"Here is buried Anton, son of Junia Vasilieff
and her husband, Alexis, Baron Varsovi,
Born 20th June, died 21st June,
1889.
"Here rests Alexis, Baron Varsovi. Into the
unknown thou didst follow me: into the
Great Unknown I follow thee.
Reunited 21st June, 1889."
Vaiti, descendant of cannibal chiefs and lawless soldiers, more than half a pirate herself, and hard of nature as a beautiful flinty coral flower, was yet at bottom a woman after all. What passed in the breast of this dark, wild daughter of the southern seas, as she stood above the strange, sad record of loves and lives unknown, cannot be told. But in a little while, with some dim recollection of the long-ago, gentle, pious days of her convent school, she knelt down beside tie lonely grave, and, crossing herself, said something as near to a prayer as she could remember. Then, still kneeling, she cut and tied two sticks into the form of a cross, and set them upright in the earth of the mound. The sun was slanting low and red across the grave as she turned away.
* * * * *
"What'd she give you?" asked Harris eagerly, as the bo'sun stepped across the gang-plank on to the quay. The lights of San Francisco were blazing all about, the cars roared past, there was a piano-organ jangling joyously at the corner.
"Fifty dollars for the two of us," said Gray, his acid face sweetened with unwonted smiles.
"Crikey! Honest men is riz in the market at last! What in h—— can she have got herself?"
"Might as well arst me what she got it for. Don't know, and don't care, so long as we've got the makings of a spree like this out of it. I see her comin' out of the Rooshian Consulate this mornin' lookin' like as if some one 'ad been standin' treat to her."
"You know she don't touch anything."
"I'm speaking figuryative; she looked that sort of way. And coming' back to the ship, she says to the old man, she says: 'Why, dad, better dead than alive!' she says. And he laughs."