"If your people have been carried off, we will follow them and release them and restore them to their homes"—there were new sparks in his eyes as she spoke like one inspired—"and that will give us the footing it might take years to obtain."
He kissed her hand.
"You give me new hopes, whatever may have happened. That is what we will attempt if the worst has taken place," and thereafter he brightened up considerably, but relaxed no whit of his anxiety to reach the islands.
They swept gallantly along on the northern fringe of the westerly wind, which maintained a propitious amplitude, and just before sunset on the fourth day, the lucent rim where sea met sky was dented with a filmy tooth which the sinking sun drew momentarily into view from the farther distance, and Captain Cathie and Blair pronounced it Kapaa'a, the highest peak in the Dark Islands.
There was not much sleep on board that night, the morrow would be so big with events. General opinion among the men ran somehow to a fight. That was, perhaps, the natural tendency of the pent-up feelings of the last few days. An outlet would be grateful, a violent outlet from choice. When a man's feelings suffer maltreatment, the natural man within him develops a violent desire to find relief in kicking, in which last word is comprehended the whole known range of methods of assault, with the exception, of course, of the circumscribed and properly debarred use of the feet.
They travelled warily that night, and the first of the dawn showed them the peaks of Kapaa'a, bold and beautiful, dead ahead, and growing bolder and still more beautiful with every graceful roll of the ship.
They hung over the sides, every man and woman of them, and eyed their future home with an eagerness which its outward aspect at once amply satisfied and further quickened.
For what they could see was grand in its opulence of crag, and cliff, and gorge, and greenery. And the clouds which wreathed the higher summits, and the gauzy films of mist, which floated along the hillsides and hung reluctantly in the tree-tops, gave promise of still daintier beauties in that which they held half hidden.
They drew in cautiously to within a mile of the outer reef, and then, not venturing the ship nearer till they should learn how matters stood inside, Blair and Evans, with a crew of ten, eight to pull and two in case of need, and Matti to interpret, shot through one of the openings in the reef on the back of a long blue roller and made straight for the white beach. They carried no visible arms, but each man of the crew had his Winchester between his feet.
The lagoon ran up into a spearhead of white sand, between two tall cliffs opposite the widest opening in the reef, as though the constant impact of the outer waves, tempered as it was by the compression of the opening and the subsequent run across the lagoon, had forced the beach inland at that spot. It was helped, however, by a river, which came down between the hills and divided the white sandspear into two equal parts.