Page:The Gates of Morning - Henry De Vere Stacpoole.pdf/274

 bigger—she was coming for the atoll. She was The Ship.

Then Rantan danced and sang on the smooth bit of coral and shouted to the gulls, and he came down to the sands and ran about on them like a dog in high spirits; he shouted to the canoe and abused her and called her filthy names, then back again to see how the ship was growing and back again to the sands to cut more capers.

She grew.

Returning to his lookout post for the fourth time, she seemed to have suddenly shot up in size as if by magic. Now he could see her clearly, her make and size and the patch on her foresail. He took a breath so deep that his chest stood out above his lean belly like a barrel. God! she was the Kermadec! The Kermadec or a sister ship, her twin image; the eye of a sailor told him that, the patch on the foresail he knew—he had helped to put it there . He turned and came running on to the sands.

White men must have come into Karolin lagoon and made friends of the kanakas—the women would have been found dead on the beach, the canoe gone. It was all plain.

They would know that with the wind blowing at that time the canoe would have come in this direction; he was being searched for, either to be clubbed to death, by kanakas or hanged by whites.

There lay the canoe on the beach and his footsteps on the sand.