“Jim!” cried Dick. “Hai amonai—Jim—where you gone to?”

He was standing before the house in the early sunlight; he had just come out and Kearney was nowhere to be seen. A breeze had broken the heat, and the absolute loveliness of the morning found reflection in the soul of the boy.

The far-off sea that would be purple at noon lay like smashed sapphires beyond the reef. The lagoon, whipped by the breeze, showed colours unimaginable by man, colours that seemed to live by their own intrinsic brilliancy, stretching from the luminous blue of the near pools to the purples and mauves of the submerged rotten coral beyond which lay the dancing sapphire that washed the reef line.

Over all, the breeze, the flower-blue sky and the gulls.

But Kearney was nowhere to be seen.

Then, as Dick called again, the girl came out from the trees at the opposite side of the sward, fresh from a dip in the lagoon beyond the cape, and with a scarlet flower in her hair, which was tied back with a bit of thread liana.

She crossed the sward, and the boy, seeing her, bothered himself no longer about Kearney, and set to preparing for breakfast. Had he not been so busy he might have noticed a difference in her. She walked assuredly and with a carelessness and an ease that were new to her. In ordinary times she would come for her food as an animal might come, an animal not quite tamed, and vaguely distrustful, take her seat at a little distance, and wait meekly, yet watchfully, for the dispensations of Providence. It was different now. She came close up to Dick and, without offering in the least to help, stood watching him, taking her seat when the meal was ready as close as “Kea’ney” had sat, and helping herself to the food without waiting to be helped.

Even Dick, satisfying his voracious appetite, noticed the change in her now. He did not know what it was in the least and he didn’t bother to think, yet in some curious way it disturbed him.

With Kearney there, he and Katafa had always been subordinates; between subordinates there is always a bond, a league, however vague and unwritten, against the master. Youth had helped, and the two had made a little society of their own, with Dick as leader. This relationship had been strangely disturbed this morning by the absence of Kearney and by the actions of Katafa, who was doing things she had never done before, sitting in a different attitude and speaking in a new tone of assurance and indifference. Dick almost felt that something had happened to himself—something had.

She had been accustomed to help in clearing away after meals, but this morning she just sat and watched. There was not much clearing to be done, but Kearney had always been particular that no scraps or fish bones were left about to bring the robber crabs round scavenging or the gulls. A dirty camp has always followers, so the scraps were shot into the lagoon; then the plates had to be cleaned and put away on their shelf in the house.

Dick, thinking she was maybe lazy or tired, did not bother. He finished his business and stamped out the fire, reckoning that if Kearney wanted food when he came back he could cook it for himself—but where had Kearney gone to, and why was he so long away?

He had not taken the dinghy. The little boat was moored at its usual place by the bank. He must have gone off in the woods.

“Katafa,” said Dick, after running to the boat to see if Kearney had taken the fishing tackle, always kept in a little locker in the stern sheets, “what makes Kearney so long away? He has not taken the lines to fish with from the boat.”

“Perhaps,” said Katafa, “he is on the reef.”

“No,” replied the boy, “for he has not taken the boat.”

“Perhaps he is amongst the tall trees.”

Dick half shook his head as if in doubt. Then, raising his voice, he cried again:

“Hai, amonai—Jim! Hai! Hai!”

A far-off echo in the trees caught the hail and sent it back. “Hai! hai!”—faint, yet clear came the echo, dying off to a silence troubled only by the sound of the reef.

“He answers,” said Katafa, “but he is too far away, he cannot come.”

There was a grove on the south beach of Karolin that had an echo; call there and you would hear the spirits of the departed answering you, jeering you in your own voice. She did not believe that the spirit of Kearney was answering Dick; some old spirit of the grove, maybe, but not Kearney. She knew that Kearney was not among the trees, and she spoke in mockery.

Dick knew that it was only an echo. He gave another shout and then, dropping the business as a bad job and Kearney from his mind, ran off to the boat to overhaul the fishing tackle. When he had finished he came back for her to go fishing and found her busy with a huge old grandfather cocoanut and one of the Barlow knives salved from the wreck.

She must have gone into the house to get the knife, but Dick never thought of that; the work she was on held him. She had frayed away the brown husk into a sort of frill and was busy now on the face of it, making eyes in it and the semblance of a nose and mouth.

A new idea had come to Katafa, a common-sensical idea, and it was this. Nanawa was the active god of Karolin; frightful, capricious, striking right and left when invoked, and sometimes hitting the invoker. She had brought him to her twice, and the first time he had roared over the lagoon and broken her canoe, angry no doubt at having been balked by the god of the little ships; the second time, last night, he was much more satisfactory in his behaviour. But Katafa had a dim suspicion that, had he not found Kearney and taken him to himself, he would have found her, and this suspicion was perfectly well founded—he would. She determined not to deal with him again.

Now, on Karolin there was another god, Nan, very old, amiable, the president of the cocoanut groves, the puraka patches and the pandanus trees; a sort of minister of agriculture, but much beloved, honoured and fÊted. Nan, in fact, was more than a god; he was the symbol of Karolin, just as the British flag is the symbol of Britain. His old carved-cocoanut face was to be found in all the houses, and the sight of it to a Karolinite was as the sight of the Union Jack to an Englishman.

Katafa’s idea was to make a symbol of Nan and stick it up on the southern reef. The common-sensical part of the business was the idea of using the deity as a signal. If any fishing canoe from Karolin were to sight that effigy erected on the reef, it would come in to explore, and, if Katafa knew anything of the Karolinites, it would not leave till the whole place had been searched for the persons who had dared to erect the image of the cocoanut god on an alien shore. For not only would they consider that the god had been trifled with, which was bad, but that his virtue had been diluted, which was worse. He belonged exclusively to Karolin, and if he went spending his powers on other islands it would be all the worse for Karolin.

Dick watched the girl as she sat working away on a business as bloody and desperate as that of filling a shell with high explosive. Any little trifling thing beyond the routine of daily life would interest Dick, and now, squatting on his heels, the fishing utterly forgotten, he followed every movement of the knife as it worked away at the mouth of the deity, which was anything but an imitation of a rosebud.

“What are you doing that for?” asked he.

“You were saying but yesterday that the fish were growing smaller in the lagoon,” replied she, glancing with head aside at the progress of her work, as a woman might glance at a picture she is painting.

“I know,” he replied, “but what are you doing that for?”

“This will bring big fish to the lagoon,” replied she darkly.

She saw, as she spoke, not the grotesque ju-ju she was gazing at, but the sun-blaze on the waters of Karolin, the azure and chatoyancy of those depths where the gulls were always fishing, the great distances, where a mind could soar in freedom, resting on nothing, caring for nothing, heedless of everything. She saw the wind and the sun and the breakers falling on the coral. For the people there she had no more feeling than she had for Dick or the departed Kearney; they were to her only as shadows or ghosts. The place was everything.

Perhaps the old Egyptians knew how to practise the taminan tabu and used it on cats with partial effect or an effect that has worn out through the ages—cats, for whom places are more real than people, who live in so strange a world of their own, almost beyond human touch.

She could see, as she worked, the big canoes landing and taking her back. As for what they might do to Dick, she neither thought nor cared.

“But how?” asked Dick.

“I will show you,” said she; “but first get me what I want.”

She gave him some directions and off he went to the groves, taking the axe with him, returning in half an hour or so dragging after him an eight-foot sapling, straight as a fishing rod, four inches thick at the base and tapering gradually to its extremity.

She examined the point of the sapling. Then, making a hole at the base of the cocoanut, she drove the point in so that the thing was fixed on tight. Then between them they carried the affair to the dinghy, placed it long-ways with the frightful face staring down at the water over the stern, got in, and pushed off.

Dick sculled under her direction, using the oars with a will, and, vastly intrigued with this new game of attracting big fish, he half expected to see them coming after the boat or coming up the lagoon, lured by this strange bait. Nothing appeared, however; the dinghy passed unfollowed down the long arm of the lagoon, passed the break and the vision of blazing sea beyond, reached the southern part of the reef, and tied up.

The wind was fresh this morning and the waves on the outer beach of the reef came in curving and clear as if cut from aquamarine, bursting in snow and thunder, sheeting over the coral and sucking back only to form and burst again. The breeze brought the spray and the mewing of the gulls and the scent of a thousand square leagues of sea. Katafa, her hair blowing in the wind, stood for a moment looking south—south, where Karolin lay—the great lagoon, in its forty-mile clip of reef, sending its fume and song to the sky, and the sun making haze of the distances.

Then she turned to Dick, who was standing beside her, supporting Nan.

He could not tell yet how the bait was to be used. With the common sense born in him from his father, he was beginning to suspect the whole business as being unpractical. However, he said nothing, and when she began to search about for a crack in the coral or some convenient hole to take the base of the sapling, he helped. They found one some three feet deep, erected the pole, secured it from rocking with lumps of loose coral and sand, and then stood to look at their work. The thing was hideous, fantastic and stamped with the seal of the South Seas. The breeze blew the frill on the thing’s head and, as the sapling swayed slightly in the wind, the grotesque and grinning head seemed nodding towards Karolin.

“Ehu!” cried Dick. “But how will that bring the big fish?”

“They will come from there,” said Katafa, pointing south.

Dick looked towards the south. He saw nothing but sea, gulls and sky. Then he turned to the dinghy, the girl following him.