“I want another man; will you come? I'm bound to Singapore with sandal-wood.”
“No, thank you, sir. I can't leave here. I've got a wife and child.”
The seaman laughed with good-humoured contempt, and sought to persuade him to come, but Brandon only shook his head solemnly. “I can't do that, sir. These here people has treated me well, and I can't play them a dirty trick like that.”
After some little bargaining the natives who had come with Brandon agreed to return to the shore and bring off some turtle to the ship. It was still a dead calm, and likely to continue so all night, and Brandon, shaking the captain's hand, got into the canoe and headed for the island.
As they ran the bow of the canoe upon the beach Brandon called loudly to his wife to come out of the house and see what he had brought from the ship, and was instantly struck with alarm at hearing no answer to his call. Running quickly over the few hundred yards that separated his house from the beach, he lifted up the door of thatch and saw that the house was empty—his wife and child were gone.
In a moment the whole village was awake, and, carrying lighted torches, parties of men and women ran along the path to seek the missing woman, but sought in vain. The island was small and had but one village, and Brandon, puzzled at his wife's mysterious disappearance, was about to lead another party himself in another direction to that previously taken, when a woman who lived at a house at the extreme end of the village, suddenly remembered that she had seen Brandon's wife, carrying her child in her arms, walking quickly by in the direction of a point of land that ran far out from the shore on the lee side of the island.
In an instant he surmised that, fearing he might go away in the ship, she had determined to swim out to him. The moment he voiced his thought to the natives around him, the men darted back to the beach, and several canoes were at once launched, and in the first was Brandon.
There were four canoes in all, and as that of the white man gained the open sea, the crew urged him not to steer directly for the brigantine, “for,” said they, “the current is so strong that Mâhia, thy wife, who is but a poor swimmer and knows not its strength, hath been swept round far beyond the point—and, besides, she hath the child.”
For nearly half an hour the canoes paddled out swiftly, but noiselessly, the men calling out loudly at brief intervals, and every now and then Brandon himself would call.
“Mâhia! Mâhia! Call to us so that we may find thee!”