The gulls knew that she was deserted, they flew above her in the golden morning and lighted on her rails and spars whilst the ripple of the tide past her anchor chain showed the living brilliancy of light on moving water.
The canoes and dinghy being destroyed they would have to get off to her in the boat.
For a moment the old man stood looking at the bones of the broken canoes and the planks of the poor old dinghy; the fishing fleet of Karolin had gone just as the fighting fleet had gone, yet the gods had made compensation, for there lay the schooner, a thing more potent than all the fleets of Karolin combined, and there lay her boat, a fine four-oared double-ender, carvel built, white painted, a joy to the eye.
Yesterday at odd times he had examined her outside and in; this morning as his eyes swept over her again, new thoughts came to him and a new vision.
Canoes, what were they beside these things, and why build canoes any more, why hollow and shape those vast tree-trunks over which they had been labouring for long weeks when here to their hands lay something better than any fleet of canoes? If Taori wished to attack those men on the northern island, why not attack with the schooner, a whole fleet in one piece, so to speak?
As he stood pondering over this new idea, Dick, who had awakened early, came towards him from the trees accompanied by Katafa.
“Taori,” said the canoe-builder, “we will go to her (the schooner) you and I; she is ours and I want no other hand to touch her or foot to rest on her till we alone have been with her for a space. Help me.” He laid his hand in the gunnels of the boat as he spoke and Dick, as eager as the other, calling to Katafa to help them, went to the opposite side; between them they got her afloat and tumbled in.
Aioma had learned to handle an oar in the dinghy; the heavy ash sweep was nothing to him and as the boat made across the glitter of the lagoon, Katafa, her feet washed by the little waves on the sand, stood watching them.
Dick had not asked her to accompany him. It was as though the schooner had come between them as a rival—a thing, for the moment, more desirable than her.
She was feeling now what she had felt before only more vaguely. She had always distrusted the little ships, those models born of the pocket knife and ingenuity of Kearney, those hints of an outside world, a vague outside world that might some day break into their environment and separate her from Dick.