“Hickson, what's the matter? Couldn't you find your sister?”
He sat up straight, and gripping my knee in his left hand till I winced, said, with an awful preliminary burst of blasphemy—
“By God, sir, she's gone to hell; I'll never see poor little Kâtia again. I'm not drunk, don't you think it. I did have a stiff pull of grog up in the village there, but I'm not drunk; but there's something running round and round in my head that's drivin' me mad.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“God knows. I went to the mission-house and asked for the white missionary. The ——— dog wasn't there. He and his wife are away in Honolulu, on a dollar-cadging trip. There was about three or four of them cursed native teachers in the house, and all I could get out of them was that Kâtia wasn't there now; went away a year ago. 'Where to?' I said to one fat pig, with a white shirt and no pants on him. 'Don't know,' says he, in the Ponape lingo; 'she's a bad girl now, and has left us holy ones of God and gone to the whaleships.'”
Coming from any other man but Hickson I could have laughed at this, so truly characteristic of the repellent, canting native missionary of Micronesia, but the quick, gasping breath of Hickson and his trembling hand showed me how he suffered.
“I grabbed him and choked him till he was near dead, and chucked him in a heap outside. Then I went all round to the other houses, but every one ran away from me. I got a swig of grog from a native house and came right back.” Then he was silent, and fixed his eyes on the ship's lights seaward.
I could not offer him any sympathy, so said nothing. Lighting our pipes we gazed out ahead. Far away, nearest the reef, lay our brig, her riding light just discernible. A mile or two further away were three or four American whalers, whose black hulls we could just make out through the darkness. Within five hundred yards of us lay a dismantled and condemned brig, the Kamehameha IV. from whose stern ports came a flood of light and the sounds of women's voices.
We were just about abeam of her when Hickson suddenly exclaimed—
“Why, sir, the boat is sinking. Pull hard, boys, pull for the brig. The water's coming in wholesale over the gunwale. Hadn't you fellows enough sense to leave a place to bale from?” and he slewed the boat's head for the brig.