Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/186

 the model; and Aioma, the old child, voracious in sea matters as the child that once was Dick, knew them too, nearly all, taught to him on the model by Dick.

Master and pupil stood for a moment in silence, looking here, looking there, absorbed, taking possession of her with their minds. Then the pupil suddenly clapping his hands began to run about swinging on to ropes, poking his head here and there, now into the galley, now down the foc'sle hatch.

“It is even as it was in my dream,” cried he, “but greater and more beautiful, and she is ours, Taori, and we will take her beyond the reef—e manta Tia kau—and we will fill her sails with the wind; she will eat the wind, there will be no wind left for canoes in all the islands.” As he chattered and ran about, every now and then his face would turn to port as though he were looking for something. It was the obsession of the outrigger. You will remember that even in his dream when half an inch high he had helped to work the model across the rock pool, the dream ship had developed an outrigger; it was so now. The outrigger had so fixed itself in his mind, owing to ancestral and personal experience, as part of the make-up of a sailing craft that Aioma could not escape from the idea of it.

There was something wanting. Reason told him that there was nothing wanting, that the schooner had beam and depth enough to stand up to the wind and sea without capsizing—all the same every now and then, when facing the bow, he was conscious that on