“‘No,’ I said, ‘there are fifteen or twenty here.’ We came to a clearing and there found the remnant of the Typees. I questioned them, but none had ever heard of him. There had been many Manus,—the word means bird,—but as they were the last of the tribe, she must have been dead before they were born, and they no longer kept in their memories the names of the dead, since there were so many, and all would be dead soon.
“The American still understood enough Marquesan to understand their answers, and taking me by the arm he left the horses and led me up the valley till he came to a spot where there were fragments of an old paepae, buried in vines and torn apart by their roots.
“‘We lived here,’ he said, and then he sat on the forsaken stones and cried. He said that they had had two children, and he had been sure that at least he would find them alive. His misery made me feel bad, and the damned nonos, too, and I cried—I don't know how damn sentimental it was, but that was the way it affected me. The old chap seemed so alone in the world.
“‘It is three miles from here to the beach,’ he said, ‘and I have seen men coming with their presents for the chief, walking a yard apart, and yet the line stretched all the way to the beach.’
“He could hardly ride back to Tai-o-hae, and he departed with the Tropic Bird without saying another word to any one.”
Typee, they told me, was half way to Atiheu and a good four miles by horse. The road had been good when the people were many, and was still the main road of the island, leading through the Valley of Hapaa. My steed was borrowed of T'yonny Howard, who, though he owned a valley, poured cement for day's wages.
“What I do?” he asked, as if I held the answer. “Nobody to help me work there. I cannot make copra alone. Even here they bring men from other place do work. Marquesan die too fast.”
If T'yonny revered his father's countrymen, his horse did not. These island horses are unhappy-looking skates, though good climbers and sliders.
“You don't need person go with you,” said the son of the former living picture. “That horsey know. You stay by him.”
The saddle must have been strange to the horsey, for uneasiness communicated itself from him to me as we set out, an uneasiness augmented to me by the incessant vicious pricks of the ever-present nonos.