[Illustration:  A chieftess in tapa garments with tapa parasol]

[Illustration:  Launching the whale-boat]

Now the game began again with the fierceness of the typhoon after the center has passed.  Men and women stood in line for the chance to redeem their fortunes, to slake their rage, to gain applause.  Once they thought they had conquered the Tahitian.  He began to lose, and before his streak of trouble ended, he had sent more than thirty packages from his hut to the grove.  But this was the merest breath of misfortune; his star rose again, and the contents of the canoes were his.

On the fifth day it became known that the Shan-Shan syndicate of Cantonese had a remaining case of toendstikkers.  They claimed that until now they had overlooked this case.  It held a hundred packages, or twelve hundred boxes.  It was priceless as the sole possible barrier against the absolute ending of the game.

The Shan-Shan people were without heart.  They demanded for the case five francs a packet.  Many of the younger Marquesans counselled giving the Cantonese a taste of the ancient u’u, the war-club of a previous generation.  Desperate as was the plight of the older gamesters, they dared not consent.  The governor would return, the law would take its course, and they would go to Noumea to work out their lives for crime.  No, they would buy the case for francs, but they would not risk dividing it among many, who would be devoured piecemeal by the diabolical O Lalala.

“Kivi, the Vagabond, the Drinker of kava, is the chief to lead our cause,” said Great Fern.  “He has never gone to the Christian church.  He believes still in the old gods of the High Place, and he is tattooed with the shark.”

Kivi was the one man who had not played.  He cared nothing for the pleasures of the Farani, the foolish whites.  After palaver, his neighbors waited on him in a body.  They reasoned with him, they begged him.  He consented to their plan only after they had wept at their humbling.  Then they began to instruct him.

They told him of the different kinds of combinations, of straights and of flushes, and of a certain occasional period when the Tahitian would introduce a mad novelty by which the cards with one fruit on them would “runnee wil’ee.”  They warned him against times when without reason the demon would put many matches on the mat, and after frightening out every one would in the end show that he had no cards of merit.

Immediately after sunset, when the popoi and fish had been eaten, and all had bathed in the brook, when the women had perfumed their bodies and put the scarlet hibiscus in their hair, and after Kivi had drunk thrice of kava, the game began.  The valley was deserted, the paepaes empty.  No fires twinkled from the mountainsides.  Only in the cocoanut-grove the candlenuts were lit as the stars peeped through the roof of the world.