Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/111

 Dick work at the building or do any work at all except fishing and fish spearing.

“You are the chief (Ompalu),” said Aioma as he sat of an evening before the house of Uta Matu, now the house of Dick. “You are young and do not know all the ways of things, but I love you as a son; I do not know what is in you that is above us, but the sea I love is in your eyes. The sea, our father, sent you, but you have still to learn the ways of the land, where the chief does no work.” Then he would grunt to himself and rock as he sat, and then his voice rising to a whine, “Could the people raise their heads to one who labours with them, or would they bow their heads so that he might put his foot on their necks?” Then casting his eyes down he would talk to himself, the words so run together as to be indistinguishable; but always, Katafa noticed, his eyes would return again and again to the little ships in the shadow of the house, the model ships made by Kearney long ago—the vestiges of a civilization of which Dick and Aioma and Katafa knew nothing, or only that the ships, the big ships of which these were the likenesses, were dangerous and the men in them evil and to be avoided or destroyed if possible.

The Portsey of long ago that had fired a cannon shot and destroyed Katafa’s canoe, the schooner that had brought the Melanesians to Palm Tree, the Spanish ship that had been sunk in Karolin lagoon and the whaler that had come after her, all these had burnt into the minds of Dick, Aioma and Katafa the fact