their shoulders.

Setting his teeth with a vengeful scowl and wrenching a stout
branch from a tree, the prince strode over to the house of his
bride-to-be. She received him modestly and pleasantly, and her beauty
struck him into such an amazement that he could not at first find words
to express the charge he wished to make. At last, by turning his back,
he managed to speak his base and foolish thought. She, thinking this
a jest, at first made light of it, but when he faced her once more,
frowning this time, like a thunder-cloud, and brandishing the cudgel
above his head, she was filled with fear and could hardly keep her
feet. She denied the charge. She begged that he would tell the names
of her accusers that she might prove her innocence.

"You are fair to see and to hear, but you are as fickle as your
parents. I will have no such woman for a wife," shouted the chief,
lashing himself into a rage. She extended her arms appealingly. He
struck her on the temple, and she fell dead. He had gone but a mile or
so when her voice was heard in song behind him, and the fall of her
steps on the path. To his astonishment, she now appeared bearing no
mark of injury, save that the rough way had cut her feet, and again
she besought him to say on whose charge he had so foully wronged
her in his thought, and why he wished to kill her. His answer was
another blow, more savage than the first, and this time there was no
doubt that he left her dead. Yet, before he had gone another mile,
her lamenting song was heard; she came to him, and he struck her down
again. Five times this monster laid the defenceless girl a corpse,
and the last time he scraped a hole under the tough roots of a tree,
crowded her body into it, covered it with earth, and went on to
Waikiki without further interruption.

The owl-god had been Kaha's friend. After each stroke he had flown
to her, rubbed his head against the bruised and broken temple, and
restored her to life. To drag her from under the tangled roots was
beyond his strength, and he flapped away into the depths of the wood,
filled with sadness that such beauty had been lost to the world. But
it was not lost. The girl's spirit could not rest under the false
accusal that had caused her death. All bloody and disfigured, her
ghost presented itself before Mahana, a young warrior of the nearest
town, with whom she had in life exchanged a kind though casual word
or two, and understanding, through his own deep bu