IV
Nipek-kem peered cautiously over a ledge of rock, all his movements stealthy. Below, with her head thrown back, sat the wife of the White Kami. Her eyes were closed; she appeared to be sleeping. The Ainu gazed down at her a moment, then crept silently backward and disappeared.
When Stella opened her eyes she started and cried out a little. Tsuda was squatting near her, looking very mild and child-like.
“You come here often,” he murmured humbly.
“Every day,” she replied. “I come to watch for ships that might pass by—just to see them—it wouldn’t matter how far off....”
The girl seemed changed; her eyes had a strained look, and she appeared drawn to a perpetual tension of nervous expectancy; she had aged a little; there was a new calm about her, too—it was dimly menacing....
King’s revolver lay beside her on the rock. One night she had a faintly disquieting dream about the Ainu, and seeing her husband’s revolver with some of his things next day, she decided to carry it with her on her solitary vigils. However, she carried it, really, not so much for protection as because it was a weapon with which she could attack the silence, when it grew too awful to be endured, as King had attacked it the day he returned home from his first inspection of the fields.
“You will see no ships go by,” said Tsuda with an emphatic shake of his long head. “Ships don’t leave the course unless they have to—no, sir!” He had heard Captain Utterbourne explain it—a law of least resistance in ships.
“Are the nearest sailing lanes a long way off?” asked the girl with a trembling touch of wistfulness in her voice.
Things weren’t going very well on Hagen’s Island. Illusions were rubbing threadbare. It was a time for spiritual inventories.