The dead calm had broken an hour ago and a merry breeze was whipping up the swell. The ship, lying beyond the northern drift current, must have been within sight of the island all night. Had she seen the fire?
Kearney, shading his eyes, stood watching her. A splash from the lagoon made him turn. Katafa had taken to the water, ridi and all, and was swimming back to the shore, evidently determined not to trust herself with him in the dinghy. He looked at her for a moment as she swam; then he turned his gaze back to the ship.
She showed, now, square-rigged and close-hauled. Yes, she was beating up for the island. Would she put in at the break? Was she a whaler, a sandalwood trader, or what?
In those days of Pease and Steinberger, a ship in Pacific waters had many possibilities, and if Kearney had known that he was watching the Portsoy, captained by Collin Robertson, who feared neither God nor the Paumotus, he would not have waited on the reef so calmly.
No, she was not making for the break, but to pass the island close to northward. She was no whaler, and, relieved of this dread, he stuck to his post as she came, every sail drawing, listed to starboard with the press of the wind and the foam bursting from her forefoot.
Now she was nearly level with him, less than a quarter of a mile away. He could see the busy decks and a fellow running up the ratlins, and at the sight of the striped shirts and the old familiar crowd, the sticks and ropes, the white-painted deck-house and the sun on the bellying canvas, Kearney, forgetting ease and comfort and the hundred good gifts God had bestowed on him, sobriety included, sprang into the air and flung up his arms and yelled like a lunatic.
The answer came prompt in a burst of sound, like the outcrying of gulls. The helm went over and the brig, curving under the thrashing canvas, presented her stern to the damned castaway on the reef.
He saw the glint of a long brass gun, a plume of smoke bellying over the blue sea, and, as the wind of the shot went over him the report shook the reef like the blow of a giant’s fist, passing across the lagoon to wake the echoes of the groves.
Aimed at nothing, fired for the fun of the thing, the shot had yet found its mark, bursting the canoe of Katafa into fifty pieces.