Island life had not quickened Mr. Kearney’s intellectual powers, and for eight or nine months after that day things happened to him that he could not account for. Sometimes fishing lines broke that ought not to have broken. He would leave a bit of chewing gum on the shelf outside the house and it would be gone, taken by the birds, maybe—but why did the birds suddenly develop a desire for gum? The dinghy sprang a leak that took him two days to mend, and fish spears would become mysteriously blunted though put away apparently sharp enough.

He never thought of the girl. The feud between them had died down, at least on his part, and she and Dick seemed getting on well together. Too well, perhaps, from a civilised person’s point of view. She and Dick would chatter away together now in the native; the girl had picked up at first enough English to help them along, but at the end of nine months it was always the language of Karolin they spoke, and even to Kearney’s heavy intelligence it was funny to hear them “clacking away” and to think that she had made him talk her lingo instead of the other way about. More than that, the boy was altering, losing the fits of abstraction that had made him seem at times almost the reincarnation of his mother, losing also the light-heartedness of the child; laughing rarely, and desperately serious over the little things of life, the moment seemed to him everything, as it is to the savage.

“She’s turning him into a —— Kanaka,” grumbled Kearney one day as he watched them starting for the reef, Dick with his fish spears over his shoulder, the girl following him. “Ain’t to hold on to these days, and sulks if he’s spoke to crooked or crossed in his vagaries. Well, if he ain’t careful I’ll l’arn him for once and all.”

But he never put the threat in action—too lazy, maybe, or too dispirited, feeling himself a back number. He was. The reins had gone out of his hands, youth had pushed him aside, and the boy, moving away towards savagery, had left this relict of high civilisation a good piece astern.

But one day Kearney was roused out of his apathy. Resting in the tree shadows at the opposite side of the sward, he saw the girl, who fancied herself alone and unobserved, cautiously approaching the house.

Never for one single day since her landing had she lost the desire to escape, to find freedom and the great spaces of the sea. Her intercourse with Dick had attached her neither to Dick nor the island, yet beyond playing tricks upon Kearney she had shown no sign of the fret that lay in her soul.

The cannon shot from the Portsoy that had burst the canoe in pieces, and the report of the gun that had rolled in echoes from the woods—these, in her firm belief, were the manifestations of the power and the voice of the shark-toothed one. Just as firmly she believed that some other god had intervened, frustrating the doings of Nanawa and spoiling the canoe out of spite.

The idea had come to her that maybe it was the god who presided over the little ships, that if she got rid of them—not all at once, for that might make a disturbance with the god, but one by one—the way might be clear. Kearney had never suspected her of stealing and throwing away his gum, of breaking the fishing lines or blunting the spears, and if she took these things off into the wood one by one and smashed them he would be equally stupid and unsuspicious—perhaps.

It was worth trying, and to-day, finding herself alone, she stole up to the house and peeped in. There they stood in the twilight on their shelves, the things whose god had broken her canoe. Impudent, unbroken themselves, and no doubt manned by sprites, they stood, the schooner, the frigate, a full-rigged ship and a tiny whaleman with bluff bows, wooden davits, crow’s nest and try-works, all complete.

An old knife of Kearney’s lay on the little shelf by the door beside the box of matches. She could not resist that. Leaving the matches untouched, she picked up the knife and flung it into the lagoon. Then she entered the house and lifted the whaleman from its shelf. It was the smallest, and it was just as well to begin with the smallest. She turned to the door with it and saw Kearney running across the sward, dropped the whaler, sprang from the doorway, and ran. Another half minute and she would have been trapped.

Kearney, on seeing her entering the house, had made a bolt from the trees on the opposite side, thinking he had her bottled, but he was too late and, as for chasing her, he might as well have tried to course a hare. Stopping suddenly and picking up Dick’s tia wood ball, which was lying in his way, he took aim at her as she ran, catching her full in the small of the back as she dived into the trees.

The sound of the smack of the ball, followed by a gasping cry, came back to him. Then she vanished, traceless but for the swaying leaves.

“That will l’arn you,” said Mr. Kearney, turning to the house and picking up the whaler, undamaged but for a broken main-topmast. He knew now who had stolen his gum, blunted the spears and outraged the dinghy. The flinging of that knife into the lagoon had told him everything, and as he sat down by the door to repair the broken spar he took an oath to be even with her.

“Break the fish lines, would you?” said he as he sat with the whaler clipped between his knees as in a vise, and his fingers busy unrigging the mast. “Fling me knife into the water? Well, you wait. Not another bite or sup will you have that you don’t get yourself, or me name’s not Jim Kearney. Not another bite or sup till you go down on your marrow bones and beg me pardon.” He worked away, his soul raging in him, his mind fumbling round and remembering other things to be laid to her account. Gum that had vanished, a saw that had gone west, spirited off as if by pixies—he had put these levitations down to his own carelessness or forgetfulness, quite unable to imagine a human being’s tricky malevolence as the agent.

As he worked, the splash of oars came from the lagoon, and Dick landed with three red-backed bream strung on a length of liana. Seeing Kearney alone, he looked round for Katafa, but could see no sign of her.

“Where’s she gone?” asked Dick.

Kearney looked up; the back number had taken fire at last. “Get off with you and don’t be askin’ me questions!” he shouted, just as if he were speaking to a man, not a boy. “Go ’n’ look for her if you want to find her, throwin’ me knife in the water and smashin’ me lines! The pair of you is one as bad as the other, always tinkerin’ together, you and her.”

The boy drew back, staring at the other with wide-pupilled eyes.

“What’s she been doin’?” he asked.

“Doin’!” cried Kearney. “I’ve told you what she’s been doin’. Go ’n’ hunt for her in the wood if you want to know what she’s been doin’! Well you know what she’s been doin’, standin’ there like the —— Kanaka she’s turned you into and askin’ me what she’s been doin’—clear off with you!”

The boy flung down the fish and started off, running towards the trees to the right of the sward. As he vanished, Kearney heard his voice crying out in the native: “Katafa, hai amanoi Katafa, hai, hai!”

“Bloody Kanaka,” grumbled Kearney.

Katafa, deep in the gloom of the groves, heard the call but she made no answer. Her mind was in a turmoil.

Once, long ago on Karolin, a stone thrown by a child had struck her accidentally, rousing in the dark part of her mind a confusion and resentment that almost upset her reason. As in the case of Kearney, the child had been behind her, she had not seen the stone coming, and the sudden blow was as though some one had struck her with a fist. It was the same now. Though she had recognised instantly that it was only the ball that had struck her, the shock remained.

She stood for a while listening to the far-off calling of Dick. “Katafa, hai! amanoi Katafa! hai!” It grew fainter; he was taking the wrong direction and now, with the suddenness of a clapped door, silence cut him off.

That was a trick of the woods caused maybe by the upward trend of the land; a person calling to you and moving away in a horizontal direction would suddenly be cut off.

Katafa had never been alone in the woods before this; she had always gone accompanied by either the boy or Kearney. Never had she grown accustomed to these vast masses of trees, their gloom, their congregated perfumes, the strange lights and shadows made by the moving branches and fronds, the sense of being surrounded; always amongst them the great distances of the atoll cried louder to her to come back, and the heartache and homesickness grew more intense.

But to-day she had lost her fear of the trees, and the call of Karolin had lost for a while its power. The outrage committed by Kearney had shaken her away from all other considerations, all other pictures but that of the first man who had struck her.

She moved away to the right and entered an alley formed by a double line of matamata trees. Ferns grew here on either side, and above in the liquid gloom cables of liantasse swung, powdered with starry blossoms.

She stood for a moment glancing up at the orchids that seemed like birds in flight, the bugles of the giant convolvuli and the far-off roof of leaves moving to the wind in trembles of shattered light and shadow.

Then she went on, reaching at last a little bay in the trees, ferns and bushes, where the glint of something white caught her eye. It was a skull. She pushed the leaves aside; the whole skeleton was there, the ribs still articulated, the vertebrae intact. Flame lit by mortal hand could not have calcined the bones more whitely, destroyed the flesh more completely than the slow fire of time burning here through the years amidst the cool green ferns.

Katafa, holding the leaves aside, gazed at the skull. Amongst Le Juan’s properties had been a man’s skull, used when she was invoking the dark powers against some enemy.

As Katafa gazed at the skull, the thought of Kearney came to her, and the vision of him lying like that—and the wish.