CHAPTER I
THE MAID OF AIOMA
Le Moan had left Karolin as a gull leaves the reef, unnoticed.
Not a soul had seen her go and it was not for some days that Aioma, busy with the tree felling, recollected her existence, and the fact that she had not followed him to the northern beach; then he sent a woman across and she had returned with news that there was no trace of the girl though her canoe was beached, also that there was no trace of food having been recently cooked, and that the girl must have been gone some days as there were no recent sand traces. The wind even when it is only moderately strong blurs and obliterates sand traces, and the woman judged that no one had been about on the southern beach for some days. She had found tracks, however, for which she could not account. The marks left by the boots of Peterson, also the footsteps of the kanakas who had carried the water casks disturbed her mind; they had nearly vanished, but it seemed to her that many people had been there, a statement that left Aioma cold.
Aioma had no time for fancies. If the girl were alive, she would come across in her canoe, if death had come to her in any of the forms in which death walked the reef, there was no use in troubling. The call to
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