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!