Safe hidden amongst the bushes he listened. It would take a full hour yet before the schooner¹ could make the break, yet he listened as he lay, his rope beside him, his mind active as a squirrel in its cage.
 
They would search the atoll, they would hunt amongst the bushes—yet they might miss him.
 
Should they find him! His dark mind took fire at the thought, wild ideas came to him of escaping into the lagoon², boarding the schooner, seizing a rifle and turning the situation. He was a white man, a match for a hundred kanakas if only he could get a foothold above them, a rifle in his hands. In this he was right, as he had slain³ the women who had him safely bound, so had he the possibility in him to meet this last attack of fate, free himself, and dominating and destroying, make good at last.
 
Time passed, the reef spoke⁴ and the wind in the trees, but from the outer sea came nothing. He peeped through the bushes, getting a view of the reef line to northward⁵. By now surely the topmasts of the schooner ought to show close in as she must be, yet there was nothing.
 
He came out of the bushes like a lizard⁶, stood erect⁷ and then came cautiously towards the higher coral where his outlook post was; literally⁸ on hands and feet he crawled, inch by inch, till the sea came in view and then he crawled no longer. He stood erect.
 
Far off on the breezed-up sea the schooner close-hauled was standing⁹ away from the island.
 
Rantan could scarcely grasp the fact before his eyes. She had been making for him and now she was standing away.
 
She had not been searching for him, then. Was she after all the Kermadec or had he been mistaken?
 
Her shape, her personality, that patch on the sail—well what of that? Other ships had patched canvas besides his schooner. He had surely been mistaken.
 
As she dwindled¹⁰ dissolving in the wind, his hungry eyes followed her.
 
How fast she was going, faster than the Kermadec could sail close-hauled.
 
He watched her till she was hull¹¹ down, till her canvas showed like a midge dancing in the sea dazzle, till it vanished taken by the round world into the viewless.
 
Then he came back to the trees.
 
Just as the ship had gone from the sea, so had his dream ship gone from his mind, taking hope with her, leaving him to his utter nakedness. He went to the old canoe that he had abused and vilified¹² in his hour of triumph; the sun had enlarged the crack, the forward outrigger pole had worked loose with the tossing in the swell¹³, there was no paddle.
 
Yet she could talk to him, telling him of Nanu and Ona and their dead children, and of Carlin and Peterson, and beyond that of Soma and Chile and many a traverse to the beginning of that great traverse of his life.
 
He wished to be done with it all.
 
With the going of hope, the fact of his nakedness had seized him again.
 
It had never quite left him; the feeling of being without clothes had tinged¹⁴ even his dreams, he had fought against it and put it by, but it always returned, and now that hope had departed it was back and in a worse form. For now if he did not fight it hard, it was taking the form, not of

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