"You mustn't leave him get at her!"
I tell you it was not the same man that had come swimming and sniveling out to the schooner less than forty hours before. Here was a fierce one, a zealot, a flame, the very thin blade of a fine sword.
"Listen, Dole, if you leave that devil get at her—"
His eyes burned through me. He failed completely to accept the fact that he was done. His mind, ignoring the present, ran months ahead. With a flair of understanding, thinking of those three travesties of husbands and the wife who was no wife, I perceived what he meant.
I left him. He was a wild man, but the quality of his wildness showed itself in the fact that he squandered none of it in shaking the bars, shouting, or flinging about. His voice to the last, trailing me around the next corner, held to the same key, almost subdued.
"By God! if that—gets at her, I'll—I'll—"
"You'll what?" I mused. You see, even now I couldn't get rid of him as the drifter, the gutter Hamlet, the congenital howler against fate. "You'll what?" I repeated under my breath, and I had to laugh.
I got the vessel under way as soon as I came aboard. The Dutchman's shipment of copra was arranged for—a week, two, three weeks (as the wind allowed)—and I was to return from the lower islands, where my present cargo was assigned, and take it on.
As we stood offshore under the waxing moonlight, as I watched the island, gathering itself in from either extremity, grow small and smaller on the measureless glass of the sea, the whole episode seemed to swell up in my mind, explode, and vanish. It was too preposterous. Thirty-eight hours chosen at random out of ten thousand empty Polynesian years—that in that wink of eternity five human lives should have gone to pot simultaneously—a man wasn't to be taken in by that sort of thing.—
Through twelve days it remained at that. Discharging cargo in the furnace of Coco Inlet, if my thoughts went back to Taai, it was almost with the deprecating amusement a man will feel who has been had by a hoax. If those minstrel husbands were murdered and buried; if that Broadway imp sweated under the red-hot roof of the godown; if that incomparable, golden-skinned heiress of cannibal emperors sat staring seaward from the gilded cage of the Dutchman, awaiting (or no longer waiting) the whim of the epicure—if indeed any one of them all had ever so much as set foot upon that microscopic strand lost under the blue equator—then it was simply because some one had made it up in his head to while me away an empty hour. I give you my word, when at noon of the thirteenth day the mountain of Taai stood up once more beyond the bows, I was weary of the fantasy. I should have been amazed, really, to find a fellow named Signet housed in the Dutchman's private jail.