He fell asleep on the thought and for days and days he hugged it, and every day a dozen times he would go to the flat space on the coral and look over the sea for the ship.
 
One morning he saw something dark on the beach near the break; it was the canoe, the tide had taken her out only a little way and the sea had played with her, submerged as she was, returning her to the lagoon¹ where the full flood had beached her. The water had drained out of her with the ebb² and there she was and there he found her, pulling her up higher just for something to do. He found the crack that made the leak, it was quite small and he might have plugged it, but there was no paddle and anyway he would not have used her—he was waiting for the ship that was sure to come.
 
Rantan had, like most sailors, the full use of his hands, and he longed to use them, but he had no tools or anything to work on; near the trees and close to the mammee apple there was a patch of coarse grass and the idea came to him to make something out of it. Once in Chile he had escaped from prison by making a grass rope and the idea came to him now to make another; anything was better than sitting in idleness, and it seemed a lucky thing to do, for not only had he escaped from the Chilean prison by means of the rope, but he had come on a streak³ of good luck when free. So, gathering⁴ grass, he sat down to weave his rope.
 
The business was a godsend to him.
 
He limited the work to a few hours a day so as not to cloy⁵ himself, and he would look forward to the work, hours as men look forward to a smoke.
 
Whilst he worked at it, he wove his thoughts into the rope, his desires, dreams and ambitions all were woven into it, the killing⁶ of Peterson went in, and the memory of the dead women on Karolin beach, his hatred⁷ of the kanakas and of the red-headed one who had come and looked at him, Dick.
 
As a woman weaves into her knitting her household affairs and so on, the busy fingers of Rantan wove into his rope visions of ripping the pearls out of Karolin lagoon, of hunting the kanakas to death, of drinking bars and loose pleasures to be had with the pearl money—truly, if an inanimate thing could be evil, it was evil, for it held Rantan’s past. The amount of grass being limited, he sometimes knocked off ............