“ And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their hands to heaven.
"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin' lunatic asylum," declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole ship's company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in an expensively pretty frock. ”

“ Then Vaiti, suddenly flinging her arms high above her head, with her light muslin dress fluttering in the wind and all her magnificent hair falling to her knees, burst into such a flood of speech as made the two hard-bitten Englishmen on the poop open eyes of stolid amaze. There is no language in the world so full of eloquent possibilities as the Maori tongue—even in the somewhat debased and altered type that is current among the islands. And, hidden away somewhere in the strange nature of this strange thing in woman's shape, there was more than a touch of the true witch wildness and fire. ”

“ She turned upon the witch-doctor and laughed in his face. Then she stretched out her hand, and Pita's leaped into it, warm and strong, and together they stepped over the threshold of the cave.
The man outside cursed them, slowly and with relish.
"Shall we not kill him?" asked Pita.
"There is no use," said Vaiti. "It is plain to me that all the tribe know, and they trust to the dangers of the place, whatever these may be. This island is at the very end of the world, it is true, and strange things may happen here." ”

“ It was right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy cocoanut, heavy with fruit. Oranges grew by the track here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral rocks. Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate. ”

“ The threat that Vaiti had made—for the carrying out of which they doubted neither her ability nor her will, any more than she did herself—was so much more potent than the curse of the witch-doctor that the terror of the one paled before the terror of the other. For the moment, they felt that they might not be able to live, but they certainly must not die; and it was right in the middle of this illogical state of mind that the mate and bo'sun came in with their rope's ends and settled the matter once for all. An hour ago, red-hot irons only would have moved them to hurry up with their dying. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The mate jumped to his feet, and answered Vaiti's sharp hail in person, a deprecating smile spreading like spilt treacle all over his face as he came up to her, cap in hand. Vaiti took her cigar out of her mouth, and looked at him for a minute without speaking. The Sybil rolled on the towering swell like a captured beast trying to beat its brains out against a wall, but Saxon's Maori daughter stood as steady as the slender main-mast upon the reeling deck. Harris smiled more than ever, and turned the marlinspike about in his hands, looking a little foolish. ”

“ The Maori blood owns strange instincts. Again Vaiti knew what she was going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before.... It was under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping vines—something long and white and slender. ”

“ 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? ”

“ You not remember Charley's in Apia?"
"I'd forgotten Samoa," said Harris, in a more cheerful tone, picking up the marlinspike, and going to work again, as if revived by Vaiti's arithmetic.
"A miss is as good as a mile, for all me, specially when it's nine hundred mile," remarked the gloomy boatswain. "Couldn't you manage to talk about something rather less 'arrowing to a man's insides?"
"I'd like to know why she's going skull-huntin' to Friday Island, then," said the mate, casting a cautious glance at Vaiti, who was scarcely out of ear-shot, up on the deck-house. ”

“ The crew, driven previously to the verge of frenzy by her gruesome threats, became entirely frantic during the eloquent peroration that followed her address to Harris. They ran up and down the deck; they shrieked, they prayed, they besought. Vaiti, with the eye of a hunter watching a quarry almost driven to bay, kept a keen look-out through all her fiery eloquence, and just at the moment when the men seamed driven to the highest point of human endurance, turned to the mate with a triumphant cry.
"Now, Alliti! he all right by'n-by: I no shoot myself, I think. ”

“ Vaiti tossed it to Pita, and the two began their walk, barefoot, swift and silent, casting a quick glance every now and then among the weirdly stilted stems of the lonely pandanus groves as they went.
"They are all down with the Sybil—it is safer now than it would be at night," said Pita. "Vaiti, if we get these things, and sell them for much money in Sitani, you and I will leave the Sybil when she next goes to Atiu; and you shall be queen of Atiu and I shall be king, and we shall eat roast pork and 'uakari' every day." ”

“ There is nothing on the bosom of Mother Earth more loathly than the centipede, and Pita's quarry—nearly a foot long, as thick as a sausage, scarlet feelers on its hideous head, and scarlet legs fringing its long lithe body—was as hideous a specimen as ever jerked itself lightning-wise across a forest path. Pita, however, with swift dexterity, seized the horrible beast by the neck and tail, holding it so that it could neither bite nor sting, and lifted it up to his companion. Vaiti's eyes dilated ever so little. ”

“ Some two or three months later, the schooner might have been seen, like a white-winged butterfly lost at sea, beating up and down before a solitary, low, green island lying far east of the lonely Paumotus. Vaiti, sitting on the top of the deck-house, was examining the land through a glass. The native crew were all on deck; also Harris and Gray, the mate and bo'sun. Captain Saxon was not to be seen.
"The old man always do get squiffy at the wrong time, don't he?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Liali group, as many people in the Southern hemisphere agree, offers the nearest possible approach to comic opera known off the actual stage. Liali itself, the chief island, is as pretty as a toy-box, and quite extraordinarily theatrical in appearance. Its handsome, merry, brown people wear the most picturesque costume in the Pacific—a knee-length kilt of fine cashmere, girded by a deep sash of pure silk, and worn with a silken or cashmere shirt or a graceful sleeveless tunic, according to sex—all in the most vivid of sea- and flower-colour. Liali is civilised after a fashion. ”

“ Lieutenant Tempest was a man and a British sailor, and he was not afraid of death. But he thought there might be pleasanter ways of dying than that which actually stared him in the face.
Memory plays strange tricks when the dark is closing down about her doors. Lying there on the damp earth, bound hand and foot to a pole, with the hideous howls of the cannibal dancers in his ears and the glare of the cooking-pits in his eyes. Tempest could think of nothing but a fragment of verse out of a half-forgotten poem read somewhere long ago:
"It isn't the fact that you're dead that counts. ”

“ At any moment a huge soft-nosed bullet, cruel as a shell, might come singing out of the darkness; or a poisoned arrow, freighted with sure and agonising death, might whirr across their path. When the officer in command, irritated by the stumbling and falling of the men, ordered them to remove their boots and march barefoot, Vaiti told him that nothing of the kind must be done, for poisoned spear-heads were in all probability set here and there in unsuspected places, ready to pierce the unwary foot. ”

“ In less than half an hour Vaiti came back, swimming the stretch of black water that lay between the Sybil and the shore, to leave the boat ready for the men. Dripping, sparkling, and laughing, she stood up in the dim light of the deck lantern and told the mate and boatswain how the capture had been managed. Tempest, with a sack over his head and his hands and feet bound to a pole, was at that moment being carried up in the dark to the bush village. ”

“ Girls with high-coiffed yellow heads and pink or green tunics wandered lazily home to the cool, dark-domed native houses open all round to the sunset sky. They went in groups, and sang as they walked—windy, fitful gusts of strange island melody, breaking out and dying away like the evening breeze among the heavy-headed palms. Smells of yam and breadfruit, brown from the baking pits, of fish cooked in green, savoury leaves, and taro spinach stewed with cocoanut cream, crept out upon the cooling air. The long, hot day was done, and Apia rested and ate. ”

“ The utter disconcerting of Mahina and Litia, now that all party feeling was removed from the matter, further appealed to them as a jest of the finest sort, and witticisms that would have made a trooper blush were hurled upon the disconsolate maidens from all sides. Some few there were who frowned at the triumph of a foreigner and a stranger; but Vaiti's arts had succeeded in making her popular, and the malcontents were borne down by the roar of public amusement and assent. Vaiti herself, safely hidden in the Methodist mission house, listened to the laughter far off, and felt well pleased. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Now, every one who has ever been in the Islands knows that these two actions are significant of courtship. Pita was courting Vaiti, as everybody knew—Pita, a mere deck hand, who had been taken on at wild Atiu, in the Cook Islands, because he was a relation of Saxon's dead native wife. Very handsome was Pita, very young and tall and broad-shouldered, wily and fierce like all the Atiuans, but smooth and pleasant of countenance. Were not the men of Atiu nicknamed "meek-faced Atiuans," even in the days, only a generation gone, when they were the cruellest and most warlike of cannibals and pirates? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Captain Saxon, his schooner safe at anchor outside, and his copra advantageously sold to an Auckland agent, sat eating at the table, heavy-faced, a little intoxicated, and almost absolutely blank in mind. This was his nearest approach to happiness, and one that he enjoyed often enough, for, since thought meant pain to him, he had managed to acquire a wonderful agility in avoiding it, and to live for the most part almost as purely by instinct and impulse as a dog. ”