,{*} as Malua
says."

* A man with extraordinary good luck.

He picked the shells up carefully, put them into his wide-brimmed leaf
hat, which he then tied up in his shirt, and taking his spear again
made towards the shore, too pleased at his good fortune to trouble any
further about another _feke_ and only anxious to let Roka and Huka see
his prizes.

Half-way to the shore he paused and looked along the curving line
of beach to see if either of them were in sight; then from behind a
vine-covered boulder not fifty yards away a rifle cracked, and he fell
forward on his face without a cry.

CHAPTER XII

Soon after they had left Harvey the Manhikian and Huka parted, each
preferring to take his own way, Roka laughingly telling his comrade that
although he, Roka, had no spear, he would bring back a turtle.

"In my land of Manihiki we trouble not about spears. We dive after the
turtle and drag them ashore."

"Thou boaster," replied the Savage Islander good-naturedly, as he
stepped briskly down the hard, white sand towards the water, his sturdy,
reddish-brown body naked to the waist, and his brawny right arm twirling
the heavy turtle-spear about his head as if it were a bamboo wand. "I go
into the lagoon, whither goest thou?"

Roka pointed ahead. "Along the beach towards the islet with the high
trees. May we both be lucky in our fishing."

In a few minutes he was out of sight and hearing of his shipmate, for
the beach took a sudden curve round a low, densely-verdured point, on
the other side of which it ran in an almost straight line for a mile.
Suddenly he paused and shaded his eyes with his hand as he caught sight
of a dark object lying on the sand.

"'Tis a boat," he muttered, and in another moment he was speeding
towards it. When within a few hundred yards he stopped and then crouched
upon his hands and knees, his dark eyes gleaming with excitement.

"It is the captain's boat," he said to himself, as lying flat upon his
stomach he dragged himself over the sand into the shelter of the low
thicket scrub which fringed the bank at high-water mark. Once there,
he stood up, and watched carefully. Then stripping off his clothes and
throwing them aside, he sped swiftly along an old native path, which ran
parallel to the beach, till he was abreast of the boat. Then he crouched
down again and listened. No sound broke the silence except the call of
the sea-birds and the drone of the surf upon the reef.

He