"How so?" I asked; though in fact I felt it quite as much as he did, but I wanted to hear Frank's own unadulterated idea about the matter.
"Why, you see," he answered, "they're getting ready for a wedding: but where's the bridegroom? A marriage is never quite complete without a man in the proceedings. Now, we've never seen any young man come courting around; especially not any one so very important as Kea makes her future husband out to be. A bridegroom, I take it, is an indispensable sort of accompaniment to every respectable civilized wedding. You can't very well get on without him. But he's not forthcoming here. It seems to me there's something awfully uncanny about it all."
"I often hear them speak among themselves," I said, "about somebody called Maloka. I wonder who on earth this Maloka is? I expect it's Maloka she's going to marry."
"I'll make inquiries," Frank answered decisively. "We must get to the bottom of it. For my part, Tom I don't half like the look of it."
CHAPTER IX.
That night I hardly closed my eyes in sleep. My leg, which for several days had scarcely pained me, became troublesome once more with a sort of violent twitching neuralgic rheumatism. Never before had I felt anything so curiously spasmodic. I had tossed about during the evening indeed a great deal more than usual, and Kalaua, who noted my discomfort with his keen and observant Hawaiian glance, asked me more than once how I felt, with apparent kindliness. I told him my symptoms in perfect frankness. "Aha," he cried grimly, looking back at me with a smile. "That settles the matter. We shall have an eruption then. The old-time folk in heathen days always noticed that all neuralgic and rheumatic pains became far more severe when an eruption was brewing."
"Did they?" I answered languidly; "that was no doubt a mere heathen superstition on their part."
"Oh, no," he retorted with flashing eyes: "it was no superstition. It was solemn fact. Wounds would never heal at such times, and broken limbs would set with difficulty. You see, in the old clays, we knew a good deal about wounds, of course—far more than nowadays. We were all warriors then. We fought and hacked each other. We were often liable to get severely injured. Stone hatchets cut a man up so awkwardly."
"Why," I cried, "now you come to mention it, I remember the year I was working at Etna, the Sicilians at Catania all declared that sprains and cuts and rheumatic affections would never get well before or during eruptive periods. I hardly believed them at the time, I confess; but if two people so widely apart in race and space as you and the Sicilians both say so, I dare say there may really be something in it."