Island Nights' EntertainmentsStevenson, Robert Louis
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Island Nights' Entertainments
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Islands of the Pacific -- Fiction; Short stories
Have you seen a child when he is all alone and has a wooden sword, and
fights, leaping and hewing with the empty air? Even so the man-eaters
huddled back to back, and heaved up their axes, and laid on, and
screamed as they laid on, and behold! no man to contend with them! only
here and there Keola saw an axe swinging over against them without
hands; and time and again a man of the tribe would fall before it,
clove in twain or burst asunder, and his soul sped howling.
For awhile Keola looked upon this prodigy like one that dreams, and
then fear took him by the midst as sharp as death, that he should
behold such doings. Even in that same flash the high chief of the clan
espied him standing, and pointed and called out his name. Thereat the
whole tribe saw him also, and their eyes flashed, and their teeth
clashed.
“I am too long here,” thought Keola, and ran further out of the wood
and down the beach, not caring whither.
“Keola!” said, a voice close by upon the empty sand.
“Lehua! is that you?” he cried, and gasped, and looked in vain for her;
but by the eyesight he was stark alone.
“I saw you pass before,” the voice answered: “but you would not hear
me. Quick! get the leaves and the herbs, and let us free.”
“You are there with the mat?” he asked.
“Here, at your side;” said she. And he felt her arms about him. “Quick!
the leaves and the herbs, before my father can get back!”
So Keola ran for his life, and fetched the wizard fuel; and Lehua
guided him back, and set his feet upon the mat, and made the fire. All
the time of its burning, the sound of the battle towered out of the
wood; the wizards and the man-eaters hard at fight; the wizards, the
viewless ones, roaring out aloud like bulls upon a mountain, and the
men of the tribe replying shrill and savage out of the terror of their
souls. And all the time of the burning, Keola stood there and listened,
and shook, and watched how the unseen hands of Lehua poured the leaves.
She poured them fast, and the flame burned high, and scorched Keola’s
hands; and she speeded and blew the burning with her breath. The last
leaf was eaten, the flame fell, and the shock followed, and there were
Keola and Lehua in the room at home.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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