Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/181



HE dawn that showed Rantan the tiny atoll awakened Aioma who had fallen asleep thinking of the schooner.

Dick had promised that to-day they would board her and the canoe-builder in him craved to get to work, and the boy—the boy wanted to sail her, to feel the wind settling in the great spaces of her canvas, to feel her heeling to it like a tilted world, to feel her answering the helm; the canoe-builder wanted to explore her above and below, examine the fastenings of her timbers; her masts and rigging.

Aioma was very old. He might have been a hundred. No man could tell, for Karolin the clockless kept no account of years. He was too old for fighting, having lost the quickness without which a spear- or club-man is of no account as a fighter; but he was not too old for fun.

Whip-ray fishing was fun to Aioma—a sport that, next to conger killing, is the nearest approach to fighting with devils; so also was shaping heavy logs to the form of his dream, for Aioma dreamt his canoes before he shaped them, the breaking of Rantan's joints and the staking him on the reef for sharks to devour would