Short Stories
worth a thousand dollars—but not to himself. It was his worth-
less carcass, rotten with disease or dead from a bursting shell,
that was worth all that money.
When the soldiers reached the knife-edged passage, he was
prompted to warn them. But his gaze fell upon the body of the
murdered maid, and he kept silent. When six had ventured on
the knife-edge, he opened fire. Nor did he cease when the knife-
edge was bare. He emptied his magazine, reloaded, and emptied
it again. He kept on shooting. All his wrongs were blazing in his
brain, and he was in a fury of vengeance. All down the goat-trail
the soldiers were firing, and though they lay flat and sought to
shelter themselves in the shallow inequalities of the surface, they
were exposed marks to him. Bullets whistled and thudded about
him, and an occasional ricochet sang sharply through the air.
One bullet ploughed a crease through his scalp, and a second
burned across his shoulder-blade without breaking the skin.
It was a massacre, in which one man did the killing. The sol-
diers began to retreat, helping along their wounded. As Koolau
picked them off he became aware of the smell of burnt meat. He
glanced about him at first, and then discovered that it was his
own hands. The heat of the rifle was doing it. The leprosy had
destroyed most of the nerves in his hands. Though his flesh
burned and he smelled it, there was no sensation.
He lay in the thicket, smiling, until he remembered the war
guns. Without doubt they would open upon him again, and this
time upon the very thicket from which he had inflicted the dan-
ger. Scarcely had he changed his position to a nook behind a
small shoulder of the wall where he had noted that no shells fell,
than the bombardment recommenced. He counted the shells.
Sixty more were thrown into the gorge before the war-guns
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