"I will not be frightened by a rotten cocoanut tree," thought Vaiti. "I will sleep again till it is light. Am I not a sea-captain's daughter, and the descendant of great Island chiefs, and shall I fear the fancies of my own mind?"
Determinedly she closed her eyes again, and lay very still. The dawn wind began to stir; the ripples crisped upon the beach; the locusts in the trees broke out into a loud chirr-ing chorus. And as the day broke silver-clear upon the shore, Vaiti, still lying on the sand, felt that some one, in the gathering light, was watching her as she lay.
Wary as a fox, she opened her dark, keen eyes without stirring her body ... and looked straight into a face that was bending almost over her ... a face hooded by a black cloth that hid the head and brow, and only left to view ... O God! O God! what was it?
The thing was featureless. Nose, eyes, and mouth were gone. In the midst of a cavern of unspeakable ruin the ghastly throat gaped vacant. Two handless, rotting stumps of arms waved blindly about—feeling—feeling....
Could it hear? Some instinct told the girl that it could. Softly as a snake she writhed out of the reach of those terrible groping arms.
It did hear. It sprang blindly forward—it snatched.
With one leap Vaiti was on her feet. Never looking back, she fled down the open beach, the sand spurting behind her as she ran. She heard a dull padding in her rear at first; it soon grew faint, but she ran on blindly, long after it had died away—ran, while the sun climbed over the horizon and cast down handfuls of burning gold on her uncovered head—ran, while the beach grew parchment-white and dazzled back the heat into her face like an open furnace—ran till at last her over-driven body gave way, and the sand spun round and the sky turned red before her eyes. Then only she staggered into the shade and dropped down upon a green mattress of convolvulus creeper to rest.
And now, when she had leisure to think and strength to cast off the haunting horror of that inhuman face, she knew what Donahue had done.
This was not Bilboa, the uninhabited guano island that she had feared. This was infinitely worse—it was Vaka, the leper isle!
She remembered that she had once heard a dim rumour of Vaka and its ghastly leper people—the remnant of a plague-smitten tribe long ago forcibly exiled there from one of the fierce western groups. No ships ever called at this graveyard of the living; it was supposed that the cocoanuts and fish of the island provided sufficient food for the people, and no one cared to run the chance of their stowing away and escaping, especially as they were known to be both daring and treacherous on occasion. Donahue had indeed laid his plans well for the most hideous revenge that the heart of man or devil could conceive. A few weeks or months in this charnel-house of horrors, where the very air must reek of contagion, and what would it avail her if, after all, some stray, storm-driven vessel should rescue the castaway? Better, then, that she should stay and die among the other nameless nightmare horrors that walked these stricken shores.