“Oh, you, you--I don't know what to call you, but I do know that I have a round turn of your moustache in my hand, and could make you go on your knees if I liked. Now guess again; you're getting 'warmer,' because it--_he_ I mean--is a captain. Quick, and don't struggle so. I mean to keep you here just as long as I please.”
“Well, then, old Freeman. He's a captain, or was one about a hundred years ago, when he was much younger than he is now.” (Freeman was a nonogenerian settler on Ponapé and a neighbour of Tessa's father.)
“Don't be so silly! I've a great mind not to tell you at all, but as you haven't whimpered when I pulled your moustache I _shall_ tell you--it--he, I mean--was Captain Reade, of the United States ship _Narrangansett_. Now!”
Then all her raillery vanished in a moment. “He was a great friend of father's, you know, Harvey; and first he asked father, and father said I was too young, and then when I was leaving school in San Francisco to come home he wrote to me and asked me if he could come and see me. And he did come, and asked me to marry him.”
“And you really didn't care for him, Tessa?”
“Not a bit. How could I? Harvey, I never, never thought about anybody in the world but you,” and she looked into his face with swimming eyes as he pressed his lips to hers. “There, I'll let you go now, dear. I can hear Huka and the others coming for you. But Harvey dear, don't stay away for two whole days.”
An hour after leaving the village the canoes turned aside into a small narrow bay on one of the larger islands. The water was of great depth, from sixty to seventy fathoms, though the bay itself was in no part wider than a hundred yards. A solid wall of coral enclosed it on three sides, rising sheer up from the deep blue, and its surface was now bared and drying fast under the rays of the sun, for the rain had cleared off, and the sky was a vault of unflecked blue once more.
The natives had told Harvey and Roka that this bay was a spot famed as the haunt of a huge species of rock-cod called _pura_, some of which, they said, “took two strong men to lift,” and they were greatly pleased when they found that both the white man and Roka knew the _pura_ well, and had eagerly assented to Harvey's proposition that they should spend an hour or two in the place, and try and get one or two of the gigantic fish; as they had the necessary tackle--thick, six-plaited lines of coir fibre, with heavy wooden hooks such as are used for shark-fishing by the natives of the equatorial and north-west islands of the Pacific.