Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/265

 Karolin, with fabulous treasure in its blue heart, lay somewhere over there, lost, so far that even the lagoon light did not show.

He turned to the southeast. Somewhere there lay the Paumotus.

Should he push off in the canoe and try to reach them?

Since waking this morning there had fallen upon Rantan a double obsession, the paralysing sense of his nakedness and now the feeling that somehow in some way Peterson was following him—following him wearing the seven-league boots of bad luck. He believed neither in God nor in ghosts, but he believed in luck—and his luck had been frightful and it had dated from the killing of Peterson.

This double obsession cut the ground from under the feet of his energy, so that the idea of escape in the canoe entered his mind only to leave it again. He came back to the trees, lay down in their shadow and now the gulls began to talk to him.

The little island had two voices, the endless sound of the breakers and the unending complaint of the gulls; sometimes it would be just a voice or two, sometimes clamour—always indifference, voices from a world that knew nothing of man.

The dead women he had left lying on Karolin beach were not further beyond the pale of things than he who had slain them, and it came to Rantan as he lay there that he was shut out; no one knew of his fate, he was of no manner of interest to anything that surrounded