The Hawaiian girl plucked some palm leaves and gently covered Waylao’s dead child.
Then the Hawaiian chief and his tender comrade went back to the hulk and proceeded to bring their leper comrades ashore. In a few moments they both appeared by the hulk’s broken bulwarks and threw some planks that made a gangway down to the wet sands, and began to carry their stricken comrades, one by one, on a deck grating, down to the shore.
There were five all told. One was a flaxen-headed little boy of about six years of age. As they laid the little form beneath the palms, the child lifted its head and moaned.
Waylao, touched with intense pity, disobeyed the order of the chief, went towards the figures of the stricken and attempted to soothe them.
She had no thought of the chances she took of catching the terrible malady, but she gave a cry of horror at the sight that met her eyes.
It seemed impossible that such advanced dissolution should still live; the fleshless, skull-like heads wobbled and lifted, the bulged, glass-like eyes stared at her like hideous misery. The stricken beings discerned the look of sympathy on Waylao’s face. The fleshless mouths smiled. The girl half drew back, for the look in those eyes, the movement of those lips resembled some grin of hate, rather than the intense gratitude that they yearned to express.
As Waylao watched, she heard splashes in the sea, and, looking in the direction of the hulk, saw the Hawaiian chief in the act of throwing the last body into the ocean depths. These were the bodies of the crew who had died ere they reached the isles, and three corpses of those who had drank too quickly of the water on deck, and so had died at once in agony. It appeared that when the hulk sailed away from the leper isle there were fourteen on board. After a week of drifting across the ocean the number was reduced to nine. Another few days without water and scorched by the blazing tropical sun had finished off three more, till only five arrived ashore alive.
The chief had finished his terrible task on the hulk, and as Waylao watched the dark spots bobbing about on the moonlit waters, she saw them drifting round by the promontory’s edge, then, with the tide, go seaward.
The Hawaiian girl clung tightly to her companion’s tall, handsome figure and moaned. The reaction had set in.
“Aiola, Aiola!” he murmured in the tenderest way as he looked down into her uplifted eyes. He was robed in the picturesque Hawaiian costume—a broad-fringed lava-lava to his tawny knees, round his waist a tappa robe swathed in a row of knots of ornamental design.