They had not noticed it coming up from the south. The smash of the rain and the rush of the wind took them like the stroke of a hand.
Taiofa, dropping the line which ran out, flung his weight to the outrigger side, whilst the girl, instinctively and at once, dropped the maul and sprang aft to the steering paddle. Her thought was to keep the canoe head to sea, but the anchor rope had parted and the canoe, instead of broaching to, was running in some mysterious manner before the squall stern on to the leaping swell.
It was the palu. The end of the line was tied to the bow and the great fish driving north was towing them.
Then, with a last roaring cataract of rain, the squall passed and the stars appeared, showing the tossing sea and Taiofa gone! He had been on the forward outrigger pole and the sea had taken him, leaving neither trace nor sound. The canoe had possibly overrun him; she did not know, nor did she care: Taiofa was less to her than an animal, and the devouring sea was feeling for her to devour her.
Something hit her like the stroke of a whip. It was the sheet of the mast sail that had broken loose. She seized it, fastened it, and then, as the sail filled before the wind, steered. The palu, feeling the slackening of the line, made a dash at right angles to their course. She saw the line tauten out to starboard and countered with the paddle before the bow could be dragged round. Then the line went slack; it had either broken or the fish had unhooked.
Then she steered, the big waves following her, and the wind that had fallen to a strong breeze filling the sails.
To turn was impossible in that sea, and even with the bow to the south she could never have made Karolin against the wind with a single paddle and that clumsy sail.
In the hands of the God who sends the seeds of the thistle adrift on the wind, fearless, and grasping the paddle, she steered with only one object—to keep the little craft from broaching to.
Blown to sea! For ages across the Pacific the seeds of life have passed like that from island to island, borne in lost canoes blown off the land at the mercy of chance and the wind.