CHAPTER XIV.
ONA, THE WITCH WOMAN
The moon was now high above the reef and all the lights in the village were out, all but the light of the house where Topi lay in the clutch of Yakoff's opium.
Fernand turned to Topi's house where he found his partner lying just the same. His pupils were like pin points and he was still unconscious. If a white man had swallowed a similar dose he would have been dead by this, but among some of the islanders, and especially those with a Melanesian strain in them, there is tremendous power of resistance to the drug. All the same, it seemed to Fernand that Topi was hopeless. He turned away from the house, more than ever determined to use all means possible against Yakoff.
It now wanted an hour of midnight; the wind had fallen and the breakers on the outer beach spoke less loud, while the moon, swinging high, made a ghostly daze on the white sands that stretched from the village into the far, star-sprinkled distance.
Fernand, leaving the canoes behind him and the palm grove and Chales' house to the westward of the grove, struck into the night.
He had a long walk before him.
Ona did not live with her kind. She lived and fished alone far away along the reef, where nothing came but the wind and the voices of the waves and the spirits of the dead. Here she had her shack by an island of the reef.
These reef islands occur here and there on nearly all atoll reefs. They are simply enlargements of the canal, swellings where the coral spreads, and on them there are generally trees.
Fernand, as he walked, kept close to the lagoon edge—the outer reef at night, like the edge of a forest, is a place to be avoided. One never knows what may be lurking there or what may come in under the moon, even if it is nothing worse than a bigger lump of swell.
Crabs scuttled away before the night walker, and had he paused and turned he might have seen crabs gazing at him amid the coral rocks to the right, “spirit crabs,” white as ivory on stiltlike legs, with eyes like ruby points.
But he did not turn, not even when, suddenly, far out on the lagoon water a jet of foam showed, followed by a concussion like the report of a big gun. One might have fancied that a battleship out at sea was making a target of the lagoon.
But Fernand knew it was only a big ray jumping, a huge, flat fish weighing a ton or more. There were two of them in the lagoon. Sometimes a school of them would come in, and should they take to playing, the noise would be heard miles out at sea; but to-night there were only two, and after a few minutes they ceased play and the night resumed its silence.
Now, far ahead, Fernand could see the clump of trees where Ona lived, and now he could make out the shack where the old woman slept and the canoe drawn up under its little shelter house, and now a spark showed which turned out to be the light of a tiny smudge fire, beside which the old woman was crouching as though waiting for him.
She was in reality watching something hung to dry from a tripod of sticks above the smudge fire. Ona carried on three businesses. She fished, she collected beach curios such as conch shells and sold them in the rush season, and she did a side line in magic.
The Chinese often came to her if out of luck, just as people go to a doctor to get a tonic if out of health. She sold charms, and she could undoubtedly “do things.”
Selincourt, the lieutenant of the French gunboat that visited the island, could have told a good deal about the doings of Ona before he died. He was a superstitious Frenchman and legend said he had bought luck from her; anyhow, he became chief officer in the station shortly after the supposed bargain, but he died shortly after that.
There was also the case of the Dutchman, Poll, who was very thick with her and who prospered for a while, only to wilt. As a matter of fact, though this woman was sought after considerably, people came to her more for peeps into the future and spells against drowning and so forth than for aid in getting rich, for it was felt that the luck she brought, though a thing of fast and furious growth, was sure to wither like a fairy plant and bring disaster, perhaps, in the withering.
Fernand quite believed in her. His simple and almost childlike mind accepted her as genuine. He rather feared her. This was the first time he had ever sought her advice or assistance, and he would never have done so for his own sake.
He stood before her as she crouched beside her fire, and as he stood a flaw of the wind brought a wreath of the smoke against his face, making him catch his breath and cough.
“I knew you were coming,” said Ona, glancing up at him without raising her head.
“How knew you that?” asked he.
“I saw you when you were yet far away,” she replied, with a little laugh.
This seeming disparagement of her own powers did not ease Fernand's mind a bit.
“You have come to me for help and advice,” said Ona, throwing a bit of dried seaweed and a morsel of hibiscus stick on the embers of the little fire. “Make known what you want, for it is late and my cooking is near done and I must sleep.”
Fernand looked at the thing round which the smoke was curling in the moonlight. It was a head, but too small even for a baby's head, possibly the head of some sea creature—who could tell?
The drying in the smoke every night, assisted by the sun during the day, must have taken a long time, perhaps a week; but time was nothing to Ona.
“Yes,” he said at last, “I have come to you for help. You know Yakoff?”
“Yes,” replied Ono. “Sit down beside me.”
He sat down beside her on the coral.
“Now take my hand,” said she, “that I may read your thoughts.”
He took her hand.
The sea spoke loud on the outer reef and the wind curled the smoke of the smudge fire beneath the moon, and a cry came from some night fishing gull beyond the reef.
“One—two,” said Ona, as if counting. “Yakoff—and another; there is another in your mind.”
“Yes, the man Chales.”
“And there is another.”
“Yes, the man who came in the white ship that lies off the village,” Fernand answered.
“And there is another?”
“Yes, there is another,” replied Fernand. He was thinking of June. “There are four people in my mind, Ona. Yakoff and Chales, and the man of the white ship and a woman that is. with him. Yakoff and Chales are set to destroy the man and the woman. That is why I have come to you for help. I have brought you that which I value most in payment for your help.” He released her hand and produced the box with the pearl.
Ona looked at the pearl, but she did not touch it. She knew its value at a glance.
“Here,” said she, “are all things desirable that a young man can want, yet you would give them to the winds so that those two may be held safe. Yours is a clean heart—but I—I can do nothing. I have no power over death or destruction. I can only say, 'Do this,' or, 'Do that.' Put it away. Now give me your hand and let me get into to-morrow.”
She took his hand, held it, and, crouching into herself, fell silent. She seemed asleep. A minute passed and then, with a little shudder and releasing his hand, she spoke:
“I have seen. To-morrow, shall Yakoff come to me to ask me for a spell to give him luck in the business he has on hand, and this he may do, for he is a believer in these things. I will give it to him.”
“You would help him?”
“Surely. For in that way only can he and the other man, his companion in his business, be brought to nothing and their plans made waste.”
“You would help him to destroy the man and woman.”
“No,” said Ona. “I would leave him to destroy himself. Let this thing be as I have said. Take no hand in it. The Dark People are working to make Yakoff's path easy, but they have prepared a hole for him like that in the coral by the four trees. Now go.”
Fernand sprang to his feet as she rose. She went to the tripod and took the head, wrapping it in a piece of sennit. She seemed to have forgotten Fernand's presence, and, turning, he went off taking his way back to the village.
He felt like a swimmer being swept out to sea in the grip of the current. His simple and straightforward mind could not understand the subtleties of Ona; he had grasped at her for help and she failed him.
Where an old, lone coco palm had fallen in the storm of last year he paused and, taking his seat on the trunk, plunged into thought, his head between his closed fists. The dawn was coming into the sky when he rose, grasping a newly formed plan. He had a weapon at last—Topi. If Topi died in the night from the effects of the opium procured from Yakoff, he would go to the French authority and denounce Yakoff, also Chales as being party to Yakoff's business transactions.
They would both be taken off to Papeete and tried. Fernand had seen several bad whites taken off to Papeete for trial before the courts and for offenses less than this.
He rose up, buoyed by this plan. It was sunrise when he reached the village, and behold!—nearly the first person he met was Topi, not dead, but sitting outside his house in the rays of the newly risen sun.
The opium that would have killed two other men had failed to kill Topi. As a matter of fact, he was as tough as an alligator, but to Fernand it seemed that the Dark People mentioned by Ona had brought him back to life, thus clearing Yakoff's path of an obstacle that might have blocked it.
He forgot that Topi was his friend and partner, and turned and walked away with scarcely a greeting. Coming down to the lagoon edge he stood and looked at the yacht swinging at her moorings and with her bow to the incoming tide.
A white figure stood at the taffrail. It was June, and she was sweeping the beach to westward with a pair of glasses. Then her eye caught Fernand's figure and she leveled the glasses in his direction, recognized him and raised a hand in greeting.