“What did old Ingrova say?” suddenly asked the old man, as he swallowed some hot tea.
“Oh, he had never even heard of Gabrielle.”
“Never heard of her! The old liar!” almost yelled the old man.
Hillary turned beetroot-red. He swallowed some hot tea and nearly fell on the floor. “You don’t mean to say Ingrova’s fooling us?”
“Don’t worry, boy, Ingrova’s all right. I know ’im!” said Everard.
“Thank God!” muttered Hillary. For he had suddenly called up terrible visions of ferocious head-hunters dancing round Gabrielle’s dying form.
Anyway, his fears were quite dispelled by Everard’s manner and all that he proceeded to tell him. As the ex-sailor and the apprentice talked and then lapsed into silence over their own thoughts, the visitors began to arrive. It appeared that the grief-stricken father had been about telling all his friends that Gabrielle was missing from home. The first one to arrive at the bungalow after breakfast was Mango Pango. When Hillary opened the bungalow door she pretended to faint. Then she lifted her hands above her head and went on in a most dramatic fashion as Hillary explained to her that Gabrielle was still missing.
“Whater you do ’ere?” said the pretty Polynesian girl, as she looked out of the corner of her eye as only a Polynesian maid can look without squinting. “I never knew that you knew Misser Gaberlielle,” she added, as Hillary smiled. Then she went on in a terrible style, for she had known Gabrielle since she was a child. “O Master Hill-e-aire, she kill! Some one fiercer head-hunter gotter her and cutter her head off!” she wailed, as she rolled her pretty eyes and then looked at Hillary in a swift flash that said “No gooder you loving girler without head—eh?” Giving this parting shot, Mango Pango ran off home to follow her domestic duties. And then a batch of native women and two white men arrived outside the bungalow to inquire if Gabrielle had returned. After a deal of jabbering and unheard-of ideas as to the cause of the girl’s absence, they put the coins in their pockets and went off mumbling. And still the old man gabbled on, saying: “How kind people are when folk are in trouble.”
Hillary at last put on his hat and went off to make further inquiries. As he stood shaving himself before the mirror in the bungalow parlour, he thought of all that Gabrielle had told him about the haunting shadow-woman. He was half-inclined to tell the father of the girl’s strange talk on the derelict ship out in the bay. Then he decided not to do so, thinking that the old sailor had quite enough trouble on his shoulders. Somehow the thought of all that Gabrielle had told him about that shadow-woman eased Hillary’s mind. It gave him greater faith in the girl. He remembered the look in her eyes when she had sung the weird songs to him by the lagoon, and also in the forest once when they were parting. “Perhaps she’s a bit eccentric, and that accounts for her strange absence,” he thought. And the thought eased his mind and was more pleasant than the thoughts that had begun to haunt him. He recalled Rajah Koo Macka’s handsome face. He also recalled how he had read that dark men had strange and terrible influence over romantic girls. He knew very well that Gabrielle was terribly impressionable. Hillary gave himself a gash with his razor as he thought of this, and his hands began to tremble. Then he hastily dressed himself and told Everard that he was off to make inquiries about Macka. “We don’t know who he is; he might be anyone, and villainous enough to lure your daughter deliberately away, after all,” said the apprentice, as he lit his pipe, said good-bye to the old man and went off to search and make inquiries.
It was nearly dusk when Hillary returned from the villages and going down to the beach by the grog bar came across a Papuan sailor who, he had been told, was an old deck-hand off one of the Rajah’s ships.