"Fool! fool! Jump quickly!" exclaimed Vaiti, in the same strained, horrible whisper.... Just for a second before he sprang, Pita looked down into the black pit beneath, and it seemed to him that the darkness shirred and shivered below the farther edge of the crevasse—that for the fragment of a second something long, red, whiplike, vibrated high up in the light of the candles, and then was gone.... There was a sickening odour in the air—a living smell, not a dead one; there was a sliding, rustling sound....
"Jump!" shrieked Vaiti.
They leaped through the air as one, but it was only Vaiti who landed on the farther side. Behind her, as she touched the rock, rose a shriek that blasted the leaden air into red-hot drops of horror—that went on and on and on, tearing upwards to the vaulted roof like a rocket fired from the mouth of hell; breaking at last into a gasping bellow, and snapping off into grisly silence on the very crest of a long, choking roar, in which there was nothing left of human.
... Pita had jumped short. Falling on the far side, with his legs half over the abyss, he had grasped for an instant at Vaiti's outstretched hands, and in the very act had been snatched away—snatched by a long, ghastly head, armed with poisoned jaws and quivering red antennas, that shot with the speed of a bullet out from the depths of the chasm, and back again with its prey.... The head was a foot long at least, the horrible winnowing feelers more than a yard, the black and red body, that just flashed into view for a second, was as thick as a man's thigh. It was a nightmare, an impossibility, and yet ... it was, beyond doubt, the Black Viri.
For a little while it seemed to Vaiti that she went mad, and then that the world went out and she died. A long time after, she found herself sitting on the floor of the tunnel, her head badly bruised and cut where she had dashed it against the rock, her candle guttering down towards extinction, her revolver empty and smelling of powder—she did not remember in the least how it had become so—and the whole black, horrible place still and silent as the bottom of the sea. Pita was gone. The bag of skulls had disappeared—fallen, no doubt, into the abyss. There was not a movement or a sound, save the whisper of the water—drops trickling ceaselessly from the roof into the dark pools upon the ground.
* * * * *
That evening, when the early starlight was beginning to shine down upon the creepers veiling the mouth of the tunnel, Saxon, sober at last, and rushing like a madman to the cave to find his daughter, met Vaiti herself coming down the rocks at the entrance, haggard, trembling, and almost old. He asked for Pita, and was answered only by a shuddering gesture of the hands. Questioning no more, he carried the girl down to the beach and brought her on board the schooner. There, when they had sailed, he left her undisturbed in her cabin for many days, while they ran steadily southward to pleasant Auckland and the temperate latitudes, farther and farther away from lonely, sun-smitten Falaite. The story of the day in the cave was known to him, as to every one on the island, for the witch-doctor of Falaite had told it far and wide, reserving only the one interesting fact—how he became possessed of the information. And as no one else alive on Falaite knew that there were two ways of reaching the skull-chamber, and more than one place where a man could hide unseen, the witch-doctor's reputation as a prophet and a clairvoyant was greatly increased; so that he suffered continually from a happily-acquired indigestion, and his dogs grew fat on bones of pig and fowl. And no one came ever any more into the sacred caves of Falaite Island.
Saxon declared plumply that he did not believe the tale, opining rather that the "blanked old wizard Johnnie had shoved Pita into the hole himself, and good riddance of bad rubbish, too."
None the less, he was uneasy at Vaiti's rather prolonged depression, and though he dared not break in upon her solitude further than to hand her in her meals and ask her how she felt, now and then, he listened almost constantly at her state-room door, and gave up whisky for at least ten days.
About the eleventh day, Te Ai, a young Samoan A.B., sat upon the main hatch in the pleasant coolness of the second dog-watch, and sang the farewell song of sweet Samoa, "Good-bye, my F'lennie"—the song that plucks so surely at the heartstrings of all who have ever loved and sailed away among the far-off fairy islands of the wide South Seas.