d batted 'im on 'is conch as 'is
leg swung over the schooner's bul'ark. 'Ayes dropped with 'is knife
between 'is teeth and 'is pistols in both 'ands.

"'E'd murdered 'undreds of white and brown and black men, and 'e was
smart, and 'e got away with it. But 'e made the mistake of not
having made a friend of 'is right 'and man."

CHAPTER XXIX

The white man who danced in Oomoa Valley; a wild-boar hunt in the
hills; the feast of the triumphant hunters and a dance in honor of
Grelet.

Grelet had gone in a whale-boat to Oia, a dozen miles away, to
collect copra, and I was left with an empty day to fill as I chose.
The house, the garden, and the unexplored recesses of Oomoa Valley
were mine, with whatever they might afford of entertainment or
adventure. Every new day, wherever spent, is an adventure, but when
to the enigmatic morning is added the zest of a strange place, it
must be a dull man who does not thrill to it.

I began the day by bathing in the river with the year-old Tamaiti,
Grelet's child. Her mother was Hinatiaiani, a laughing, beautiful
girl of sixteen years, and the two were cared for by Pae, a woman of
forty, ugly and childless. Hinatiaiani was her adopted daughter, and
Pae had been sorely angered when Grelet, whose companion she had
been for eighteen years, took the girl. But with the birth of Tamaiti,
Pae became reconciled, and looked after the welfare of the infant
more than the volatile young mother.

Tamaiti had never had a garment upon her sturdy small body, and
looked a plump cherub as she played about the veranda, crawling in
the puddles when the rain drove across the floor.

"The infant has never been sick," Grelet had said. "One afternoon I
was starting for the river to bathe, when that girl was making
herself a bed of cocoanut-leaves under the house. She said she
expected the baby, as, when she climbed a cocoanut-tree a moment
earlier, she had felt a movement. She would not lie in a bed, but,
like her mother before her, must make her a nest of cocoanut-leaves.
When I returned from my bath, Tamaiti was born. She was chopping
wood next day--the mother, I mean."

Though scarcely a twelve-month old, the baby swam like a frog in the
clear water of the river, gurgling at intervals scraps of what must
have been Marquesan baby-talk, unintelligible to me, but showing
plainly her enjoyment. Something of European caution, however, still
remained with me and, perhaps unnecessarily, I picked up