Le Moan had never known pity. She had lived amongst the pitiless, and if any seed of the divine flower lay in her heart it had never grown nor come to blossom. She had seen her tribe raided and destroyed and the remnants chased to sea by the northern tribe under Uta Matu, she had seen battle and murder and sudden death, storm and destruction; she had seen swordfish at war and the madness and blood-lust of fish, bow-head whales destroyed by orcas and tiger sharks taking men—all these things had left her unmoved by pity as they would have left Rantan. Yet between these two pitiless ones lay a distance greater than that between star and star.
Le Moan had sacrificed herself for the sake of Taori; had faced what was more terrible than death—the unknown, for the sake of the man who had inspired her with passion; and had found what was more terrible than death—separation.
To return and find Taori she would, if necessary, have destroyed the Kermadec and her crew without a second thought, just as to save him she would have destroyed herself. Rantan could not have understood this, even if it had been carefully explained to him with diagrams exhibiting the savage soul of Le Moan, all dark, save where at a point it blazed into flame.
All that day working out his black plan he reviewed his instruments, Sru, Carlin, the crew, the ship, and last and least the kanaka girl who would act as a compass and a navigator. A creature of no account save the instinct she shared with the fish and the birds, so he fancied.
The Kermadec had loaded some turtle shell at Soma and at Levua she was to pick up a cargo of sandalwood. San Francisco was the next port of call, but to Rantan’s mind it did not seem probable that she would ever reach San Francisco. It all depended on Carlin. Rantan could not do the business alone even with the help of Sru; Carlin was a beachcomber and to leave him with a full whiskey bottle would have been fatal for the whiskey bottle, but he was a white man; he would have been fired off any ship but the Kermadec, but he was a white man. Rantan felt the necessity of having a white man with him on the desperate venture which he had planned, and taking Carlin aside that night he began to sound him.
“We’re due at Levua to-morrow,” said Rantan. “Ever been to Levua?”
“Don’t know it,” replied the other, “don’t want to neither; by all accounts, listening to the old man, there’s nothing there but one dam’ sandalwood trader and the kanakas he uses for cutting the wood. I want to beach at Tahiti, that’s where I’m nosing for when I get to ’Frisco; there’s boats in plenty running down from ’Frisco to Tahiti.”
“Maybe,” said Rantan, “but seems to me there’s not much doing at Tahiti. Hasn’t it ever hit you that there’s money to be made in the islands and better work to be done than bumming about on the beach? I don’t mean hard work, handling cargo or running a ship—I mean money to be picked up, easy money and plenty of it.”
The big red man laughed and spat over the rail.
“Not much,” said he, “not by the likes of me or you; clam shells is all there’s to be picked up by the likes of me and you when the other chaps have eaten the chowder.”