Rantan was only fooling—keeping up appearances, so that the crew might fancy him as good as Peterson in finding his way on the sea. Sru had never told the others that they depended entirely on Le Moan, the fact that she was a way-finder was known to them, but it is as well for the after guard to keep up appearances. Rantan might as well have been looking at the sun through a beer bottle for all he knew of the matter, but the crew could not tell that. So, as a navigator, he held a place in their minds above the girl.
At night when the binnacle lamp was lit and she happened to be at the wheel, her eyes would wander to the trembling card. She would put the ship a bit off its course just to see it move, noticing that it always moved in the same manner in a reverse direction to the alteration in course. If the head of the schooner turned to starboard, the card would rotate to port and vice versa. She studied its doings as one studies the doings of a strange animal, but she never caught it altering its mind or its action.
At night it always seemed to her that the thing in the binnacle, whether god or devil, was inimical to her, or at all events warning her not to take the ship back to Karolin; by day it did not matter.
So under the stars and over the phosphorescent sea the Kermadec headed south, ever south, the blazing dawns leaping over the port rail and the gigantic sunsets dying with the blood of Titans the skies to starboard, till one morning Le Moan, handing the wheel to Rantan, pointed ahead and then walked forward. Her work was done. Far ahead, paling the sky, shone the lagoon blaze of Karolin.
BOOK II
CHAPTER I—THE MAID OF AIOMA
Le Moan had left Karolin as a gull leaves the reef, unnoticed.
Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma, busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact that she had not followed him to the northern beach; then he sent a woman across and she had returned with news that there was no trace of the girl though her canoe was beached, also that there was no trace of food having been recently cooked, and that the girl must have been gone some days as there were no recent sand traces. The wind even when it is only moderately strong blurs and obliterates sand traces, and the woman judged that no one had been about on the southern beach for some days. She had found tracks, however, for which she could not account. The marks left by the boots of Peterson, also the footsteps of the kanakas who had carried the water casks disturbed her mind; they had nearly vanished, but it seemed to her that many people had been there, a statement that left Aioma cold.
Aioma had no time for fancies. If the girl were alive, she would come across in her canoe, if death had come to her in any of the forms in which death walked the reef, there was no use in troubling. The call to the canoe building, resented at first, had given him new youth, the spirit of the sea sang in him and the perfume of the new-felled trees brought Uta Matu walking on the beach, and his warriors.
Aioma, like Le Moan, had no use for the past or the future, the burning present was everything.