And Shalli went on talking as if he never would stop, and the Sybil rolled ceaselessly on the idle swell, and the useless sails slapped rhythmically upon the mast. And Vaiti, standing on the poop above the group of men on the main-deck, listened with an unmoved countenance until quite the end of Shalli's long speech.
When he had finished he turned his face away, and instantly began to weep. And the five other men, exactly as if a tap had been turned on, also began to weep at the same moment, howling loudly and lifting their hands to heaven.
"If this isn't a bloomin' mutiny, it's a bloomin' lunatic asylum," declared Harris quite inaudibly in the midst of the hideous noise from the main-deck. It is not a common thing, even in that world where all things are possible, the wide, strange Pacific Ocean, to see a whole ship's company shedding tears in concert on a calm and peaceful afternoon, with nothing more alarming in sight than a handsome young woman in an expensively pretty frock.
"Ow-ow-ow!" went Shalli, getting quite beyond his own control.
"Ey-ah, eyah!" screamed a plump lad from Aitutaki, fluttering his hands like frantic pigeons.
"For God's sake, Vaiti, tell us what's up," called Harris, sending his bull-like tones through the confusion.
And then Vaiti spoke, shrieking at the top of her voice in order to be heard. Her face, its hard calm broken up at last, was black with rage, and she had pulled out her revolver, and was holding it in her hand, though, strange to say, none of the men took the least notice of it.
"That ——, —— witch-man belong Niué, he curse them, they say they die!" she screamed. "By'n-by I cut him liver out!"
"What witch-man?" bellowed Harris. "Don't understand. That white bloke—him with the red hair and the scar on his nose—who dresses native, and lives native up in the bush? Saw him lookin' at you like as if he'd like to knife you, from behind Mata's house."
"No, pig-head! no white man got 'mana' for make die that way," shrieked Vaiti, shaking her revolver without effect at the men. "Niué witch-man. What man you mean? I not see——"