Hot as the breath of a tiger, blowing up from southward, through the clear night it had come, tremendous and sudden, like a giant springing on the island; shouting and dashing the trees together, clashing the branches, stripping the leaves and sending the nuts flying like cannon balls.
It took Nan from his post and sent him flying into the lagoon, the post after him; it stripped the mat sails from the anchored fleet and sent them sailing off like dish cloths; it drove the limp, dead body of Laminai up against the trees, the spear still sticking in its throat.
Dick, with Katafa’s hair streaming across his face, half bent, nearly blown from his feet, took shelter to leeward of the rock. Here there was peace though the whole island beneath them was yelling and tossing under an absolutely cloudless sky and in the strong, clear light of the moon. It was the Naya e Matadi, the great wind without rain that once in a decade swept Karolin and the sea for a hundred miles beyond, coming always at night and always at the full of the moon, lasting only an hour, and more dreaded than a hurricane, because more mysterious.
Here, sheltered in the cup of the wind, they lay in the light of the quiet moon, the fight, the killing of Laminai, the still imminent presence of death, all as remote from them as the tossing trees below, the thundering reef and the infinite moonlit sea.
CHAPTER XXXI
DEBACLE
When the fighting men of Karolin began their assault on the woods, they broke into two companies, one under Laminai and Ma, the other under Utah, a son of Makara, once chief of the southern tribe. When the southern tribe had been destroyed Utali, a boy of some fourteen years, had been spared—he, and a few old men, and several women past childbearing. He had grown up with the northern tribe, become one of them, fought in their wars and fished in their waters, and forgotten and forgiven. He knew that Makara had been slain by the followers of Uta Matu, and slain on Palm Tree beach. That did not matter a bit to him; he bore no grudge. He had always been well treated by Uta, and his father, as he remembered him, had been a brute—“a mouth to shout, a foot to kick and a hand to strike.”
He had bravely set off with the others, thinking of nothing but the work in hand; as the finest and most powerful man after Laminai the command of the second division had been given to him, and, leading it, he went off through the trees by the bank of the left arm of the lagoon, whilst Laminai’s men struck due west.
Now, Utali carried no love for his father, but he carried still the fear of him, a much more enduring possession if a parent gives it to his offspring, and it was not till the woods of Palm Tree surrounded him that Utali remembered that Makara was a ghost and that he had been made a ghost here, on this island, by the chief whom he, Utali, was now serving.
A nice complication!