“‘Oh, it’s ten to one she’s either broke her tabu or some ship has taken her off by this,’ I says to ease him, for I saw that being a good-hearted chap, and imaginative as most Irishmen are, the thing was hitting him as it never hit me.
“Buck shakes his head and falls back into himself and says no more, and time goes on, till one day when we were on the run to Papeete with a mixed cargo, seeing that the chap was making an old man of himself over the business, I says, ‘S’pose we run down to the Scours now instead of on the voyage back as you’d fixed, and see what’s become of that woman?’
“His face lit up, but he pretended to hang off for a while; then he falls in with the idea, and we shifted the helm, raising the place four days later and dropping anchor outside the reefs four months and eight days from the time we’d left it.
“There wasn’t a sign to be seen of anyone on the island, so Buck tells me to take a boat and look; he hadn’t the heart to go himself and said so, plump, and off I put, leaving the boat’s crew with the boat on the beach and tramping across the coral on the look-out for signs.
“I found the canned stuff. There had evidently been a big wind and blown the stuff about, and I found it here and there, but not one empty can could I find or one that had been opened, then, in a dip of the coral I found a skull, the black hair still sticking to it, and a backbone and ribs—the birds make a skeleton of a corpse in no time on a place like that; I reckon I could have found the whole skeleton if I’d hunted, but I didn’t. I put back for the schooner and came on board laughing.
“‘Well,’ I said, ‘she’s done us. You and your talk of Kanakas not breaking their tabu; why, half the tins are opened and empty, and she’s gone, took off by some ship.’
“‘Thank God,’ says Buck.
“That lie of mine lifted the black dog right off his back, and to his dying day he never knew he’d killed that woman as sure as if he’d shot her with a gun. He was as cheerful as a magpie all the rest of that voyage, and so was I. You see I’d heard Sellers screaming whilst those brutes were doing him in and Buck hadn’t.
“That’s all I know about tabu, but it’s first-hand knowledge, personal experience as you might say.”
He ceased, and through the night came the voices of fish spearers from the reef and the far rumble of the surf, and from the back premises the voice of Tahori singing some old song of an Island world whose brilliancy breaks sometimes to reveal the strangest phantoms from the Past.