Page:Pele and Hiiaka; a myth from Hawaii (IA pelehiiakamythfr00emeriala).pdf/89



Hiiaka's voyage across the Ale-nui-haha channel, considered merely as a sea adventure, was a tame experience. There was no storm, no boistrous weather, sea as calm as a mill-pond, nothing to fillip the imagination with a sense of excitement or danger; yet it was far from being an agreeable experience to the young woman who was now having her first hand-to-hand tussle with the world.

They had spent the night at the house of one Pi'i-ke-a-nui. In the early morning their host and a younger man—apparently his son—named Pi'i-ke-a-iki, made ready their canoe to sail for Maui. Hiiaka, assuming that passage would be granted both of them, in accordance with a promise made the previous day, stood ready against the hour of departure. At the last moment, the younger man, having assisted Wahine-oma'o to her seat in the bow next to himself, called to his elder, "Pi'i-ke-a-nui, why don't you show your passenger to her seat, the one next you?"

"I won't do it," Pi'i-ke-a-nui answered groutily. "I find that the canoe will be overloaded if we take passengers aboard and all our landlord’s freight will get wet."

The real reason for this volte-face on the part of the old sailor was that he had made an unseemly proposition to Hiiaka the night before and she had repelled him.

Wahine-oma'o, thereupon, left her seat and the canoe started without them. It was not more than fairly underway, however, when a violent sea struck the craft and swamped it, and all the loose freight was floating about in the ocean.

"There, you see! We'd 'ave had better luck with the women aboard." Such was the exclamation of Pi'i-ke-a-nui.

It did not take long to convince the old man Pi'i-ke-a-nui, who was captain of the canoe, that he had invited this disaster on himself, the agent of which, as he rightly suspected, was none other than the distinguished-looking young woman who now stood on the beach watching him in his predicament with unperturbed countenance.

The two men floated their canoe, collected their baggage and came ashore. When they had got the stuff dry and stowed in the waist of the craft, they escorted the women aboard, seating Wahine-oma'o, as directed by the captain, in the bow near Pi'i