She shook her head. Ask a fox to enter a trap. 'Well, then, you can just sleep in the trees," said he, and off he went round the house, leaving her to her choice.

Dick, tired out with the day, was in the house and sound asleep, and the sailor, who had a fishing line to overhaul, sat down by the door and set to work on it. As he sat busy with his fingers and reviewing with his mind Kanakas and their unaccountable ways, he saw the girl coming out from the trees. She had fished two of the blankets out of the shack and she was crossing the sward with them towards the canoe that was tied to the bank. She got into the canoe with them and vanished from sightall but her head, which was visible in the sunset light above the bank.

Now, Kearney had old-fashioned ideas as to how young people should behave towards their elders, and Dick had received many a clip" from him for disobedience. He was starting to go after" the girl when he saw two hands go up to her head. She was arranging her

hair. One might have fancied her before a mirror.

This sight checked him. He finished his work, put the line away and retired to the house. During their many years of residence the house had almost been destroyed by a big, blow from the north-west, and Kearney in rebuilding had enlarged it.

Kearney was worried. Living in ease and quietude one might fancy worry his last visitant, but that was not so; quite small things, things he would never have given a second thought to on shipboard, had the power to upset him here, and though he would not have changed his mode of life for worlds, a broken fishing line or a leak in the dinghy would make him grumpy for hours, cursing his fate and wondering what was going to happen next.

was

Katafa was worrying him now-she unlike any Kanaka he had ever seen. Where had she come from? Was it from that island he guessed to be lying down south there? And if so, might she not bring others of her kind after her? Then the way she had slipped from under his hand, and those eyes of hers which she kept fixed on him-she wasn't right.

He dropped off to sleep with this conviction in his mind and dreamt troublous dreams, awaking about two in the morning to wonder what she was doing and whether everything was secure. Then, sleep driven away, he came out into the windless, starry night, where a six days' old moon was lolling above the trees.

Away out to sea a red flicker met his gaze. A fire was burning on the reef. Trumpets

blowing in the night could not have astonished him more.

He watched for a moment as the flame waxed and waned, now casting a trail of red light on the lagoon water, now dying down only to leap up again. Then he came running to the canoe. The girl was not there and the dinghy was gone : the paddle was gone from the canoe also; she must have taken it to paddle herself over to the reef, not being able to use the sculls.

There was plenty of dried weed and bits of wreckage on the reef to make a fire with, but how had she got a light? He came back to the house and searched for the box of matches on the little shelf outside where it was always put when done with. It was gone.

She must have come " smelling round" when they were asleep; she must have noticed where the matches had been put and treasured up the fact in her dark mind!

But what in the nation's she done it for ? " asked Kearney of himself as he stood scratching his head. What's she up to, anyway?

He came to the trees on the other side of the sward and watched for an hour, till at last the fire died to a spark and the spark vanished.

Then came the sound of the paddle as the dinghy stole like a beetle across the starshot lagoon water and tied up at the bank. A figure passed along the bank towards the house; she was putting the matchbox back. she came along towards the canoe, slipped into it, and vanished from sight.

Then

Kearney waited ten minutes, then he stole back to the house and turned in again.

"You wait till the mornin' and I'll l'arn you," said he to himself as he closed his eyes, composing his mind to slumber with the thought of the whacking in store for the Kanaka girl.

K

X.

ATAFA, when she had arranged her hair and made her bed of blankets in the bottom of the canoe, lay down, but she did not close her eyes. She lay watching the last glow of the sunset, and then the instantly following stars held her gaze, talking to her of Karolin and the great sea spaces she had been suddenly caught away from.

The atoll island has never been adequately described by pen or brush-never will be. What brush or pen could paint the starlight on the great lagoons, the sunrises and sunsets, the vastness of the distances unbroken by any land but just the low ring of reef? Life on an atoll is like life on a raft, immensity on every sideand the sea.

Here the girl felt herself suddenly shut in; the groves rising to the hill-top fretted her spirit, the bit of lagoon was nothing, and even the reef was different to the reef of Karolin. Kearney had raised something deep down in her mind against him, and he seemed somehow now the centre and core of all her trouble. Dick

she scarcely thought of; he, like other human beings, was of little account to her.

Thoughts came to her of trying to get the canoe out and escaping back to the freedom which was the only thing she loved, but it was hopeless, she could never do the business singlehanded. She was trapped and she knew it.

Now, when Le Juan wanted help from Nanawa, the shark-toothed god, she had several methods of invoking the deity. One of the simplest was by fire. She would go off, build a little fire, and, as she fed it. repeat over it a formula, always the same string of words, representing the wish of her heart which was never spoken.

Something generally happened after that; sometimes the wish would be granted, long overdue rain would come, or some enemy already dying would die, or the palu that had forsaken for awhile the palu bank would come back.

But the shark-toothed one was a tricky deity, and had a habit of sending other gifts along by way of Lagniappe.

For instance, in that great drought long years ago, Le Juan had sacrificed stacks of fuel to the god, and weeks after he had sent the rain, but he also sent the Spanish ship with Katafa on board of it, and Katafa had given Le Juan a lot of trouble and heart searching.

Again, two years ago he had sent the palu back to the bank, but at the same time he had extended by a fortnight the season in the lagoon when the fish were poisonous.

Sometimes he was quite amiable and would cure an indigestion without killing the patient as well, but it was all a toss-up. He was a dark force, and even Le Juan recognized in a dim way that she was playing with evil and was never easy till the effects of her invocations were over and done with. Katafa had often helped to stoke the little fires, and she knew the ritual in all its simplicity. The thing had never interested her much till now.

Maybe Nanawa could help her, take the island away or knock it to pieces without hurting her, or lift it like a dish cover to the sky as she had seen it lifted by mirage, or free her in some way-any way.

She brooded for an hour or more over this business. Then, having made up her mind, she rose, skipped lightly on to the bank and, moving silently as a shadow, approached the house. She could tell by their breathing that the occupants were asleep, and she could see the box of matches on the little shelf in the moonlight.

She took it, and as she held the strange fire box in her hand the sudden impulse came to her, maybe from the shark-toothed one, to fire the house. The mysterious antagonism against Kearney urged her to destroy him; it seemed also a way out of her trouble.

The little ships saved the sleepers.

The remembrance of them suddenly came to the girl, and the thought that some god of whom they were the insignia might be on the watch. She could not see them in the darkness of the house, but they were doubtless there on their shelves, put there to protect the sleepers just as Le Juan hung over her bed-place a shrunken human hand. Maybe she was right, and that Kearney, without knowing, had placed them there under higher direction; but, right or wrong, the things acted as efficiently as a spell. She turned away and, taking the paddle from the canoe, unmoored the dinghy and pushed off for the reef.

She found, as she had expected, plenty of fuel, and the matchbox gave her no trouble. She had watched the process of striking a match carefully with those eyes from which no detail escaped, and in a minute the stuff she had collected was alight and burning.

Then, standing in the windless night and piling on dead weed, bits of wood and dried fish fragments that popped and blazed like gas jets, Katafa, with hands pressed against her ridi so that the flames might not catch its dracæna leaves, put up her prayers to the shark-toothed one, repeating the old formula of Le Juan and backing it with the unspoken wish that the island might be taken away and freedom restored to her.

Playin' with the matches," replied the other, thinking it just as well not to go into full particulars, that were sure to bring a string of Dick's endless questions.

They were seated at breakfast and Katafa had drawn close for her food. Katafa could be ugly, she could be pretty; never was anything more protean than the looks of this Spanish girl who was yet, in all things but birth and blood, a Kanaka. This morning, as she sat in the liquid shadow of the trees, she was unpaintably beautiful. She had run away beyond the cape of wild coco nuts and taken a dip in the lagoon, and now, fresh from sleep and her bath, with a red flower in her hair and her hands folded in her lap, she sat like the incarnation of dawn, her luminous eyes fixed on Kearney.

But Kearney had no eye for her beauty.

When was she playin' with them, Jim?" asked the boy, a piece of baked bread fruit in his fingers.

Never you mind," replied the other. "Get on with your breakfast and hand us that plate. I'll l'arn her."

He passed a plateful of food to the girl and then helped himself and the meal proceeded, Dick attending to business, but with an occasional side glance at the criminal.

Playing with the matches was a hideous offence for which he had been whacked twice in earlier days. He reckoned Kearney would

whack her, and he looked forward to the business with an interest tinged, but not in the least unsharpened, by his sneaking sympathy with the offence and the offender.

But, the meal finished, the sailor, instead of setting to, simply walked to the dinghy, beckoning the girl to follow him. He got in, took the

He picked up a stalk of seaweed and made a skelp" at her. She was quite close, and it was impossible to miss her; all the same the stalk touched nothing. She had skipped aside.

Trees had once grown here on the reef and the coral was smooth, and round and about this smooth patch Kearney, blazing with righteous wrath, pursued her. It was like trying to whip the wind. He tried to drive her on to the rough coral, but she wasn't to be caught like that; she kept to the smooth, and in three or four minutes he was done.

Flinging the stick of seaweed away he wiped his brow with his arms. Dick was watching them from the sward and he felt that he had been making a fool of himself.

Now never you do that no more," said Mr. Kearney, shaking his finger at her. If you do, b'gosh, I'll skelp you roun' the island." He nodded his head to give force to this tremendous threat, and was turning to the dinghy when something caught his eye.

Away to the east across the sparkling blue stood a sail.

The dead calm had broken an hour ago, and a merry breeze was whipping up the swell. The ship, lying beyond the drift current, must have been within sight of the island all night. Had she seen the fire?

Kearney, shading his eyes, stood watching her. A splash from the lagoon made him turn. Katafa had taken to the water, ridi and all, and was swimming back to the shore, evidently determined not to trust herself with him in the dinghy. He looked at her for a moment as she swam, then he turned his gaze back to the ship.

She showed now, square-rigged and closehauled. Yes, she was beating up for the island. Would she put in at the break? Was she a whaler, a sandal-wood trader, or what?

In those days of Pease and Steinberger, a ship in Pacific waters had many possibilities, and if Kearney had known that he was watching the Portsoy, captained by Collin Robertson, who feared neither God nor the Paumotus, he would not have waited on the reef so calmly.

She

No, she was not making for the break, but to pass the island close to northward. was no whaler, and, relieved of this dread, he stuck to his post as she came, every sail drawing, listed to starboard with the press of the wind and the foam bursting from her forefoot.

Now she was nearly level with him, less than a quarter of a mile away; he could see the busy decks, and a fellow running up the ratlins, and at the sight of the striped shirts and the old

familiar crowd, the sticks and ropes, the white painted deck-house, and the sun on the bellying canvas, Kearney, forgetting ease and comfort and the hundred good gifts God had bestowed on him, sobriety included, sprang into the air and flung up his arms and yelled like a lunatic.

The answer came prompt in a burst of sound, like the outcrying of gulls; the helm went over, and the brig, curving under the thrashing canvas, presented her stern to the damned castaway on the reef. He saw the glint of a long brass gun, a plume of smoke bellying over the blue sea, and, as the wind of the shot went over him, the report shook the reef like the blow of a giant's fist, passing across the lagoon to wake the echoes of the groves.

Aimed at nothing, fired for the fun of the thing, the shot had yet found its mark, bursting the canoe of Katafa into fifty pieces.

I

XII.

SLAND life had not quickened Mr. Kearney's intellectual powers and for eight or nine months after that day things happened to him that he could not account for. Sometimes fishing-lines broke that ought not to have broken; he would leave a bit of chewing-gum on the shelf outside the house and it would be gone, taken by the birds maybe-but why did the birds suddenly develop a desire for gum? The dinghy sprang a leak that took him two days to mend, and fish spears would become mysteriously blunted, though put away apparently sharp enough.

He never thought of the girl. The feud between them had died down, at least on his part, and she and Dick seemed to be getting on well together. Too well, perhaps, from a civilized person's point of view. She and Dick could chatter away together now in the native; the girl had picked up at first enough English to help them along, but at the end of nine months it was always the language of Karolin they spoke, and even to Kearney's heavy intelligence it was funny to hear them " clacking away and to think that she had made him talk her lingo instead of the other way about.

More than that, the boy was altering, losing the fits of abstraction that had made him seem at times almost the reincarnation of his mother, losing also the light-heartedness of the child; laughing rarely, and desperately serious over the little things of life; the moment seemed to him everything, as it is to the savage.