Short Stories
hairless brows.
"Let us not make trouble," he began. "We ask to be left alone.
But if they do not leave us alone, then is the trouble theirs and
the penalty. My fingers are gone, as you see." He held up his
stumps of hands that all might see. "Yet have I the joint of one
thumb left, and it can pull a trigger as firmly as did its lost
neighbour in the old days. We love Kauai. Let us live here, or die
here, but do not let us go to the prison of Molokai. The sickness
is not ours. We have not sinned. The men who preached the
word of God and the word of Rum brought the sickness with the
coolie slaves who work the stolen land. I have been a judge. I
know the law and the justice, and I say to you it is unjust to steal
a man's land, to make that man sick with the Chinese sickness,
and then to put that man in prison for life."
"Life is short, and the days are filled with pain," said Koolau.
"Let us drink and dance and be happy as we can."
From one of the rocky lairs calabashes were produced and
passed round. The calabashes were filled with the fierce distilla-
tion of the root of the ti-plant; and as the liquid fire coursed
through them and mounted to their brains, they forgot that they
had once been men and women, for they were men and women
once more. The woman who wept scalding tears from open eye-
pits was indeed a woman apulse with life as she plucked the
strings of an ukulele and lifted her voice in a barbaric love-call
such as might have come from the dark forest-depths of the pri-
meval world. The air tingled with her cry, softly imperious and
seductive. Upon a mat, timing his rhythm to the woman's song
Kiloliana danced. It was unmistakable. Love danced in all his
movements, and, next, was a woman whose heavy hips and gen-
erous breast gave the lie to her disease-corroded face. It was a
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