The White Waterfall

by James Francis Dwyer

A MIDNIGHT ALARM

I think that Professor Herndon was the only person in the company who was quite contented with the day's doings on that evening when we camped near the table of stone. The polished slide and the ledge along which we had passed to the cavern stirred his imagination concerning the wonders that were before him, and he convinced himself that he had the god of his ambition by the heel. The fat notebook was made the repository of countless surmises regarding the period at which the ledge was in active use as a test for courage, and the stone structure that loomed up immediately beside the camp was tagged with countless suppositions regarding its uses and its probable date of construction. Soma gathered in some easily earned shillings by raking his mind in search of traditions and retailing them to the scientist by the light of the fire. He made magazine prices for tales that he spun from his fertile brain, and the Professor could hardly write fast enough in the excitement brought about by the discovery of so much historical knowledge.

"It is wonderful!" he cried, pausing for a moment to polish the thick lenses of his glasses upon the end of his silk coat. "The chance of enlightening the world upon this subject is one that I would not have missed for a million dollars."

"The dollars for me," murmured Holman. "I don't think the old world cares three cents about anything that happened a thousand years ago in this patch."

The Professor adjusted his glasses and turned them upon the doubter for the space of three minutes, but Holman was blissfully ignorant of the look which the angry archæologist favoured him with. The youngster was watching the firelight upon the face of Miss Barbara Herndon, and his thoughts were probably in a dream-fed future instead of a dismal past.

Leith sat silent and gloomy, his head pillowed against the trunk of a maupei tree, his face in the shadow of his hat, which he had pulled down over his forehead. The supper had been eaten with little conversation, the Professor being the only one who showed conversational powers of any note. With the notebook already partly filled he felt certain of a niche in the Pantheon of Fame, and he could not resist a desire to prattle childishly about the sensation which his discoveries would cause. It's a terrible thing for a man to get the applause craving in its worst form. It is liable to make him do things which no craving for treasure would allow him to do, no matter how badly he desired the tempting gold.

The girls retired early, and soon afterward Leith wrapped himself up in a blanket and lay down at the foot of the tree. The Professor at last became tired of firing questions at the wonderfully well-informed Soma, and the Kanaka, finding that the market for legends was not as good as it was in the early part of the night, retreated to the other fire, where Kaipi and the fire carriers were slumbering.

The heavy silence that comes in the night to the outposts of the world fell upon the place like a cold hand at that moment. A moon that appeared to have a pellicle across it, like the film upon a dead man's eye, peeped over the barrier of black rocks—peeped over as if it wondered what we were doing in that God-forgotten quarter. Sudden puffs of wind rustled the leaves of the maupei and fled hurriedly, and from somewhere in the coral rocks one of those red-striped lizards that are sometimes found in the rocky parts of the Carolines sent his unearthly shik-shuck into the stillness, where one fancied it a little projectile of sound crushed in its efforts to pierce the tremendous silence of the night. One's imagination pictured the places where there were lights and music, the tinkle of glasses, and the laughter of men and women, and the wilderness suffered in the comparison. Coral atolls with waving palm trees are delightful spots when one reads of them when seated in a comfortable armchair in a snug library, but the real island comes down heavily upon the nerve-centres when night falls upon the spot. Then the fringe dweller feels that he is an outcast from the warm places of the world where men and women meet in social intercourse.

Holman, who had been staring in silence at the fire for some twenty minutes, turned toward me after the Professor had retired.

"Sleepy?" asked the youngster.