“The _Star of Troy_?” There was a flash almost of sudden dismay in his bright eyes.
“It’s not certain,” she admitted wistfully.
“Wife-of-the-Kami, he will not come today.”
She turned her eyes, so full of sorrow and of disillusion, upon him. “Why do you say that, Tsuda?”
“We must—gn—wait out the year. It is always so. He will not come today, Wife-of-the-Kami.”
Her eyes travelled away from his face dully and rested on the sea again—the sunny, vacant sea. She felt that her heart was very close to breaking.
When at last her arms tingled with the strain of holding up the binoculars, she lowered them slowly. And then she saw that the young savage, Nipek-kem, had slipped noiselessly toward them and had prostrated himself before her.
“Please tell him he may get up,” she said.
Then Tsuda, who, she saw, had likewise dropped to his own slightly rheumatic knees, spoke a few low words to Nipek-kem, who promptly arose and sat on the ground Turk-fashion, beginning at once an elaborate Ainu gesture salutation. Every movement of his body lured a tiny jingle from the accoutrements of his royal-looking shirt-front. Finally he lifted up his hands as high as his head, the palms turned upward, and lowered them gradually to his knees, speaking at the same time a few murmuring words in the crude Ainu dialect.
“He tell—gn—of a prayer in the valley for rain. It is long time, Wife-of-the-Kami, that we get no rain, and the cocoanut withers in the sun. They ask if you will show yourself on the crest of the hill as a sign—gn—the gods will open up the sky.”
She felt the primitive fog of superstition in the midst of which she dwelt, and a shudder of new misgiving and vague fear oppressed her. But she rose and said: “Yes, I will go. Where is the hill, Tsuda?”
“Just come along this way, Wife-of-the-Kami. I give you a hand so you don’t slip down where it get steep.”
And Nipek-kem followed at a respectful distance. But first, his eyes agleam, he picked up the little revolver which Stella had left on the rock. He slipped it inside his tunic of birds’ feathers. This, he knew with a gay heart, would mean all the good saké he could drink.
The hill to which Tsuda took her, his hand hot, trembling now and then a little as it supported her up the rough trail, proved to be the same hill upon which reposed the prostrate slab sacred to the remains of Vander Hagen. It was one of the loftiest spots on the island. They stood just beside the grave to watch the rain ceremonial.
