Chapter XI: Too Late

Following instructions, Captain Cathie shook out every stitch of canvas the _Torch_ could carry, and laid her course dead for the Dark Islands. They made good way, but their progress still seemed slow to Kenneth Blair; for his fears outstripped the flight of the little ship, and, anxious as he was to reach the Islands, he still almost dreaded the cry that should tell of their sighting, in fear of what he might find there.

And grounds for fear were not lacking. The Dark Islands lay some five days distant, east by north--on the line, therefore, of the marauders' way home. From the atoll they had already raided, he judged, from the number of dwellings and general appearances, they might have got some fifty or sixty souls, not more. Their holds would still be far from full. If they had invaded the Dark Islands in similar fashion, it was a stormy reception the next comers might expect. At best it would be a negative welcome, and a matter of slow and cautious approach to their few good graces; but if the islands had been raided, the work would be thrown back for years, and all his hopes with them. He could scarce eat or sleep for thinking of it, and the pricking off of their position each day on the chart, and the calculation of the hours that still intervened between them and full knowledge of how matters lay, were matters of supremest interest and absorbing anxiety.

He could settle to none of the ordinary routine, and his evident upsetting, the causes of which they perfectly understood, disturbed them all in like fashion.

He spoke little, even to Jean, and she never once, by word or look, expressed anything but the utmost sympathy and confidence in him.

He tramped the deck day and night almost, with eager outlook over the waste of waters ahead, and never a look behind unless at the seething bubbles of their long, straight wake, which told of the speed and directness of their flight.

Once only, in these days of biting anxiety, he said to her--

"Dearest, I am poor company at present. Can you forgive me? I am on the rack about these poor souls ahead. I cannot help fearing the worst, and it means so very much to us."

"I am with you, Ken, heart and soul. We can only pray for the best. If what you fear has happened, all we can do is to do our best to right it."

He shook his head unhopefully. The idea had taken possession of him that they would arrive only to find death and desolation and the wild fury of revenge.

"Even if it is so," said his comforter, "I can see possibility of good coming out of the evil."

"It will throw us back years," he said gloomily.

"If your people have been carried off, we will follow them and release them and restore them to their homes"--there were new sparks in his eyes as she spoke like one inspired--"and that will give us the footing it might take years to obtain."

He kissed her hand.

"You give me new hopes, whatever may have happened. That is what we will attempt if the worst has taken place," and thereafter he brightened up considerably, but relaxed no whit of his anxiety to reach the islands.

They swept gallantly along on the northern fringe of the westerly wind, which maintained a propitious amplitude, and just before sunset on the fourth day, the lucent rim where sea met sky was dented with a filmy tooth which the sinking sun drew momentarily into view from the farther distance, and Captain Cathie and Blair pronounced it Kapaa'a, the highest peak in the Dark Islands.

There was not much sleep on board that night, the morrow would be so big with events. General opinion among the men ran somehow to a fight. That was, perhaps, the natural tendency of the pent-up feelings of the last few days. An outlet would be grateful, a violent outlet from choice. When a man's feelings suffer maltreatment, the natural man within him develops a violent desire to find relief in kicking, in which last word is comprehended the whole known range of methods of assault, with the exception, of course, of the circumscribed and properly debarred use of the feet.

They travelled warily that night, and the first of the dawn showed them the peaks of Kapaa'a, bold and beautiful, dead ahead, and growing bolder and still more beautiful with every graceful roll of the ship.

They hung over the sides, every man and woman of them, and eyed their future home with an eagerness which its outward aspect at once amply satisfied and further quickened.

For what they could see was grand in its opulence of crag, and cliff, and gorge, and greenery. And the clouds which wreathed the higher summits, and the gauzy films of mist, which floated along the hillsides and hung reluctantly in the tree-tops, gave promise of still daintier beauties in that which they held half hidden.

They drew in cautiously to within a mile of the outer reef, and then, not venturing the ship nearer till they should learn how matters stood inside, Blair and Evans, with a crew of ten, eight to pull and two in case of need, and Matti to interpret, shot through one of the openings in the reef on the back of a long blue roller and made straight for the white beach. They carried no visible arms, but each man of the crew had his Winchester between his feet.

The lagoon ran up into a spearhead of white sand, between two tall cliffs opposite the widest opening in the reef, as though the constant impact of the outer waves, tempered as it was by the compression of the opening and the subsequent run across the lagoon, had forced the beach inland at that spot. It was helped, however, by a river, which came down between the hills and divided the white sandspear into two equal parts.

Here, according to usage and natural proclivity, a village should have stood, but in this case did not. John Gerson had told Blair that other morning, when they came racing up the lagoon in similar brave case, that it lay up the valley near the taro fields.

His heart beat painfully as, one by one, he picked up the points which had charted themselves for ever in his memory.

There, to the left of the stream, was where they landed.

There was the rough scarp of rock round which they had followed the bristling crowd to the death.

There his former life had ended in turmoil and darkness, and the new life had begun in twilight dimness and the painful groping after broken threads.

And yet, how mercifully he had been guided! The shadowed valley had led, after all, to the fuller life and the mountain-top, and he bowed his head gratefully.

The white boat slid gently up the white beach, and so far their keen outlook had seen no sign of hostile life. But experience had taught him that appearances are deceptive, and that sometimes when least is seen most is to be feared.

They disembarked cautiously, and stood looking round. The palms about the mouth of the valley waved sombre welcome, or it might be warning. The thick brush below lay still and silent, but bright black eyes by the hundred might be watching them from it.

The very lack even of opposition was a menace, and suggestive of trickery and ambush.

"We will go round the point," said Blair at last. "And--yes, you must take your guns, men. I would have preferred not, but we don't know how matters stand."

So, leaving two in the boat, the rest shouldered their guns, and the little party went forward round the point where Kenneth Blair had been once before in his life, and almost in his death.

But no bristling mob confronted them this time. They went on step by step, with eyes for every rock and bush, and ears alert, and every nerve tight strung for the faintest hint of treachery, and Blair's face crumpled somewhat at the menace of the silence and the solitude.

Step by step they left the white beach and the friendly sea, and drew in to the blank hostility of the woods. He would a thousand times sooner have been confronted by the visible hostility of the natives. For that which is visible and tangible one may hope to cope with and subdue, but the invisible and intangible contain possibilities beyond the compassing, and the elements of unreasoning fear.

On one member of the party these were already having their effect. Perhaps on others also, but not so perceptibly. The knowledge of better things had not, in Matti, effectually eradicated the superstitions of a lifetime. Terrors of which the white men had no conception beat like bats about his soul, the indefinable terrors of bygone ages of horrors and darkness. His face was green. He sweated fears at every faltering step. His eyes bulged crablike in quest of that which he dreaded to find.

"Sirs, sirs!" he gasped, in an agonised whisper, "it is not good. I counsel----"

"Be quiet," said Blair. "We must see," and they went on warily, expecting the sudden outleap of death at every step.

But they saw nothing, heard nothing. That dreadful menacing silence brooded over the place just as it had brooded over the atoll. A flock of gay little paraquets whirred suddenly from the hillside and dived into the bush ahead, and the silence and the spell of it were broken. The paraquets started chattering and quarrelling like a school of sparrows, and Blair's danger-pointed wits suggested to him that they would not behave so if the brush was otherwise tenanted.

With a last careful inspection of the hillsides he moved forward, and the rest followed. There was a track through the brush, and the trampled ground showed signs of much traffic.

Five minutes more and they had found all they feared.

The thicket thinned and widened towards the valley and they were standing once more amid blackened ribs of houses, and heaps of ashes from which thin wisps of smoke still curled lazily. They had arrived too late!