She stood for a moment glancing up at the orchids that seemed like birds in flight, the bugles of the giant convolvuli and the far-off roof of leaves moving to the wind in trembles of shattered light and shadow.
Then she went on, reaching at last a little bay in the trees, ferns and bushes, where the glint of something white caught her eye. It was a skull. She pushed the leaves aside; the whole skeleton was there, the ribs still articulated, the vertebrae intact. Flame lit by mortal hand could not have calcined the bones more whitely, destroyed the flesh more completely than the slow fire of time burning here through the years amidst the cool green ferns.
Katafa, holding the leaves aside, gazed at the skull. Amongst Le Juan’s properties had been a man’s skull, used when she was invoking the dark powers against some enemy.
As Katafa gazed at the skull, the thought of Kearney came to her, and the vision of him lying like that—and the wish.
CHAPTER XIV
OUT OF THE GLOOM
When Dick came back to the house, the girl had not returned.
Kearney seemed to have recovered his temper, and presently, putting the ship away on the shelf till to-morrow, he helped the boy to prepare supper. They scarcely spoke over this business; the shadow of the quarrel still hung between them, and that supper, as they sat silent opposite one another, was a mark in the life of Dick. It was his coming-of-age party, for Kearney was treating him as a man with whom he had a difference, not as a boy to be threatened and skelped.
Neither of them saw that far-away scene of the Dick of the Ranatonga, the tall sailor dancing the tiny child in his arms and crying out to Bowers: “Says his other name’s M. Sure as there’s hair on his head, he’s been tellin’ me Dick M’s his name. Ain’t it, bo?”
Neither of them saw the early island days when Dick M, left entirely in the sailor’s charge by his grandfather, fished in the lagoon with thread for line and played at fish-spearing on the reef and tried to scull the dinghy, guided and assisted by his big companion.