though frozen in a sheet of clear ice. Miti and the two sailors remained on board most of the time, sleeping during the heat of the day under a piece of canvas rigged over the main beam, and at night fishing over the side in dreamy contentment. If they came ashore at all it was only for a few moments, and they never crossed to the lagoon beach. During these three days I remained the Englishman's guest, and although I was out of patience with myself for my curiosity, it grew in spite of me. What under the sun was the man doing here? Evidently he had not come to an atoll, as my friend Crichton had, to do his writing and thinking undisturbed. Crichton had books, a practical interest in planting, and a cultural interest in Polynesian dialects. He would muse for hours over a word in one dialect which might or might not bear a remote resemblance to some other word in usage a thousand miles away. The study fascinated him. As he once told me, it gave his imagination room to work in. I have no doubt that he made up for himself stories of the early Polynesian migrations vastly better than any romances he might have read. This other Englishman had no books; not so much as a scrap of writing paper. At least I saw none in his house, which was as bare as it was clean. There was a sleeping mat in one corner; a chest and some fishing gear against the wall; picks and shovels in a corner; a few old clothes hanging from nails driven into the supports, and absolutely nothing else. How did he put in his time? Fishing was a healthy interest, but it was not enough to keep a man sane for a period of seven years. He let that bit of information slip in one conversation I had with him.

He was not a taciturn chap. After our first evening he talked quite freely about his earlier adventures. He had spent three years in northern Australia, prospecting for gold, and he gave me an intensely interesting account of the aborigines there--of their marvelous skill at following a trail, no matter over what sort of country. I had heard that these people were biologically different from the rest of humankind and that their blood would not cross with white blood. This was not the case, he said. He had known white men animal enough to take the Australian blacks for wives, and had seen the children which they had by them. From Australia he had gone to New Guinea, still prospecting for gold, although at times he sought relief from the disappointment of it by making expeditions with the natives in search of bird-of-paradise feathers. But "gold" was the word that rang through all his talk. Several times it was on the tip of my tongue to say, "But there's no gold at Pinaki." I was able to resist the temptation, remembering his remark about the damnable inquisitiveness of the people of Nukatavake. Then, on the morning of my third day on the island, an incident occurred which made the situation clear.

*CHAPTER XVII*

*The Englishman's Story*

I rose at dawn, but my host was out before me. He had left two fish cleaned and ready for cooking on a plate outside the door. Having breakfasted, I started on a walk around the atoll, which I estimated I could accomplish in about an hour. I expected to meet the Englishman somewhere on the way, and I did find him on the opposite side of the lagoon. The shore was steep-to there. He had a steel-tipped rod in his hand and was diving off a ledge of rock, remaining below for as long as a full minute. He waved when he saw me, but kept on with his work. In about a quarter of an hour he came over to where I was standing.

"Tiresome work," he said. "I need a blow." Then, "You see, I've been doing a bit of digging here."

I had walked along the lagoon beach and had not noticed before the series of trenches higher up the land. I should think he had been digging! I inspected the ditches under his guidance. There were three at least a quarter of a mile in length each and from three to four feet deep. These ran in parallel lines and were about four paces apart. Fifteen to twenty shorter trenches cut through them at right angles.

The sun was well above the horizon. We lit our pipes and sat down in the shade. After a few moments of silence he said: "I suppose you know what I'm doing here? If you have been in Papeete you must have heard. There is no secret about it--at least not any longer."

I said that I had left Papeete shortly after my arrival. I had spent several idle afternoons on the veranda of the Bougainville Club, but in the talk which went around there I didn't remember having heard of Pinaki.

"So much the better," he said. "Yes, seven years is a long time, and I'm not keen about feeding gossip; but when I first came down here there was a clacking of tongues from one end of the group to the other. I believe I have since earned the reputation of being rather queer. I thought you must know. The fact is I'm looking for treasure. Would you care to hear the story?"

"Very much," I said, "if it won't bore you to tell it."

"On the contrary, it will be something of a relief. Seven years of digging, with nothing to show for it, must strike an outsider as a mad business. Sometimes I'm half persuaded that I am a complete fool to go on with the search. But you can't possibly know the fascination of it. It seems only yesterday that I came here. As you see for yourself, it's not much of an island. And to know that there is a treasure of more than three million pounds buried somewhere in this tiny circle of scrub and palm--"

"But do you know it?" I asked.

"I'm as sure of it as that I am smoking your tobacco. That is, I am sure it was buried here. Whether it has been removed since, I can't say, of course. The natives at Nukatavake remember a white man whom they called Luta, who came here about twenty years ago and remained for something over a month. One of the four men who stole the gold and brought it to Pinaki was a man named Luke Barrett, and it may have been he who came back, although he was supposed to have been killed in Australia forty years ago. It is the uncertainty which makes this such killing work at times. But when I think of giving it up--you would have to live with the thought of treasure for seven years, and to dream at night of finding it, before you could understand." He rose suddenly. "If you don't mind a short walk, I will show you something rather interesting."

We went along the lagoon beach for several hundred yards, then crossed toward the ocean side. Near the center of the island we came upon an immense block of coral broken from the reef and carried there by some great storm of the past. Cut deeply into the face of the rock I saw a curious design:

I asked what it meant.

"Man, if I knew that! I believe it's the key, and I can't master it! But we may as well sit down and be comfortable. If you would really care to hear the story from the beginning it will take the better part of an hour. I'll not give you all the details; but when I have finished you will be in a position to judge for yourself whether or not I was mad in coming here.

"Have you ever read Walker's book, _Undiscovered Treasure_? It doesn't matter, except that you have missed a very entertaining volume. It is a pity that old work is out of print. Nothing in it but bare facts about all sorts of treasure supposed to have been buried here and there about the world. You might think it would be dry, but I found it better company than any romance I've ever read. However, that has nothing to do with this story, except in an indirect way. I first read the book as a boy and it started me on my travels.

"To me the facts about this Pinaki treasure are as interesting as any of Walker's. He, of course, knew nothing about it, for it had not been stolen when his book was published. Four men had a hand in the business: a Spaniard named Alvarez; an Irishman named Killorain; and two others of uncertain nationality, Luke Barrett, whom I spoke of a moment ago, and Archer Brown. They were a thieving, murdering lot by all accounts--adventurers of the worst sort; and in hope of plunder, I suppose, had joined the Peruvian army during the war with Chile in eighteen fifty-nine to sixty. Their hopes were realized beyond all expectations. They got wind of some gold buried under the floor of a church, and the strange thing was that the gold was there and they found it. It was in thirty-kilo ingots, contained in seven chests, the whole lot worth in the neighborhood of three and a half million pounds. How they managed to get away with it I don't know; but I have investigated the business pretty thoroughly and I have every reason to believe that they did. They buried it again in the vicinity of Pisco, and then set out in search of a vessel. Alvarez was the only one of the four who had any education. They had all followed the sea at one time or another, but he alone knew how to navigate. The others could hardly write their own names. At Panama they signed on as members of the crew of a small schooner, and as soon as they had put to sea knocked the captain and the two other sailors in the head and chucked them overboard. They returned to Pisco, loaded the gold, and started for Paumotus.

"This was in the autumn of eighteen fifty-nine. In the December following they landed at Pinaki, where they buried the treasure. The island was uninhabited then as now, and they crossed to Nukatavake to learn the name of it. The natives were shy, but they persuaded one man to approach, and when they had the information they wanted, shot him and rowed out to their boat. If you should go to Nukatavake you will find two old men there who still remember the incident.

"Then they went to Australia, scuttled their vessel not far from Cooktown, and went ashore with a story of shipwreck. They had some of the gold with them--not much in proportion to the amount of the treasure, but enough to keep four ordinary men in comfort for the rest of their lives. It soon went, and the four were next heard of at the Palmer gold fields. Alvarez and Barrett were both supposed to have been killed there in a fight with some blacks. Brown and Killorain had not mended their ways to any extent, and both were finally jerked up for manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years' penal servitude. Brown died in prison, but Killorain served out his term, and finally died in Sydney hospital in nineteen twelve.

"Most of these facts--if they are facts--I had from Killorain himself the night before he died. I met him in a curious way; or, better, the meeting came as the result of a curious combination of circumstances. You may have noticed the scar on my side?"

I had noticed it, a broad gash puckered at the edges where the flesh had healed, tapering to a point in the middle of his back.

"It was not much of a wound," he went on, "but it gave me a deal of trouble at the time. I got it in New Guinea in nineteen eleven, when I was prospecting for gold in the back country. I was a long way from a settlement, and one day a nigger took it into his head to stick me with a spear. I suppose he wanted my gun and ammunition, for I had little else excepting my placer outfit. I let him have one bullet from my Colt just as he was about to dive into the bush, and for all I know he may be lying there to this day. I have that little frizzly headed native to thank for my knowledge of the Pinaki treasure. Sometimes I am sorry that I killed him; but at other times I feel that shooting was altogether too easy a death for the man really responsible for bringing me here. I was in a bad way from the wound. Infection set in, and I had to nurse myself somehow and get down to a place where I could have medical attention. I managed it, but the ten days' journey was a nightmare. I was nothing but skin and bone when I left the hospital, and New Guinea not being a likely place for a convalescent, the doctor recommended me to go to Australia.

"I had a small bag of dust, the result of a year and a half of heart-breaking work in the mountains. Most of it went for the hospital bill, and when I reached Sydney I had very little left. I was compelled to put up at the cheapest kind of a boarding house, although the woman who kept it was quite a decent sort. Her house was in a poor quarter of the town and her patrons mostly longshoremen and teamsters. It was a wretched life for her, but she had two children to support and was making the best of a bad job. I admired her pluck and did what I could in a small way to help her out.

"One evening I was waiting for supper in the kitchen when some one rapped. Before I could go to the door, it opened, and an old man came stumbling in, asking for something to eat. I thought he was drunk and was about to hustle him back the way he came when I noticed that he was wet through--it was a cold, rainy night--and really suffering from exposure and lack of food. I made him remove his coat--he had nothing on under it--but not without a great deal of trouble, and he insisted on drying it across his knees. He was a little wizened ape of an Irishman, about five feet three or four in height, with deep-set blue eyes, bushy eyebrows, a heavy, discolored mustache, and a thick shock of white hair--altogether the most frightful-looking little dwarf that ever escaped out of a picture book. He was tatooed all over the arms and chest--Hands Across the Sea, the Union Jack, a naked woman--several other designs common in waterfront tatooing parlors.

"His body was as shriveled as a withered apple, but his little bloodshot eyes blazed like bits of live coal. Except for the fire in them, he might have been a hundred years old and, as a matter of fact, he wasn't a great way from it. Eighty-seven, he told me, and that is about all he did tell me. He gorged some food and was all for getting away at once. But it had set in to rain very hard and I persuaded him to wait until the worst of it was over. He was very suspicious at first. I believe he expected me to call a policeman. Later he thawed a little, and became even talkative in a surly way when I told him, with the landlady's consent, that he might stay the night if he had no place else to go. Wouldn't hear of it, though. He said he had a job as night watchman at Rush-cutters' Bay. That might or might not have been true. At any rate, I went with him to the car line--the boarding house was a good mile from Rush-cutters' Bay--and gave him a couple of shillings, as a loan, I said. He could return it sometime. Just before I left him he asked for my name and address, mumbling something about doing me a bit of good one of these days. He was insistent, so I gave it to him, but not at all willingly. He had frightened Mrs. Sharpe, the landlady, just by the way he looked at her, and I didn't want him coming back.

"He didn't come back. That was in May, nineteen twelve, and I heard nothing more of him until September. I was still at the boarding house, getting slowly better, but not yet good for anything. I kept out of doors as much as possible, took long walks in the country and along the waterfront looking at ships. When I came in one evening Mrs. Sharpe told me that an attendant from the Sydney hospital had called twice during the day. An old man named Killorain, a patient at the hospital, wanted to see me. The name meant nothing to me and I couldn't imagine who the man could be. The attendant called again later in the evening. Killorain was about to die, he said, and wouldn't give them any peace until I was brought to see him.

"It was getting on toward midnight when we reached the hospital. The old man was in one of the public wards. I recognized him at once, although he had shriveled away to nothing at all. It was impossible to forget his eyes, once you had seen them. He was dying--no doubt of it, but I could see that he wasn't going to die until he was ready.

"'Sit down close here,' he said. 'I'm glad you came. You did me a good turn once and I haven't forgot it. Few good turns I've had in my life. Not so many but what I can remember the lot.' The night nurse had approached quietly and was standing on the other side of the bed. All at once he saw her. 'Hey, you!' he said. 'Grease off out of this! Stand over there on the other side of the room where I can watch you!' When she had gone he rose from his pillow and looked cautiously around the room. The beds on either side of him were empty. There was a patient in the one across the aisle, but he was sleeping. Killorain watched him for a moment to make sure of this. Then he motioned me with his finger to come still closer. 'Listen!' he said. 'I've cut more throats in my time than you might think.' Sounds a bit stagey, doesn't it? But these were his exact words. Nothing remarkable about them, of course. Throat-cutting is still a fairly thriving business. I waited for him to go on. He again looked up and down the room, and then asked me to hand him the coat which was lying across the foot of the bed. It was the same coat he had been wearing in May, when he came to the boarding house.

"'When they brought me here,' he said, 'they took my clothes, and I've had some trouble getting this back.' The attendant had told me as much. The old man had raised the very devil of a row until it was found. He asked me to rip open the lining of the right sleeve and to give him the paper I would find there. It was a soiled, greasy sheet of foolscap, pasted on a piece of cloth. 'Once,' he went on, 'you gave me two shillings for car fare to Rush-cutters' Bay. It probably wasn't any hardship on you, but never mind about that. You said I could pay it back if I'd a mind to. Well, I'm going to pay it back with a bit of interest. I'm going to give you this paper, and it's as good as three million pound notes of the Bank of England.'

"I thought, of course, that he was completely off his chump, and the fear that I would think so was uppermost in his mind. He kept repeating that he was old and worn out, but that his mind was clear. 'Don't you think I'm balmy,' he said. 'I know what I'm talking about as well as I know I'm going to die before morning.' He gave me a circumstantial account of the whole affair. I have outlined it briefly. There were many other interesting facts, but it is not worth while to speak of them here. As he talked, the conviction grew upon me that he was perfectly sane and was telling the truth. He went over the chart with me. It had been made by Alvarez, the scholar of the party, he said. There had been a good deal of quarreling and fighting later for the possession of it.

"Before I left him he made me promise that I would go to Pinaki. He wouldn't rest easy in his grave, he said, unless he knew that I was looking for the treasure. 'It's there, and it will always be there if you're bloody fool enough to think I'm queer. It ain't likely I'd lie to you on my deathbed.' Rest easy in his grave! There was an odd glimpse into his mind. He wasn't worrying about his crimes, and there were enough of them, according to his own confession. It was the thought of the gold lying forever forgotten which worried him. He could rest quietly if he knew before he died that some one else was fighting and throat-cutting over it. I asked him why he hadn't gone back for it himself. He told me that of the fifty-three years since it had been buried he had spent forty in prison and the rest of the time he was trying to earn or steal the money to buy a schooner. I told him that I would come back to see him the following day. 'You needn't bother,' he said. 'I'm finished.' And it was true. He died three hours later.

"I tried to forget the incident, but it was one of those things which refuse to be forgotten. It was always in the back of my head. I decided to check up Killorain's story where I could. I made inquiries in Peru, and found that the gold had actually been stolen. The dates and circumstances coincided with his account. A friend in the customs at Cooktown confirmed for me the story of four shipwrecked sailors who landed in February, eighteen sixty, from a ship called the _Bosun Bird_. I had a small piece of property on the outskirts of Cooktown which I had bought years ago. With the money realized from the sale of it I took passage for Tahiti on my way to Pinaki.

"That voyage was the longest one I have ever made. By that time the thought of those seven chests of gold, all in thirty-kilo ingots, was with me twenty-four hours out of the twenty-four. Yes, even at night. I slept very little, and when I did it was to dream of hunting for the treasure; of finding it. I became suspicious of a villainous-looking old man who was traveling third class. I thought he might be Brown or Luke Barrett. Perhaps they were not dead, after all. At Papeete I told no one of my purpose there, with the exception of one governmental official. If the treasure should be found the French government would have a claim to certain percentage on uncoined gold, and I meant to be aboveboard in my dealings with it. This official was sworn to secrecy, but the business leaked out eventually and created a great deal of excitement. I was immensely annoyed, of course, for I had guarded the secret as well as old Killorain ever had. However, I had in my pocket all the necessary papers, drawn up accurately, witnessed, signed, and sealed. I went on with my preparations, and finally, in February, nineteen thirteen, I was put ashore from a small cutter, not four hundred yards from where we are sitting.

"I started the search before the cutter was two miles on the return voyage. For two months I slept in the open--had no time to build a house--and ate tinned food which I had brought with me. Killorain's chart was of but little use. It made reference to trees which had long since rotted away or had been cut down by the natives of Nukatavake. The marks which I found corresponded precisely with those on the chart, but several of the most important ones were missing."

The treasure hunter rose. "Well," he said, "there's the end of the story. You know the rest of it."

"But I don't know the rest at all!" I said. "You have left out the most interesting part. Tell me something of your life here."

"You have seen three days of it. It has gone on for seven years in the same way."

"You were diving just now in the lagoon. Do you think the gold may have been buried there or that the land has fallen away?"

"My dear fellow, I'll not weary you with an account of what I think. It's rather warm here. Shall we go back to the house?"

I was hoping for a week of calm, and when we went to bed that evening there was reason to believe we might have it. A few hours later, however, I was awakened by the Englishman. "There's going to be a bit of a blow presently," he said. "Your skipper has just sent for you. He wants to get away at once."

The stars had been blotted out. The wind was soughing in the palms, and the waves slapping briskly on the lagoon beach. Our farewell was a brief one.

"When shall you come to Tahiti?" I asked.

"Not until I have found what I'm looking for."

"Well," I said, "I hope that will be soon."

But if he holds fast to his resolve my belief is that it will be never.

*Conclusion*

*CHAPTER XVIII*

*Aboard the *_*Potii Ravarava*_

I was awaiting Hall's arrival in Tahiti, confident that sooner or later he would keep a vague rendezvous set months before. I knew that by this time he must have penetrated far into the sea of atolls, traveling in the leisurely manner of these latitudes, transferring from one schooner to the next and stopping over--for weeks at a time, perhaps--in the tranquil and lonely communities he had grown to love. Once or twice--when a dingy Paumotu schooner, deep laden with copra and crowded with pearl divers eager for a whirl of gayety in the island capital, crept into the pass--I had word of him, but there was no hint of return.

It was a month of calms: long days when the lagoon, unruffled by the faintest cat's-paw, shimmered in the blinding sunlight, while the sea outside seemed to slumber, stirring gently and drowsily along the reef. Once, at midday, a three-masted schooner with all sails furled and Diesel engines going, came in to waken the town with the hoarse clamor of her exhaust. An hour later I met her skipper on the street.

"Your friend Hall is homeward bound," he told me. "I spoke the _Potii Ravarava_, a bit of a thirty-ton native schooner, off Nukatavake, and he was aboard of her--she ought to be in some time this week."

The days passed in the rapid and dreamy fashion peculiar to the South Seas. From time to time I thought of Hall and his diminutive schooner drifting about becalmed among the coral islands, or perhaps only a score of miles off Tahiti, helpless to reach the sighted land. The _Potii Ravarava_ was a full week overdue when the calm weather came to an end. The heat was intense that afternoon, and toward sunset towering masses of cloud began to pile up along the horizon to the north. The sky grew black; there was a tense hush in the air, vibrant with the far-off rumble of thunder. When I strolled out along the waterfront the people were gathering in anxious groups before their houses; I heard snatches of talk: "Have you noticed the glass? Things have an ugly look.... Hope it doesn't mean another cyclone.... The town will catch it if the sea begins to rise."

I had heard of the hurricane of 1906, when the sea rose and reached clean into the harbor, driving the population of Papeete to the hills. On Motu Uta, an islet in the bay, a white man was living with his Paumotuan wife. When the angry seas began to race in over the reef without a pause, sweeping the islet from end to end, the watchers ashore gave the pair up for lost. But the woman was a Low-Islander, and just before dawn, when the coconut palm in which she had taken refuge was swept away, she swam six hundred yards to shore and landed through a surf a sea otter would have hesitated to attempt. Next day they found the drowned and battered body of her husband drifting with dead pigs and horses and a litter of wreckage from the lower portions of the town.

Possibly Tahiti was in for another hurricane. When I glanced at my barometer after dinner, it was falling with ominous rapidity, and at bedtime the glass stood lower than I had seen it in the South Seas. In the small hours of the morning a servant came to waken me. There was a new sound in the air--the uproar of surf breaking on the inner shore of the lagoon.

"The sea is rising," said Tara; "the waves are breaking under the _purau_ trees, and if you do not come quickly to help me our canoe will be washed away."

The stars were hidden by black clouds, and though scarcely a breath of air stirred, the level of the lagoon was four feet above its normal limit, and the sheltered water, usually so calm, was agitated by a heavy swell. Then the rain came--drumming a thunderous monotone on my tin roof--and after the rain the wind. At dawn, though a seventy-mile gale was blowing out of the northeast, it was obvious that ali danger of a hurricane was past. At midday the glass began to rise and before dark the wind was falling away perceptibly.

More than once during the night I had thought of Hall out somewhere on the wild and lonely sea to the east. The _Potii Ravarava_ was reputed an able little boat--with proper offing she would probably come through worse than this. But she had no engine, and if she had been caught in the Paumotu--the Dangerous Archipelago, where unknown currents and a maze of reefs make navigation ticklish in the best of weather--there was cause for anxiety.

The storm blew itself out in two days' time, and on the evening of the third day I was standing on the water front with a group of traders and schooner captains. They were speaking of the _Potii Ravarava_, by this time the object of mild misgivings, when one of the skippers gave a sudden shout.

"There she is now!" he announced and, looking up, I saw a deeply laden little schooner, with patched grayish sails, rounding the point of Fareute. Presently she turned into the wind, dropped anchor, and sent a boat ashore--a few moments later I was welcoming Hall--very thin, raggedly dressed, and brown as a Paumotuan. His eyes were smiling, but they had in them a look unmistakable when once seen--the expression of a hunger greater than most of us have known.

"Hello!" he said. "Come along to the hotel--it must be dinner time. By Jove! I feel as though I could eat a raw shark!"

When he had eaten two dinners complete--from soup to black coffee, and beginning with soup again--he lit a cigarette and told me the story of his return from the Low Islands.

"It was all right," he began, "until we left Hao. The palm tops were still in sight on the horizon when the breeze died away, and we drifted for seven whole days in a broiling, glassy calm. It was a curious experience, but one I would not care to repeat.