He weighed one hundred and ten pounds. His
hair was kinky and negroid, and he was black. He was
peculiarly black. He was neither blue-black nor
purple-black, but plum-black. His name was Mauki, and he
was the son of a chief. He had three tambos. Tambo is
Melanesian for taboo, and is first cousin to that
Polynesian word. Mauki's three tambos were as follows:
First, he must never shake hands with a woman, nor have a
woman's hand touch him or any of his personal belongings;
secondly, he must never eat clams nor any food from a fire
in which clams had been cooked; thirdly, he must never
touch a crocodile, nor travel in a canoe that carried any
part of a crocodile even if as large as a tooth.
Of a different black were his teeeth, which were
deep black, or, perhaps better, LAMP-black. They had been
made so in a single night, by his mother, who had
compressed about them a powdered mineral which was dug
from the landslide back of Port Adams. Port Adams is a
salt-water village on Malaita, and Malaita is the most
savage island in the Solomons--so savage that no traders
or planters have yet gained a foothold on it; while, from
the time of the earliest beche-de-mer fishers and
sandalwood traders down to the latest labor recruiters
equipped with automatic rifles and gasolene engines,
scores of white adventurers have been passed out by
tomahawks and soft-nosed Snider bullets. So Malaita
remains today, in the twentieth century, the stamping
ground of the labor recruiters, who farm its coasts for
laborers who engage and contract themselves to toil on the
plantations of the neighboring and more civilized islands
for a wage of thirty dollars a year. The natives of those
neighboring and more civilized islands have themselves
become too civilized to work on plantations.
Mauki's ears were pierced, not in one place, nor
two places, but in a couple of dozen places. In one of the
smaller holes he carried a clay pipe. The larger holes
were too large for such use. The bowl of the pipe would
have fallen through. In fact, in the largest hole in each
ear he habitually wore round wooden plugs that were an
even four inches in diameter. Roughly speaking, the
circumference of said holes was twelve and one-half
inches. Mauki was catholic in his tastes. In the various
smaller holes he carried such things as empty rifle
cartridges, horseshoe nails, copper screws, pieces of
string, braids of sennit, strips of green leaf, and, in
the cool of the day, scarlet hibiscus flowers. From which
it will be seen that pockets were not necessary to his
well-being. Besides, pockets were impossible, for his only
wearing apparel consisted of a piece of calico several
inches wide. A pocket knife he wore in his hair, the blade
snapped down on a kinky lock. His most prized possession
was the handle of a china cup, which he suspended from a
ring of turtle-shell, which, in turn, was passed through
the partition-cartilage of his nose.
But in spite of embellishments, Mauki had a nice
face. It was really a pretty face, viewed by any standard,
and for a Melanesian it was a remarkably good-looking
face. Its one fault was its lack of strength. It was
softly effeminate, almost girlish. The features were
small, regular, and delicate. The chin was weak, and the
mouth was weak. There was no strength nor character in the
jaws, forehead, and nose. In the eyes only could be caught
any hint of the unknown quantities that were so large a
part of his make-up and that other persons could not
understand. These unknown quantities were pluck,
pertinacity, fearlessness, imagination, and cunning; and
when they found expression in some consistent and striking
action, those about him were astounded.
Mauki's father was chief over the village at Port
Adams, and thus, by birth a salt-water man, Mauki was half
amphibian. He knew the way of the fishes and oysters, and
the reef was an open book to him. Canoes, also, he knew.
He learned to swim when he was a year old. At seven years
he could hold his breath a full minute and swim straight
down to bottom through thirty feet of water. And at seven
years he was stolen by the bushmen, who cannot even swim
and who are afraid of salt water. Thereafter Mauki saw the
sea only from a distance, through rifts in the jungle and
from open spaces on the high mountain sides. He became the
slave of old Fanfoa, head chief over a score of scattered
bush-villages on the range-lips of Malaita, the smoke of
which, on calm mornings, is about the only evidence the
seafaring white men have of the teeming interior
population. For the whites do not penetrate Malaita. They
tried it once, in the days when the search was on for
gold, but they always left their heads behind to grin from
the smoky rafters of the bushmen's huts.
When Mauki was a young man of seventeen, Fanfoa got
out of tobacco. He got dreadfully out of tobacco. It was
hard times in all his villages. He had been guilty of a
mistake. Suo was a harbor so small that a large schooner
could not swing at anchor in it. It was surrounded by
mangroves that overhung the deep water. It was a trap, and
into the trap sailed two white men in a small ketch. They
were after recruits, and they possessed much tobacco and
trade goods, to say nothing of three rifles and plenty of
ammunition. Now there were no salt-water men living at
Suo, and it was there that the bushmen could come down to
the sea. The ketch did a splendid traffic. It signed on
twenty recruits the first day. Even old Fanfoa signed on.
And that same day the score of new recruits chopped off
the two white men's head, killed the boat's crew, and
burned the ketch. Thereafter, and for three months, there
was tobacco and trade goods in plenty and to spare in all
the bush villages. Then came the man-of-war that threw
shells for miles into the hills, frightening the people
out of their villages and into the deeper bush. Next the
man-of-war sent landing parties ashore. The villages were
all burned, along with the tobacco and trade stuff.
The cocoanuts and bananas were chopped down, the
taro gardens uprooted, and the pigs and chickens killed.
It taught Fanfoa a lesson, but in the meantime he
was out of tobacco. Also, his young men were too
frightened to sign on with the recruiting vessels. That
was why Fanfoa ordered his slave, Mauki, to be carried
down and signed on for half a case of tobacco advance,
along with knives, axes, calico, and beads, which he would
pay for with his toil on the plantations. Mauki was sorely
frightened when they brought him on board the schooner. He
was a lamb led to the slaughter. White men were ferocious
creatures. They had to be, or else they would not make a
practice of venturing along the Malaita coast and into all
harbors, two on a schooner, when each schooner carried
from fifteen to twenty blacks as boat's crew, and often as
high as sixty or seventy black recruits. In addition to
this, there was always the danger of the shore population,
the sudden attack and the cutting off of the schooner and
all hands. Truly, white men must be terrible. Besides,
they were possessed of such devil-devils--rifles that shot
very rapidly many times, things of iron and brass that
made the schooners go when there was no wind, and boxes
that talked and laughed just as men talked and laughed.
Ay, and he had heard of one white man whose
particular devil-devil was so powerful that he could take
out all his teeth and put them back at will.
Down into the cabin they took Mauki. On deck, the
one white man kept guard with two revolvers in his belt.
In the cabin the other white man sat with a book before
him, in which he inscribed strange marks and lines. He
looked at Mauki as though he had been a pig or a fowl,
glanced under the hollows of his arms, and wrote in the
book. Then he held out the writing stick and Mauki just
barely touched it with his hand, in so doing pledging
himself to toil for three years on the plantations of the
Moongleam Soap Company. It was not explained to him that
the will of the ferocious white men would be used to
enforce the pledge, and that, behind all, for the same
use, was all the power and all the warships of Great
Britain.
Other blacks there were on board, from unheard-of
far places, and when the white man spoke to them, they
tore the long feather from Mauki's hair, cut that same
hair short, and wrapped about his waist a lava-lava of
bright yellow calico.
After many days on the schooner, and after
beholding more land and islands than he had ever dreamed
of, he was landed on New Georgia, and put to work in the
field clearing jungle and cutting cane grass. For the
first time he knew what work was. Even as a slave to
Fanfoa he had not worked like this. And he did not like
work. It was up at dawn and in at dark, on two meals a
day. And the food was tiresome. For weeks at a time they
were given nothing but sweet potatoes to eat, and for
weeks at a time it would be nothing but rice. He cut out
the cocoanut from the shells day after day; and for long
days and weeks he fed the fires that smoked the copra,
till his eyes got sore and he was set to felling trees. He
was a good axe-man, and later he was put in the
bridge-building gang. Once, he was punished by being put
in the road-building gang. At times he served as boat's
crew in the whale boats, when they brought in copra from
distant beaches or when the white men went out to dynamite
fish.
Among other things he learned beche-de-mer English,
with which he could talk with all white men, and with all
recruits who otherwise would have talked in a thousand
different dialects. Also, he learned certain things about
the white men, principally that they kept their word. If
they told a boy he was going to receive a stick of
tobacco, he got it. If they told a boy they would knock
seven bells out of him if he did a certain thing, when he
did that thing, seven bells invariably were knocked out of
him. Mauki did not know what seven bells were, but they
occurred in beche-de-mer, and he imagined them to be the
blood and teeth that sometimes accompanied the process of
knocking out seven bells. One other thing he learned: no
boy was struck or punished unless he did wrong. Even when
the white men were drunk, as they were frequently, they
never struck unless a rule had been broken.
Mauki did not like the plantation. He hated work,
and he was the son of a chief. Furthermore, it was ten
years since he had been stolen from Port Adams by Fanfoa,
and he was homesick. He was even homesick for the slavery
under Fanfoa. So he ran away. He struck back into the
bush, with the idea of working southward to the beach and
stealing a canoe in which to go home to Port Adams.
But the fever got him, and he was captured and
brought back more dead than alive.
A second time he ran away, in the company of two
Malaita boys. They got down the coast twenty miles, and
were hidden in the hut of a Malaita freeman, who dwelt in
that village. But in the dead of night two white men came,
who were not afraid of all the village people and who
knocked seven bells out of the three runaways, tied them
like pigs, and tossed them into the whale boat. But the
man in whose house they had hidden--seven times seven
bells must have been knocked out of him from the way the
hair, skin, and teeth flew, and he was discouraged for the
rest of his natural life from harboring runaway laborers.
For a year Mauki toiled on. Then he was made a
house-boy, and had good food and easy times, with light
work in keeping the house clean and serving the white men
with whiskey and beer at all hours of the day and most
hours of the night. He liked it, but he liked Port Adams
more. He had two years longer to serve, but two years were
too long for him in the throes of homesickness. He had
grown wiser with his year of service, and, being now a
house-boy, he had opportunity. He had the cleaning of the
rifles, and he knew where the key to the store room was
hung. He planned to escape, and one night ten Malaita boys
and one boy from San Cristoval sneaked from the barracks
and dragged one of the whale boats down to the beach. It
was Mauki who supplied the key that opened the padlock on
the boat, and it was Mauki who equipped the boat with a
dozen Winchesters, an immense amount of ammunition, a case
of dynamite with detonators and fuse, and ten cases of
tobacco.
The northwest monsoon was blowing, and they fled
south in the night time, hiding by day on detached and
uninhabited islets, or dragging their whale boat into the
bush on the large islands. Thus they gained Guadalcanar,
skirted halfway along it, and crossed the Indispensable
Straits to Florida Island. It was here that they killed
the San Cristoval boy, saving his head and cooking and
eating the rest of him. The Malaita coast was only twenty
miles away, but the last night a strong current and
baffling winds prevented them from gaining across.
Daylight found them still several miles from their goal.
But daylight brought a cutter, in which were two white
men, who were not afraid of eleven Malaita men armed with
twelve rifles. Mauki and his companions were carried back
to Tulagi, where lived the great white master of all the
white men. And the great white master held a court, after
which, one by one, the runaways were tied up and given
twenty lashes each, and sentenced to a fine of fifteen
dollars. They were sent back to New Georgia, where the
white men knocked seven bells out of them all around and
put them to work. But Mauki was no longer house-boy. He
was put in the road-making gang. The fine of fifteen
dollars had been paid by the white men from whom he had
run away, and he was told that he would have to work it
out, which meant six months' additional toil. Further, his
share of the stolen tobacco earned him another year of
toil.
Port Adams was now three years and a half away, so
he stole a canoe one night, hid on the islets in Manning
Straits, passed through the Straits, and began working
along the eastern coast of Ysabel, only to be captured,
two-thirds of the way along, by the white men on Meringe
Lagoon. After a week, he escaped from them and took to the
bush. There were no bush natives on Ysabel, only
salt-water men, who were all Christians. The white men put
up a reward of five-hundred sticks of tobacco, and every
time Mauki ventured down to the sea to steal a canoe he
was chased by the salt-water men. Four months of this
passed, when, the reward having been raised to a thousand
sticks, he was caught and sent back to New Georgia and the
road-building gang. Now a thousand sticks are worth fifty
dollars, and Mauki had to pay the reward himself, which
required a year and eight months' labor. So Port Adams was
now five years away.
His homesickness was greater than ever, and it did
not appeal to him to settle down and be good, work out his
four years, and go home. The next time, he was caught in
the very act of running away. His case was brought before
Mr. Haveby, the island manager of the Moongleam Soap
Company, who adjudged him an incorrigible. The Company had
plantations on the Santa Cruz Islands, hundreds of miles
across the sea, and there it sent its Solomon Islands'
incorrigibles. And there Mauki was sent, though he never
arrived. The schooner stopped at Santa Anna, and in the
night Mauki swam ashore, where he stole two rifles and a
case of tobacco from the trader and got away in a canoe to
Cristoval. Malaita was now to the north, fifty or sixty
miles away. But when he attempted the passage, he was
caught by a light gale and driven back to Santa Anna,
where the trader clapped him in irons and held him against
the return of the schooner from Santa Cruz. The two rifles
the trader recovered, but the case of tobacco was charged
up to Mauki at the rate of another year. The sum of years
he now owed the Company was six.
On the way back to New Georgia, the schooner
dropped anchor in Marau Sound, which lies at the
southeastern extremity of Guadalcanar. Mauki swam ashore
with handcuffs on his wrists and got away to the bush. The
schooner went on, but the Moongleam trader ashore offered
a thousand sticks, and to him Mauki was brought by the
bushmen with a year and eight months tacked on to his
account. Again, and before the schooner called in, he got
away, this time in a whale boat accompanied by a case of
the trader's tobacco. But a northwest gale wrecked him
upon Ugi, where the Christian natives stole his tobacco
and turned him over to the Moongleam trader who resided
there. The tobacco the natives stole meant another year
for him, and the tale was now eight years and a half.
"We'll send him to Lord Howe," said Mr. Haveby.
"Bunster is there, and we'll let them settle it between
them. It will be a case, I imagine, of Mauki getting
Bunster, or Bunster getting Mauki, and good riddance in
either event."
If one leaves Meringe Lagoon, on Ysabel, and steers
a course due north, magnetic, at the end of one hundred
and fifty miles he will lift the pounded coral beaches of
Lord Howe above the sea. Lord Howe is a ring of land some
one hundred and fifty miles in circumference, several
hundred yards wide at its widest, and towering in places
to a height of ten feet above sea level. Inside this ring
of sand is a mighty lagoon studded with coral patches.
Lord Howe belongs to the Solomons neither geographically
nor ethnologically. It is an atoll, while the Solomons are
high islands; and its people and language are Polynesian,
while the inhabitants of the Solomons are Melanesian.
Lord Howe has been populated by the westward
Polynesian drift which continues to this day, big
outrigger canoes being washed upon its beaches by the
southeast trade. That there has been a slight Melanesian
drift in the period of the northwest monsoon, is also
evident.
Nobody ever comes to Lord Howe, or Ontong-Java as
it is sometimes called. Thomas Cook & Son do not sell
tickets to it, and tourists do not dream of its existence.
Not even a white missionary has landed on its shore. Its
five thousand natives are as peaceable as they are
primitive. Yet they were not always peaceable. The Sailing
Directions speak of them as hostile and treacherous. But
the men who compile the Sailing Directions have never
heard of the change that was worked in the hearts of the
inhabitants, who, not many years ago, cut off a big bark
and killed all hands with the exception of the second
mate. The survivor carried the news to his brothers. The
captains of three trading schooners returned with him to
Lord Howe. They sailed their vessels right into the lagoon
and proceeded to preach the white man's gospel that only
white men shall kill white men and that the lesser breeds
must keep hands off. The schooners sailed up and down the
lagoon, harrying and destroying. There was no escape from
the narrow sand-circle, no bush to which to flee. The men
were shot down at sight, and there was no avoiding being
sighted. The villages were burned, the canoes smashed, the
chickens and pigs killed, and the precious cocoanut trees
chopped down. For a month this continued, when the
schooner sailed away; but the fear of the white man had
been seared into the souls of the islanders and never
again were they rash enough to harm one.
Max Bunster was the one white man on Lord Howe,
trading in the pay of the ubiquitous Moongleam Soap
Company. And the Company billeted him on Lord Howe,
because, next to getting rid of him, it was the most
out-of-the-way place to be found. That the Company did not
get rid of him was due to the difficulty of finding
another man to take his place. He was a strapping big
German, with something wrong in his brain. Semi-madness
would be a charitable statement of his condition. He was a
bully and a coward, and a thrice-bigger savage than any
savage on the island.
Being a coward, his brutality was of the cowardly
order. When he first went into the Company's employ, he
was stationed on Savo. When a consumptive colonial was
sent to take his place, he beat him up with his fists and
sent him off a wreck in the schooner that brought him.
Mr. Haveby next selected a young Yorkshire giant to
relieve Bunster. The Yorkshire man had a reputation as a
bruiser and preferred fighting to eating. But Bunster
wouldn't fight. He was a regular little lamb--for ten
days, at the end of which time the Yorkshire man was
prostrated by a combined attack of dysentery and fever.
Then Bunster went for him, among other things getting him
down and jumping on him a score or so of times. Afraid of
what would happen when his victim recovered. Bunster fled
away in a cutter to Guvutu, where he signalized himself by
beating up a young Englishman already crippled by a Boer
bullet through both hips.
Then it was that Mr. Haveby sent Bunster to Lord
Howe, the falling-off place. He celebrated his landing by
mopping up half a case of gin and by thrashing the elderly
and wheezy mate of the schooner which had brought him.
When the schooner departed, he called the kanakas down to
the beach and challenged them to throw him in a wrestling
bout, promising a case of tobacco to the one who
succeeded. Three kanakas he threw, but was promptly thrown
by a fourth, who, instead of receiving the tobacco, got a
bullet through his lungs.
And so began Bunster's reign on Lord Howe. Three
thousand people lived in the principal village; but it was
deserted, even in broad day, when he passed through. Men,
women, and children fled before him. Even the dogs and
pigs got out of the way, while the king was not above
hiding under a mat. The two prime ministers lived in
terror of Bunster, who never discussed any moot subject,
but struck out with his fists instead.
And to Lord Howe came Mauki, to toil for Bunster
for eight long years and a half. There was no escaping
from Lord Howe. For better or worse, Bunster and he were
tied together. Bunster weighed two hundred pounds. Mauki
weighed one hundred and ten. Bunster was a degenerate
brute. But Mauki was a primitive savage. While both had
wills and ways of their own.
Mauki had no idea of the sort of master he was to
work for. He had had no warnings, and he had concluded as
a matter of course that Bunster would be like other white
men, a drinker of much whiskey, a ruler and a lawgiver who
always kept his word and who never struck a boy
undeserved. Bunster had the advantage. He knew all about
Mauki, and gloated over the coming into possession of him.
The last cook was suffering from a broken arm and a
dislocated shoulder, so Bunster made Mauki cook and
general house-boy.
And Mauki soon learned that there were white men
and white men. On the very day the schooner departed he
was ordered to buy a chicken from Samisee, the native
Tongan missionary. But Samisee had sailed across the
lagoon and would not be back for three days. Mauki
returned with the information. He climbed the steep
stairway (the house stood on piles twelve feet above the
sand), and entered the living room to report. The trader
demanded the chicken. Mauki opened his mouth to explain
the missionary's absence. But Bunster did not care for
explanations. He struck out with his fist. The blow caught
Mauki on the mouth and lifted him into the air. Clear
through the doorway he flew, across the narrow veranda,
breaking the top railing, and down to the ground.
His lips were a contused, shapeless mass, and his
mouth was full of blood and broken teeth.
"That'll teach you that back talk don't go with
me," the trader shouted, purple with rage, peering down at
him over the broken railing.
Mauki had never met a white man like this, and he
resolved to walk small and never offend. He saw the boat
boys knocked about, and one of them put in irons for three
days with nothing to eat for the crime of breaking a
rowlock while pulling. Then, too, he heard the gossip of
the village and learned why Bunster had taken a third
wife--by force, as was well known. The first and second
wives lay in the graveyard, under the white coral sand,
with slabs of coral rock at head and feet. They had died,
it was said, from beatings he had given them. The third
wife was certainly ill-used, as Mauki could see for
himself.
But there was no way by which to avoid offending
the white man who seemed offended with life. When Mauki
kept silent, he was struck and called a sullen brute. When
he spoke, he was struck for giving back talk. When he was
grave, Bunster accused him of plotting and gave him a
thrashing in advance; and when he strove to be cheerful
and to smile, he was charged with sneering at his lord and
master and given a taste of stick. Bunster was a devil.
The village would have done for him, had it not
remembered the lesson of the three schooners. It might
have done for him anyway, if there had been a bush to
which to flee. As it was, the murder of the white men, of
any white man, would bring a man-of-war that would kill
the offenders and chop down the precious cocoanut trees.
Then there were the boat boys, with minds fully made up to
drown him by accident at the first opportunity to capsize
the cutter. Only Bunster saw to it that the boat did not
capsize.
Mauki was of a different breed, and escape being
impossible while Bunster lived, he was resolved to get the
white man. The trouble was that he could never find a
chance. Bunster was always on guard. Day and night his
revolvers were ready to hand. He permitted nobody to pass
behind his back, as Mauki learned after having been
knocked down several times. Bunster knew that he had more
to fear from the good-natured, even sweet-faced, Malaita
boy than from the entire population of Lord Howe; and it
gave added zest to the programme of torment he was
carrying out. And Mauki walked small, accepted his
punishments, and waited.
All other white men had respected his tambos, but
not so Bunster.
Mauki's weekly allowance of tobacco was two sticks.
Bunster passed them to his woman and ordered Mauki to
receive them from her hand. But this could not be, and
Mauki went without his tobacco. In the same way he was
made to miss many a meal, and to go hungry many a day. He
was ordered to make chowder out of the big clams that grew
in the lagoon. This he could not do, for clams were tambo.
Six times in succession he refused to touch the clams, and
six times he was knocked senseless. Bunster knew that the
boy would die first, but called his refusal mutiny, and
would have killed him had there been another cook to take
his place.
One of the trader's favorite tricks was to catch
Mauki's kinky locks and bat his head against the wall.
Another trick was to catch Mauki unawares and thrust the
live end of a cigar against his flesh. This Bunster called
vaccination, and Mauki was vaccinated a number of times a
week. Once, in a rage, Bunster ripped the cup handle from
Mauki's nose, tearing the hole clear out of the cartilage.
"Oh, what a mug!" was his comment, when he surveyed
the damage he had wrought.
The skin of a shark is like sandpaper, but the skin
of a ray fish is like a rasp. In the South Seas the
natives use it as a wood file in smoothing down canoes and
paddles. Bunster had a mitten made of ray fish skin. The
first time he tried it on Mauki, with one sweep of the
hand it fetched the skin off his back from neck to armpit.
Bunster was delighted. He gave his wife a taste of the
mitten, and tried it out thoroughly on the boat boys. The
prime ministers came in for a stroke each, and they had to
grin and take it for a joke.
"Laugh, damn you, laugh!" was the cue he gave.
Mauki came in for the largest share of the mitten.
Never a day passed without a caress from it. There were
times when the loss of so much cuticle kept him awake at
night, and often the half-healed surface was raked raw
afresh by the facetious Mr. Bunster. Mauki continued his
patient wait, secure in the knowledge that sooner or later
his time would come. And he knew just what he was going to
do, down to the smallest detail, when the time did come.
One morning Bunster got up in a mood for knocking
seven bells out of the universe. He began on Mauki, and
wound up on Mauki, in the interval knocking down his wife
and hammering all the boat boys. At breakfast he called
the coffee slops and threw the scalding contents of the
cup into Mauki's face. By ten o'clock Bunster was
shivering with ague, and half an hour later he was burning
with fever. It was no ordinary attack. It quickly became
pernicious, and developed into black-water fever. The days
passed, and he grew weaker and weaker, never leaving his
bed. Mauki waited and watched, the while his skin grew
intact once more. He ordered the boys to beach the cutter,
scrub her bottom, and give her a general overhauling. They
thought the order emanated from Bunster, and they obeyed.
But Bunster at the time was lying unconscious and giving
no orders. This was Mauki's chance, but still he waited.
When the worst was past, and Bunster lay
convalescent and conscious, but weak as a baby, Mauki
packed his few trinkets, including the china cup handle,
into his trade box. Then he went over to the village and
interviewed the king and his two prime ministers.
"This fella Bunster, him good fella you like too
much?" he asked.
They explained in one voice that they liked the
trader not at all. The ministers poured forth a recital of
all the indignities and wrongs that had been heaped upon
them. The king broke down and wept. Mauki interrupted
rudely.
"You savve me--me big fella marster my country. You
no like m this fella white marster. Me no like m. Plenty
good you put hundred cocoanut, two hundred cocoanut, three
hundred cocoanut along cutter. Him finish, you go sleep m
good fella. Altogether kanaka sleep m good fella. Bime by
big fella noise along house, you no savve hear m that
fella noise. You altogether sleep strong fella too much."
In like manner Mauki interviewed the boat boys.
Then he ordered Bunster's wife to return to her family
house. Had she refused, he would have been in a quandary,
for his tambo would not have permitted him to lay hands on
her.
The house deserted, he entered the sleeping room,
where the trader lay in a doze. Mauki first removed the
revolvers, then placed the ray fish mitten on his hand.
Bunster's first warning was a stroke of the mitten that
removed the skin the full length of his nose.
"Good fella, eh?" Mauki grinned, between two
strokes, one of which swept the forehead bare and the
other of which cleaned off one side of his face. "Laugh,
damn you, laugh."
Mauki did his work throughly, and the kanakas,
hiding in their houses, heard the "big fella noise" that
Bunster made and continued to make for an hour or more.
When Mauki was done, he carried the boat compass
and all the rifles and ammunition down to the cutter,
which he proceeded to ballast with cases of tobacco. It
was while engaged in this that a hideous, skinless thing
came out of the house and ran screaming down the beach
till it fell in the sand and mowed and gibbered under the
scorching sun. Mauki looked toward it and hesitated. Then
he went over and removed the head, which he wrapped in a
mat and stowed in the stern locker of the cutter.
So soundly did the kanakas sleep through that long
hot day that they did not see the cutter run out through
the passage and head south, close-hauled on the southeast
trade. Nor was the cutter ever sighted on that long tack
to the shores of Ysabel, and during the tedious head-beat
from there to Malaita. He landed at Port Adams with a
wealth of rifles and tobacco such as no one man had ever
possessed before. But he did not stop there. He had taken
a white man's head, and only the bush could shelter him.
So back he went to the bush villages, where he shot old
Fanfoa and half a dozen of the chief men, and made himself
the chief over all the villages. When his father died,
Mauki's brother ruled in Port Adams, and joined together,
salt-water men and bushmen, the resulting combination was
the strongest of the ten score fighting tribes of Malaita.
More than his fear of the British government was
Mauki's fear of the all-powerful Moongleam Soap Company;
and one day a message came up to him in the bush,
reminding him that he owed the Company eight and one-half
years of labor. He sent back a favorable answer, and then
appeared the inevitable white man, the captain of the
schooner, the only white man during Mauki's reign, who
ventured the bush and came out alive. This man not only
came out, but he brought with him seven hundred and fifty
dollars in gold sovereigns--the money price of eight years
and a half of labor plus the cost price of certain rifles
and cases of tobacco.
Mauki no longer weighs one hundred and ten pounds.
His stomach is three times its former girth, and he has
four wives. He has many other things--rifles and
revolvers, the handle of a china cup, and an excellent
collection of bushmen's heads. But more precious than the
entire collection is another head, perfectly dried and
cured, with sandy hair and a yellowish beard, which is
kept wrapped in the finest of fibre lava-lavas. When Mauki
goes to war with villages beyond his realm, he invariably
gets out this head, and alone in his grass palace,
contemplates it long and solemnly. At such times the hush
of death falls on the village, and not even a pickaninny
dares make a noise. The head is esteemed the most powerful
devil-devil on Malaita, and to the possession of it is
ascribed all of Mauki's greatness.