Short Stories
They may fall to their deaths. Let us watch."
"They are brave men," said Koolau. "Let us watch."
Side by side they lay among the morning-glories, with the
yellow blossoms of the hau dropping upon them from overhead,
watching the motes of men toil upward, till the thing happened,
and three of them, slipping, rolling, sliding, dashed over a cliff-
lip and fell sheer half a thousand feet.
Kiloliana chuckled.
"We will be bothered no more," he said.
"They have war guns," Koolau made answer. "The soldiers
have not yet spoken."
In the drowsy afternoon, most of the lepers lay in their rock
dens asleep. Koolau, his rifle on his knees, fresh-cleaned and
ready, dozed in the entrance to his own den. The maid with the
twisted arms lay below in the thicket and kept watch on the
knife-edge passage. Suddenly Koolau was startled wide awake
by the sound of an explosion on the beach. The next instant the
atmosphere was incredibly rent asunder. The terrible sound
frightened him. It was as if all the gods had caught the envelope
of the sky in their hands and were ripping it apart as a woman
rips apart a sheet of cotton cloth. But it was such an immense
ripping, growing swiftly nearer. Koolau glanced up apprehen-
sively, as if expecting to see the thing. Then high up on the cliff
overhead the shell burst in a fountain of black smoke. The rock
was shattered, the fragments falling to the foot of the cliff.
Koolau passed his hand across his sweaty brow. He was ter-
ribly shaken. He had had no experience with shell-fire, and this
was more dreadful than anything he had imagined.
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