"Dead tired? Oh dear, no. Are you?"
"Well, fact is, I'm not."
"How you get things mixed up! Of course our animals are tired, which we washed, fed, watered, rode to a finish, then washed, fed, and watered all over again before we put them to rest. But we left our animals asleep. We are not the horses, but the riders, the mounted Spirits of the Heavens. We are free, we use the free will which white men talk so much about, and know so little."
"Free will? What do you mean?"
"I'm free, dear man. I will to be in a country called Tahiti, at the hut of the Queen Pomare. Look!"
The dusk was taking form within a large grass hut, where there seemed to be many persons, women, asleep on the floor. The sudden flinging open of a door filled the place with the hot splendor of a tropic day. Outside, the cocoa palms were streaming in the breeze above the coral reefs and the leaping diamond-glittering surf.
A man stood in the doorway, seen darkly against the blaze, his white uniform heavily laced, braided and hung with cords of gold across the shoulders. His gestures and his speech were French and full of studied deliberate insult, addressed to a woman who sat up on the mats, while she suckled a new-born baby at her breast. She was lithe, tawny, fierce, tigerishly regal, and in a royal rage as she stood up to confront this bully.
"Admiral," she answered him, holding out her baby that he might see, "this is the prince you have robbed of his kingdom, this is my son, the king who shall avenge me against your people. Now"—with a sweeping gesture of her arm, Pomare pointed away through the door to the sun and the leap of the crested seas—"get out!" she hissed, "or I'll have you thrown to the sharks. They love a cur. I don't."
"Poor thing!" Rain muttered. "So she has lost her kingdom after all, to the cruel Stonehearts. What do you think of that man who could bully a woman in labor?"
From Tahiti westward Rain showed her pupil the wide immensity of the Coral Sea which, like the sky at night, glitters with far-flung constellations, though these are of ring-shaped palm groves and white beach, set in a riot of surf. Beyond that gleamed the Indies; and, crossing a forest continent, they came to a bay in Sarawak where a white schooner yacht rolled in the anchorage. The white man was puzzled by Rain's Blackfoot accent, which gave a funny twist to "Rajah Brooke."