The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1908-01-25

The wind whipped him, and the SPIN
drift stung his naked body like hail.
He struggled on-and he shrieked
aloud in the mad excess of courage
that came to him as the joy of bat
tie, crying his defiance to the gods.
Once he glanced down, to see Ahana-
san looking up at him in a wrapt won
der of admiration, as a dog looks at
its master.
That gave him strength to fight He
held his own more firmly. He even
thought to give the sweep one turn,
thus helping the 1aboring boat to
mount the wall of black water Be-
yond the first wave, although the seas
would still be high, the peril would
not be so immediate, He might hope.
with good fortune, to ride out the
gale.
And just as he had gained this con-
fdence in his ability to master the ele-
ments, the wave tricked him It
seemed, at the moment, about to fall
away astern. The sampan had come
almost level Full relaxed, for the
fraction of a second, the strong pull
that was holding the boat front to the
sea- IIldI he lliSul gather purchase
for the one turn of the sweep that he
needed-and those unseen hands be-
meath the water caught his steering
oar with resistless grasp, jerked it
from his hands, and threw 1t a hun
dred feet away into the boiling sea.
The recoi sent him sprawling into the
waist of the boat beside the crouching
woman.
The next moment the sampan was
caught and whirled along dizzily be-
fore the advancing wave. The broad
beam of the small craft saved it, at
that critical time, from turning end
over end. 1t was filed with water,
Full and Ahana-san being drenched,
and was rushed along so fast that the
man and woman were sickened by the
speed and dizzy turning. and deafened
by the roaring of the waters.
Without the sweep, it was useless to
try to recover control of the boat.
Neither sail nor rudder could have
been kept on her, if either could have
been set in that mad whirl. Full could
not even rise to his feet from the
waist, where he had been thrown But
the first wave passed at last. Then
the wind caught the low hull and hur-
ried it on. The speed was slackened,
but the waves, running high as great
hills, curled and broke, kissing, all
about it. The sampan was filled with
water, but beyond that the threats of
the sea came to nothing.
Presently, in the smoother going,
Fuji recovered himself a little, and be-
gan to bail out the water and to light
en- the sampan of a part of its load
of fish. That eased her, and she rose
to the seas more buoyantly; but there
was still nothing to be gained in an
attempt to get her kinder control Full
sat down again beside Ahana-san, and
waited for the storm to blow itself
out
He sat thus until night fell, and in
all the tossing world there was no
light save the pale blue fires that
cleaned without warmth in the run
ming waves All through that night
the wind ragged, and the sampan was
hurried onward by the seas. Then, as
the morning broke, the rain began
falling, a drenching Kona rain, that
came down from a sky that shut in a
little round of the sea like a gray
curtain. The wind died with the COM
ing Of the rain, and presently the fall
ing sheets of water beat down the
angry waves.
Still, it was of no use to attempt to
get sail upon the sampan. There was
no wind, and, if there had been, there
was no sun to give the sailor direction.
The gray curtain of the rain shut in
about the sampan too closely to permit
Full to see whether he was near to
any land, although he did not think
the gale had carried him beyond the
island of Kauai.
~Wet and uncomfortable, those two
sat in the waist of the sampan. Yet
they were not unhappy. The storm
had not destroyed them, and they still
had love. And, at 6, little after day
light Fuji took from the cuddy under
the poop deck a five-gallon tin, such
as oil is shipped in, and few pine
chips and bits of coal picked up about
the wharves in Honolulu, and boiled
water and made tea. Also, he had a
supply of cooked rice, and there were
fish in the boat. They ate, laughing
at their makeshifts, and were content
A man who has life has all other
things.
All that day the rain fell, and Full
and Ahana-san sat in the waist of the
sampan. adrift helplessly. The second
night shut down upon them, and it
still rained and the sampan still drift
ed. Then, at midnight, the clouds |
broke UP, the rain stopped, and a puff |
of the trade wind came feeling it's way
across the sea, like a man dispossessed |
who comes back to his own place in |
the track of 81 devastating invasion.
F'uji, asleep in the sampan, felt the |
wind upon his face and arose at once
In a few minutes he had the rudder |
shipped, the sail upon the boat, and |
his little flare lighted upon the forward |
half deck. He knew where he was no |
more than a man lost in any wilder
ness, and had no compass by which |
he might have found his way across
the sea even in daytime: but the North
star was in the sky, and the Kona
had blown his boat in a generally
nor6herly direction.
All the remainder of that night he
held a southerly course. Morning
broke, and he saw no sign Of land on
any hand, nor was there a sail upon
the sea. The woman made tea, and