Chapter III: Part 3

Did she suspect? There was nothing for suspicion to lay hold of. Donahue was one of the acutest villains under the Southern Cross, and he did not make clumsy mistakes. The story of the derelict, of the valuables abandoned on board, of the necessity for finding the ship soon and secretly, might have sounded far-fetched to city-dwelling folk, but out in the wild South Seas stranger things may happen any day. The plan was neat and plausible from every point of view, and Vaiti had taken the bait readily enough that afternoon. Yet Donahue felt—as the two walked silently down the dim, perfumed beach street, all ablow with vagrant sea winds and wandering wafts of song—that he would have given a good deal for just one peep into his handsome companion’s mind.

Vaiti walked beside him, looking straight ahead. Had Donahue’s wish been granted, he would have thought somewhat less of his own acuteness. She did suspect. A man, in her case, would have been convinced by the reasonable aspect of the whole affair. Vaiti, being a woman, with sea-anemone tentacles of instinct floating and tingling all about the steady centres of reason in her mind, was convinced, and vet not convinced. She thought it was all right, yet she knew it was not—after a woman’s way.

In any case, however, it was an adventure, and there was a mystery to fathom. So she put on a more substantial dress than the gauzy draperies she had been wearing, hung the neatest possible little pearl-handled Smith and Wesson round her neck, under the swelling folds of her frock, by means of an innocent-looking thin gold neck-chain that would snap with a tug; put her long-bladed knife in her pocket, with the sheath sewn to the dress, so that a pull would bring out the blade, and joined Donahue an hour after dinner, on the verandah steps, confident of her ability to see the thing through, whatever it might be.

She looked sharply about her, as she stepped over the low bulwarks of the _Ikurangi_ and dropped down on to the encumbered, untidy deck. No one about. Nothing to be seen but a dirty little main deck, with rusty pumps and a yawning hatch, and a poop that even in the pallid light just beginning to tremble up from the rising moon showed neglect of the sacred ceremony of daily deck-washing.

Now, any decent ship’s captain will attend to his deck-washing, even if he doesn’t shave or wash himself from port to port. Vaiti did not like that unscrupulous, dirty poop. But she was already up on it, and Donahue was bowing her down the cabin companion, with a jarring smile and a good deal of over-fluent blarney. The cabin was small and smelly; it had an oblong table in the middle, surrounded by cushioned lockers, and an open door at the end facing the companion. This door evidently opened into Donahue’s own cabin, for a rough wash-stand and a looking-glass, the latter hung high on the bulkhead, were plainly visible. There was a lamp nailed above the glass, and the two together shone brightly out into the rather ill-lit main cabin.

“What’ll you take?” asked Donahue, with his unpleasant smile. “I’ve got some sweet sherry wine, just the thing for ladies—or wouldn’t ye put your lips to a taste of peach brandy?”

Vaiti shook her head.

“No good drink, suppose talk business,” she said. She would not have swallowed a glass of water on the _Ikurangi_ for a dozen Virot hats.

Donahue had not expected to catch her so easily; still, he cast a thought of regret to his nicely-doctored liquors. She evidently meant what she said—and the other way Was harder.

“Well, thin, darlin’, we’ll have a look at the cha-art,” he observed, producing a roll of paper. “It’s yourself that can help us t’rough this business—you and the ould man—better than any one from Calloa to Sydney if only yez are raisonable about terms.”

He spread the chart out on the table, and weighted it down with a couple of tumblers.

Vaiti, her mind charged full with watchful suspicion, felt that sudden small, sick thrill that is the forerunner of the thought—“I wish I hadn’t!” Afterwards, when she came to think matters over, she knew that it was because Donahue had made the mistake of bringing out the chart before the terms had been discussed, which was an improbable sort of thing to do. In such moments, however, one does not think, one only feels. Still, the warning was unmistakable, and Vaiti made as if to rise, intending to plead sudden illness and get out on deck. But Donahue, sharp as a snake, saw the movement, and brought out his trump card at once.

“Sure, I’m a —— fool, I am, to forget the necklashe! You haven’t seen that yet,” he said, whipping a stream of white fire out of his pocket and letting it fall across the dark wood of the table. It was a magnificent piece of paste-work, and had taken in Donahue himself, some few weeks ago, after a fashion that made him sore enough to remember. Vaiti gasped when she saw it, and laid both her pretty olive hands upon it at once. Her suspicions were not exactly killed, but they had for the moment no room to live with the passionate feeling aroused by the gems. Donahue, with his unspeakable experience of the sex, had calculated rightly when he classified her among the women who would almost do murder for a diamond.... Such jewels! and she had never had one in her hand before, though her eyes had often filled and her heart ached with hopeless desire before the maddening glories of the jewellers’ windows in Auckland and Sydney.

She hugged the necklace to her breast like a baby, she shook it, she danced it in the light.... And then, was it in woman’s nature to refrain from snapping the clasp about her neck, and feeling the dear touch of those cold drops and pendants on her bosom?

“Ah, now, but you’re the beauty wit’ them little jokers round your neck! And the lovely neck you have, darlin’!” blarneyed Donahue. He had better have been silent, for Vaiti, used to admiration of every kind and degree as to daily bread, felt the falseness of the tone. If all other men admired her beauty, this one did not, though he said so. His grey, goat-like eyes looked something more like hate across the narrow table, under the ill-smelling oily lamp, and Vaiti saw they did.

Donahue, taught by twenty years of active villainy, was quick to feel the necessity for the next move. He went into his own cabin and turned up the lamp. The looking-glass shone out brightly under its rays.

“Come and look at yourself, me beauty,” he said; “and let me ould shavin’-glass see the handsomest girl in the islands wearin’ what she ought to wear every day of her life, if she’d her rights.”

For the moment, Vaiti was not herself. She was drunk with the jewels; she was crazed with the desire to see herself in them. If heaven and hell had stood between her and the looking-glass, she was bound to go to it, and Donahue knew it, as surely as he knew that the moon would set that night.

Vaiti—still sensing the danger that she would not heed, through all the intoxication of the jewels—thought, in a cinematographic flash, that one was safe before a glass, at all events.... No one could come up behind you.... Besides, there was the little revolver, hanging on the chain that would snap with a tug....

And then, for the space of a full minute, she saw nothing, knew nothing, lived for nothing but the sight of her own dark, beautiful face in the glass, lit up into surpassing loveliness by the scintillating fires about her neck. There was no movement in the mirror behind her. Donahue sat motionless at the table, and the cabin was very still.

... The first ecstasy subsided, and she turned her head a little to see the diamonds twinkle....

Donahue’s elbow knocked a glass off the table with a sharp crash. Almost at the same instant two powerful hands closed on each of Vaiti’s ankles, and snatched her feet from under her. She plucked out the revolver as she fell, but her hands were caught, whisked behind her, and securely tied, with a prompt swiftness that told of frequent experience. In another minute her ankles were lashed together, none too gently; she was carried into a small state-room, thrown down upon the bunk, and left alone in the dark, with the slam of the door and snap of the lock resounding in her ears.

Most women would have screamed. Vaiti remembered that they were out in the middle of a wide harbour, and decided not to risk the infliction of a gag for such a slight chance of rescue.... Certain ugly scenes on the _Sybil_ rose up before her eyes. No; decidedly it was her only policy to keep quiet.

Outside there was the thud of bare feet running about the deck, the creak of the booms rising on the masts, the slatting of loose sails—loud orders, long yells from the native crew, as they pulled and hauled. The _Ikurangi_ was making sail.

Then sudden silence, slow heeling over of the cabin, lip-lap of hurrying water along the hull. They were off. Where? God—or the devil—only knew!

*CHAPTER VI*

*MAROONED*

There was plenty of time for reflection in the long days that followed. The greasy-faced old mate came in and cut the lashings off Vaiti’s ankles and wrists, a few hours after sailing, and she was left free to move about the cabin, which offered a promenade of exactly seven feet by three. Meals were handed in to her three times daily—the usual black tea, tinned meat, and weevily biscuit of second-class island schooners—and she was not in any way molested, though the door was always kept locked. Donahue put in his head once or twice to look at her, as she sat cross-legged on her bunk, staring out through the port at the tumbling seas. He generally had something to say—a jarring, mocking compliment, or a remark about the time they were likely to make Sydney Heads—knowing all the time that Vaiti could estimate the general direction of their course by the sun, and that there was no southing in it. If she had ever feared any one, she feared this man—almost.

It was not difficult to understand how the capture had been brought about. A man under the bunk, another under the sofa opposite—her own eyes watching only the upper part of the cabin as reflected in the glass—nothing could be simpler or better planned. The affair was none the less ugly on that account. Perhaps it was only Vaiti’s burning anger at her utter rout and defeat in her own business of plotting and intrigue that saved her from something very like despair, as the schooner ploughed steadily on, day after day, carrying her into the great unknown, farther and farther away from all who could defend her. Yet, despairing or not, Saxon’s daughter never lost her courage. They had taken her weapons from her as they carried her into the cabin, but they could not take away her undaunted spirit. She waited her time.

As to the meaning of the business, she trusted, again, to time’s enlightenment. Saxon had many enemies; so had she. It would all come out by-and-by. Meantime, it was clear that no one meant to murder her. What else might be meant she could not tell, and she did not care to speculate overmuch. Under such circumstances one does best to save one’s nerve against the time it may be wanted.

It was on the twenty-third day out from Apia, bearing, as far as she could discover, in a north-westerly direction, that she first noted the approach of land. Nothing could be seen from her side of the ship, but she heard the long, excited cries of the island crew, and the thundering of their feet, as they began putting the ship about with unwonted vigour, to a chorus of native songs. She strained her eyes eagerly when the ship came about on the other tack, but the line of the horizon was unbroken; and it was not for another hour that she saw, from her low elevation, what the look-out in the crow’s nest had sighted long before—a line of small black bristles pricking the edge of the horizon several miles away.

Vaiti knew the sight at once for the palms of a low atoll island—evidently some barren, sun-smitten spot close up to the line—and a ready solution of the whole puzzling affair at once sprang into her mind.

Marooning!

Most people know the meaning of this term; nearly every one has heard of sailors captured by pirates in old days, and left on lonely islands, or even deserted by their own comrades on some isolated spot, with just enough food and water to save the marooners’ consciences from the guilt of actual murder. Vaiti knew both the word and the thing very well-indeed, and she was almost certain that the _Ikurangi_ had gone off the course on the way to some South American port with the view of hiding her where she would not easily be found again. There are many islands in the wastes of the vast Pacific where a ship may not pass once in half a century, and these—unlike the typical “desert” island of stories—are almost always barren, hungry, shadeless spots, where Crusoe himself would have been hard put to it to make a decent living. The fertile, mountainous, well-watered isle is never without a native population, permanent or occasional, and is very seldom indeed, in these days, without a trader as well, and a regularly calling schooner. As for the breadfruit, oranges, pineapples, the pigs and goats, the sugarcane and maize of uninhabited islands as known to fiction, they have no counterpart in real life. All the valuable food plants and all useful animals are the product of importation and cultivation, ancient or modern. It follows, that where there are no people and no ships, there is nothing worth having.

Vaiti knew this very well, and decided that if she was going to be marooned, she might as well make such provision as circumstances allowed. She had hunted over every inch of the cabin—which seemed to belong to the mate—during the long days of the voyage, and she knew exactly what it contained. From the stores put away under the bunk she selected a large new sheet, which she concealed under her dress; a small stock of needles and thread, a box or two of matches, some hooks and line, and a stick of dynamite, evidently meant for some forgotten fishing purpose. There was nothing in the shape of a knife, much to her regret; and there was a good deal of clothing that she would have liked to carry away; but it would not do to take more than she could easily conceal. So she made an end of her preparations, and sat down to wait once more.

There was no moon that night until very late, and darkness came down so close on the stroke of four bells that Vaiti felt sure they were very near the equator. No one came near her, and tea seemed to be unusually late. The anchor-chain roared home soon after dark, the ship lay very still, and there was a good deal of running about on deck. Vaiti was confirmed in her anticipations of an uninhabited island by the fact that no boat was to be heard coming off from shore. Not a sound of any kind, indeed, came from the island, and there were no lights on the beach. Some one handed her in her tea by-and-by, and a little later her door was flung open again by the mate.

“Come on out,” he said.

Vaiti followed the mate out of the cabin at once, rather to his surprise. She had made up her mind that anything was better than the _Ikurangi_, and she was looking out sharply for a chance—any chance—of turning the tables.

It did not look at first as if she were to have one. The dinghy had been swung out when she got on deck, and a couple of men were standing ready to lower away. They were islanders, and she knew that they would befriend her if they could—indeed, their glances showed as much—yet what could they do?

Donahue was nowhere visible. He had planned this business with some forethought, and he wanted to have a chance of casting blame on his subordinate if any inquisitive Government official should incline to look the matter up later on. So he stayed down in his own cabin, pretending to be asleep, and the mate, rather against his will, had to carry out orders alone.

Just as the boat was ready to lower away, one of the men let her go with a run, and she struck the water stern first, with a terrible splash. The mate, screaming curses, ran over to the falls and began to abuse the crew. The dinghy was injured, and they had to haul her up and swing out the whaleboat instead.

This took some little time, and Vaiti was forgotten for the moment—a chance that made her heart beat with eagerness to profit by it.

Two ideas held possession of her—that she must plan to secure a boat, and that she must manage to do the _Ikurangi_ some sort of mischief. Was it to be borne that Donahue should go unpaid? The blood of a hundred fierce Island chiefs made answer.

Concerning the boat, she thought she saw a chance. They were bound to stay a day for wood and water, and that should furnish an opportunity. But the other matter?

If she could only get hold of the ship’s papers and destroy them! That would be satisfactory. She knew, none better, that a ship’s papers are her character, her “marriage-lines” of respectability. Without them a vessel is an illegitimate, furtive creature, every man’s hand against her, every official eye turned coldly upon her. Vaiti would have liked very well to get hold of the _Ikurangi’s_.

But, careless as Donahue was, the papers were not to be found in the little deck cabin which he used as a chart-room. Vaiti, disappointed, took one of the charts and began studying the position of the ship, with a view to finding out the name of the island off which they were lying. The chart was almost a blank, nothing being marked upon its wide expanse but a number of reefs and two or three atolls—Bilboa Island, Vaka, Ngamaru—dotted hundreds of miles apart in a naked waste of white. Bilboa, an abandoned guano island, of which she had heard something, seemed to Vaiti the most likely of the three spots. Ngamaru, she knew, had a native population, and about Vaka she could for the moment remember nothing, although she knew she had heard something once upon a time. All this part of the Pacific was far removed from the _Sybil’s_ haunts, and indeed from the haunts of any other ship of which Vaiti had ever heard.

It did not seem to be a healthy place for schooners; the reefs round both Vaka and Bilboa were many, and most were marked “Position doubtful.” Donahue was evidently not familiar with either place, for the chart was freshly pencilled over with notes and corrections. Vaiti’s heart leaped up as she looked at the careless work.... She saw a way.

They were still clearing the lumber out of the whaleboat on deck. No one was watching.

Vaiti took a pencil and rubber, and began to do some artistic alterations on the chart, helped by her knowledge of seamanship. In ten minutes she had converted the innocent piece of parchment into a perfect death-trap, rolled it up and replaced it, put back the rubber and pencil, and slipped out again on deck, where she sat down on a coil of rope and waited.

In another couple of minutes the boat was in the water, and the mate called rudely to Vaiti. She came without a word, covering her face with her dress, and sobbing bitterly. She stumbled as she walked; you would have sworn she was weak, broken in spirit, and utterly helpless.

If the mate felt any compassion, he did not dare to show it. They shoved off, two natives at the oars. Vaiti, sobbing effectively behind her hands, kept a sharp look-out with the corner of one eye as they slid across the dark water, but she could see nothing save a faintly glimmering line of grey shore, and hear nothing but the humming of the surf on the reef.

As soon as they reached the shallow water near the shore, the mate took Vaiti by her arm and roared, “Out you go!”

Sobbing afresh, in the most natural and convincing manner in the world, she obeyed.... It was dark, and the native who rowed bow oar never knew that she whipped his knife dexterously out of his belt as she passed him.

“Why are you marooning me?” she wailed, as she waded through the warm, shallow water towards the shore.

The mate leaned out of the boat, now fading fast away into the starry gloom, and shouted as he disappeared:

“To pay for Delgadas Reef and the _Margaret Macintyre_!”

Vaiti, who had reached the shore, almost sat down with the shock. So that was it! that was it! The pearl-shell lagoon out of which she, almost unaided, had “jockeyed” the schooner _Margaret Macintyre_, some months before, was bringing in a crop other than pearls—of which last, indeed, the canny Scot who had financed the working of the place had had very much the larger share.

Well, things must be taken as they were found. The soft tropic night stirred gently round her. The stars were large and golden; they shone in the still lagoon like little moons. Palm trees waved somewhere up in the dusk above, striking their huge rattling vanes together with the swing of the night-breeze. It was land, safe, solid land, and the sand was warm and soft, and Vaiti was tired. She walked a little way up the beach, stretched herself under a pandanus tree, and went to sleep....

Some hours later she woke, with the dim, mysterious volcano-glow of the tropic dawn in her eyes, and a curious feeling of disquiet about her heart. Still half asleep, she saw the long grey shore sloping down to the silent lagoon, the ink-coloured pandanus trees standing up against the dull orange sky, the leaning stems and stumps of coco-palms, dark and formless in the shadow. She shut her eyes and tried to sleep again.

No use. That nameless disquiet—now almost fear—still stirred at her heart. She opened her eyes once more, and looked about. A little more light—the touch of a glowing finger away in the east—a clearer defining of the cocoanut stumps, snapped off near their roots in the last great hurricane.... One of the stumps was oddly shaped—almost like a human figure. She could have fancied it was a rude image of a sitting man, only that the profile, against the lightening east, was featureless, and there was nothing to represent the hands.

“I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree,” thought Vaiti. “I will sleep again till it is light. Am I not a sea-captain’s daughter, and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies of my own mind?”

Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still. The dawn wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus. And as the day broke silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.

Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body ... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ... a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left to view ... O God! O God! what was it?

The thing was featureless. Nose, eyes, and mouth were gone. In the midst of a cavern of unspeakable ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant. Two handless, rotting stumps of arms waved blindly about—feeling—feeling....

Could it hear? Some instinct told the girl that it could. Softly as a snake she writhed out of the reach of those terrible groping arms.

It did hear. It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.

With one leap Vaiti was on her feet. Never looking back, she fled down the open beach, the sand spurting behind her as she ran. She heard a dull padding in her rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on blindly, long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed over the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold on her uncovered head—ran, while the beach grew parchment-white and dazzled back the heat into her face like an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned red before her eyes. Then only she staggered into the shade and dropped down upon a green mattress of convolvulus creeper to rest.

And now, when she had leisure to think and strength to cast off the haunting horror of that inhuman face, she knew what Donahue had done.

This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island that she had feared. This was infinitely worse—it was Vaka, the leper isle!

She remembered that she had once heard a dim rumour of Vaka and its ghastly leper people—the remnant of a plague-smitten tribe long ago forcibly exiled there from one of the fierce western groups. No ships ever called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed that the cocoanuts and fish of the island provided sufficient food for the people, and no one cared to run the chance of their stowing away and escaping, especially as they were known to be both daring and treacherous on occasion. Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for the most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil could conceive. A few weeks or months in this charnel-house of horrors, where the very air must reek of contagion, and what would it avail her if, after all, some stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway? Better, then, that she should stay and die among the other nameless nightmare horrors that walked these stricken shores.

No! Vaiti, sitting cross-legged on the netted vines and staring grimly out to sea, then and there took resolve that such a fate should not be hers.... Sharks were uncertain, if you really wanted them; but the stick of dynamite she had taken from the mate’s cabin was safe and sure. If she failed in using it for the special purpose she had planned, she would put it in her mouth and light the fuse.... There would be no more trouble after that. And as for the flies—one did not feel them, of course, when one was dead.

All the same, she did not mean to die if she could avoid it, and, as the first step towards helping herself, she knocked some nuts off a young palm, and took her breakfast off the refreshing water and juicy meat. Then she cut a length of bush rope, looped it round the tallest palm in sight, and set her feet inside the loop, so that she could work herself up to the top of the tree, monkey-on-stick fashion, leaning against the rope. When she got into the crown of the palm she knelt among the leaves, holding on tightly, and looked right and left over the island.

It was a pure atoll, an irregular circle of feather palms lying on the sea like a great green garland set afloat. The inner lagoon was several square miles in extent, but the land was not more than a few hundred yards wide at any point, and there was no soil to speak of. The palms, the scanty, pale green scrub, the mop-headed pandanus trees, the trailing creepers, all sprang out of pure white coral gravel and sand. The scene was lovely as only a coral atoll can be—the jewel-green water of the inner lagoon, shaded with vivid reflections of lilac and pale turquoise, the stately circled palms, the wide, white beach enclasping all the island like a frame of purest pearl, the burning blue of the surrounding sea, all combined to form a picture bright as fairyland and sparkling as an enamelled gem set upon a velvet shield.

But Vaiti, while she saw and admired the loveliness of the scene, also recognised its barrenness as only an islander could. No fruit, no roots, little fresh water—nothing, in fact, but cocoanut and pandanus kernels, eked out by a little fish.... The lepers must often go hungry.

The hot day turned suddenly chill as Vaiti recalled those blind, snatching, handless arms. They came of a cannibal race, these Vaka folk. What if she had not waked? What if, wearied as she well might be, she slept too long and too soundly in the night that was to come?

*CHAPTER VII*

*THE TURNING OF THE TABLES*

She looked narrowly about the island, hoping to discover the place where the lepers lived. A cluster of small, miserable huts, on the far side of the lagoon, attracted her attention. It seemed not more than half a mile from the spot where she had spent the night. The best fishing grounds she judged, by the look of the shore, to be near the village. She was therefore, no doubt, several miles from their usual haunts.

So far, so good. Where was the schooner? It lay to her left about a mile out at sea, close to a small, uninhabited, sandy islet. Vaiti supposed that the men were cutting wood and looking for water. She saw one or two black dots on the shore, recognisable by their blue dungaree clothing, and strained her eyes eagerly to see if the dinghy had been pulled up on the sand, for in this lay her only chance. If they brought the boat up on the beach, to repair her where wood could be had without going to the atoll itself (Vaiti would have wagered that the _Ikurangi_ did not carry a splinter outside of the galley fuel), then the schooner would probably stop overnight. In that case she could carry out her plans. Otherwise ... there was always the dynamite.

The dinghy was ashore, drawn well up on the beach.

She drew a breath of relief, and slid down the tree again. Now she could wait till night with an easy mind.

All day she hid in the tangle of young palm and low-growing scrub that clustered about the foot of the loftier trees. Once she saw a couple of the lepers pass by in the distance, evidently looking for something. These had eyes, and she crept closer into the shelter of the scrub till they were gone. Then she came cautiously out, and plucked long sheets of the fine pale-brown natural matting that protects the young shoot of the cocoanut, to cover up her white dress, for the scrub was dangerously thin, in that staring overhead sun. She did not venture down to the sea to fish, but fed upon cocoanuts during the day.

Night came at last—night and coolness, with big stars shining in the lagoon, and a gentle breeze stirring among the palms. About midnight, as near as she could guess, Vaiti came out of her shelter and prepared for action.

She took off her clothes, and fastened about her waist a petticoat of the dark-coloured cocoanut matting which she had stitched together during the day. So habited, with her olive skin and black hair, she knew that she was invisible in the darkness of the night. She fastened the dynamite, and a box of matches, into the coil of hair on the top of her head, stuck her knife into the waist of her petticoat, and walked down the beach into the warm, dark sea.

She knew very well that the outer side of an atoll commonly swarms with sharks, but the risk did not trouble her. There was something a good deal worse to face on the island than any number of sharks. Heading for the distant light of the schooner, she swam through the starry water with the low, dog-like island paddle that can cover such marvellous distances—keeping her head well out, and quietly taking her time.

It was a long swim, but it ended at last, and the schooner rose up before her in the water, black and silent, and shifting ever so little upon the swell of the incoming tide. The stars made little trickles of light upon her wet, dark hull. Two boats lay alongside—the dinghy, freshly mended and watertight, and the whaleboat, loaded with wood and cocoanuts. After the slovenly fashion of the _Ikurangi_, they had left the boats until the morning to hoist inboard, seeing that it was dead calm in the lee of the islet.

This was more than Vaiti had hoped for, and it made her task easy. She cut the dinghy’s painter, got into the boat, and muffled the oars with a strip or two torn from her petticoat. Then she put the dynamite into the whaleboat, cut and attached a good long fuse, set a match to it, and saw that the tiny red spark was steadily eating its way along, before she pulled off from the ship. She towed the whaleboat after her a little way, and then let it go thirty or forty yards from the ship. It was not her desire to wreck the schooner at Vaka Island, and possibly let loose her enemies upon the atoll; rather she wished the ship well out of the way before any disaster should overtake her. The charts would most probably ensure that matter. The destruction of the boat was only intended to secure her own possession of the dinghy.

She had scarcely reached the shore before a loud explosion boomed out across the water, and immediately after lights began to stir on board the schooner. Vaiti worked with coolness and speed, knowing that it was not likely, though possible, that any one would swim ashore. From her eyrie in the coco-palm she had noted a deep, narrow creek running up from the lagoon—a mere crack in the coral, but wide enough to admit a small boat, taken in with care. There was just enough light from the stars to enable her to find the place, and run the boat up on the sand at the end, into the heart of a tangle of leaves and creepers that entirely concealed it. For safety’s sake, she cut a few more armfuls of trailing vines from the shore, and buried the boat two or three feet deep, so that neither from the sea nor the land could it possibly be seen.

As she worked, she could hear shouts and cries, made faint by distance, coming across the water from the schooner. She could imagine the scene that would take place on board when they found themselves boatless. Some of the native crew—not Donahue or the mate; they would never face the sharks—would probably swim ashore to-morrow to investigate. Well, let them!

Having finished the concealing of the dinghy, she got into it herself, put on her clothes again, drew the tangled creepers well over her, and went calmly to sleep, secure that no one could find her unless she chose to be found.

All the same, she was very cautious about getting up the next morning, and looked carefully between the leaves before she ventured out of her hiding-place. She covered up her light dress with the cocoanut canvas, and then climbed a palm to look about.

People were moving hurriedly about the decks of the schooner; something seemed to be going on. As she watched, she saw two natives, clad only in loin-cloths, stand up on the bulwarks, ready to dive. In another moment they had flashed down into the sea, small as ants to sight at that distance, but perfectly clear to Vaiti’s sea-trained eyes. Then the dark specks began to make their way across the water. The sun was newly risen, the sea was still a mirror of molten gold, and the tiny black heads stood out sharply on its surface. Vaiti set her teeth as she watched them creeping on. They were island men, of her mother’s own race, and they had done her no harm. And ... the longer a vessel lies at anchor in equatorial latitudes, the more certain it is that sharks will gather round her—even if there has been no explosion in the water alongside to kill the fish and collect the tigers of the sea from far and near.

Vaiti looked away, and began desperately to count the nuts clustered among the palm-fronds at her feet.... How many were there? Ten—fifteen—twenty——

A long, despairing shriek tore across the water. She put her fingers in her ears and buried her face in the leaves. Yet, all the same, she heard a second cry, short and sudden, and quickly ended. There was nothing more. She lifted her face again, her teeth set tight into her lower lip. The two black heads were gone.

“No one will come ashore to-day,” she said, with a shiver. Something seemed to stab her, as she thought of that doctored chart in the schooner’s deck cabin. The reefs on the course to South America were hundreds of miles from shore—the ship had no boats—and the native crew must suffer with the villainous captain and mate, if the disaster that she had plotted so carefully should come about.... There would be sharks there, too, when the ship broke up....

The crystal-gold of the sea turned dim before Vaiti’s eyes. It was only a mist of tears that lay between, but to the girl’s excited imagination it seemed like the spreading and darkening stain of blood.

Careless of whether she was seen or not, she slid down the tree and rushed into the scrub, where she sat down upon the sand and cried like a mere nervous schoolgirl. The sun was past the zenith when she lifted her head again; the schooner had put out to sea, and lay, a far-off snowy speck, upon the blue horizon.

Vaiti stood up, flung back her hair, and cast the trouble from her. She could not afford to grieve over the inevitable now; there was too much to do. The boat had to be prepared and provisioned, and that was not the work of a moment.

She husked and opened a number of large cocoanuts, and removed the insides. She then cut a quantity of young palm-leaves, and plaited them into baskets, which she filled with the cocoanut meat. Afterwards she cut down dozens of young green nuts for drinking, husked them to save space, and slung them together in bunches with strips of their own fibre. This done, she hid the provisions in the boat, and set about her own supper, as it was almost dark.

Nourishing food she felt she must have, if she was to get through with her enterprise, but she dared not attract attention to herself by going out torch-fishing on the reef. However, there were certain holes in the ground about the roots of the palms that to her experienced eye promised something better than fish.

She dug a fire-hole in the gravel at the end of the gully where she had hidden the boat, lined it with stones, and made a fire, looking well to it that no gleam should be visible from above. When the stones were beginning to heat, she took a piece of palms-leaf in her hand, hid herself in the bush, and waited, still as a rock.

By-and-by there was a faint scuffling among the roots of the trees, and a shadowy thing began climbing up the trunk of a palm. Vaiti waited till it had disappeared in the crown of the tree, and then climbed after it to a point about ten feet from the top, where she tied her strip of leaf round the trunk and came down again.

Thump! thump! Two cocoanuts fell to the earth. The crab (for it was a cocoanut crab of the biggest and fiercest kind) was getting his supper. Now he would come down the tree, rip open the nuts with his formidable claws, and enjoy the contents.

Slowly he began to back down the palm, his sensitive tail ready to tell him when he had touched earth and might safely let go. And now it was that Vaiti’s trap (a well-known native trick) proved his undoing. The belt of dry leaflets round the tree tickled his tail, he promptly let go, and fell with a crash seventy feet through air on to the pile of coral lumps that Vaiti had heaped up at the foot of the tree.

The girl picked him up, badly injured and unable to use his claws (which were big enough to crack her ankle), and put an end to him with a clever stroke of her knife. He proved to be two feet long in the body alone, and of a fine blue and red colour, as seen in the dim light of the fire. She put him on the heated stones, wrapped in leaves, buried him until cooked, and then enjoyed a hot supper that an epicure might have envied.

Strengthened by the good food, she worked on late into the night, catching more crabs, whose meat she hoped she could dry in the sun, making a rough sail out of the bed-sheet she had carried away from the schooner, twisting sinnet plait out of cocoanut husk for ropes, cutting and trimming a small pandanus for the mast. She had all her plans laid, and knew what she meant to do. Her present position was about five hundred miles from the Marquesas, and the south-east trades would be in her favour. With lines for fishing, a beaker full of fresh water on board (she had found that in the dinghy when she took it away), cocoanuts to help out with, and plenty of crab to dry, she hoped that she might manage to reach the islands before her strength or her food gave out. Greater voyages had been done many a time in mere canoes, and the dinghy was a large boat of its kind, strong, well built, and new. If she failed—well, any death, any horror that the wide seas could hold was better than Vaka Island.

All being ready, she lay down and slept till dawn—a somewhat restless sleep, for it was full of wandering dreams, and all the dreams took one shape: Donahue’s schooner, snared by the lying chart, rushing helpless to her end, with the green-eyed tigers of the sea hovering ever about the reefs, and waiting ... waiting....

* * * * *

“I don’t think the patient can see any one,” said the nurse doubtfully.

The big, yellow-haired sailor took off his hat and stepped up on to the verandah. It was a very beautiful verandah. You could see most of Suva Bay from it, and half the tumbled purple peaks of Fiji’s wonderful mountains lying across the harbour.

“If you could stretch a point, ma’am,” said the sailor, “it might be as well for him. I’ve got good news.”

“About his daughter?” asked the nurse. She, like every one else in Suva, was deeply interested in this especial patient’s story. He had come to Suva in his own schooner, the _Sybil_, several weeks before, furious with rage and despair at the loss of his daughter, and eager to demand assistance from the High Commissioner of the Western Pacific, although it seemed by no means clear in what manner Her Majesty’s representative could aid him. Before the matter had even been discussed, however, he had fallen seriously ill of sunstroke and excitement combined, and had been sent to hospital, with rather a bad chance of recovery. He was just turning the corner now, and the nurse—who could not but admire his rather weather-beaten good looks and romantic history—regarded him as her most interesting patient.

“Yes, it’s about his daughter,” answered the sailor. “I’m the mate of the _Sybil_, ma’am; Harris is my name. Perhaps you’d kindly read this.”

He held out a long slip of printed paper, containing a _résumé_ of the cables for the day—Suva’s substitute for a daily paper.

The nurse took it, and read:

“The missing daughter of Edward Saxon, owner and master of the trading schooner _Sybil_, has at last reappeared. Her fate has excited much interest and conjecture all over the Pacific. She arrived in Sydney yesterday on board the cable-ship _Clotho_, by which she was picked up on the 2nd instant, in an open boat, alone, and two hundred miles from any land. She had experienced bad weather, and was much exhausted for want of food, but declared herself capable, if it had been necessary, of reaching the nearest island group unaided. She had been carried away, as was surmised, by the captain of the island schooner _Ikurangi_, who marooned her on a remote leper island, Vaka, and then sailed for South America. Revenge for the loss of a pearl-shell bed of disputed ownership is said to have been the motive of this unparalleled outrage.”

“He shall have it at once,” said the nurse cordially. “It’ll do him more good than our medicines.”

* * * * *

The story was a popular one in the hospital for months after, and it had not been quite forgotten when, towards the close of the hot season, a Sydney paper furnished the last chapter of the tale. Saxon’s late nurse read it aloud to the others at afternoon tea, and they all agreed (not knowing how Vaiti’s fingers had cogged the dice of chance) that it was a wonderful Providence and a real judgment. The item read:

“THE LAST OF AN OCEAN ROMANCE.

“News comes via Tahiti from Nukahiva, Marquesas Islands, of the arrival of a shipwrecked crew on a raft, six weeks ago. They were the survivors of a disaster that destroyed the notorious schooner _Ikurangi_ whose master, it will be remembered, kidnapped and marooned the daughter of a British captain some months ago. The schooner, after leaving the island, sailed for Callao, but was wrecked on an uncharted reef three days east of Vaka, and went to pieces. The crew escaped on a raft, and underwent great suffering in their efforts to reach land. The captain and mate were drowned.”

“And serve them right, too!” said the audience.

*CHAPTER VIII*

*THE WHITE MAN OF NALOLO*

“By Jove! it’s a white man,” said Saxon, checking like a pointer on the threshold of the low dark doorway.

“Certainly. Very pleased to meet you,” observed the figure on the mats. It was sitting cross-legged, clad only in a waist-cloth, and the house was a Fijian chief-house in a mountain village three days’ journey from the nearest white settlement—but the thing squatted on the mats was undoubtedly white, and—English? Well, no; Saxon thought no. The phrase was American in flavour. He stepped across the threshold, and came a little way in, relieved in mind. When you have been dead and buried among the islands for a quarter of a century it is much pleasanter not to run the risk of meeting other ghosts (with university accents, tea-coloured families, and a preference for modest retirement on steamer days) who may possibly have been alive together with you before....

Before.... The word means much in that vast Pacific world, sepulchre of so many lost hopes and forgotten lives. We do not, in the Islands, cultivate curiosity as a virtue, since it would be likely to bring rather more than virtue’s own reward after it. We do not ask cross questions, because the crooked answers might involve questions of another sort. And when overfed, sanguineous passengers from smart liners happen along and tell us, as a new and excellent joke, that the proper formula for receiving an introduction in the Islands is: “Glad to meet you, Mr. So-and-so; what were you called _before_?” we smile an acid smile, and pretend we are amused....

Saxon was very tired, having walked thirty miles that day, and very hungry, being out of luck, and more or less on the tramp. But I think, tired as he was, he would have found another village to rest in if the derelict white on the mats had spoken with the shibboleth of his own class and country.

As things were, the look of the house pleased him, and he came in and folded himself up on the mats. The other man noted that he selected a “tabu kaisi” mat (a kind strictly forbidden to all but chiefs or whites), and that he looked hopefully towards the kava bowl.

“Not the first time you’ve stopped under a pandanus roof, I guess?” he remarked.

“No,” said Saxon. “Whose house is this?”

“Mine,” said the stranger. “Make yourself at home.”

It was a handsome chief-house of the best Fijian type, forty feet from mats to ridge-pole, the walls covered with beautifully inlaid and interwoven reeds, the roof bound together with exquisite sinnet work in artistic patterns, of red, black, and yellow, and towering up into a dark, cool cavern of pleasant gloom. The floor was overlaid with fine parquetry of split bamboo at the “kasii” or common-folk end, and piled deep with fine mats in the “chief” part. A Fijian bed, ten feet wide and three feet high, ran like a dais right across the end of the house. It was covered by mats prettily fringed with coloured parrot feathers. There were three great doors, east, west, and south, each framing in its dark-set opening a different picture of surpassing loveliness. Nalolo town (its name is on the map of Fiji, but it reads otherwise) stands very high on the sheer crest of a pointed green hill that is just like the enchanted hill in the pictures of a fairy tale. There is a little round green lawn on the top, and all about it stand the high, pointed beehive houses of the town, each perched on its own tiny mound like a toy on a stand. Sloped cocoanut logs run up to the doors of the houses, and quaintly coloured crotons cluster about them. In the deep, soft grass golden eggs from the guava trees lie tumbled about among fallen stars of orange and lemon blossom, and everywhere the red hibiscus shakes its splendid bells in the soft hill-winds. About the foot of the peak a wide blue river wanders, singing all day long; and from every door of every house, high perched above the cloudy valleys and hyacinth hill ranges, one can see pictures, and pictures, and pictures almost too lovely to be true. There are not two places in the world like Nalolo.

The White Man of Nalolo, however, was only interested in the fact that the river provided excellent crayfish; and that taro grew very well indeed on the slopes below the town. He had once been young, but he was not young now, and did not matter any longer. Therefore he had become particular about his dinner and indifferent to scenery. I will not tell you the story of the White Man of Nalolo, or why he, of all men, rebelled so fiercely against the common lot of “not mattering any more,” that he came away to the wilds of the Pacific and the highlands of Fiji, and never went back again, because, like many true stories, it cannot be believed, and therefore had better not be told. Besides, this is the story of Saxon and his daughter.

Saxon was down on his luck. He had a charter for the _Sybil_, but she was not able to undertake it at present, for, trying to pilot her into Suva harbour himself, he had contrived to run her on a reef, and damaged her so seriously that she was at present careened on the beach in front of the local boat-builder’s, undergoing repairs. The builder, knowing something of Saxon’s reputation, had insisted on cash in advance, and the captain, in consequence, found himself so nearly out of funds that he was unable to stay in Suva pending the repairs to his ship. He had therefore started with Vaiti for the interior of the great island of Viti Levu, intending to live on the real hospitality of the natives for a few weeks, and tramp from village to village.

He explained something of this as he sat on the mats enjoying the grateful coolness of the house. The other man nodded gravely, watching the door. He offered a curious contrast to the Englishman’s coarse red fairness, being lean, sundried, and grizzled, with expressionless, boot-buttoned eyes, and a straggling “goatee” beard that dated his exile from America back to long-ago days.

“Where’s your daughter?” he asked.

“Coming. She stopped to tidy up at the river.”