His white drill jacket dwindled to a speck which—so rapidly did the twilight deepen—was already no more than a gray blur when he vanished past the spot where the warrior had been seen that forenoon. Gleason did not wait for the further deepening of the night. In a racked whisper he ordered his paddlers to clear the whaleboat of the branches that had decked it and to make for the open sea once more.
Sheer horror was almost paralyzing Gleason now. The whaleboat lifted to the first of the ocean swells and made for far offshore. Night rolled across the face of the sea and swallowed up all the world. The whaleboat headed due north, for the open water beyond the coast.
But a dull booming set up behind it. Almost instantly the booming was duplicated to the right and to the left. The whaleboat had been seen before night hid it.
There followed a nightmare of terror. Three times in the next two hours the war canoes went swiftly on past the whaleboat, with paddles splashing in the haste of the paddlers. Once Gleason saw the dim outline of a horrible carved prow with the wide, white-ringed eyes of the god that was its figurehead. Once a four-man canoe blundered slap into the whaleboat and Gleason sobbed as the spurting flames of his revolver split the darkness, and sobbed again as a swimming man from the overturned canoe screeched horribly when the paddlers beat him away from the gunwale with their oar-blades.
The whaleboat turned back for the shore, then. It headed at a panic-stricken rate in the direction of Henderson’s island plantation. That was the last course it would be expected to take, because safety for Gleason lay no nearer than Uras Cove to the northwest. And Gleason, sick with terror in the stem, heard the rushing war-boats streaking for the site of the combat and heard them yelling to one another before they scattered to hunt again.
Of Maehoe he heard nothing. He knew, however, that that questing person had doffed his white jacket and had replaced a nose-plug in the cartilage between his nostrils, and had redecorated his distended ear-lobes with divers gruesome ornaments and was in the thick of the hunt. Maehoe was a native of this part of the world. He was not safe, of course, among the man-hunters of another village than his own, but, armed as he was, and with a white man afloat being hunted by war-boats from half a dozen villages, he would be ignored until the greater game was captured.
Dodging, drifting shadows, sweating alike with exertion and with fear, those in the whaleboat made but little progress. They reached the shingle beach of the plantation island two hours before dawn. By daybreak the whaleboat was hidden. During the day Gleason saw the still smoking ruins of the house and the store. He did not see where Henderson was buried, of course. Maehoe would have attended to the hiding of that burial place. A white man’s head is a white man’s head, however it be come by, and Maehoe on deserting the plantation would take precautions lest his late master provide a trophy for some devil-devil house ashore.
Maehoe came back. A canoe became visible not later than five o’clock in the afternoon, paddling steadily and openly along the sea. Its occupants were plainly savage; befrizzed, bepainted, and going about the business of paddling with the calm practicality of the salt-water boy.
The canoe drove up to the shingle beach and landed. The man in the stem shepherded the others before him—Gleason saw a glint of metal in his hand—up among the trees. Out of sight of the water, that man donned a white drill jacket and moved on, still driving the others before him. Gleason saw gnarly and lean and astoundingly naked-looking legs beneath the white jacket. Three times before sunset and darkness he caught a glimpse of white among the trees, moving about as if looking for signs that Gleason had returned to the ruins.
Gleason cursed himself in a whisper for having had the courage to go and look. A white man’s boot-tracks in fresh ashes would show clearly. When darkness fell and he saw a flambeau lighted, and saw it moving steadily as if Maehoe had at last found his trail and was following it by torchlight, Gleason cursed hysterically.