As she finished, Mr. Hennessy rode away on a cross path, and Dick Forrest dropped back to squire his wife on the other side.
"Will you sport a bet, Evan?" he queried.
"I'd like to hear the terms of it first," was the answer.
"Cigars against cigars that you can't catch Paula in the tank inside ten minutes--no, inside five, for I remember you're some swimmer."
"Oh, give him a chance, Dick," Paula cried generously. "Ten minutes will worry him."
"But you don't know him," Dicked argued. "And you don't value my cigars. I tell you he is a swimmer. He's drowned kanakas, and you know what that means."
"Perhaps I should reconsider. Maybe he'll slash a killing crawl-stroke at me before I've really started. Tell me his history and prizes."
"I'll just tell you one thing. They still talk of it in the Marquesas. It was the big hurricane of 1892. He did forty miles in forty-five hours, and only he and one other landed on the land. And they were all kanakas. He was the only white man; yet he out-endured and drowned the last kanaka of them--"
"I thought you said there was one other?" Paula interrupted.
"She was a woman," Dick answered. "He drowned the last kanaka."
"And the woman was then a white woman?" Paula insisted.
Graham looked quickly at her, and although she had asked the question of her husband, her head turned to the turn of his head, so that he found her eyes meeting his straightly and squarely in interrogation. Graham held her gaze with equal straightness as he answered: "She was a kanaka."
"A queen, if you please," Dick took up. "A queen out of the ancient chief stock. She was Queen of Huahoa."
"Was it the chief stock that enabled her to out-endure the native men?" Paula asked. "Or did you help her?"
"I rather think we helped each other toward the end," Graham replied. "We were both out of our heads for short spells and long spells. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other, that was all in. We made the land at sunset--that is, a wall of iron coast, with the surf bursting sky-high. She took hold of me and clawed me in the water to get some sense in me. You see, I wanted to go in, which would have meant finish.
"She got me to understand that she knew where she was; that the current set westerly along shore and in two hours would drift us abreast of a spot where we could land. I swear I either slept or was unconscious most of those two hours; and I swear she was in one state or the other when I chanced to come to and noted the absence of the roar of the surf. Then it was my turn to claw and maul her back to consciousness. It was three hours more before we made the sand. We slept where we crawled out of the water. Next morning's sun burnt us awake, and we crept into the shade of some wild bananas, found fresh water, and went to sleep again. Next I awoke it was night. I took another drink, and slept through till morning. She was still asleep when the bunch of kanakas, hunting wild goats from the next valley, found us."