If a line be drawn between Jaluit, in the Marshall Group, and
Bougainville, in the Solomons, and if this line be bisected at two
degrees south of the equator by a line drawn from Ukuor, in the
Carolines, the high island of Fuatino will be raised in that sun-washed
stretch of lonely sea. Inhabited by a stock kindred to the Hawaiian,
the Samoan, the Tahitian, and the Maori, Fuatino becomes the apex of the
wedge driven by Polynesia far to the west and in between Melanesia and
Micronesia. And it was Fuatino that David Grief raised next morning,
two miles to the east and in direct line with the rising sun. The same
whisper of a breeze held, and the _Rattler_ slid through the smooth sea
at a rate that would have been eminently proper for an island schooner
had the breeze been thrice as strong.
Fuatino was nothing else than an ancient crater, thrust upward from the
sea-bottom by some primordial cataclysm. The western portion, broken
and crumbled to sea level, was the entrance to the crater itself, which
constituted the harbour. Thus, Fuatino was like a rugged horseshoe, the
heel pointing to the west. And into the opening at the heel the Rattler
steered. Captain Glass, binoculars in hand and peering at the chart made
by himself, which was spread on top the cabin, straightened up with an
expression on his face that was half alarm, half resignation.
“It's coming,” he said. “Fever. It wasn't due till to-morrow. It always
hits me hard, Mr. Grief. In five minutes I'll be off my head. You'll
have to con the schooner in. Boy! Get my bunk ready! Plenty of blankets!
Fill that hot-water bottle! It's so calm, Mr. Grief, that I think you
can pass the big patch without warping. Take the leading wind and shoot
her. She's the only craft in the South Pacific that can do it, and I
know you know the trick. You can scrape the Big Rock by just watching
out for the main boom.”
He had talked rapidly, almost like a drunken man, as his reeling brain
battled with the rising shock of the malarial stroke. When he stumbled
toward the companionway, his face was purpling and mottling as if
attacked by some monstrous inflammation or decay. His eyes were setting
in a glassy bulge, his hands shaking, his teeth clicking in the spasms
of chill.
“Two hours to get the sweat,” he chattered with a ghastly grin. “And a
couple more and I'll be all right. I know the damned thing to the last
minute it runs its course. Y-y-you t-t-take ch-ch-ch-ch----”
His voice faded away in a weak stutter as he collapsed down into the
cabin and his employer took charge. The _Rattler_ was just entering the
passage. The heels of the horseshoe island were two huge mountains of
rock a thousand feet high, each almost broken off from the mainland and
connected with it by a low and narrow peninsula. Between the heels was
a half-mile stretch, all but blocked by a reef of coral extending across
from the south heel. The passage, which Captain Glass had called a
crevice, twisted into this reef, curved directly to the north heel, and
ran along the base of the perpendicular rock. At this point, with the
main-boom almost grazing the rock on the port side, Grief, peering down
on the starboard side, could see bottom less than two fathoms beneath
and shoaling steeply. With a whaleboat towing for steerage and as a
precaution against back-draughts from the cliff, and taking advantage of
a fan of breeze, he shook the Rattler full into it and glided by the big
coral patch without warping. As it was, he just scraped, but so softly
as not to start the copper.
The harbour of Fuatino opened before him. It was a circular sheet of
water, five miles in diameter, rimmed with white coral beaches, from
which the verdure-clad slopes rose swiftly to the frowning crater walls.
The crests of the walls were saw-toothed, volcanic peaks, capped and
halo'd with captive trade-wind clouds. Every nook and crevice of the
disintegrating lava gave foothold to creeping, climbing vines and
trees--a green foam of vegetation. Thin streams of water, that were
mere films of mist, swayed and undulated downward in sheer descents
of hundreds of feet. And to complete the magic of the place, the warm,
moist air was heavy with the perfume of the yellow-blossomed _cassi_.
Fanning along against light, vagrant airs, the _Rattler_ worked in.
Calling the whale-boat on board, Grief searched out the shore with his
binoculars. There was no life. In the hot blaze of tropic sun the place
slept. There was no sign of welcome. Up the beach, on the north shore,
where the fringe of cocoanut palms concealed the village, he could see
the black bows of the canoes in the canoe-houses. On the beach, on even
keel, rested the strange schooner. Nothing moved on board of her or
around her. Not until the beach lay fifty yards away did Grief let go
the anchor in forty fathoms. Out in the middle, long years before, he
had sounded three hundred fathoms without reaching bottom, which was to
be expected of a healthy crater-pit like Fuatino. As the chain roared
and surged through the hawse-pipe he noticed a number of native women,
lusciously large as only those of Polynesia are, in flowing _ahu's_,
flower-crowned, stream out on the deck of the schooner on the beach.
Also, and what they did not see, he saw from the galley the squat figure
of a man steal for'ard, drop to the sand, and dive into the green screen
of bush.
While the sails were furled and gasketed, awnings stretched, and sheets
and tackles coiled harbour fashion, David Grief paced the deck and
looked vainly for a flutter of life elsewhere than on the strange
schooner. Once, beyond any doubt, he heard the distant crack of a rifle
in the direction of the Big Rock. There were no further shots, and he
thought of it as some hunter shooting a wild goat.
At the end of another hour Captain Glass, under a mountain of blankets,
had ceased shivering and was in the inferno of a profound sweat.
“I'll be all right in half an hour,” he said weakly.
“Very well,” Grief answered. “The place is dead, and I'm going ashore to
see Mataara and find out the situation.”
“It's a tough bunch; keep your eyes open,” the captain warned him. “If
you're not back in an hour, send word off.”
Grief took the steering-sweep, and four of his Raiatea men bent to the
oars. As they landed on the beach he looked curiously at the women under
the schooner's awning. He waved his hand tentatively, and they, after
giggling, waved back.
“_Talofa!_” he called.
They understood the greeting, but replied, “_Iorana_,” and he knew they
came from the Society Group.
“Huahine,” one of his sailors unhesitatingly named their island. Grief
asked them whence they came, and with giggles and laughter they replied,
“Huahine.”
“It looks like old Dupuy's schooner,” Grief said, in Tahitian, speaking
in a low voice. “Don't look too hard. What do you think, eh? Isn't it
the _Valetta?_”
As the men climbed out and lifted the whale-boat slightly up the beach
they stole careless glances at the vessel.
“It is the _Valetta_,” Taute said. “She carried her topmast away seven
years ago. At Papeete they rigged a new one. It was ten feet shorter.
That is the one.”
“Go over and talk with the women, you boys. You can almost see Huahine
from Raiatea, and you'll be sure to know some of them. Find out all you
can. And if any of the white men show up, don't start a row.”
An army of hermit crabs scuttled and rustled away before him as he
advanced up the beach, but under the palms no pigs rooted and grunted.
The cocoanuts lay where they had fallen, and at the copra-sheds there
were no signs of curing. Industry and tidiness had vanished. Grass
house after grass house he found deserted. Once he came upon an old
man, blind, toothless, prodigiously wrinkled, who sat in the shade and
babbled with fear when he spoke to him. It was as if the place had been
struck with the plague, was Grief's thought, as he finally approached
the Big House. All was desolation and disarray. There were no
flower-crowned men and maidens, no brown babies rolling in the shade of
the avocado trees. In the doorway, crouched and rocking back and forth,
sat Mataara, the old queen. She wept afresh at sight of him, divided
between the tale of her woe and regret that no follower was left to
dispense to him her hospitality.
“And so they have taken Naumoo,” she finished. “Motauri is dead. My
people have fled and are starving with the goats. And there is no one to
open for you even a drinking cocoa-nut. O Brother, your white brothers
be devils.”
“They are no brothers of mine, Mataara,” Grief consoled. “They are
robbers and pigs, and I shall clean the island of them----”
He broke off to whirl half around, his hand flashing to his waist and
back again, the big Colt's levelled at the figure of a man, bent double,
that rushed at him from out of the trees. He did not pull the trigger,
nor did the man pause till he had flung himself headlong at Grief's
feet and begun to pour forth a stream of uncouth and awful noises. He
recognized the creature as the one he had seen steal from the _Valetta_
and dive into the bush; but not until he raised him up and watched
the contortions of the hare-lipped mouth could he understand what he
uttered.
“Save me, master, save me!” the man yammered, in English, though he was
unmistakably a South Sea native. “I know you! Save me!”
And thereat he broke into a wild outpour of incoherence that did
not cease until Grief seized him by the shoulders and shook him into
silence.
“I know you,” Grief said. “You were cook in the French Hotel at Papeete
two years ago. Everybody called you 'Hare-Lip.'”
The man nodded violently.
“I am now cook of the _Valetta_,” he spat and spluttered, his mouth
writhing in a fearful struggle with its defect. “I know you. I saw you
at the hotel. I saw you at Lavina's. I saw you on the _Kittiwake_. I saw
you at the _Mariposa_ wharf. You are Captain Grief, and you will save
me. Those men are devils. They killed Captain Dupuy. Me they made kill
half the crew. Two they shot from the cross-trees. The rest they shot
in the water. I knew them all. They stole the girls from Huahine. They
added to their strength with jail-men from Noumea. They robbed the
traders in the New Hebrides. They killed the trader at Vanikori, and
stole two women there. They----”
But Grief no longer heard. Through the trees, from the direction of
the harbour, came a rattle of rifles, and he started on the run for the
beach. Pirates from Tahiti and convicts from New Caledonia! A pretty
bunch of desperadoes that even now was attacking his schooner. Hare-Lip
followed, still spluttering and spitting his tale of the white devils'
doings.
The rifle-firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, but Grief ran
on, perplexed by ominous conjectures, until, in a turn of the path, he
encountered Mauriri running toward him from the beach.
“Big Brother,” the Goat Man panted, “I was too late. They have taken
your schooner. Come! For now they will seek for you.”
He started back up the path away from the beach.
“Where is Brown?” Grief demanded.
“On the Big Rock. I will tell you afterward. Come now!”
“But my men in the whaleboat?”
Mauriri was in an agony of apprehension.
“They are with the women on the strange schooner. They will not be
killed. I tell you true. The devils want sailors. But you they will
kill. Listen!” From the water, in a cracked tenor voice, came a French
hunting song. “They are landing on the beach. They have taken your
schooner--that I saw. Come!”