The Heathen Page 3

  By this time I was played out and gave up hope. The schooner was still two hundred feet away. My face was in the water and I was watching him maneuver for another attempt, when I saw a brown body pass between us. It was Otoo.

  "Swim for the schooner, master," he said, and he spoke gayly, as though the affair was a mere lark. "I know sharks. The shark is my brother."

  I obeyed, swimming slowly on, while Otoo swam about me, keeping always between me and the shark, foiling his rushes and encouraging me.

  "The davit-tackle carried away, and they are rigging the falls," he explained a minute or so later, and then went under to head off another attack.

  By the time the schooner was thirty feet away I was about done for. I could scarcely move. They were heaving lines at us from on board, but these continually fell short. The shark, finding that it was receiving no hurt, had become bolder. Several times it nearly got me, but each time Otoo was there just the moment before it was too late. Of course Otoo could have saved himself any time. But he stuck by me.

  "Good by, Charley, I'm finished," I just managed to gasp.

  I knew that the end had come and that the next moment I should throw up my hands and go down.

  But Otoo laughed in my face, saying:

  "I will show you a new trick. I will make that shark damn sick."

  He dropped in behind me, where the shark was preparing to come at me.

  "A little more to the left," he next called out. "There is a line there on the water. To the left, master, to the left."

  I changed my course and struck out blindly. I was by that time barely conscious. As my hand closed on the line I heard an exclamation from on board. I turned and looked. There was no sign of Otoo. The next instant he broke surface. Both hands were off at the wrist, the stumps spouting blood.

  "Otoo," he called softly, and I could see in his gaze the love that thrilled in his voice. Then, and then only, at the very last of all our years, he called me by that name.

  "Good by, Otoo," he called.

  Then he was dragged under, and I was hauled aboard, where I fainted in the captain's arms.

  And so passed Otoo, who saved me and made me a man, and who saved me in the end. We met in the maw of a hurricane and parted in the maw of a shark, with seventeen intervening years of comradeship the like of which I dare to assert have never befallen two men, the one brown and the other white. If Jehovah be from his high place watching every sparrow fall, not least in His Kingdom shall be Otoo, the one heathen of Bora Bora. And if there be no place for him in that Kingdom, then will I have none of it.

  [1] woman