Only one answer was possible. The mass of apparently virgin bush in the centre of the island—several acres in extent—was the only spot where a cat could have concealed itself. The scent was growing hot.
With sparkling eyes Vaiti began to circle the wood, watching narrowly for the smallest trace of a pathway. The branches were interlocked and knitted together as only tropical bush can be. Many were set with huge thorns; all were laced and twined with bush ropes and lianas of every kind.
Nothing larger than a rat could have won its way through such a rampart. Vaiti walked swiftly on and on, striking the bushes now and then with a stick, to make sure that there were no loose masses of stuff masking a concealed entrance, and keeping a sharp eye for traces of footsteps.... It was with a heart-sinking shock that she found herself once more beside the low white coral rock that had marked the commencement of her journey, and realised that she had been all round, and that there was most certainly no opening.
The sun was slipping down the heavens now. She had been exploring half the day, but she was not beaten yet. The unexpected difficulties she had met with only sharpened her determination to enter the thicket at all costs. Harris, suffering acutely, as usual, from suppressed curiosity, was nearly driven mad by the sight of the "she-cat" suddenly reappearing on the ship, picking up an axe, and departing as silently as she had come, with a countenance that did not invite questions. She had taken off her smart silk dress, and was in her chemise and petticoat, arms and feet bare, and waist girdled with a sash into which she had stuck her revolver. She dropped the axe into her boat, rowed silently away, and disappeared on the other side of the island.
The sun was still some distance above the sea when she let the axe slip from her torn, scratched, and aching hands, and stood at last, tired but triumphant, in the heart of the mysterious island's mystery. She had won her way, with the woodcraft that was in her island blood, through the dense belt of bush, hacking and slashing here, stooping and writhing there, until the light began to show through the tangled stems in front, and a few swift strokes cleared the way into the open. Yes! there was a space in the centre, after all—a clearing over an acre in extent. There was grass here, and a few overgrown bananas, and a tangle of yam and pumpkin vines. Passion fruit ran in a tangle of wild luxuriance over the inner wall of the thicket; pine-apples rotted on the ground and fig-trees spread their wide leaves unchecked and unpruned.... In the middle of all was a house—a one-storied little bungalow, iron-roofed, with a tank to catch the rain. There was a long, low store behind it, and something that looked like a pig-sty, and something that might have been a fowl-run. But....
But everything was rotten, ruined, overgrown, hardly to be distinguished in the thick tangle of vegetation that had overflowed the little retreat like a great green wave let loose upon a low-lying shore. Vaiti knew what she was going to see before she had reached the door of the bungalow—a rotten floor, with green vines shooting up between the crevices, and bush rats scuffling and squeaking under the boards—a rusted iron roof, where pink convolvulus bloom peeped in under the rafters, and lizards sunned themselves in the airy blue furniture unglued and decayed fast sinking into one common mass of ruin—door aslant, and thresholds sunken. Everywhere silence, emptiness, decay. There needed no explanation of the vanished pathway.
The Maori blood owns strange instincts. Again Vaiti knew what she was going to see before it came—knew, and walked straight over to a certain corner of the enclosure, as if she had been there before.... It was under a scarlet-flowered hibiscus tree that she found it—a long, low grave, fenced round with a wall of coral slabs, so that the overflowing bush had surged less thickly here, and one could see that there was something lying on the mound, only half hidden by creeping vines—something long and white and slender.
Vaiti dragged away the creepers.... Yes, it was a skeleton, bare and fleshless, with bony fingers and black, empty eyes. There was a splintered gap in one temple, and close to one of the hands lay a mass of rusted steel that had once been a revolver.
On a flat white stone, standing at the head of the grave, a long inscription had been carved with infinite care in three different languages. Two of them Vaiti did not understand, but the third was English. She pulled the growing ferns off the stone, and, wiping its surface, read:
"Here is buried Junia, of the race of Vasilieff.
Died 20th June, 1889.