Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/270

 When he reached it and stood up, the canoe was gone, swept to sea to be submerged and tossed on the swell.

His last possession had been taken from him. Schooner, money, pearls, clothes and lastly the canoe, all were gone; he had nothing in the world—save the loin cloth made from the bindings of the dead children.

But he was not thinking of that. His life had been saved. He had almost touched death and now as he looked on the boiling current, he saw a shark fin shearing along as though the shark that had missed him was blindly hunting for him.

He came back to the trees, hugging the life that had been spared to him and sat down to rest, Death sitting opposite to him—cheated.

This business brought things to a crisis with Rantan; though robbing him of his last possession, it still had given him a sense of winning a move, and truly, though his luck had been dreadful, there had been an undercurrent of good luck. He had escaped from Le Moan that night, he had escaped from Nanu and Ona who had him bound hand and foot, he had escaped from the sea coming to this atoll, and he had escaped from the leaking canoe and the shark. His mind took a turn. He felt that he was meant to live, he was sure that now he would be rescued. A ship would come.

And at this thought that seemed clothed in surety, the man’s soul blazed up against Karolin. If she were only a ship with the right sort of people on board, he