Harris caught it deftly and asked, with the constitutional calm that alone saved his reason when Vaiti took over command, "What's to pay now?"
"She got auxiliary," said Vaiti, with a note of agony in her voice.
"What if she has? Isn't any vessel free to carry an auxiliary that can stand the stink of the oil and the cussedness of the injin?"
"I go see captain," said Vaiti, flashing down the companion.
Saxon was better to-day, and almost in full possession of his senses. Vaiti went to the medicine chest; took out a hypodermic syringe, filled it with careful accuracy from a tiny dark blue bottle, and lifted her father's arm as he lay limp and weak, but mending fast, in his bunk.
"Good girl, take care of your old father," he murmured in island Maori as she slipped the needle-point painlessly under the skin, and the powerful drug began to race through every vein of the inert body. The effect was rapid and decisive. Saxon sat up against his pillows in five minutes, clear-headed though weak, and asked if the Sybil had not sighted the Delgadas yet.
"Listen, father," said Vaiti, speaking fluently in the low, soft tongue that the two had used together all her life—the Maori language Saxon had first learned from the pretty brown girl, dead this many years, whom he had stolen from her South Sea island to sail the blue Pacific at his side in the days of long ago. "Listen. There is little time, and we are in great need. We came to the reef, and the shell was there truly, but a strange ship had been before us. Even as we lay there she returned from Christmas Island with diving gear. I sent Gray on board to look at her chart and find out if she had been to Wellington; and it seemed that she had not the new line of annexation marked on the chart, where New Zealand this year added to herself all that lay within a certain space of the sea; also she had not been south of Auckland. So then, knowing that we, if we asked the Government, might have the atoll granted us for twenty years and take possession above the people of the other ship, I made sail for Wellington; and we are now but one day away when this ship appears again, chasing us. Where the suspicion has waked in their hearts, or when, is nothing; but that they have thought and discovered our desire, that is certain."
"Give the Sybil all sail, daughter, and she will leave the other. What is this talk?" asked Saxon, raising himself on his elbow to look out of the glooming circle of the port.
"But the ship has 'auxiliary,' my father, and she will have passed out of sight before the morning."
"Oh, she has, has she?" grunted the captain, dropping back into his native tongue. "What are you going to do about it?"