Then, giving his wife the two hundred dollars, he placed the rest in a canvas pouch slung round his waist, and, embracing them all tenderly, bade them farewell, and walked down to the shining beach to where the boat from the whaleship awaited his coming.
Drawing her children to her side, Te Ava Malu stood out upon the sand and watched the whaler loosen her canvas and heave up anchor. Only when the quick click, click of the windlass pauls reached their listening ears, as the anchor came up to the song of the sailors and the ship's head swung round, did the girls begin to weep. But the mother, pressing them to her side, chid them, and said that a year was but a little time, and then she sank down and wept with them.
So, with the tears blinding their eyes, they saw the whaler sail slowly out through the passage, and then, as she braced her yards up and stood along the weather shore of the island, they saw Big Harry mount halfway up the mizzen lower rigging. He waved his broad leaf hat to them three times, and then soon, although they could see the upper canvas of the ship showing now and then above the palms, they saw him no more.
Seven months had come and gone, and every day, when the great red sun sank behind the thick line of palms that studded the western shore of Nukufetau, Fetu and Vailele would run to a tall and slender fau tree that grew on their mother's land, and cut on its dark brown bark a broad notch.
“See,” said Vailele to her sister on this day, “there are now twenty and one marks” (they were in tens) “and that maketh of days two hundred and ten.”
“Aue!” said the quiet Fetu. “Cut thou a fresh one above. One hundred and fifty and five more notches must there be cut in the tree before Hari, our father, cometh back; for in the white men's year there are, so he hath told me, three hundred and sixty and five days.”
“O-la!” and Vailele laughed. “Then soon must we get something to stand on to reach high up. But yet, it may be that our father will come before the year is dead.”
Fetu nodded her dark head, and then, hand in hand, the two girls walked back to their mother's house through the deepening gloom that had fallen upon the palm grove.