“Remembering you, I came back,” he finished.
That was the truth. Only for Katafa he would have no doubt done to the black-bearded man what he had done to the red. Heaven knows what the end of the whole adventure might have been, or the end of that dominant and fearless spirit—whether he would have fallen beneath the weight of numbers and been trodden out on the sand, or whether he would have brought the New Hebrideans to heel, taken the schooner, sailed and found civilisation and risen to Napoleonic heights. No one knows where a human rocket may go, once fired, but Katafa and Fate interposed—at least to delay the firing and alter the direction of the line of energy.
They lay listening, yet hearing nothing but the wind and the surf; but they knew that this silence was absolutely deceptive—the woods were full of trickery and the altering of a few points in the wind would cut off or increase sound travelling from a distance.
More, the altering of the time of day made a difference. Here, in the twenty-four hours of a day, leaves, twigs, branches, the very trees themselves, altered in pose or position, and every alteration of the great green curtain interposed or removed barriers to sound. The energy expended in the opening and closing of earth flowers—what mill might it not drive if “properly directed”? And the energy Palm Tree Island expended in a day—who could measure it? It was unknown, or only instinctively known, to Dick and Katafa in the recognition that the sound-carrying qualities of the woods varied with morning, noon and night.
As they lay secure, hidden and listening, Katafa, whose left arm was about the neck of her companion, let her right hand rest on the club that lay beside her.
The cocoanut fibre always wrapped round the club handles in war time, so as to give a better grip, had unwound a bit, and her fingers, straying, felt a ring surrounding the wood, lower down another ring, and lower down another. It was the three-ringed club of Karolin, the sacred pasht always carried by the eldest son of the king or his representative in battle. It had been carried by Laminai in the attack on the Spanish ship long years ago, and recently by Ma, the only son of Laminai. When Dick had killed Ma in the glade, it had lain there in the moonlight and had been picked up by one of the fugitives from the battle, who cast it away on the beach before plunging into the water in his vain attempt to escape.
Katafa knew that it was the royal club, a thing equivalent to a sceptre. She had seen it naked of its cocoanut-fibre wrapping, carried in state, worshipped.
No woman of Karolin dared handle it on pain of death, and as her fingers touched the sacred rings and the fact became clear to her that it was it, a thrill of pride went through her.
It was Dick’s.
Karolin’s symbol of power and success in war had fallen into the hands of Taori.