His last possession had been taken from him. Schooner, money, pearls, clothes and lastly the canoe, all were gone; he had nothing in the world—save the loin cloth made from the bindings of the dead children.
But he was not thinking of that. His life had been saved. He had almost touched death and now as he looked on the boiling current, he saw a shark fin shearing along as though the shark that had missed him was blindly hunting for him.
He came back to the trees, hugging the life that had been spared to him and sat down to rest, Death sitting opposite to him—cheated.
This business brought things to a crisis with Rantan; though robbing him of his last possession, it still had given him a sense of winning a move, and truly, though his luck had been dreadful, there had been an under-current of good luck. He had escaped from Le Moan that night, he had escaped from Nanu and Ona who had him bound hand and foot, he had escaped from the sea coming to this atoll, and he had escaped from the leaking canoe and the shark. His mind took a turn. He felt that he was meant to live, he was sure that now he would be rescued. A ship would come.
And at this thought that seemed clothed in surety, the man’s soul blazed up against Karolin. If she were only a ship with the right sort of people on board, he would find Karolin for them and they would rip the floor out of that lagoon and the hearts out of the kanakas that lived by it.
And the right sort of people would be on that ship and she would come—she would come. He knew it.
CHAPTER VI—WHAT HAPPENED TO RANTAN (CONTINUED)
He fell asleep on the thought and for days and days he hugged it, and every day a dozen times he would go to the flat space on the coral and look over the sea for the ship.
One morning he saw something dark on the beach near the break; it was the canoe, the tide had taken her out only a little way and the sea had played with her, submerged as she was, returning her to the lagoon where the full flood had beached her. The water had drained out of her with the ebb and there she was and there he found her, pulling her up higher just for something to do. He found the crack that made the leak, it was quite small and he might have plugged it, but there was no paddle and anyway he would not have used her—he was waiting for the ship that was sure to come.
Rantan had, like most sailors, the full use of his hands, and he longed to use them, but he had no tools or anything to work on; near the trees and close to the mammee apple there was a patch of coarse grass and the idea came to him to make something out of it. Once in Chile he had escaped from prison by making a grass rope and the idea came to him now to make another; anything was better than sitting in idleness, and it seemed a lucky thing to do, for not only had he escaped from the Chilean prison by means of the rope, but he had come on a streak of good luck when free. So, gathering grass, he sat down to weave his rope.