could easily get
to Amboyna; and all going well, it was more than likely that my friend
would lend or sell me on easy terms, one of his own small trading
vessels, for he had half a dozen or more employed throughout the
Moluccas, and on the coast of the Phillipine Islands.

On the second day after our arrival on Oraluk, the rain cleared off
for an hour, and I went over to the chief's house, and found Lucia
conversing in Spanish with some native women who could speak it
brokenly, for years before there had been a Jesuit mission on the
island, but it had been abandoned, and the two priests, after a stay of
five years, had gone back to Manila. Niabon was not in the house--she
had gone into the forest with some of the young girls, Lucia said, as
she bade me come in and sit down.

"She is a strange girl, Lucia. She seems to love to be in the forest, or
walking on the cliffs or mountain tops. I wish I knew the true story of
her life."

Lucia shook her head. "She will not tell it, Jim, and I am sure she
does not like to be questioned even by me. But yet she _has_ told me a
little, and there can be no harm in my telling you--I am sure she would
not mind."

"No, why should she mind?"

"She told me that her very first memories of her childhood go back to
when she was a child of six at Manhiki. She lived alone with her mother
in a little hut quite apart from the other people. Even then she says
she knew that her mother was a 'witch-woman' and was greatly feared
by the natives, who yet came to her for charms and medicines. Who her
mother was she does not know--but she is quite certain that she was a
full-blooded Polynesian, though not a native of Manhiki. Her father she
had never seen, nor had her mother ever made even the faintest allusion
to him, and Niabon herself had never dared question her on the subject.
She told me, however, that she imagined he was a white man."

"I am almost sure he was," I said; "she certainly is not a full-blooded
native."

"I am sure of it too. But she does not like to be thought anything but a
pure native. Why, I cannot tell, and have never asked her her reasons."

"Is her mother still living?"

"I do not know and do not like to ask her. She told me that she, her
mother, and Tematau had left Manhiki and wandered through the islands of
the South Pacific for many years. Tematau she says is a blood relation.
He only took service as head boatman with Krause so as to be near
her, for from the v