But Kinie showed no signs of any desire to give the show away. She manœuvred her canoe so that it came gently beside theirs, stem towards stern, so that her outrigger did not prevent her from clasping their gunnel. Kinie had come to say good-bye. She had watched them provisioning without knowing exactly why they were doing so, then they had put off, and she had recognized that they were leaving for good.
Seeing them hanging on to the ship, she had taken heart and put off herself, and now, patting Harman on the shoulder with her little hand, she was looking at him with the eyes of a dog, while he, slipping one huge arm round her, was patting her back and telling her to be a good girl and to get back to the shore quick.
“Aroya manu, Kinie. We’re off—we’re goin’ away. See you again maybe, soon. There, don’t be holdin’ me. Well, you’re askin’ for it.”
“Oh, close up or you’ll be capsizing the canoe,” cried Davis. “Shove her off—Now paddle for all you’re worth. Mind! the outrigger is lifting.”
The canoes parted and the moonlit waving water came between them like a river, then, driven by tide and paddle, they passed the shadows of the cliffs at the harbour mouth, and Harman, looking back, saw the glow of the festival fire like a topaz beyond the silver-satin of the harbour water, and against the glow the canoe of Kinie making for the shore.
Outside they ran up the sail while astern Motul, with its hills and dark forests, lay like a cloud on the water, visible all night, dwindling to a speck in the dawn, destroyed utterly by the sun as he rose beyond it, flooding the sea with fire.
“Well, here’s another blessed day,” said Harman, as he took his trick with the steering paddle, “and that chap will be wakin’ just now with a palm-toddy head on him to find we’ve done him, but he won’t never know it’s us, worse luck. Anyhow, he’ll have his headache. There ain’t nothin’ to beat a palm-toddy head unless maybe samshu, but, samshu or palm toddy, drink don’t pay, nor Bourbon, nor Champagne—it don’t pay. I’m not sayin’ if a chap could get drunk and stay drunk I wouldn’t be the first to jine in, but it’s the wakin’ up——Oh, d——n petticuts!”
He had put his hand in his pocket for the handkerchief, at that moment flaunting itself on Motul beach around the brows of its proud possessor.
“Mind your steering!” cried Davis. “What ails you? Mind your paddle or we’ll be over.”
“Me handkerchief’s gone,” cried the distracted Harman. “She’s took it. Twice she nicked it from me before, and I ought to ha’ known—she’ll have flung them away, for it’s only the rag she wanted—buzzed them into the harbour most like. They were tied in the corner of it and she’d ha’ thought them stones—ten thousand dollars’ worth of——”