place
slept. There was no sign of welcome. Up the beach, on the north shore,
where the fringe of cocoanut palms concealed the village, he could see
the black bows of the canoes in the canoe-houses. On the beach, on even
keel, rested the strange schooner. Nothing moved on board of her or
around her. Not until the beach lay fifty yards away did Grief let go
the anchor in forty fathoms. Out in the middle, long years before, he
had sounded three hundred fathoms without reaching bottom, which was to
be expected of a healthy crater-pit like Fuatino. As the chain roared
and surged through the hawse-pipe he noticed a number of native women,
lusciously large as only those of Polynesia are, in flowing _ahu's_,
flower-crowned, stream out on the deck of the schooner on the beach.
Also, and what they did not see, he saw from the galley the squat figure
of a man steal for'ard, drop to the sand, and dive into the green screen
of bush.

While the sails were furled and gasketed, awnings stretched, and sheets
and tackles coiled harbour fashion, David Grief paced the deck and
looked vainly for a flutter of life elsewhere than on the strange
schooner. Once, beyond any doubt, he heard the distant crack of a rifle
in the direction of the Big Rock. There were no further shots, and he
thought of it as some hunter shooting a wild goat.

At the end of another hour Captain Glass, under a mountain of blankets,
had ceased shivering and was in the inferno of a profound sweat.

"I'll be all right in half an hour," he said weakly.

"Very well," Grief answered. "The place is dead, and I'm going ashore to
see Mataara and find out the situation."

"It's a tough bunch; keep your eyes open," the captain warned him. "If
you're not back in an hour, send word off."

Grief took the steering-sweep, and four of his Raiatea men bent to the
oars. As they landed on the beach he looked curiously at the women under
the schooner's awning. He waved his hand tentatively, and they, after
giggling, waved back.

"_Talofa!_" he called.

They understood the greeting, but replied, "_Iorana_," and he knew they
came from the Society Group.

"Huahine," one of his sailors unhesitatingly named their island. Grief
asked them whence they came, and with giggles and laughter they replied,
"Huahine."

"It looks like old Dupuy's schooner," Grief said, in Tahitian, speaking
in a low voice. "Don't look too hard. What do you think, eh? Isn't it
the _Valetta?_"

As the men cl