Grelet and I found Pere Olivier sweeping out the church, cheerful, humming a cradle-song of the French peasants.  He was glad to see us, though my companion was avowedly a pagan.  Dwelling alone here with his dying charges, the good priest could not but feel a common bond with any white man, whoever he might be.

The kiosk, to which he took us, proved to be Pere Olivier’s eating-place, dingy, tottering, and poverty-stricken, furnished with a few cracked and broken dishes and rusty knives and forks, the equipment of a miner or sheep-herder.  Pere Olivier apologized for the meager fare, but we did well enough, with soup and a tin of boiled beef, breadfruit, and feis.  The soup was of a red vegetable, not appetizing, and I could not make out the native name for it, hue arahi, until Grelet cried, “Ah, j’ai trouve le mot anglais! Ponkeen, ponkeen!” It was a red pumpkin.

[Illustration:  Removing the pig cooked in the umu, or native oven]

[Illustration:  The Koina Kai or feast in Oomoa]

“La soupe maigre de missionaire,” murmured the priest.

I led the talk to the work of the mission.

“We have been here thirty-five years,” said Pere Olivier, “and I, thirty.  Our order first tried to establish a church at Oomoa, but failed.  You have seen there a stone foundation that supports the wild vanilla vines?  Frere Fesal built that, with a Raratonga islander who was a good mason.  The two cut the stones and shaped them.  The valley of Oomoa was drunk.  Rum was everywhere, the palm namu was being made all the time, and few people were ever sober.  There was a Hawaiian Protestant missionary there, and he was not good friends with Frere Fesal.  There was no French authority at Oomoa, and the strongest man was the law.  The whalers were worse than the natives, and hated the missionaries.  One day when the valley was crazed, a native killed the Raratonga man.  You will find the murderer living on Tahuata now.  Frere Fesal buried his assistant, and fled here.

“That date was about the last Hanavave suffered from cannibalism and extreme sorcery.  The taua, the pagan priest, was still powerful, however, and his gods demanded victims.  The men here conspired with the men of Hanahouua to descend on Oi, a little village by the sea between here and Oomoa.  They had guns of a sort, for the whalers had brought old and rusty guns to trade with the Marquesans for wood, fruit, and fish.  Frere Fesal learned of the conspiracy, but the men were drinking rum, and he was helpless.  The warriors went stealthily over the mountains and at night lowered themselves from the cliffs with ropes made of the fau.  There were only thirty people left in Oi, and the enemy came upon them in the dark like the wolf.  Only one man escaped—­There he is now, entering the mission.  We will ask him to tell the story.”

He stood in the rickety doorway and called, “Tutaiei, come here!” An old and withered man approached, one-eyed, the wrinkles of his face and body abscuring the blue patterns of tattooing, a shrunken, but hideous, scar making a hairless patch on one side of his head.