* A man with extraordinary good luck.
He picked the shells up carefully, put them into his wide-brimmed leaf hat, which he then tied up in his shirt, and taking his spear again made towards the shore, too pleased at his good fortune to trouble any further about another feke and only anxious to let Roka and Huka see his prizes.
Half-way to the shore he paused and looked along the curving line of beach to see if either of them were in sight; then from behind a vine-covered boulder not fifty yards away a rifle cracked, and he fell forward on his face without a cry.
CHAPTER XII
Soon after they had left Harvey the Manhikian and Huka parted, each preferring to take his own way, Roka laughingly telling his comrade that although he, Roka, had no spear, he would bring back a turtle.
“In my land of Manihiki we trouble not about spears. We dive after the turtle and drag them ashore.”
“Thou boaster,” replied the Savage Islander good-naturedly, as he stepped briskly down the hard, white sand towards the water, his sturdy, reddish-brown body naked to the waist, and his brawny right arm twirling the heavy turtle-spear about his head as if it were a bamboo wand. “I go into the lagoon, whither goest thou?”
Roka pointed ahead. “Along the beach towards the islet with the high trees. May we both be lucky in our fishing.”
In a few minutes he was out of sight and hearing of his shipmate, for the beach took a sudden curve round a low, densely-verdured point, on the other side of which it ran in an almost straight line for a mile. Suddenly he paused and shaded his eyes with his hand as he caught sight of a dark object lying on the sand.