This evening, just before sunset, Katafa was standing on the beach waiting for Taiofa, the son of Laminai. They were going out to fish for palu beyond the reef.
Straight as a dart, naked but for a girdle of dracæna leaves, she stood, her eyes sweeping the lagoon water where the gulls were fishing.
Near by some native girls were helping to unload a canoe that had come over from the southern beach, and as they talked and laughed over the work, flat-nosed and plain, muscular and full of the joy of life, they formed the strangest contrast to the Spanish girl in the dawn of her beauty. Slim, graceful as a young palm tree, Katafa stood separate from the others in spirit as in body.
The work of Le Juan had been well done and the result was amazing, for Katafa from all other human beings stood apart, ringed by the mystic charm of taminan.
One might have said of her that here was a living, breathing human being who yet was divorced from humanity. Every movement of her body, her glance, her laughter, spoke of a spirit irresponsible, thoughtless, light as the spirit of a bird. She who touched nothing but the food she ate, the ground she trod on and the water she swam in, who had never grasped a living thing since the tragedy of the Spanish ship so long ago, had seemingly failed to find the hold upon life given to the least of the Kanaka girls amongst whom she had grown up—creatures almost animal, yet human in affection and tied together by the common bonds of joy and hope and fear. One of the strangest effects of the terrible law under which Katafa lived was her insensibility to fear.
The natural law of compensation gave to the isolated one fearlessness and the power to stand alone, and to the one who had no use for a soul the lightness of spirit and waywardness of a bird, the irresponsibility of the flower moved by the wind. Katafa—well was she named as she stood there, her mind roving with the frigate birds across the sunset-tinged waters of the lagoon.
“O he, Katafa!”
It was Taiofa, sixteen years of age and strong as a grown man. He was carrying a big basket containing food and several young drinking cocoanuts, the lines and bait; the canoe that was to take them lay on the beach, the water washing its stern, and between them they put off, Taiofa running up the sail to catch the favouring westerly wind.
Katafa steered with a paddle. The tide was running out and they cleared the break just as the setting sun touched the far-off invisible western reef.
Out here they met the swell and, with the wind blowing up against the night and the last of the sunset on the sail, they steered for the fishing bank and the forty-fathom water that lay three miles to the northeast.