“Katafa,” came the reply; then, swift as a rippling stream, “Te tataga Karolin po uli agotoimoana—Katafa.”
“Ain’t no use,” replied Mr. Kearney. “Tie a clove hitch in it and we’ll call you Jimmy. Want some food? God bless my soul, where’s the use in talkin’ to her? Here you, Dick, come along an’ get the fire goin’. Come along, Kanaka girl.” He clapped her on the shoulder—made to do so, but his hand touched nothing but empty air.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Kearney. He had got the shock of his life. It was not the fact that she had evaded him, but the manner of the evasion. His hand had missed the shoulder, driven it away, seemingly, as wind moves a curtain; yet she had scarcely moved and her face and attitude had not altered in the least. She seemed quite unconscious of what had happened, and the man who has ever tried to touch a taminanite will know exactly the feeling of Mr. Kearney as he turned to make the fire, followed by Dick.
Katafa drew closer; then, at a certain distance, she squatted down and watched them at work. She had no fear of men or ghosts. Human beings and ghosts were things equally remote to Katafa, who could touch or be touched by neither.
Infected by Le Juan and filled with wild fancies, or maybe endowed with psychic powers, she had seen the “men who leave no footprints” walking in the sun-blaze of Karolin. There was a sandy cove eight or nine miles from the break and here with Taori, the second son of Laminai, she had watched them walking like people astray and bewildered.
She had flung stones through them, Taori wondering and seeing nothing. At night, had you possessed the eyes of the Spanish girl, you would have seen in the dark of the moon, and at a certain hour, a man swimming in the starlight from the old anchorage of the Pablo Poirez towards the break, leaving a trail in the starlight, always at the same hour and always in the same direction; and sometimes on these nights fires would spring up on the reef where it trended to the west, lit by no man’s hand, for no man was there.
But Palm Tree to her eyes seemed free of anything like this. Amongst the gifts presented by the wreck were three or four tin cases of Swedish matches, enough to last for years. Kearney had discarded the tinder-box and he was lighting the fire with a box of matches, a fact more interesting than bonnets to Katafa as she squatted, watching his every movement.
Then, when the food was ready and Dick had fetched some water from the little spring at the back of the yam patch, Kearney called to the “Kanaka girl” to pull in her chair.
She came within a couple of yards, but would come no further, squatting on her heels in an attitude that gave her freedom to spring away at a moment’s notice. Kearney stretched over with some food on a plate for her, then he handed a cocoanut bowl with some water in it. Then he began on his own meal. He seemed put out.
“She ain’t right,” said Mr. Kearney, as though communing with himself.