“Kanoa,” cried Poni, “what is going on below there?”
“Coward!” cried Le Moan, “come and see. Come and help now that the work is done.”
“Ay,” said Kanoa the valorous, “come and help now that the work is done.”
Then, kneeling by the bound figure of Rantan, he gazed on the girl, consuming her with his eyes, rapturous, and unknowing that the work had been done for Taori.
Taori, beside whom, for Le Moan, all other men were shadows, moving yet lifeless as the moon-born butterfly still dancing above the corpse of Carlin.
CHAPTER VI—MORNING
When the firing had ceased and the boat had returned to the ship the wretched people hiding amongst the mammee apple had come out and grouped themselves around Aioma and Taori. Taori had saved them for the moment by his act in swimming out to attack the boat; he was no longer their chief, but their god, and yet some instinctive knowledge of the wickedness of man and of the tenacity and power of the white men told them that all was not over.
Amongst them as they waited whilst Aioma and Katafa distributed food, sat two women, Nanu and Ona, each with a dead child clasped in her arms. The child of Nanu had been killed instantaneously by a bullet that had pierced its neck and the arm of its mother. Ona’s child, pierced in its body, had died slowly, bleeding its life away and wailing as it bled.
These two women, high cheeked, frizzy-headed and of the old fierce Melanesian stock which formed the backbone and hitting force of Karolin, were strange to watch as they sat nursing their dead, speechless, passionless, heedless of food or drink or what might happen. The others ate, too paralysed by the events of the day to prepare food for themselves, they yet took what was given to them with avidity, then, when dark came, they crept back into the bushes to sleep, whilst Dick, leaving Katafa in charge of Aioma, left the trees and under cover of the darkness came along the beach past the bodies, over which the birds were still at work, until he was level with the schooner.
She showed no lights on deck, no sign of life but the two tiny dim golden discs of the cabin portholes.