“Ia ora na, Nohea!” I called to him. “Is Mapuhi a Mapuhi at home?”
“Mapuhi?” he repeated and shuddered. “Mapuhi máte!”
Mapuhi dead! It did not seem possible; the giant I had known so recently!
Nohea began to weep and left us. Outside the inclosure of Mapuhi’s house were a dozen men, and among them Hiram Mervin, the Paumotu-American who had described to me the cyclone of Hikueru. We shook hands, and I asked of what Mapuhi had died. Surely not of disease. The reef must have beaten him at last. I could not think of that super-man yielding to a clot or a kidney. He, who had made the wind and currents his sport, who in the dark of night had sailed through foaming passes the white mariner shunned in broad daylight, who had given largesse to his people for decades, and who had made the shells and nuts of his isles pay him princely toll, despite the cunning of the white, the papaa, who came to take much and give little.
“He was eighty,” said Hiram Mervin. “He took sick on Reitoru, that tiny island near here. He was brought here. Some one wanted to give him medicine.
“‘No,’ he said, ‘my time has come. I will not live by things. I die content. I have been a good Mormon since I accepted the Word. What I did before was in darkness, when I was a gentile.’
“He passed away peacefully. We lost a bulwark of the church, but he will reign with Christ.”
Lutz and I did not wish to intrude upon the kin of Mapuhi, nor to remain longer within the sound of the wailing that now issued from the house at the news that I, the American, had come back on the steamship. This extemporized burst of lamentation was a special honor to me and to the decedent, an expression of a tie between us, and, though it swelled suddenly at my arrival, was not the crying of hired mourners but the lacrymation of sincere grief. In wakes among the Irish I had found exactly the same spirit—an increase or instant renewal of the keening or shrieking when one who had been dear to the dead person appeared.
We two walked away, and encountered McHenry, who had learned of our presence. McHenry was shaken by the castigation given him by his wife, and assumed an air of brazen indecency and bluster to hide his condition.
“One bottle of booze and I’ll make ’em all quit their catabawlin’ an’ dance a hula,” he said. “Much they care for except the bloomin’ francs the ol’ boy left ’em!”