quished Often. The slender fingers clung timorously to mine.
Unhappy Hinatini feared that she was about to be disgraced before her
people by the white man's scorn of her beauty.

I was fain to invent a romance upon the spot. I was madly enamoured
of an Atuona belle, I said. She waited for me upon my own _paepae_;
she was a mighty woman and swift to anger. She would wreak vengeance
upon me, and upon Vanquished Often. I would adopt Vanquished Often
as my sister. In token of this I pressed my lips upon her forehead
and kissed her hands. She smiled bewitchingly, pleased by the novel
honor.

My hosts and their friends departed with her, half pleased, half
puzzled at this latest whimsy of the strange white, and I lay down
upon the mats of the chief's house, with Exploding Eggs lying across
the doorway at my feet.

The night brought fitful dreams, and in the darkest hour I woke to
feel a frightening thing upon my leg. By the light of the dimly
burning lantern I saw a thousand-leg, reddish brown and ten inches
long, halting perhaps for breath midway between my knee and waist.
It seemed indeed to have a thousand legs, and each separate foot
made impresses of terror on my mind, while each toe and claw
clutched my bare flesh with threatening touch.

The brave man of the tale who saves himself from cobra or rattler by
letting the serpent crawl its slow way over his perfectly controlled
body might have withheld even a quiver of the flesh, but I am no
Spartan. At my convulsive shudder each horrid claw gripped a
death-hold. In one swift motion I seized a corkscrew that lay nearby,
pried loose with a quick jerk every single pede and threw the odious
thing a dozen yards. A trail of red, inflamed spots rose where it
had stood and remained painful and swollen for days.

[Illustration: Idling away the sunny hours]

[Illustration: Nothing to do but rest all day]

Whether it was because this experience became mixed with my first
dreams in beautiful Vait-hua, or whether my Celtic blood sees
portents where they do not exist, certain it is that as the stealthy
charm of that idyllic place grew upon me through the days something
within me resisted it. I was ever aware that its beauty concealed a
menace deadly to the white man who listened too long to the rustle
of its palms and the murmur of its stream.

CHAPTER VIII

Communal life; sport in the waves; fight of the sharks and the mother
whale; a day in the mountains; death of Le