“Just the same one big weather devil,” came the Kanaka's answer. “I know. He want big blow, he make big blow. He want no wind, no wind come.”
“A regular old Warlock,” said Mulhall.
“No good luck them pearl,” Tai-Hotauri blurted out, rolling his head ominously. “He say he sell. Plenty schooner come. Then he make big hurricane, everybody finish, you see. All native men say so.”
“It's hurricane season now,” Captain War-field laughed morosely. “They're not far wrong. It's making for something right now, and I'd feel better if the Malahini was a thousand miles away from here.”
“He is a bit mad,” Grief concluded. “I've tried to get his point of view. It's—well, it's mixed. For eighteen years he'd centred everything on Armande. Half the time he believes she's still alive, not yet come back from France. That's one of the reasons he held on to the pearls. And all the time he hates white men. He never forgets they killed her, though a great deal of the time he forgets she's dead. Hello! Where's your wind?”
The sails bellied emptily overhead, and Captain Warfield grunted his disgust. Intolerable as the heat had been, in the absence of wind it was almost overpowering. The sweat oozed out on all their faces, and now one, and again another, drew deep breaths, involuntarily questing for more air.
“Here she comes again—an eight point haul! Boom-tackles across! Jump!”
The Kanakas sprang to the captain's orders, and for five minutes the schooner laid directly into the passage and even gained on the current. Again the breeze fell flat, then puffed from the old quarter, compelling a shift back of sheets and tackles.
“Here comes the Nuhiva” Grief said. “She's got her engine on. Look at her skim.”
“All ready?” the captain asked the engineer, a Portuguese half-caste, whose head and shoulders protruded from the small hatch just for'ard of the cabin, and who wiped the sweat from his face with a bunch of greasy waste.