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A long minute afterward Mauriri broke surface noiselessly at Grief's side. "Here! Drink!" The calabash was full, and Grief drank sweet fresh water which had come up from the depths of the salt. "It flows out from the land," said Mauriri. "On the bottom?" "No. The bottom is as far below as the mountains are above. Fifty feet down it flows. Swim down until you feel its coolness."
Beyond, they could hear the occasional click of an oar or the knock of a paddle against a canoe, and sometimes they saw the flare of matches as the men in the guarding boats lighted cigarettes or pipes. "Wait here," whispered Mauriri, "and hold the calabashes." Turning over, he swam down. Grief, face downward, watched his phosphorescent track glimmer, and dim, and vanish.
From the eyrie on the face of the rock Grief could see nothing for another hour, when the Rattler appeared, making for the passage. As before, the captive Fuatino men towed in the whaleboat. Mauriri, under direction of Grief, called down instructions to them as they passed slowly beneath. By Grief's side lay several bundles of dynamite sticks, well-lashed together and with extremely short fuses.
After that, with jealously guarded shark-meat for bait, they managed on occasion to catch more sharks. But water remained their direst need. Mauriri prayed to the Goat God for rain. Taute prayed to the Missionary God, and his two fellow islanders, backsliding, invoked the deities of their old heathen days. Grief grinned and considered.
From the shore of the peninsula the discharges of four rifles announced that Brown and his men had worked through the jungle to the beach and were taking a hand. The bullets ceased coming, and Grief and Mauriri joined in with their rifles.
Despite the accustomed nerve of a sailor for height and precarious clinging, he marvelled that he was able to do it in the broad light of day. There were places, always under minute direction of Mauriri, that he leaned forward, falling, across hundred-foot-deep crevices, until his outstretched hands struck a grip on the opposing wall and his legs could then be drawn across after.
Grief grinned to himself at the appositeness of it as "Lead, Kindly Light," floated out over the dark water. "We must take the passage and land on the Big Rock," Mauriri whispered. "The devils are holding the low land. Listen!" Half a dozen rifle shots, at irregular intervals, attested that Brown still held the Rock and that the pirates had invested the narrow peninsula.
The rifle-firing ceased as abruptly as it had begun, but Grief ran on, perplexed by ominous conjectures, until, in a turn of the path, he encountered Mauriri running toward him from the beach. "Big Brother," the Goat Man panted, "I was too late. They have taken your schooner. Come! For now they will seek for you." He started back up the path away from the beach. "Where is Brown?" Grief demanded.
The deck of the Rattler was populous. For'ard, rifle in hand, among the Raiatean sailors, stood a desperado whom Mauriri announced was Raoul's brother. Aft, by the helmsman, stood another. Attached to him, tied waist to waist, with slack, was Mataara, the old Queen. On the other side of the helmsman, his arm in a sling, was Captain Glass.
"It is well that you swim as a man should, Big Brother," Mauriri whispered. From the lava glen they had descended to the head of the bay and taken to the water. They swam softly, without splash, Mauriri in the lead. The black walls of the crater rose about them till it seemed they swam on the bottom of a great bowl. Above was the sky of faintly luminous star-dust.
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