Vaiti girded her dress high, and walked swiftly. She had a long way to go, and she wanted to be back in her neat, white, mosquito-curtained bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, before the trader's wife should come in with her morning cup of tea. Vaiti was a past mistress in the art of avoiding useless comment.
Three miles, five miles, seven miles.... It was right at the other side of the island, past mile after mile of tangled bush, acre after acre of sparsely planted, rocky, open ground, grove after grove of tall, plumy cocoanut, heavy with fruit. Oranges grew by the track here and there; broad green banners of banana leaf blotted out whole sections of the stars, and slim, quaint mummy-apple trees stood up among the prickly coral rocks. Vaiti had no time to stop, but she snatched a little refreshment on her way from time to time, as the wayfarer may always do in the kindly South Sea climate.
She struck at last into a narrow track leading off the main pathway—so small that in the dusk of the starry night it must have been invisible save for a mass of pointed rocks that stood up just beside the overgrown entrance and made a landmark. Afterwards came a mile or two of tangled walking among clumps of pink and scarlet and yellow hibiscus, all reduced to a common blackness by the levelling night, and through thorny lemon-trees, and over rocky knolls where there was scarce footing for a goat.... A lonely God-forsaken region this; not a village, nor even the gleam of a solitary white-washed hut. What had the "Kapitani" of the Sybil to do with such a place?
Vaiti knew very well indeed what she had to do. She had gathered in the town that the mysterious white man who "lived native" in the bush had his dwelling about this lonely neighbourhood. It was very well known to her, and she meant to find the man's dwelling-place, and see him with her own eyes before...
Well, that was still to come.
It took her rather longer than she had expected, but she did at last succeed in finding the tumble-down little palm-leaf shanty, built against the side of a rock, that she had heard described. It was a miserable place, so far as her cat-like eyes could judge it in the purple gloom, not more than three or four yards long, and looking like nothing so much as a heap of dead leaves and rubbish piled against the rock. She trod noiselessly round its three sides, and listened here and there. The door, as she ascertained by feeling, was a heavy mat hung up from the eaves, and it was tightly fastened across the opening. There was a faint sound of slow, heavy breathing from within. The man was evidently asleep.
Vaiti climbed up on the rock above the hut, and pulled away a piece of the loose grey coral of which it was composed. Then, sheltering herself behind a clump of hibiscus growing in a cleft, she raised her voice in a fearful squealing cry, exactly reproducing the yell of a wild pig wandering in the bush at night. At the same time she cast a lump of coral with all her strength down the side of the big rock, whence it landed with a crash in the middle of a mass of brushwood, burying itself completely.
The double noise, as she had anticipated, brought out the owner of the hut, very cross and sleepy, clad only in a pareo, and angrily anxious for the safety of his patch of yams. He carried a torch in his hand, made of blazing candlenuts strung on a stick ("Must have run out every bit of credit at the stores," thought Vaiti parenthetically), and he was, beyond all shadow of doubt, against all common probability, the red-haired master of the Ikurangi.
If looks could ever blast, those black eyes behind the hibiscus boughs would have slain him where he stood. Vaiti quivered with rage as she watched him shambling sleepily about, looking, with his long, matted red hair, bloated, evil face, and half naked body, infinitely lower than any coloured native on the island.... He had not prospered since he escaped the wreck of the Ikurangi—how or where she did not care to know. He looked as if he had been living on the natives and half drinking himself to death, as was indeed the case.
But Vaiti was not in the least mollified by his unprosperous case. In her opinion, he ought to have been dead long ago. There could be no peace of mind for her while he was still drifting about the Pacific, ever on the alert to do her an evil turn. She was not equal to actual murder, and, in any case, Niué was a British-owned island, with a resident Commissioner and a regular nest of missionaries, where you had to be very careful of what you did. But if any accident—a safe, convenient accident—should befall him by-and-by, why, it would certainly be an advantage to the Sybil and her owners. Well, that might come about, and without introducing Saxon into it either. In such a delicate matter Saxon's interference would very likely have acted much as a charge of dynamite might act in the destruction of a wasps' nest—something more than the wasps would probably come to grief.