.

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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.”

СКАЧАТЬ