Crossing the village square—if it could be so called—I directed my steps towards the great open-sided moniep, or council house, from which came the sound of many voices, talking in the vociferous manner common to all natives of the Gilbert and Kingsmill groups. As I drew near I saw that there were about twenty men seated inside, smoking, card playing, or making cinnet for fishing lines by twisting up the strands of coco-nut fibre on their naked thighs. As they heard my footsteps on the gravel, their conversation dropped a little, but they all gave me Tiakapo! as usual, invited me to enter and sit down and smoke, and then went on with either their work or their pastime.
“Now,” I thought, as I sat down on the mat brought to me, “I shall get these fellows to tell me the meaning of all this reticence about the disposal of Krause's body.”
For some minutes I smoked in silence and took the opportunity of looking at my hosts. They were all either middle-aged or old men, and were all known to me personally, especially one old bald-headed fellow named Kaibuka—“The Ship.”
In his younger days this Kaibuka had acquired an evil reputation for being the instigator and leader of cutting-off attacks on whaleships and trading vessels, and his performances had gained him such kudos and respect from his savage associates that now in his old age he was the most influential of the three principal head men of the whole lagoon. Like all the others present, he wore but the usual airiri, or girdle of grass, round his loins, and his dark reddish-brown body was covered from head to waist with the scars of wounds received in earlier years. Each of his ear-lobes, pierced in infancy, had from long years of continuous distention by means of rolls of pandanus leaf, become so pendulous that they now hung loosely upon his shoulders in two great bights of thin flesh as thick as a lead pencil, though one of them had twisted in it a long stick of tobacco and a spare pipe. He was not, however, a bad-looking old ruffian, and his shining bald head, still perfect teeth, and extremely Jewish cast of features gave him quite a distinctive appearance from the younger men, whose long coarse hair, cut away across the forehead and hanging loosely down on their shoulders and backs, made their fierce, savage faces appear as if they looked at you from a moving frame of black. They certainly were a wild-looking lot, but their appearance somewhat belied their dispositions—at least as far as I was personally concerned. We had always got along very well together both socially and in business, and I was well aware that whilst they disliked and mistrusted Krause they placed implicit confidence in me.
Putting down my pipe on the mat beside me, I told old Kaibnka that I desired to talk to them.
There was a dead silence at once.
“E rai rai” (“Good”), he said.
“Kaibuka,” I said, “hath the dead white man been taken to his wife?”
He looked stolidly at me for an instant, and then answered with an air of intense surprise.
“Dead white man! What dead white man, Simi? I know of none. We saw no dead white man!”