Short Stories
unknown quantities were pluck, pertinacity, fearlessness, im-
agination, 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 amphibi-
an. 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 Ma-
laita, 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 har-
bor so small that a large schooner could not swing at anchor in
it. It was surrounded by mangroves that overhung the deep wa-
ter. 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
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