Toward three o'clock, while I paddled and Marama scanned the empty line of the horizon from his perch in the bows, he gave a sudden shout. "E pahi!—a ship!" he cried, and presently I made her out, a two-masted schooner, hull down in the north. Could it be the Tara, come out in search of us? But no—this was not the first time we had spent a day away from camp; by evening my uncle would begin to feel anxiety, but for the present he would think we had been caught in the squall and forced to land—a stove-in canoe, perhaps, and a weary journey on foot through thorny bush and over sharp and broken rocks.
A light steady breeze ruffled the sea that afternoon, and anxious minutes passed before we made certain that the schooner was heading south. When she was still miles away I saw that she was not the Tara. She carried a pair of lofty topsails, a rare sight in these seas; and unlike the schooners in the island trade, the stranger's mainsail sported a gaff, cocked at a jaunty yachting angle. As she came closer, her towering canvas drawing every ounce of power from the air, she made a picture to delight more critical eyes than mine. The Tara had a sturdy beauty of her own, but she was a "bald-headed" schooner, without topmasts, and she would have had the look of a barge beside the tall, graceful vessel approaching us, skimming the sea like a cup-defender under her press of sail.
Presently she was within hailing-distance and we saw her native crew along the rail. The brown men began to shout questions at us, after the fashion of their race: Who were we—whence did we come—where were we going? Then I heard a command, in a roaring voice that made the sailors spring to their posts. The schooner shot into the wind with a crisp shiver of canvas, bobbing and ducking into the head sea as she moved forward and lost way close alongside. Lines were passed down, strong hands came out to help us; the next moment our canoe lay on deck and we were standing beside it, surrounded by good-natured islanders who were chattering, gesticulating, grinning with flashes of their white teeth.
Again the roaring voice boomed out from astern: "Back the fore-staysail! Eh, Tua! Send the Kanaka forward and bring the white boy aft to me!"
Tua, the mate, a tall native with a handsome determined face, touched my arm. Walking aft while the schooner filled away again, I had my first look at the helmsman, a white man of herculean build. He wore a suit of drill, freshly starched and ironed, snowy yachting-shoes, and a Panama of the finest weave. The lower part of his face was concealed by heavy moustaches and a thick blond beard, but the skin above his cheek-bones was smooth as a woman's. His eyes were of a blue I have never seen before nor since: dark and sparkling when his humor was good—in anger, glittering with the cold glare of ice. In some subtle way the eyes reflected the man's whole personality, at once virile, magnetic, daring, unscrupulous, and cruel. But I was young and his cordial manner disarmed me; for the time, my eyes were not open to the evil in our rescuer. He smiled and stretched out a hand to me—an enormous hand with fingers like so many bananas.
"Well, young man," he said, his deep voice and the order of his words carrying a foreign hint, "from where are you come? In that direction, South America is the nearest land!"
I had asked for water as I stepped aboard, and now a black man with a great shock of hair came aft to hand me a pitcher and a glass. The captain watched me, smiling behind his beard as I drank the water to the last drop. Finally I set down the glass.
"Excuse me, sir," I said, "I was very thirsty! It was lucky for us that you happened to pick us up. We went fishing this morning and our canoe was swamped in a squall. Afterward, when the clouds passed, the land was out of sight, and we've been paddling ever since." He glanced down at a chart unrolled before him on the cockpit floor.
"From Iriatai you are come, then," he remarked. "That is strange, for the island is marked as uninhabited. Well, it is not far out of my course—I am bound for Mangareva to load shell."
His courteous manner and lack of curiosity made me feel that it would be boorish to be reticent. I had no suspicion that he was feeling me out for information. And my uncle had nothing to conceal.