He had stolen through the trees to spy on the strangers and, drawing towards the eastern beach, had heard the sound of axes at work. The men with holes in their ears and slit noses were cutting down trees away to the right of the beach, in amongst the trees and invisible from the beach. Having watched them through the leaves without being seen, he made for the beach itself. The great canoe was in the lagoon, just as she had been on the night before, and on the sands, walking up and down, were two white men. Men the same as Kearney, only different in face; men with hair on their faces, one red, the other black.
What happened then he told in few words.
Watching the bearded men walking up and down and talking together, the wish came on him to go up to them and look them in the face and speak to them. His pride had somehow risen against the fact that he was hiding there in concealment whilst they were walking free with command of the beach, and besides that there was the wish to speak to them, to hear them speak, to see them closer. Yet something held him back. Caution, maybe—who knows?—but it did not hold him long. Just as though something were pushing him from behind, out he came from the trees and, crossing the sands, approached the two men. They stopped in their walk, turned and stared at him.
Dick’s description of the two men was succinct. They stank—gin probably, but whatever it was, it offended his fine sense of smell and the memory of it made him spit over the side of the dinghy as he told of it.
One can fancy that the disgust was written on his beautiful and expressive face as he came towards the strangers, chin uptilted and with level eyes, like an object lesson in what man ought to be, contrasted with what man is; and one may fancy what the products of high civilisation may have felt at the sight of a bloody Kanaka walking as if the world belonged to him as well as the beach, and with a look like that on his mug.
Nothing is so infectious as dislike and distaste, and the gentlemen from the ship exchanged remarks and laughed, and, though Dick had all but forgotten the language of his birth, he knew. An animal would have known what they said and what they thought, for the language of insult is universal, and Dick, standing before them, forgetting Katafa, forgetting everything, replied. Just one word: “Panaka!”
“Panaka” in Karolinese means a dogfish, just as “kanaka” means a shark. Do the Karolinites know the relationship between the two creatures, since they use only a single letter to differentiate one name from the other? Who knows? But the single letter concludes the business as far as insult is concerned, for the shark is feared and respected, the dogfish loathed and despised; it steals the bait, it bites the fish on the hook, it will sometimes attack a man if he is defenceless, or a child. It was Katafa’s term of dishonour and reproach for the robber crabs, and scavenger gulls, and the bula fish, all spines and snap, the ink-jetting octopods and the green eels that tangled the lines when caught.
The word heaped with insult had scarcely left Dick’s mouth when the red man struck. Dick nearly fell, recovered himself and, with a great half-moon sweep of the club, brought the red man low. Then he chased the black-bearded man for half a hundred yards till reason returned and he remembered the ape-men, Katafa and all the things he ought never to have forgotten.
Shouts from the anchored schooner did not delay his steps as he took cover in the trees, making with all speed for the hidden dinghy.
That was the story he told into Katafa’s ear.